New spirituality for Nonbelievers

Lomer Pilote

Description

The object of that book is to search for an objective subject which could dwell the physical body to replace the religious soul of religions. That subject would live in a scientific space. The author describe the steps which enabled him to find such a profound subject in the spiritual unconscious of everybody located in the same space as the freudian unconscious. The author search also where the necessary energy could come from.

Informations

• Publié par: Les Editions Chapitre.com
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9791029000454
• Langue: English

Extrait

New spirituality for Nonbelievers

Lomer Pilote
New spirituality
for Nonbelievers


















Les Éditions Chapitre.com
123, boulevard de Grenelle 75015 Paris
© Les Éditions Chapitre.com, 2014
ISBN : 979-10-290-0045-4
Introduction
Why would I reinvent myself as a writer at 80 years of age, when the last remaining dinosaurs are packing for Florida? I’ll try to explain how the course of my life led me to publish in my golden years.
I should start by saying that my life took a new turn over two decades ago. I had reached retirement age and my fourth twenty years had just begun. I had accomplished a fair amount over two successive careers. Initially I was a doctor, with four years of surgical specialty training. And then, due to circumstances out of my control, I reoriented my professional life, attended law school and became a lawyer. Still, as I approached my sixtieth birthday, I was unsatisfied with my life. I’d had a strict Catholic upbringing and early education in my hometown in Québec, but I had gradually lost my religious faith and become a nonbeliever, a quasi-atheist, if you will. And there was little reason to replace the powerful psychosocial resources of religion with any form of abstract spiritual values. Modern scientific theories like the big bang and advances in genetic research and medicine, awe-inspiring though they may be, could not take the place of an essential absolute creative energy. I was empty. I had lost track of nearly everything except for material values. For an intellectual, a life that is singly focused on social prestige, economic success and power is at great risk of succumbing to Nietzschian nihilism.
But rather than surrendering to despair, something inside me led me to seek out an alternative. I had slowly become aware that despite completing two traditional academic programs, my philosophical and scientific understandings were inadequate. Accordingly, I decided to go back to school to find the intellectual tools I needed to devise my own spiritual or religious notions, as I didn’t feel as though I could pick up where I left off with major traditional religions. I needed to rediscover the great minds of human civilization. Ultimately, this led to my Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Sciences at the University of Québec at Montréal (UQAM). I received this degree after seven years of study, from 1992 to 1999. It didn’t take me long to realize that my understanding of physics and mathematics was also unsatisfactory. I brushed up on these subjects, reading everything I could from departments offering refresher materials. I was no longer a traditional student, studying to pass an exam or to become a doctor or professional mathematician. My only goal was to learn the fundamentals of science and mathematics to better understand myself as a human being and formalize, or at least make progress towards advancing my own conceptions and world view. For my own personal satisfaction and understanding, I wanted to explore concepts that encompassed the daily, social and cosmic reality of the created universe that surrounds us - a modest undertaking! It was perhaps a bit too ambitious, but at the very least it kept the neurons firing.
This book is a glimpse into my personal journey over the last twenty years. My goal was a simple one, even if my approach was at times circuitous and overly complicated. I merely wanted to give my life new meaning, for it to become intellectually satisfying and rewarding to allow me to better understand myself and to feel comfortable and relatively happy in my own skin as I navigated my golden years. Contentedness and inner peace gradually took precedence over the balance of my bank account.
I won’t take the time here to detail every stepping stone along the path I have followed over the last quarter century. I presume the seven to eight hundred pages of notes saved on my home computer would make for rather tedious reading. No editor worth his salt would consider publishing a brick of that size written by an as-yet-unpublished octogenarian. I was advised that my work might be better received if divided into 3 books. This introduction is simply intended to provide my eventual readers with a bit of context. If my readers disagree with my arguments or have an incomplete understanding of my arguments after reading only the first book, they will at least know what I am trying to accomplish with my occasionally complex arguments and how I arrived at my conclusions.
In the present book, I will attempt to explain why I renounced the religious beliefs of my upbringing. It’s not a trivial matter to reject the religious heritage and traditions passed down by one’s ancestors, and one’s parents in particular. To ease my conscience, I began with an open mind, reading the Judeo-Christian writings of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. What I found was improbable mythology. I could not approach these texts, which dogmatics claim to be absolute truth, straight from the mouth of the Judeo-Christian God, with any seriousness or sense of authority. The intervening and vengeful god of the Old Testament seemed rationally implausible. How can one believe in a god who, to punish evil and reward good, can suspend the natural laws of the universe and control natural disasters similar to those that can be observed today that menace innocent children? I came to believe that I should reject all dogmatic religions that claimed to be uniquely privy to the truth. Perhaps I would have felt differently if any such religion enjoyed a purely positive influence on mankind. History, however, reveals no such legacy. Most wars have involved a religious component, whether explicitly or implicitly stated. We have only to read a newspaper or watch the news on TV to grasp how the major traditional religions have failed so miserably at providing humanity with the keys to the happiness they promise. I can think of a number of examples illustrating how the major conflicts of our modern-day lives are rooted in contention between major religions. For me, there was no going back to my old beliefs, and no substitution of a new religious belief system that bore any similarity to Eastern religions either. Those doors were now closed.
I resigned myself to a secular quest for understanding. I even considered a few esoteric forms of spirituality that discarded the notion of a creator. I found them all to be unsatisfactory. I thought that modern science and genetic medicine might hold the answers. I devoured text after text authored by the most well respected astrophysicists. But despite my favorable bias, I didn’t find the answers I was so desperately looking for, answers that would reveal the values capable of giving meaning to my life. Even worse, I found inconsistencies and even little tricks in the more advanced theories. I was getting nowhere. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I needed to start over with a blank slate, ignoring all of these existing theories, to conduct my own research. It was not my original intent to write a book. My hard drive is filled with the observations and results I gathered along the way. I was writing for myself.
But, I realized that I couldn’t keep my ruminations a secret. I had to share them with others, not to convince anyone of anything, but rather to invite further analysis and criticism, whether positive or negative. I had long ago renounced the notion that I could possess any kind of absolute truth. The little bit of wisdom I gained as I grew older is that it the people with the questions are far better company than the people who claim to have the answers!
Nonetheless, I was having trouble finding a publisher for my hefty, nuanced monograph. So, I tried to publish the text by subdividing the text into sections that were more straightforward, particularly the first section I intended to publish.
In this first book, I would hold myself to a more philosophical approach, with a slight predilection for psychology, particularly psychoanalysis. The goal of this work would be to cast an eye upon my own self. The strict censorship of my early education had resulted in my unfamiliarity with many important works. My first introduction to the great philosophers convinced me of a few basic truths that were useful in my research. The philosophical academic subject-object dilemma was of no practical interest to me. But I had to start somewhere. Descartes' proposition, cogito ergo sum , served my research nicely. His postulate proposes a subject, who, in ascertaining that he thinks, obtains assurance of his existence. The subject arrives at an initial truth that no one could reasonably challenge, regardless of their philosophic frame of reference or belief system. It goes without saying that the certainty described here does not equate to an absolute truth. In itself, it is incomplete. Otherwise, the vanity of its invulnerable truth would strip it of its power to give order and meaning to a human life. Simply acknowledging my existence as a conscious, living being does not mean that my total being is confined to the being expressed by my physical body. Major religions and a number of philosophies have hypothesized the existence of a soul, or at the very least an abstract spirit existing beyond the superficiality of the physical human body.
After a cursory review of traditional psychology, I found myself gravitating toward psychoanalysis as a launching point for my new journey. I read, and re-read a long passage by Sigmund Freud cited in its entirety in a masterpiece titled, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics , written by my