I had always felt that such signs of physical individuality as a bulging belly (sign of spiritual sloth) or a flat chest with protruding ribs (sign of an unduly nervous sensibility) were excessively ugly, and I could not contain my surprise when I discovered that there were people who loved such signs. To me, these could only seem acts of shameless indecency, as though the owner were exposing his spiritual pudenda on the outside of his body. They represented one type of narcissism that I could never forgive.
Yukio Mishima – Sun and Steel Pg. 15
In this era it is easy to neglect the body because the current societal power structure is based on mental power, not bodily or spiritual power.
Easy is the pursuit of pleasure because growth and fulfillment require overcoming difficulty. Walking the path to mastery across Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS) is never easy, but the wanderer walking the authentic path may not view things as easy or hard, but see the path as the route to fulfillment, the correct way to live.
Living correctly is easier than living incorrectly, even though the path to mastery is hard and the path of pleasure requires no effort–because the pursuit of pleasure is Hell.
Contained inside the depths of every spirit is the desire to give effort. To produce. To be valuable and create value for others.
Narcissistic & toxic weakness
A protruding belly is a physical and visual display of the pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure is narcissism of the highest degree because it is volunteering to be weak.
Promoting weakness is promoting narcissism because the strong must carry the burden of the weak. There is nothing wrong with being involuntarily weak, and you must understand that strength and weakness differ across the domains of Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS). A village elder may be weak of body, but she may be a bulwark of mind and spirit.
A community is not as strong as its weakest link–this is a common misconception. A community’s strength is the average of the strength of all individuals who are part of that community. Strength is not just physical strength, but strength or mastery over Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS).
If members of a community of any size, from a couple to a country, promote weakness, say by the pursuit of pleasure, they make the group weaker. The strong must pick up the slack of the weak because if they don’t, stress increases. Enough stress leads to fractures. This applies to nature, to relationships, to buildings, to all things. A relationship can fracture just like a bridge with too much stress.
Being out of shape when you have the capacity to be in shape and promoting such a lifestyle in pursuit of pleasure makes the individual and the community weaker and more prone to fracture. It is narcissistic, gluttonous, negligent, cowardly, vain, and overtly privileged.
The obese pursuer of pleasure is a modern king or queen who continues to eat while watching others carry their weight, even if they do not see this directly. This is oppressive behavior to the individual as well as the whole.
Those working their way out of this position are walking an honorable path and must be supported. Do not attack those on the wrong path who are sincerely looking for a new way; instead, show them the way.
A strong body is organic
Civilization has existed for roughly 6,000 years. Civilization, through technology, reduces the dependency on the body domain as the mind seeks to solve problems and create efficiencies. The fields used to be plowed by hand, then by donkey, then by tractor, and one day by AI or drones. Technology supports the mind domain and is at odds with the body domain.
Pre-civilized life is near-impossible to measure as it existed before the written word, but you can estimate it to 294,000 years ago, which is 49 times the amount of civilized life. Before recorded civilization, strength was king–and in many civilized events, strength is still king.
We aren’t adapted to the mental-first society; we are made to use our bodies.
The most organic way you can live is through cultivating bodily strength. This is the authentic human experience.
The most manufactured, fake, and corporate way to live is through weakness of body.
There is no value to having a weak body, only cost.
If you love your neighbor, if you care about others, you will cultivate your strength so that your weakness does not burden others.
The love of weakness
The love of weakness is the love of narcissistic destruction. The love of weakness is stolen valor, taken from the strong and given to the weak who do not deserve it because they have not pursued mastery.
The love and embrace of weakness across Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS) is anarchy. It is destruction for the sake of destruction and the pursuit of pleasure, which is hell because it has no end.
The pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of weakness, is death.
Anyone with disabilities across any domain of man can and must pursue mastery across the three domains of mankind. Disabilities do not make an individual weak; the pursuit of weakness does.
Having a disability can be encouraging to the spirit. A disability creates an opponent to work against, a force to overcome and thrive against. This is why many people who are legitimately disabled accomplish so much more than the able-bodied pursues of pleasure who may create fake disabilities to rationalize their pursuit of pleasure, or pursue pleasure so much that they give themselves an authentic disability.
The interconnectedness of Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS)
“The steel faithfully taught me the correspondence between the spirit and the body: thus feeble emotions, it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and overimpressionability to an oversensitive, white skin. Bulging muscles, a taut stomach, and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit, the power of dispassionate intellectual judgement, and a robust disposition.”
Yukio Mishima – Sun and Steel Pg.22
Yukio Mishima learned about his Body, Mind, and Spirit(BMS), the three that make the one(3:1), through the pursuit of mastery over weightlifting. So much so that he wrote an entire book about the philosophical lessons he acquired through lifting steel under the sun.
A weak and feeble body, weakness of the body domain, can overflow to other domains of the individual.
A weak body can make the mind and spirit weak, so it is crucial to pursue mastery across all three domains–you must never neglect the body.
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