The Zen of Bodybuilding - In my view

For me bodybuilding started out with a quest for aesthetics, but I've always been a spiritual person to some degree. It didn't take long before I discovered the deeper essence - the zen of bodybuilding. It is in the gym where I sprint to ridiculous speeds, and push that bar up one more time, when there is nothing left but the will to get it up. It is in doing these things that I blow all the accumulated stress and astral garbage out of my nervous system. It is meditation, it is catharsis, it is a cleansing of the body and the worship of the self as a manifestation of the divine.

I don't know if you are familiar with the concepts of evolutionary enlightenment of not, but I have to suggest at least a little bit of it, as it's become so central to my bodybuilding practice and my life as a whole. From the moment of the big bang an impulse has been present, an original impulse. That impulse is to become, to grow from perfection to ever greater perfection. First subatomic particles became atoms, and atoms became molecules, and molecules became proteins, and proteins became cells, and cells became multi celled organisms, and organisms became animals and from animals came our ancestors, and from our ancestors became one of the greatest leaps in universal history - self aware beings capable of awareness of their own consciousness and evolutionary potential. For fourteen and a half billion years the original impulse has existed and flourished throughout the universe selecting the cream of the crop and gently recycling the previous forms into ever more perfect form. Here we are the cream of the crop of 14.5 billion years of natural selection, I am that and you are that, and within my bicep a million God's eyes seeking their own perfection.

What we can become, we must. To become aware of our place in evolutionary history is to become aware of both the awe of where we are in history and the awesome responsibility we have to be that evolutionary impulse. To see ourselves and all beings as living works of perfection moving towards ever more perfect form. For me when I lift, I maintain awareness of the millions of miracles going on in my body at this moment, the 10 million cells replaced each minute, and its amazing ability to adapt chemically to all manners of outside stimulus, and the miracle of being at the crux of human evolution. For me the lift is about that evolution, it's the evolutionary impulse to grow towards ever greater form, made manifest in my life, in my body, in every fiber of my being. To me to not realize my full potential is a form of slow suicide, what I can become I must. I must push my body to greater levels of strength and capability, I must move my soul towards greater evolutionary awareness and oneness with life.

When I look around at my human brothers and sisters and I see them involved in all their seemingly ridiculous drama's I try to remember that they are beings caught in suffering and moving towards evolutionary enlightenment, moving towards a more perfect form just like everything else in the universe since the beginning of time. It is in this awareness of our commonality, our oneness, that my work in the gym becomes work for the benefit of all living beings. When I lift, I lift for me, I lift for you, I lift for the freedom of Tibet, and the freedom of imprisoned monks in Burma, as I lift for the perfection of the universe itself, as my growing muscles are nothing but original impulse made of recycled material that has been present from the beginning of time.

In this intention I am quantumly connected to the entire universe as energy. With this connection to universal energy, my pulse quickens, blood races oxygen and nutrients to muscles, nerve cells fire ordering neurotransmitters like adrenaline, ordering more testosterone, ordering the sweating reflex to cool the body, ordering the intention of fierce determination. The million manifest conditions in my body come together to create a state of mind of charge, that will not be defeated, a state of mind that is capable of pushing this body past all it's self imposed limits, to a quantum state where the bodies ability to do things is occurring far beyond what would be normal parameters, expanding its capability and growing it's quest toward greater forms of perfection. Along with this a very meditative process occurs, its a process of passive awareness as the body prepares for a lift, sitting quietly in the rest period after the last set; then comes the focused breathing - the conscious building of energy for the next lift; then comes the grounding where the energy is grounded and stabilized and accessed; and then comes the release as the lift gets underway, the mind orders the muscles to contract again, and again, as the mind and body push this fragile form towards its own greatest potentials, and when the lift is done, again comes rest in passive awareness. As this process is repeated dozens of times in a workout, the mind grows calm and clear, aware of this present moment completely, aware of all that occurs in this moment, and in such awareness becomes aware of the universe itself, aware of the entire universe taking place right within this very body.

To some this might be a difficult read, because I can't organize in clear cut paragraphs with the names of major philosophers, or the names of specific world religions, I can't call eastern or western, nor can I engage in endless intellectualizing about it. Why? Because I actually know what I am talking about, its something that has to be experienced to understand and once you have experienced it, you could never reduce it to intellectualization, and theorization. Experiential transcendence does not know logic, theories, egos, names, divisions, etc; it knows oneness and it knows the quest of all beings to move towards evolutionary enlightenment and progressively greater forms of perfection. In experience, I cannot talk about general theories, but only my experience as it exists in this moment.