Who are you? Who am I? | Week 18

May | Health and Fitness | Week 18 | 5/7/2023

A commentary on physical exertion and mental clarity

Sometime between the years 4 BC and AD 65, Seneca, one of the great philosophers of Stoicism, was quoted as saying, "The body should be treated rigorously, that it may not be disobedient to the mind." We read this today and marvel at the profundity and wisdom of a statement made ~2000 years ago. Seneca was in truth, recapitulating a loosely understood amalgam of older concepts fundamental to the human condition. 800 years before this quote, in the year 776 BC, the first Olympic Games were held in Ancient Greece - a celebration of physical fitness, competition and achievement. These Olympic games predated any of the renowned philosophers whom we quote from ancient Greece. Plato, born 427 BC, argued in The Republic, some 300 years after the Olympic Games, that physical exercise could help to cultivate courage, self-discipline and other virtues. Diogenes, born 412 BC, famously stated, "If you want to become an athlete, you have to exercise rigorously every day. If you want to become a philosopher, you have to exercise rigorously every day."

The ancient Greek philosophers were observing a concept that was perhaps even older than the Olympic Games, which predated their own philosophizing and the novelty of celebratory athletic competition. In the context of the philosophical and theological, the earliest connection I can find, between spirituality/wisdom and physicality/discipline, comes from the Book of Proverbs, thought to have been compiled during the reign of King Solomon, 1015 BC to 975 BC (~250 years before the Olympic Games). Proverbs 24:5 states, "A wise man is full of strength, and a man of knowledge enhances his might." 

The point I'm making is this: more than two millennium before King Arthur pulled the sword from stone, before Leonardo DiVinci drafted the Vitruvian Man, before the Philosophes of the enlightenment pontificated, before Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders, humanity began understanding the connection between temperance, discipline, wisdom and physicality. To me, Seneca's quote is to humanism what the 10 Commandments are to the Abrahamic religions - a concise enshrinement, a stone tablet of truism. His words describe 1000 years of instantiated wisdom about the mind and the body, as well as a fundamental description of reality as a human being.

Hundreds of years after the quote by Seneca, sometime between the years AD 386 and AD 534, the Shaolin temple in Henan Province, China began practicing Shaolin Kung Fu. As it stands today, Buddhism and Shaolin Kung Fu are a quintessential paired-duo, which most accurately represent Seneca's conceptual understanding. Buddhism is in some sense areligious compared to the Western religions, it is lacking in dogmatism and deity. In that way, it is spiritual in the most fundamental way, pertaining to a spirit associated with nature (behavior) and metaphysics (consciousness) and disassociated from morality (as a pathway to 'heaven'). Karma Lekshe Tsomo is quoted, "There are no moral absolutes in Buddhism." Sound familiar? In Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, Anakin, on his downward spiral towards becoming Darth Vader, says to Obi Wan Kenobi, "If you're not with me, you're against me." Obi Wan responds as a Buddhist monk might (the Jedi were based on Buddhist monks), "Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

The primary mission of a Buddhist monk is to escape the endless rebirth cycle of samsara, through nirvana (enlightenment). Put differently, life (our conscious experience of life, not the nature of living) is fundamentally suffering, and we are 'reborn' into this repeating cycle of suffering (even on a minute to minute time scale) as long as we continue doing the same things that cause suffering in the first place - ascribing ego and personal meaning to the physical world, to attachments, to the words and actions of others and most basically, to elements of life outside our control (sounds similar to the core pillar of Stoicism). In practice, the way to escape this cycle of suffering is through mastery of the mind. One tenet of Buddhist mastery over the mind, the most well known, is meditation/mindfulness. But the other tenet, and the reason I drew this parallel, is physical discipline and rigorous movement. Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Yoga, these movement-oriented, discipline-based, rigorous practices accompany Eastern religions like Hinduism, Taoism, Jainism and most relevantly (and most difficult in Kung Fu), Buddhism. 

In modernity, we still see this truism play out all the time. The best among us, tasked with defending the Nation and the sovereignty of the West, are the Navy Seals. In order to become a Seal, physical hardship must be endured to superhuman levels. However, intellect and ethics are prerequisites before the physical tests can ever begin. Many of our finest cultural leaders, Jocko Willink and David Goggins for example, come from the seal teams, men of integrity and wisdom, but feared in the realm of physical competency. It is not just the fittest, nor just the smartest who inspire our collective cultural aspiration, it is the apex of wisdom - combining physical competency with mental  mastery - who inspire us. Captain America, Yoda, Optimus Prime, an archetype of the virtuous, disciplined, competent leader. We have seen the many examples of when philosophy or physicality are taken to their respective edges, without the balance of the other. The philosophers who crafted communism, responsible for the deaths of +100M people, were intellectually brilliant, but sluggish, undisciplined and morally corrupt. The Mongols, responsible for the deaths of +40M people, were physically menacing and highly skilled, but spiritually unaware and intellectually unconcerned. 

In my own life, this concept of physical rigor and mental clarity, and its relationship with virtue and wisdom, is something I attend to daily. It is canonical to my life. I full-heartedly embrace and believe in it. Since I was young, my proclivity towards exercise was driven 50% by my competitive nature. I'm learning now, the other 50% is my body's natural tendency to counteract anxiety and discomfort with dopaminergic satiety derived from physical exertion. In other words, I'm predisposed to physicality but in large part I've used it implicitly my whole life to gain mental clarity and achieve conscious equilibrium. Whether it was the flow state of cooperative team sports, or the mind-wandering I found in running, swimming and hiking, it was nonetheless a clarity found through difficult cardiovascular output. A necessary focus and present-ness found through treating the body rigorously has enabled me to quiet my mind for studying, reading, conversing, and experiencing. 

I'll close on a few lines I wrote in an essay entitled Binary, published November 2021. In this essay I was commenting on my internal state of being, and the thoughts that flow through me during a very hard hike on a particularly steep mountain in North Carolina - one which I've summited a dozen times but in each instance I gain a new level of mental clarity. "In the chaos of my life I find stillness in my mind. As my diaphragm violently expels the CO2 from my lungs I find a solace so deep, so instantiated in a circuitry as old as the oak trees in my periphery, that I wonder if I will return."