There is always a time during the day when all your bits and pieces are in harmony - your heart rate is stable, blood pressure the lowest it is going to be, parasympathetic nervous system in lock-step with your central nervous system. It's the opposite of the fabled "Zone".
Eastern mystics have for centuries postulated that in this "state", the Mind is at its most powerful, and the human potential at its highest.
The "Zone" is at the opposite end of the scale - smack in the middle of "characteristic tension", that point where arousal and stress are balanced by perception and physical potential, generated by adrenalin coursing through the veins and creating all the endorphins and chemical reactions we need to physically produce beyond our normal capacity.
This is the Human Condition. One of opposites, different States, different abilities and awareness.
What is the point?
If you can train your Mind to find your maximum rest "state", while gearing up your body to work in the "zone", you can, literally, do anything.
What today we see as "X" sports were once the sacred domain of the military, and Olympic athletes.
It has taken a generational revolution backed by slick marketing to develop the urge for people to take their Lives to the very edge, time after time, in the execution of seemingly impossible feats of daring-do.
A biker throwing a tripple back summersault off a two hundred foot ramp? Chicken feed.
An ordinary Mum (no such thing!) throwing herself of a bridge, just to plunge down a thousand feet with a rubber hose tied around her ankles? Happens every minute of every day somewhere in the world.
We now even have "war zone tourism", where for a large fee and signing away all your rights, you can have an armoured escort through some of the world's worst combat zones.
Why do we need to find such danger, just to prove we are alive? Has our very existence become so boring and predictable that unless we are living on the edge in our spare time, we have no sense of purpose?
What is it that we have lost?
I'd be interested in listening to your ideas on this subject, feel free to add a comment!
1 comment:
I like how your posing this Pete. In some of my background are spiritual thinkers who concentrate on removing forces of desperation from within our experience- greed, envy, a mind in dissonance. Love and detachment are two methods that have been offered.
And what about thinking that focuses on bodily sensation- such as Stoic or Carmalite groups-- where the focus is on reducing body experience to its bare minimum?
Then there's your experience flying fighter jets. How do you manage to sit in such a small compartment while doing nothing for those long stretches that are merely punctuated by the actual good stuff of flying?
When is activity beating back some un recognized sense of desperation, and when is it an authentic expression of someone's real-ness?
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