Genealogy — How Universal Mechanics was born

Philosophy, love and happiness

It was close to the end of the year 1999.

In those days, to entertain myself during my lunch breaks, I used to write short stories in a public square, not far from the company where I was employed — and which stole the most beautiful hours of my creative spirit.

During one of these southern draftings — I live in the city of cinema — a sentence arrived unexpectedly on my notebook, introduced by something I do not know how to name. Uninvited. Beyond my will. A magic intuition, hatched like a rose in the middle of a jumble.

This fascinating sentence was: "Humanity is destined to reach its perfection."

After writing these surprising words, I stood back a little to re-read them more attentively. On the second reading, I grasped their sense — I mean at the very heart of my being. I felt a profound dizziness mixed with a great happiness, as if suddenly all the lights of my spirit illuminated at the same moment all the hidden corners of all the rooms. As if I had just discovered the key to an enormous enigma.

That is exactly how I felt.

After years of wandering beneath the Chinese lanterns of bars, looking for truths capable of satisfying me — after decades of painful searching for meaning, for an ideal position, in short after years of questioning without answers — everything was suddenly coloured by evidence. The passageway to my heart cleared as if by magic.

For a long time, my nature had wondered why we were on earth — but my sensitivity could not pierce the curtains of violence that cover everything life holds of sense. I could not know that beyond this evil, an open valley offered its clarity to all its visitors.

This ceaseless fight between meaning and absurdity had been playing out, certainly for a long time, in the dark limbo of my unconscious. It was certainly the silent reason for my deepest fears, my phobias and my strange dizzinesses.

You will certainly understand why, during all those pre-philosophical years, I had to drink so much. It is the same mechanism for the addict, the obese person, the phobic, the depressive, the person with suicidal tendencies. In an absurd world, spiritually sensitive beings try to protect themselves from violence by all available means.

So, this sentence reached me in October 1999, on the bench where I was writing.

After some minutes of euphoria and pleasant peace of mind, a rush of questions filled my head. I wondered about which perfection was meant, why, when and how this destination should arrive. I felt a close relationship between perfection and happiness — but it was difficult to conceive it clearly. A great distance seemed evident between the reality of this selfish and warlike world, and universal happiness: brotherhood, equality, love, peace.

From that moment, everything took place naturally. I abandoned the novel I had been writing to dive into the deep waters of this profound reflection. During approximately a month, the whole of my being — heart, body and soul — was entirely devoted to what we might consider today the skeleton of this theory: the austere skeleton of the Mécanique Universelle.

Humanity was destined to its perfection. This perfection was universal happiness — peace, love — in short, the real experience of our dearest desires, our most beautiful aspirations and our most cherished moral values. Therefore, the world had a meaning. If it had a meaning, then human evolution, included in this world, also had a meaning. And as the orientation seemed unalterably steered towards perfection, this evolution — including good and evil, errors, experimentation and victories, pleasure and suffering — was the right one.

Spinoza, Kant, Hegel

All these reflections led me to deduce that what we call "evil" had a meaning — because it participated in evolution. My tendency for provocation quickly suggested a fundamental equality of principle between the criminal and his judge. As perfection needed both good and evil to build itself, there was a fundamental equality between these two values — exactly like the two opposite poles of a battery.

If the principle is important, the form is also necessary. And so, even if I decreed that for the evolution of humanity, the criminal had as much importance as his judge, in the sphere of ordinary human society the first had to remain the bad example — the way not to follow — while the other represented the positive path, the one most people had chosen to walk.

At the end of a few days of pure joy and intensive work, I found myself with an embryo of theory that seemed to me entirely solid. Every new idea, every new question or discovery fitted as if by magic into this positive vision of evolution.

Let me say something important about this moment: I had almost no belief in anything, even though I never stopped wondering. I was at least agnostic — and especially completely ignorant of what philosophy and theology had already concluded on these matters. This is important because it justifies the euphoria I felt during this period, when I confronted the conclusions incessantly generated by the thinker I was becoming.

During those last two months of 1999, I forgot daily trivialities to devote 15 or 16 hours a day to this fascinating subject. To every new question I found an immediate answer — it was like an easy puzzle. My reflection began with the evolution of humanity and quickly extended to the whole evolution of the living. Somewhere — perhaps in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, which served me as a Bible at that moment — I discovered some key notes that allowed me to pass from the human species to the whole of the living: "Evolution is no longer a theory but a fact", and "the living is characterised by a progressive ascension towards a higher spirit".

Everything seemed clear. If the world was in evolution, it had a direction — therefore a meaning. The higher spirit was love, happiness, peace.

In a few weeks and in a totally laborious way, I had managed to write some pages summarising my ideas:

• "Evolution shows that we incessantly improve our humanism and our charity, while losing more and more of our bestiality."
• "The world does not create what is not useful to itself. Without Neanderthal man, we would not exist — and without the criminal, the progress of human justice would not be possible."
• "As we evolve towards the good, justice is always the best in the present, while being perfectible."
• "Like a great caravan moving towards an unknown paradise, humanity gropes its way forward towards unification. To take the wrong path is inevitable — it helps us to discover our way."
• "Every negative force on the planet activates a superior force to correct it in a positive way."

The main lines of my theory were there.

The envelopes — a decisive moment

At this moment I did not know what to do. I had the feeling of holding an important idea — one that needed to be written correctly and offered to the world. But I was acutely aware of the gaps in my knowledge. I had no training in philosophy or theology.

So I decided to send these few confused pages to what seemed to me the heights of contemporary philosophy and criticism — certain French philosophers who regularly appeared on television, and the intellectual weeklies regularly displayed in libraries.

I should tell you what happened just before dropping the thirty envelopes into the post box. I stood there, holding the corner of all the envelopes above the letter box, ready to let them slip in — and I did not dare. Would these people think I was mad? Would my theory, which seemed to me like lightning, turn the world upside down?

I hesitated — and then I remembered one of the conclusions of this philosophy: "Because no act can be undone, and because humanity, beyond our errors and our faults, progresses towards its perfection — what has been done simply had to be done that way."

When an act had been carried out, it was coherent for humanity. I said to myself: "I am going to think of nothing. If my fingers open to let these letters slip towards their addressees, it is because they had to open — and the mail had to be sent. If they remain closed, I go home with the envelopes."

I emptied my mind and let my fingers obey my empty head.

They let go.

The week of rapture

Then, everything began. First, I felt a sort of violent anguish — the fear of having committed something irreversible. Then slowly, thinking of my theory, the feeling of having done what was needed began erasing all the bad sensations, and opened my spirit onto a strange cheerfulness.

Gradually, this feeling of well-being — this sense of having fulfilled my destiny — rose powerfully. I had the impression of having completed something essential. The sensation of having given to life all that it expected of me. I arrived home in a totally extraordinary state. I was full of love, compassion and gentleness. All pain had left my body. Without knowing it, I had entered, for some days, into what we call awakening, rapture, or bliss.

I could not stop smiling. I was unable to do anything other than enjoy a body in which every cell was delighted with the harmony of the others. Everything in me vibrated in harmony with joy. Breathing, swallowing, touching, moving, feeling — all maintained in me a constant, subliminal, platonic and unchanging enjoyment. I could not think of the past or plan myself into the future. I was totally absorbed in a perpetual present.

This state was absolutely new for me — and it never reproduced itself from that moment. I had no idea what was happening to me. I interpreted this state much later — some months after the experience — as a case of rapture.

I do not consider this experience of rapture as a "superhuman" experience. It did not transform me into a wise man or a superior being. Rapture, when it is not the result of long and laborious asceticism, is relatively common in my view. A large part of humanity feels, at some point, this state of absolute well-being — sometimes briefly. It is present in sexual ecstasy, in near-death experiences (people who have been close to death speak of light, love and plenitude), in long meditation. But most of these experiences remain in silence. People are afraid of being considered madmen or visionaries.

The sensation of plenitude, absolute happiness, deep love and total osmosis felt in rapture has nothing to do with what ordinary people call "happiness", "pleasure" or "love". Nevertheless, this experience is not from another world — it is truly carnal and neuronal. When we approach philosophy under a mystical lens, the experience of rapture seems to be at the heart of most of its greatest books — from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, from Aristotle to Bergson, from medieval philosophy to Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Yet philosophers who speak of it directly — as Plotinus and Jean-Jacques Rousseau do — are very rare.

The return

My state of rapture ended in the same way it began. A question crossed my spirit for the first time since the experience began: were my rudimentary notes really legible? Coherent? Understandable? I had sent them in a state of delight, without re-reading them.

Slowly, the question pulled me out of my torpor. I switched on the computer — it had remained off for an entire week, like the television and the radio. I opened the file of the theory and forced my spirit to read. After the first page, I felt a kind of hot flush, a growing anxiety. I became brutally aware that this work was terribly badly written — too raw, too brutal to have real interest.

Very quickly, I left the state of absolute enjoyment that characterises rapture. I found again all the small subtle pains — and especially the fear, the doubt, the anxiety and the excitement that are typical of my normal state.

Today I can truly say: from that moment — we were very close to the year 2000 — I entered definitively into philosophy, without knowing it.

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Teleology 2 · English Index · Synopsis · Plotinus · Consciousness · Help us translate