In the United States each year billions of dollars are spent on entertainment, athletics, care of the body, cosmetics and other beauty aids, physical fitness, golf, football, baseball, worship of superstars, of music, TV and movies, on yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, Kung Fu, karate, jiujitsu, judo, aikido, swimming pools, tennis courts, mountain climbing, camping, skiing, water skiing, sailing, surfing, and so forth. In each of these activities a very high premium is placed on various aspects of bodily function and the appearance of one’s body to others. Very large numbers of people who indulge in these activities believe in God as the Body.
Over the last few decades, as the belief of God Out There was weakened, the belief of God as Body became strengthened. Instead of going to religious services on Saturday or Sunday, thousands of Americans spent their weekend being physically active, and more and more thousands are becoming adherents of the physical-fitness cult, if only in terms of jogging or light morning exercises. The manufacture of sports equipment has become a very large industry. The various techniques of body improvement, from Jack LaLanne’s to Yoga classes and the various so-called martial arts, are also fast becoming big business.
Let us try to get at the basic factors involved in such a belief system as God as the Body. First of all, whether we like it or not in our more idealized moments, we are a walking, running, climbing animal; unless we perform these activities, our body deteriorates. Unless we work out equivalents for body toning in terms of stretching and stressing the body, the quality of our thinking, feeling and doing slowly but surely likewise deteriorate. Most people exercise because they feel better as a consequence of the exercise. They can think, work, and play better. In the Far East this has been known for literally thousands of years. Stretching and stressing the body have become esoteric sciences. The best known of these, Hatha-Yoga, is touted as one of the doorways to spiritual advancement. Various martial arts: aikido, Kung Fu, karate, and so forth, are also parts of spiritual trips in various countries in the East. The “feeling better” that results from these activities is taken as an advance in personal discipline and in perfection of the body itself.
In the West there is a saying “A sound mind in a sound body,” in other words, a sound mind results from generating a sound body. Apparently, the body responds to a cyclical need for exercise and stretching. There is a daily cycle of twelve to twenty-four hours, and a weekly cycle of approximately seven days. If these cycles are studies in oneself, one can find, for example, that he should devote a period to stretching early in the morning and another period late in the afternoon or before going to bed. On the weekends he should stress the whole organism, exerting physical effort to the extent he hyperventilates as a consequence of the muscular activity, and one’s heart rate and the heart beat volume are stepped up during this period of exercise. Without these the circulatory system and the respiratory system degenerate, and all the familiar processes of aging and disease take place. One of the amazing things that one notices in the older teachers of Yoga and the martial arts from the Far East is their extreme youthful appearance, even when they are old. A fifty-year-old looks like a thirty-year-old and an eighty-year-old looks about like a forty-year-old. The obvious effects of aging, including either emaciation or overweight, just do not occur in these people who have managed to keep these physical disciplines going over their life span. To be continuously effective these disciplines cannot be followed for a year and then dropped. They must be followed from one’s youth to his old age.
For those who practice these disciplines, what I am saying is obvious. For those who do not, what I am saying may be taken with a good deal of skepticism. All I can say in response to the latter group is “try it.” In our next book, The Dyadic Cyclone, my wife and I will explain the minimum possible programs for the body, the stretching and stressing exercises, complete with a time schedule. These programs can be elaborated or extended. We will try to achieve the minimum possible for the busy person so that he can fit it into his everyday life with a minimum of strain.
For beginners it is wise to stress that in bodily development if your body is not in good shape, you must start slowly and not stretch or stress beyond the minimum discomfort level at the beginning. With these exercises one can overdo it. The important metaprogram, the important general principle above all others, is to exercise a little bit every day up to one’s comfort limit. As practically everybody has found who has followed a proper stretching and stressing regimen there is a point at which it becomes fun. One can always push beyond his limits and make it not fun once again, no matter how good a condition he is in. One cannot only get a second wind, but a third, fourth, and a fifth wind, as it were.
These seem to be the physiological bases for the activity centered around the body in the United States today. In addition to the basics of running, climbing, and walking, the necessity of stressing and stretching, there are less necessitous kinds of activities that go with belief system of God as the Body. One can transfer the pleasure obtained from his own body and its stretching and stressing to others who are better than he is in a given type of exercise. One can make a hero or a heroine out of those who have spent a professional life doing the particular kind of exercise that one is interested in. He can worship the body and the mind of his Hatha-Yoga guru, of his aikido teacher, of his Tai Chi teacher, of his athletics coach, of professionals and amateurs in any sport. This kind of transference to another from oneself, from one’s own body to another’s, to his activities, is a familiar learning procedure in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This identification with idealized persons who are doing better than oneself seems to be a necessary step for most of us to achieve on our own. However, sometimes this worship, this God as the Body, becomes separated from one’s own accomplishments and he worships on a vicarious basis without doing anything about his own body. This vicarious worship accounts for the popularity of spectator sports rather than engaging in them oneself.
Of course one can aspire to be a teacher of a given stretch and/or stressing set of exercises. He may then want to have vicariously the admiration that he sees professionals getting; or he may simply feel that a particular kind of activity is so worthwhile that he wants others to learn it. The thin line between God as the Body and the planetside survival trip as a professional teacher is a narrow boundary indeed. It is possible to flip over into complete worship as opposed to a balanced life. This is very easy to do with the God as the Body system.
Another outgrowth of God as the Body is the beauty industry. This industry does not necessarily ground itself on a physical fitness basis, even though the most beautiful bodies in our present culture are considered to be those in good physical shape—not too fat, not too thin, with adequate muscular development. But we have already handled this aspect of beauty. It is the form rather than the substance that we wish to deal with now.
No one seems to know where our criteria of physical beauty arose. It is well known that the criteria of beauty in various parts of Africa are different from one another and from the European criteria toward beauty. The differences of the human face and figure throughout the world extend across a fairly wide spectrum of form, color, texture, body weight per unit height, and so forth. The saying “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” shows that most criteria of beauty are arbitrary programs inserted into our training while very young. To the very young everything is beautiful. It is only with the shaping by parents and peers that one develops a narrow set of criteria for what he considers beauty.
Some people when we first see them look beautiful. Others become beautiful only with continued contact and the appreciation gained by delving into their thinking, feeling, and doing. With some of the first mentioned, we may realize with time that their beauty is of form rather than of substance and function. Of other persons we can say that the form is not formally beautiful but the mind and the spirit are beautiful. There are times when we can recapture the ecstatic, blissful state of the infant in which everything and everyone is beautiful. We can change our “eye of the beholder.”
Those that are considered formally “beautiful” are hired by the advertising industry, by corporations, by government, by the movie and TV industries, to play the roles of public purveyors of beauty products, clothes, automobiles, and so forth. In the United States there used to be white models only. In recent years, with the new respect for colored peoples, more and more models are colored. It is to be noticed, however, that these models of various races are selected not so much according to the criteria of the Africans, Asiatics, and so on, as according to United States criteria of formal beauty. Noses, eyes, lips, chin, jowls, are selected according to Western European/American criteria rather than racial/tribal criteria.
What formal beauty is is so well stipulated that practically the whole beauty industry operates on the basis of one set of standards. If one looks at a copy of Vogue, or Cosmopolitan, or other women’s magazines, he sees a uniformity of standards for women and for men. There are currently in fashion definite kinds of eye-shadow, eyeliner, lipstick color, face powder, anti-perspirant, toothpaste, shampoo, hair conditioner, body oil, feminine hygiene preparation, deodorant soap, nail polish color, and so forth. Setting up the criteria for what a female should put on various parts of her face is almost an esoteric art. Should or should not she wear false eyelashes? Should or should not she wear lipstick? How long should she wear her hair in what sort of fashion? Should she change her hair color at this time? Is she color-coordinating her clothing and her face?
More and more people are beginning to realize that underclothing is not the answer to a beautiful body. Not long ago whalebone corsets, waist cinches, panty girdles, and so forth, were used to shape the sloppy body. There is still a big industry in the “best” brassiere, the best form of the female breast under clothing. Nowadays more and more of the younger generation are taking care of their bodies through Yoga and other forms of exercise. The products of the beauty industry do not appeal to them and they wear very simple clothing, without elaborate stretch materials and wired-in shapes that are meant to create an illusion of form which isn’t there. These youngsters believe in the particular form they have as a consequence of the right kind of exercise and the right diet and they consciously avoid overweight and its problems.
In the fundamental psychophysiology of the obesity-skinniness dichotomy, there is a basic factor determining body weight and the steady state associated with it. For each individual there is a critical body weight above which appetite for food is a runaway propensity causing overeating. Below this critical weight there is not enough appetite to maintain the bodily needs. At the critical weight the appetite and the needs balance, so that the weight remains constant.
Over a long period of time this steady-state weight may change with a change in the physical activity of the person involved. For example, if one goes from a physically active life to a sedentary one, the critical weight may shift downward as he loses the muscle mass that had been needed for the physical life. As he shifts in the opposite direction, from sedentary to physical, the critical body weight can be expected to rise as the muscular fraction of the total body weight increases. The best measurement to date of this critical weight is the work of Commander Albert R. Behnke of the U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute during World War II on the density of the body. If the body has a density of 1.0 or higher there is very little fat present. If the density is below 1.0, there is excess fat. The steady-state weight seems to occur for most people at a body density of approximately this same 1.0.
The value of fat for survival is dictated by factors not generally present in our society. (See the discussion of the Polynesians, below.) For the best physical condition the body density should be as high as possible in our society. This leaves very little allowance for body weight loss in the case of illness. The weight lost in bed when one is ill is first the fat of the body. When this is all used up the muscle mass starts going. Hence one is losing protein, literally “eating” one’s own protein after “eating” one’s own fat. Thus it is wise to have some fat reserve.
However, it is to be remembered that muscle mass varies directly as the amount of physical activity varies. The more active one is, the larger the fraction of one’s own body weight that is in protein.
In my own experience the best diet for control of weight is high protein. Inevitably this means eating meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs, and not much else, and drinking milk. Nuts are a source of protein, but they are one third carbohydrate and one third fat. A meat diet tends to be self-regulating in the sense that the amount of fat with the protein is sufficient to quench the appetite after a small intake. This diet requires the additional intake of vitamins to make up for a lack of them in the meat.
It is harder to maintain this diet in the tropics than it is in temperate zones or in the Arctic. High environmental temperature and humidity require a larger flow of fluid and minerals. In my experience this flow is best maintained by eating green coconuts and drinking their milk. This was taught to me by British Virgin Islanders.
The beauty industry specifies that “fat is ugly.” There are some cultures in which “fat is beautiful.” In general in Polynesia the royalty are overfed until they have become very fat, when they are considered very beautiful. I suggest that this criterion of body beauty was influenced by the long sea voyages of the Polynesians in which survival could depend upon being fat. If one must go without water for many days at a time, then it is best to be fat, because he can burn the fat to carbon dioxide and water, thus avoiding the necessity of taking in water. The dolphins, whales, and porpoises do exactly this; they are mammals living at sea without fresh water.
Another reason the Polynesians might have fattened themselves for their voyages is the flotation that being fat gained for them. If one is blown overboard, he does not have to exert much effort to float if he is sufficiently fat. I have seen many people who are as if living at sea, as it were which causes fatness to have survival value for them; as though if they weren’t fat, they might drown. There is a desperation to staying fat among these people. For the Polynesians of today, however, there is no such desperate need for being fat; consciously they consider it an aesthetic thing rather than a survival thing. It is imbedded in their culture because they were brought up with the programming left over from the time of the large migrations across the Pacific.
One other possible reason for staying fat is that there is more to eat when one runs out of food under desperate conditions. First of all, one’s need for food intake does not arise as soon if he is fat; he burns up, “eats,” his own fat, as explained earlier. Secondly, if a person dies or is killed while stranded with others or while adrift in a lifeboat, for example, there is more for the others to eat if he was fat. This kind of thing rarely happens nowadays, but it does happen: after a crash landing in the mountains of Peru (Survive!, by Clay Blair, Jr.); after the sinking of the whaleship Essex, when the crew, having been forced to the boats after a whale had destroyed the ship, ate the body of the cabin boy as they drifted to the Chilean coast; during the Nobile expedition across the North Pole by dirigible. Cannibalism in the service of survival is not very well understood by those who have not been faced with survival desperation. In his book The Boat Walter Gibson presents a strong pro case in such circumstances.1
Of course in all the above situations, the consideration of beauty disappeared. It usually does under conditions of desperation, danger, and threats to one’s survival. Under these circumstances, when one is under the sway of the survival programs within his biocomputer, beauty and its criteria are hardly important.
However, once one has taken the spiritual path and achieved a certain experience with various far-out states of consciousness, he begins to expand his criteria of beauty into regions where, before, they were almost forbidden. In these states of consciousness one’s criteria are so expanded that anything and everything becomes beautiful and perfect. One pulls out of the human condition and the necessity for survival of the physical being and moves into eternal spaces united with all other sentient beings throughout the universe. The impact of such experiences is so great that one’s criteria of beauty or of sin and virtue are completely flipped. One goes through peculiar transformations in that what used to be considered beautiful expands to include many, many things that one might have considered ugly. Finally, the dichotomy “beauty and ugliness” disappears; one achieves a state of High Indifference in which he realizes that bliss does not come from the outside world, it comes from within. One elicits his own bliss, he elicits bliss in others. He realizes his own eternal nature and hence is no longer quite so subject to the survival programs of the biocomputer.
God as the Body disappears. One is no longer subject to the same kinds of programming that he was previously. The body is now part of a more immense God whose vastness encompasses the whole universe and all of one’s higher states of consciousness. For example, in the old belief system of God as the Body, one’s own death was unjust, catastrophic, a complete disaster. With the new belief system, death is merely a transition form, a change in state of oneself, a change in a state of being, a change of consciousness into a new, more expanded state, highly desirable and not as restricting as the state of consciousness which was tied to a body. One can leave the body with joy, with a sense of completeness of his planetside trip, and go to whatever it is that one goes on to. God as Death is also gone.
1. See Lilly, John C., “Mental Effects of Reduction of Ordinary Levels of Physical Stimuli on Intact, Healthy Persons,” Psychiatric Research Reports 5, American Psychiatric Assn., June 1956.