A few days ago I had an amazing workout. Not because I burned so many calories. Not because I lifted more weight than ever before. But because there were moments of purity in my experience. During those moments some ideas came to me with a clarity that I rarely experience. And though I will do my best to share these ideas with you, I know I will fail. Because I didn’t experience these ideas as words or, even, as pictures. I just experienced them. And this is precisely what I want to share with you.
There were moments during my workout when I was just working out. I wasn’t thinking about irrelevant issues like the fact that I was tired, what I had to do the next day or what was on TV. I wasn’t even thinking about relevant issues like how I should be moving my muscles. I was just doing it. And it occurred to me somehow that this was entirely about purity of action. There was nothing pulling me away from the act. Not my mind. Not my body. This last point is important. I was working out properly. I was standing in the right position. I was using my muscles properly. My motions were pure. If they weren’t, I would have felt it. I would have been pulled into a state of consciousness that would have disconnected me from the act.
This concept of purity is something that came to me during these moments of purity. As I said above, I did not experience these ideas the way that ideas normally present themselves to me – as the products of deliberate acts of reason. I lived these ideas. I was these ideas. And now I’m trying to capture them in words so that you might taste what was, for me, a truly transcendent experience.
Purity of the act means that the act is done in the right way. For me, on the elliptical, it meant that I was not slumping forward, that I was not rising and falling in an effort to avoid working my thigh muscles, that I had the right balance of arm and leg exertion and that all of my motions were synchronized in the right way. Every act will have its own definition of purity in this way. But there is more to it. Purity of the act also means that the act is its own justification. It is not a means to an end. It is not merely a step in some larger task. It just is. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that one should randomly engage in acts without purpose. Quite the contrary. I believe that one should employ the powers of reason to define one’s purpose and direction. But having chosen to engage purposefully in the act, the act must become all that there is. Otherwise it will not contribute to your purpose as powerfully as it otherwise might. It will hang on the walls of your life like a painting you have purchased and cherish but which you do not truly understand.
This perspective challenges the way we typically think in the West. We are a culture riven with conflict. With many different types of conflict. And I think the most powerful conflicts are intra rather than inter personal. We all have competing objectives and desires and they cause us to behave inconsistently. Our self-concept is bifurcated. We believe in such entities as heart, mind, body, soul (which I guess means our self-concept is quadfurcated). And we conceptualize our selves as distinct from our acts. I have a lot of respect for Cartesian dualism and the general Western analytical perspective. Yet, there are other perspectives that are worth exploring. The experience I had during my workout the other night is hard for me to explain with my Western perspective. And certainly, any such explanation will not be as valuable to me as one that helps me experience such states more often.
And so I come to the title of this post about seeking excellence. There’s a small point I want to make about this before getting to what I really want to share. The small point is that excellence sets too low a bar. The right bar is perfection. Excellence is where you will land if you aim at perfection. I know all about “perfection is the enemy of the good.” I agree with that famous quote. The problem with typical perfection-seeking is not that perfection is the bar, it’s that people insist on achieving it right away and they refuse to move forward one inch unless they are doing it perfectly. That’s foolish and wasteful. But we ought to at least have our sights on perfection and aim ourselves in its direction.
But there’s a more important point here. Our search for excellence is typically a search for excellent acts and results. We set objectives. We make plans to achieve them. And thusly, we move forward. It’s all very external to our selves. There’s us and there’s our acts. And it seems to me that our search for excellence not only fails to lead to excellent selves, it fails to lead to excellent acts! My workout was so amazing precisely because I wasn’t trying to be excellent. I let go of external objectives and just did it. [I’m trying so hard not to say that I became the workout. That’s way too goofy for me!] I let go of the distinctions between self and act, between mind and body. This led to an experience that was so much more fulfilling than what I normally can achieve.
I am not prepared to discard Cartesian dualism. It has an elegance that I find fascinating and beautiful. But, nonetheless, I think there is a lesson here. Whatever you chase will forever elude you. But what you do is what you will become. If you pursue externalities then even if you find them, they will never become part of your soul. Don’t seek excellence. Be excellent. Live every moment with purity.
