New spirituality for Nonbelievers

By Lomer Pilote

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Les Editions Chapitre.com
• Release date: Jun 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9791029000454

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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 philosophic guru, Paul Ricœur. This passage by Freud essentially summarized the cornerstone of my research. In it, he cautions us against the ruses of our immediate unanalyzed conscience.

The full citation appears in an English translation of The conflict of Interpretations, published by Northwestern University Press in 1974. On page 152, we read:

Psychoanalysis, he says, is chronologically the most recent of the severe blows which the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered … from the researches of science (p. 139) First there was the cosmological humiliation inflicted upon man by Copernicus, who destroyed the narcissistic illusion by which the home of man remained at rest in the center of the universe. Then there came biological humiliation, when Darwin put an end to man's claim to be unconnected with the animal kingdom. Finally came psychological humiliation. Man, who already knew that he was lord of neither the cosmos nor all living things, discovers that he is not even lord of his own psyche.

Conscience cannot possibly reveal all which can be understood. According to Freud, there is the most obvious evidence that a great deal more must constantly be going on in your mind than can be known to your consciousness. Ultimately, Ricœur argues that Freud urges us to let ourselves be taught something on this one point… and to turn [our] eyes inward, look into [our] own depths, and learn first to know [ourselves]!

In his psychoanalytic theories, Freud claims to have revealed the origin of the impulses that drive our neurotic behaviors from a dimension beyond the conscience, or in other words, at an unconscious level. For Freud, these impulses are purely sexual in nature, although he distinguishes between two forms. The first form is comprised of personal experiences from an individual’s past, the most traumatizing of which are repressed into what he calls the id. The second form is comprised of the influence of language and parental and religious prohibitions that are internalized within the deep pockets of the conscious which ultimately forgets them after their incorporation into the structures of the superficial EGO. Freud calls this the SUPEREGO. I investigated psychoanalytic structures in the writings of the great French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, particularly Book XI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. While calling himself fundamentally Freudian, Lacan had a few of his own ideas, which ultimately led to his excommunication from his professional association. I retained a number of his ideas, including the necessity of freeing psychoanalysis from the negative influence of Freud’s two forms of the unconscious. This was the secret to fruitful psychoanalytic therapy. In particular, Lacan linked Freud’s famous superego to the influence of all significant predecessors passed down by parents and educators. As for the rest, he accepted Freud’s sexual theories at face value, while adding certain nuances of his own that his colleagues would deem unorthodox. To summarize Freudian psychoanalysis, the only source of psychic energy originated in sexual impulses residing in one of the two forms of unconsciousness, the id or the superego. In other words, Freud, a committed antireligious atheist, for all practical purposes, denied the existence of any form of spirituality whatsoever. But even as a nonbeliever myself, I could not fully subscribe to such a categorical and anti-dogmatic position. For that reason, I was very pleased to discover the writings of another Freudian disciple, who Freud himself admonished over his dissenting ideas on the purely sexual origin of energy. This disciple was none other than the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung refused to recognize Freudian sexuality as the only energy source in the unconscious. His experiences and practice convinced him that the psychic energy source found in the unconscious may have a spiritual component. It was Jung’s influence that allowed me to expand my own unconscious beyond the duality of Freud’s construction. I thereby discovered an unconscious spiritual dimension where I could find a much more nuanced ego than the superficial ego of my superficial conscience. However, Jung did not indicate any method to distinguish this spiritual ego from the immortal souls of major religions or abstract metaphysics. Accordingly, I had to orient my notion of a spiritual dimension around a global cosmic construct in which this concept could reside.

Obviously, this was not the denouement of my research. I had only scratched the surface of my questions. So while I continued my exploration in the field of psychology, I launched into cosmological research as well. Otherwise, I would have had to resign myself to hoping for the celestial afterlife promised by traditional religions, or wait idly by to see if astrologers could determine if the universe would continue on its trajectory of indefinite expansion originating in the Big Bang or reverses its trajectory, collapsing on itself in a Big Crunch. In any case, I had to begin by imagining an origin of some sort for psychic energy and for the four fundamental forces of physics: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, the electromagnetism and gravitation. The Big Bang hypothesis fails to answer one very significant question: who lit the fuse that resulted in an explosion so large that its effects are still felt today, according to the expanding universe theory! During these two decades of research, I tried to imagine a comprehensive mathematical and physical theory that could integrate the two opposing infinities in a single physical system in a parallel dimension of my unconscious. I documented nearly 300 pages of quasi-scientific texts, supported with the 200 or so pages of notes comprising the present text. But when I approached publishers with a single 500+ page book, I was met with less than enthusiasm. Taking on such a hefty text from an unknown, and as yet, unpublished author was apparently unimaginable. Based on this feedback, I decided to divide my text into two books.

My second book will focus on my comprehensive theories while this first book will be dedicated the psychological underpinnings of these theories, which may make it somewhat more difficult to grasp. Accordingly, I’ll ask for my readers’ forgiveness and patience as I lay the groundwork for my other works awaiting publication.

A little over a year ago, while I was waiting to hear from publishers, I discovered a new critical edition of the works of a major philosopher with whom I was unfamiliar, yet who lived and published from the late 19th century into the early 20the century. It was Henri Bergson, who died in Paris in 1941 during the Second World War. I immediately procured his main works, including Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1910), Matter and Memory (1911), Creative Evolution (1910), Mind Energy (1920), Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe (1922), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), and The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946). My own two books were complete and I was waiting to hear from publishers when I dove into Bergson’s books. In Bergson’s books, I discovered interesting analogies to my own research. My objections to Bergson’s work are based in my reading of one of his last texts, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), which served as a capstone to his career. Despite an excellent start, Bergson seems to have failed to identify an original location in which to situate his spiritual dimension. He seemed to be perfectly satisfied with basing his spiritual dimension rehashed Christian mysticism. I could not endorse the same conclusions as they do not provide a satisfactory comprehensive answer for nonbelievers such as myself. And so, while I didn’t find anything in Bergson’s texts that caused me to revisit and revise my own writings, I continued to take notes on his works. This left me with sufficient material to write a third book, in which I would analyze Bergson’s more interesting theories in the light of my second book, among others. In the meantime, I will continue to concentrate on the book’s preliminary arguments.

In the process of writing, I tapped into a considerable number of ideas set forth by other great minds. I’ll only mention a few here. My first intellectual mentor was the great philosopher Paul Ricœur, who passed away recently at the age of 92. This great mind was an invaluable resource to me while I was writing my doctoral dissertation. His major work, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, has an unshakable place on my bedside table, and I read its various themes often and repeatedly. Ricœur’s other works on the subject of narrative theory were particularly relevant to a 167-page mini dissertation I wrote at UQAM, entitled, Utilisation de la théorie narrative ricœurienne par le modèle AA (The AA Model’s Use of Ricœurian Narrative Theory). Another master philosopher I relied upon to help me in my quest for self-understanding was the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. I read and studied a number of Freud’s books despite my personal objections to his notoriously atheistic framework. The book of one of Freud’s disavowed disciples, Book XI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, was most practical, and joined Ricœur’s writings on my bedside table. I read it often. This book provided the overarching framework I used in my own self psychoanalysis.

As I’m sure my readers have gathered by now, I explored the writings of a long list of authors, including Bachelard, Hegel, Kant, and Sartre, among others. And as you’ll discover, through the citations included in this book, that I haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel. No one starts from an entirely blank slate, no matter what their field of interest. Many ideas and understandings are learned, passed down from our predecessors and integrated by the CONSCIOUS EGO, or repressed and preserved in the unconscious. The conscious enunciative subject uses these ideas to express personal opinions, often believing them to be original inventions, failing to associate these ideas with their true originators. On this note, I will immediately introduce an idea from Jacques Lacan’s theory of signifiers, which recognizes this fact. Lacan first refers to structures described by Freud which he positions at the level of the last layer of the unconscious, where the diaphragm functions, where the pre-relations between the primary process and that part of it that will be used at the level of the pre-conscious. (p. 46, Book XI of The Seminar) As for the pre-conscious structure of Freudian topics, Lacan positions it at the level of the set of rules governing the arrangement of words into phrases known as syntax. Syntax, as defined in Larousse, is the set of rules governing the arrangement of words in phrases. Lacan positions it at the level of the pre-conscious (p. 66, Book XI of The Seminar). He is referring to the subject speaking through his enunciations