“Politics of Being”: my ten-year gestation (1/3)
Part 1: the spiritual journey
Why did I write this book? Why did I spend so much time over the last ten years researching, meditating upon and writing this book proposing a new development paradigm focused on “being” instead of “having”? In brief, my spiritual path, my thought as a social scientist and my professional experience have gradually converged on the need to turn to wisdom traditions to frame, in a dialogue with science, a new development path that could support our collective conscious evolution.
I think it all started when I opened to the world as a late teenager in Paris in the nineties. I began to feel the same violence and awkwardness in the people around me, as well as in the economic and social systems I was studying. I grew aware that there should be some links between the inward mess and the outward mess.
In 2002, I lived six months in Mexico City, as part of a university exchange. My encounter with native spirituality there changed my life. It brought about a profound reconnection with myself and mother earth. One night, I found myself in a small adobe house in an indigenous village hidden in the mist of Southern Mexican mountains for a ceremony. I asked the shaman many questions and first saw in his teachings a clear spiritual path. I knew right away this was what I had always looked for, without having been able until now to put a name on it. I decided to come back to Mexico, after finishing my last semester of study, to learn shamanism with him and his group, which I did for the next 3 years.
I started to reorient my life drastically and once and for all established my spiritual path as my priority. I wanted to explore my full potential as a human being. This spiritual awakening put me naturally on a path of service. Back in France for a last semester of study, it led me to change my major and eventually get a master’s degree in international development and start to work in sustainability. My personal experience has convinced me that inner development is the key to reconcile our individual happiness with our care and our capacity to act for the common good. I will develop in the next blog how science supports this.
Throughout the years, I have had the chance to study and practice different spiritual paths and developed a great trust in their wisdom. In 2015, I settled down with my wife near Plum Village, the Buddhist monastery and mindfulness practice center of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, often considered one of the most influential Buddhist and spiritual teachers of our times and the “father of mindfulness”. I was always interested in spiritual views on our current collective reality and challenges, particularly those emphasizing the spiritual evolution of humankind and the importance of our current times, such as those of Sri Aurobindo and Baha’u’llah. This vision has progressively grown in me and seems more and more the right lens through which I can understand the happenings of the world. It feels so incredible to me that it is still almost completely absent from our public debate, that I have developed the desire to make this perspective accessible to a large audience, using the language of science and sustainability.
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