One Possible Choice
One Real Choice and the Imaginary Ones
I could have, you could have…
There is no absurdity that has not been upheld by some philosopher. Cicero
If only I had known!!! What a quintessentially vain phrase — one we often use while imagining the past could have unfolded differently. This thought is inapplicable and therefore illusory, because in reality we could never have known what we know when we say "if only I had known."
On one side we have an imaginary possibility — for instance: if I had taken that road I would not have had the accident — and on the other, the real itinerary that led me to the accident. This latter was the only possible choice, in so far as I could not have foreseen — from the start or along the way — what was going to happen.
In reality, when we undertake an action concerning the future, we have no choice. Whichever route we take, the one we travel becomes the only possible one. All others are non-existent. Our mind imagines them, makes them exist through concepts such as:
— I shouldn't have!
— If only I had known!
In other words: through regret, remorse, reproach, notions of luck or bad luck, etc.
These concepts are useful to the construction of humanity, but they are merely imaginary and transient materials.
Time and Free Will
Our capacity to conceive past and future is the origin of the concepts of time and free will. Animals are foreign to both notions. The builder-man needs these two elements — past and future — to construct his world. Both notions will abolish themselves when humanity reaches its perfection. The accomplished human will then live in the immediate present. As Spinoza recommended, he will welcome what comes to him with love. Without expectation or regret. Without remorse or illusion.
If the intermediate period (between the animal we were and the accomplished human to come) is so deeply involved in the concept of time, it is because time is a driver of progress. And progress exists to eliminate, little by little, the primate obstacles preventing us from reaching beatitude (impulses, dangers, the quest for food, etc.).
From the Stoics to Spinoza
Humanity Toward Its Wisdom
Accepting the World as It Comes
No religion in the world asks us to believe in as great a number of miracles as the philosophy of chance! Thierry Maulnier
When one accepts things as they arrive and submits to destiny, the idea of chance disappears. In other words, to abolish chance, man must accept what befalls him (what befalls having no other option but to befall). Everything that happens, happens justly, writes Marcus Aurelius. If man accepted what comes to him as bound to come — the Stoic state of mind that urges loving what arrives rather than hoping for what awaits — he would accede to wisdom and to supreme happiness.
This is what the sage, the nirvanic, achieves. Universal Mechanics believes this state of mind is the future of humanity.
Ecstasy Swallows Chance
When the global consciousness of human society reaches its summit — a summit whose state is beatitude — the notion of chance will disappear. The beatific person, emptied of all tendency and all project, is content to savour each instant in fullness. He lets himself be carried by the creative power. He no longer needs to make choices. No longer needs references to the past. He is thus exempt from remorse. The sage at this summit allows himself to be guided by his biological clock (drinking, eating, sleeping, moving, etc.).
In the state of beatitude, man acts perfectly. He is entirely governed by the vital impulse (God). This power administers ideally and without failure the organic needs. The vital impulse manages the beatific person as it manages any simple living organism.
Obviously, this state of mind, devoid of aggression, makes man vulnerable. Hence the logic of progress, whose aim is to reach zero-degree danger — a degree of zero danger that cannot fail to arrive.
Year 2001
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