Subject: Lifescope TIPs & QUIPs [22] "Sports, Adventure,and Sense of Self"

Most people will agree that mind, body and spirit are interconnected. 
The debate is generally not this fact, but more in the extent of it. All of
us have had some direct experience which proves this truth to us. Now what
you consider proof of interconnection, and proof of what it means, varies.

YOUR proof of these holistic bonds may come from that sense of calm after a
massage. Or it may be the emotional satisfaction accompanying the pleasant
fatigue of an energetic play activity, like tennis. Or your proof may
require the sharper edge attained from risk sports, like the exhilaration
of skiing the steeps, or a 130mph free-fall with a parachute on your back.
You might elicit proof from the feeling during sex of psyches merging.

Your proof might also have been that quiet moment where the pause of
physical activity opened a window of perception to glimpse an elusive part
of your being, which could only be described as spiritual. Or perhaps just
the opposite, you've emulated the whirling dervish, spinning yourself into
physical and spiritual ecstasy.

Whatever your own personal link between body, mind and spirit, the history
of humanity is one that has sought and cultivated this linkage.

My belief is that a disservice is done when we propagate stereotypes and
situations in which mind, body, and spirit are kept separate, and which
thereby subvert this age-old quest. To see what I mean, simply conjure
images of the following: athlete, religious leader, genius. You probably
associated to a large degree, that the three could not overlap.

While in the recent past society has seen fit to develop each of these
areas as distinct from the other, more and more of us are declaring the
imperative that we now integrate all our abilities and essences so as to
realize our true evolutionary potentials.

So in that spirit, I'd like to share some of the words from a book on
this topic, "The Future of The Body."    -- Lee Lukehart

In this issue:
     *** WiseWords
     *** This Issue's Theme
     *** Suggested Resources
     *** Thrive On! Recommended Site


*** WiseWords ***                                     [TOP]
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"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, 
 but to their capacity for experience."
  --George Bernard Shaw
   
"Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies."
  --Frank Gelett Burgess
  
"Some men are like pyramids, 
 which are very broad where they touch the ground, 
 but grow narrow as they reach the sky."
  --Henry Ward Beecher

(For a collection of some of our favorite WiseWords, see our web page at
<http://www.lifescope.com/pages/WiseWords.html>.)


*** This issue's theme: SPORT, ADVENTURE, AND SENSE OF SELF   [TOP]
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(excerpted from "The Future of The Body")

THE WORLDS OF physical adventure and sport dramatize our capacity for
self-exceeding. The immense variety of challenges athletes embrace on
land, air, and water; the increasing number of new games and contests
(and the growing complexity of many old ones); the exquisite analysis of
technique and physiology used to achieve high-level performance; the
wide range of physiques cultivated for competitions of many kinds; and
the pain, risk, and sacrifice many people accept for the sake of sport
all demonstrate our human capacity and drive to achieve new levels and
kinds of functioning. Considering sport in its immense complexity, one
might imagine that the modern world has unwittingly made it a vast
laboratory to experiment with our bodily powers.

Athletes and adventurers, moreover, often experience paranormal events,
altered states, and ecstatic moments bordering on the mystical. That
such experience comes unbidden into the lives of many sportspeople,
affecting them deeply and challenging their beliefs about themselves,
dramatizes the fact that flesh and consciousness tend to co-evolve
during the practice of strenuous disciplines. The fact that spiritual
moods occur spontaneously in many athletes indicates that disciplines
for the body sometimes catalyze depths of the mind, even in people who
have little or no understanding of such experience. The mind frequently
opens in sport, suffusing bone and muscle with its latent energies,
whether or not the athlete can describe what is happening to him.
Indeed, I have come to believe that sport sometimes becomes a Western
yoga of sorts, an earthy form of transformative practice. Through a
contagion we are hardly aware of, athletes in top form awaken a secret
sense that we harbor capacities for extraordinary life.

Though modern sportspeople rarely have a philosophy to account for their
illuminations or self-transcending feats, the connections between such
experience and sport have been recognized in several cultures. In
certain Amerindian tribes, for example, ritual running, developed from
religious ceremony. Kathakah and other forms of Hindu dance join
elements of yoga, athletics, and religious devotion. The temples of
Askleplos combined physical exercise with devotion to God.

Women have extended this transformational enterprise. Their records have
improved more dramatically than men's wherever women have begun to
compete in numbers, notably in swimming, long distance running, and
track events; and they now participate successfully in dangerous sports
such as mountaineering, skydiving, and hang gliding. Even more
remarkable, perhaps, is the growth of athletic achievement among
middle-aged and elderly men and women. Marks for older age groups are
improving constantly in swimming and running.

PHYSICAL FITNESS AND HEALTH RESEARCH
Modern studies give us new understanding of the physiological processes
and particular practices that facilitate health. These studies show that
men and women of all ages can improve their vitality and mental state
through intelligently designed exercise programs. Never before in human
history has the relationship between physical fitness and health been so
thoroughly studied or well understood. Discussions about fitness and
exercise sometimes suffer from a confusion of terms, however, so I will
define certain words that are central to this discussion.

'Physical activity' will refer to any bodily movement produced by skeletal
muscles. The term 'exercise', on the other hand, will refer to physical
activity that is planned, structured, and purposive-for play, sport, or
the attainment of health. 'Health' in this discussion will mean freedom
from disease and a general vitality in work and leisure; while 'physical
fitness' will refer to a composite of agility, balance, coordination,
speed, power, and reaction time as well as more health-related
attributes such as cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular endurance,
strength, body composition, and flexibility. Because the various
components of fitness do not always vary in concert, I use terms such as
'cardiorespiratory fitness' or 'degree of flexibility' to signify
development along particular lines.  ...

SPORT AS TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE
In this and other chapters I have noted several kinds of extraordinary
experience reported by sportspeople, including exalted states of mind
and metanormal movement abilities. Here I will describe certain elements
of sport that help to evoke such experience.

   REGULAR PRACTICE WITH THE INTENT TO IMPROVE.
   Practice entrains countless physical and psychological processes to
   produce new skills, not only in sport but in every field of endeavor.
   This is the case even if the practitioner knows little or nothing about
   the specific changes such learning entails. And more than that, practice
   invites answering graces. As I have noted in previous chapters,
   disciplined activities sometimes give rise to spontaneous
   metanormalities. At times, the part of our nature most stretched gives
   birth to an extraordinary version of itself, as for example when a
   mother's long-suffering love gives rise to a sense of oneness between
   her and her child. And so it is in the heat of sport: inspired jumping
   can give rise to apparent levitation, disciplined ball-handling to
   unearthly hand-eye coordination, practiced footwork to superordinary
   agility. Where capacities are stretched to their limits, metanormalities
   tend to appear, despite the expectations or desires of their recipients.
   
   SUSTAINED AND FOCUSED ATTENTION.
   Every sport requires concentration and freedom from distraction,
   qualities fundamental as well to contemplative devotion. Athletic skill
   demands unbroken attention to the environment, to the objects and other
   people involved in a sporting event, and to kinesthetic sensations.
   Success is correlated with constant presence in the moment. Indeed,
   concentration can produce a state of mind graced by extraordinary
   clarity and focus. As they try to describe such experience, athletes
   sometimes begin to use metaphors similar to those used in religious
   writing. Listening to such accounts, I have come to believe that
   athletic feats can mirror contemplative graces.
   
   IMAGERY REHEARSAL.
   After studying the imagery used by successful athletes, sports
   psychologist Richard Suinn distinguished it from lazy reverie or mere
   reflection upon past events. Such imagery, he wrote,is more than visual.
   It is also tactile, auditory, emotional, and muscular. One swimmer
   reported that the scene in her mind changed from black and white to
   color as soon as she dove mentally into a pool, and she could feel the
   coldness of the water. A skier who qualified for the US. Alpine ski team
   experienced the same "irritability" that she felt during actual races
   when she mentally practiced being in the starting gate. Without fail,
   athletes feel their muscles in action as they rehearse their sport.
   
   RELINQUISHMENT OF LIMITING COGNITIVE, VOLITIONAL, EMOTIONAL, AND
   SENSORIMOTOR PATTERNS.
   To some extent, sportspeople must acquire (or open to) another nature,
   which is why some of them say that in sport they are reborn (though the
   old self typically returns when the sporting event is over). Even the
   most commonplace sports require abandonment of habitual responses.
   Runners, for example, must resist the impulse to quit if they exercise
   lungs, heart, and legs beyond their usual limits. The urge to slow down
   is evident to everyone in races and hard training sessions. But the
   compensating pleasure of exceeding a limit, the glow of fitness, and the
   satisfaction that comes from overcoming resistance, come into play as
   well. Many sportspeople testify to both the pains and joys of
   self-surpassing, to the freedom that emerges in the midst of discomfort,
   to the second energy that comes with transcendence of ordinary patterns.
   By enduring the naysaying voices inside them, athletes discover new
   capacities. Breakdown for buildup--whether physical, emotional, or
   cognitive--is the rule in sport, as it is in all transformative practice.
   
   PRACTICED DETACHMENT FROM RESULTS.
   Sport inevitably requires detachment from immediate results, even in the
   poorest loser. Without some ability to transcend failure, sports
   participants cannot finish most games or contests. Detachment produced
   by the ups and downs of training and competition, by the strange twists
   of certain games, by the fluctuations of winning and losing often leads
   to a marked equanimity. Many who persevere in athletics learn that there
   is an interior freedom and grace beyond their sport's uncertain results.
   
   LONG-TERM COMMITMENT,
   which sport often commands, facilitates all the elements of discipline
   noted above. No other activity requires more dedication to somatic
   alteration, more willingness to restructure physique and behavior.
   
   SPORT-BOUNDEDNESS.
   Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life those boundaries
   bring a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and
   supreme. The least deviation from it "spoils the game," robs it of
   character and makes it worthless. The profound affinity between play and
   order is perhaps the reason why play seems to lie to such a large extent
   in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may
   be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create
   orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use
   to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics,
   terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension,
   poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc. Play
   casts a spell over us; it is "enchanting," "captivating." It is invested
   with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things:
   rhythm and harmony.
   
   NEW INTEGRATIONS OF MIND AND BODY.
   Volition, self-awareness, imagination, emotions, the senses, and motor
   control are involved in surpassing performance. To be successful, sports
   training must harmonize countless psychological and physical systems. It
   needs to establish new kinds of ordered functioning, yet allow
   spontaneous action. It must take our repertoires apart and reassemble
   them with new power and beauty.

The elements of sport I have just described are present in other
transformative practices, but in the context of sports they evoke a
greater range of physical abilities than that produced by any other
family of disciplines. In the service of integral practices, they can, I
believe, evoke a still greater range of capacities.

--from "The Future of The Body" by Michael Murphy
[Excerpt authorized as Fair Use under Copyright Act of 1976, Section 107]


*** Suggested Resources ***                                       [TOP]
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THE FUTURE OF THE BODY 
Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature by Michael Murphy
An impressively researched, authoritative, and absolutely mind-boggling
survey of 'the transformative capacities of human nature.' As to be
expected from a co-founder of California's Esalen Institute, the
emphasis here is very much on mind-body phenomena, with the focus on
individuals who apparently have extended the usual reach of human
possibility--saints, mystics, psychics, artists, geniuses, etc.  Drawing
on an astonishing array of eyewitness accounts, scientific studies,
biographies, letters, monographs, etc., Murphy rigorously organizes his
vast material into three categories: `Possibilities for Extraordinary
Life; Transformative Practices; and Evidence for Human Transformative
Capacity. In the last category, for example, he discusses and documents
placebo effects, spiritual healing, hypnosis, somatic disciplines such
as the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method, yogic powers, the
charismas of saints, etc. All this fascinating if sometimes sensational
information does serve a purpose, of course--to illuminate the author's
central observations and proposals, e.g., that 'the evidence for
extraordinary human attributes strongly supports some sort of
penentheism... the doctrine that Divinity is both immanent and
transcendent to the universe.' Whatever one thinks of Murphy's
conclusions, even a casual dipping into his text, which will no doubt
become a primary source for future mind-body investigation, will reveal
a world of inspiring wonders. (text with permission from Amazon.com)

   (softcover book, 793pp) Item# G6201-BK
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You can also buy this title directly from Amazon.com.

   (hardcover book, 793pp) Item# G6201-BH
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*** Thrive On! Recommended Site ***                              [TOP]
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THE FUTURE OF THE BODY 
Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature
by Michael Murphy, at Putnam Berkely Group's website.
<http://www.mca.com/putnam/books/future_of_the_body/book.html>
Lists the table of contents of, and various quotes about, this book.

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The contents herein are solely the opinions of Lifescope editors, and should 
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validity or accuracy. Lifescope therefore assumes no responsibility for injury
and specifically disclaims any warranty, express or implied, of fitness or 
merchantability for a particular purpose. Besides, actual mileage may vary.

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