I grew up in a French-Canadian practicing catholic household. Like many people in modern times I abandoned religious beliefs early in adolescence once I became somewhat acquainted with scientific knowledge. I came to the same conclusion as the physicist Laplace who, when Napoleon inquired about what place God took in his theories, replied that he had "no need for that hypothesis". Laplace was following Occam's razor, who invented the principle of "deploying the minimum number of hypothesis to account for the observed facts”. The hypothesis of the existence of God became superfluous.
The realization I had was that religious beliefs provide no satisfactory answers to the workings of the world, its origin, and the origin of life. The religious stories, creeds, and dogmas all sounded incompatible with science. Science and the stories in the bible couldn't both be true, and since I could repeat and test scientific experiments myself but had to accept by faith all sorts of miracles to remain a religious believer, I chose to relegate religion to the level of myths, and use science as a guiding principle of my life. I pursued a Ph.D. in physics, then got interested in artificial intelligence and brain science.
Eventually, in the mid-1990’s, I started to feel a slight discontent with science, first in the recess of my consciousness, then more insistently. Not that there was anything wrong with science, its methods, and the view of the world that it unearthed. It’s just that it was incomplete as a guiding principle for one's life. I came to realize that maybe I had thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Sure, the superficial level of religion that I had been exposed to up to that point was not compatible with science. But science did not have anything to say about how to live my life. It is silent about how to lead a happy, fulfilled, balanced life. Worse still, the mechanical view of the universe as deterministic seemed to sap life of any meaning. There are no good or bad actions, the universe is indifferent, but knowing this intellectually did not help me much. The subjective feeling of free will I felt was at odds with my understanding, as a physicist, of how the world works. There simply isn’t any room for free will, and the concept of an entity that can make a decision independently from causes-and-effects is anathema to a scientific understanding of the world.
I also began to wonder if there was more to life than accumulating and creating knowledge for knowledge's sake. I already knew that true, deep happiness does not reside in fleeting pleasures of consumption, or other forms of "experiences" such as travel, sex, winning sport competitions, falling in love, making scientific discoveries, building a business or making lots of money. The age-old wisdom that enduring happiness cannot be found in external events has been confirmed by recent research on happiness. Any boost in happiness due to a positive experience, such as winning the lottery, soon reverts to baseline. Conversely, any downturn in happiness due to a negative experience also reverts back to baseline sooner or later.
Being the intellectual that I am, I began to read widely in the fields of western philosophy, psychology, then Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. At first, I dismissed Buddhism because of its reliance on the concepts of karma and rebirth. I was looking for a path that did not require believing in concepts that were incompatible with modern science. But reading Jack Kerouak's "Dharma Bums" showed me the possibility of picking and choosing aspects of Buddhism that one finds congenial with one’s temperament. I went back and read some more of the Dalai Lama's writing intended for non-Buddhist readers, and was struck by the following statement of his, that: "even if modern science was able to demonstrate unambiguously that reincarnation does not happen, Buddhism would still have much to offer to humanity". That is a direct invitation to explore Buddhism while not embracing its dogmas. The door swung wide open for a deeper exploration of what that ancient tradition had to offer. For example, Buddhism has 2,500 years of careful, one could say quasi-scientific, exploration of the human mind on the subjective, first person (phenomenological) level, in which millions of people took part. Surely something can be gained by someone willing to invest some time exploring the wealth of knowledge and wisdom accumulated in Buddhist texts and practices, and willing to undergo some of the practices themselves.