What am I doing?
I’ve been wrestling with this question for some time. People constantly ask me what Modern Bronze is, and I give everyone a different answer. After all, it’s a beast with many heads, and from the outside (at least right now), things seem unrelated. I write these Daily Reflections and pour out my soul, and meanwhile I post crazy strongman lifting content on social media. What gives? I’ve had a feeling that everything I’m doing is related, but I just never knew how to say how. That is, until now.
I’ve been rereading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, and it dawned on me…
“Religious Experience.”
That’s it. That’s the thing I’m after. That’s what I’m trying to share with you, and that’s what I want to help you achieve. I want to be clear - this has nothing to do with organized religion. It has nothing to do with hierarchy or tribalism. It has everything to do with YOU, the individual, and the depth of experience you can access in this life. The word “religious” has been stolen by the holy nay-sayers of the past, and I want to take it back. We are all capable of religious experience, whether we belong to a church or a synagogue or nothing at all. It is accessible to the apologist and the atheist alike.
So what is religious experience? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not a “spiritual experience” as defined by our New Age standards. It has nothing to do with starseeds, radiating light or psychedelic drugs. It has nothing to do with forests or dance festivals. It is an experience that occurs only within the human psyche and soul, and it is not all (sometimes at all) pleasant. When I think of the term “spiritual” I can’t help but think of the hordes of peace-loving “seekers” that attend Burning Man each year. That could not be further from what this is.
“Religious” has a more serious tone, a somber, antiquated ring. It does justice to the depth of the experience I’m describing. What that experience is has been called many things throughout our history - Dark Night of the Soul, Resurrection, Nirvana, sometimes it’s even called psychosis. It is coming to grips with the true nature of reality while simultaneously shedding the parts of ourselves that keep us trapped in our individual prisons of thought. In my experience, we don’t get there through the light. We must first go through the dark to see the true meaning of the light.
The religious experience is the act of staring into the abyss - all of our pain, all of our fears, all of our failures, all of our lost expectations - and waiting. It’s the the waiting we despise, the sitting with all of our guilt and shame and resentments. We don’t want to feel pain. We want sex, food, alcohol, drugs, entertainment, iPhones - anything but the pain. The problem with that, though, is that by masking the pain, we are sure to pass it on to others. Even if we don’t mean it. Even if we have good intentions.
If we wait long enough, we’ll start to see things differently. We’ll start to grow out of the old narratives that have long been our masters. We’ll start to feel compassion rather than simply understand it, and, perhaps most importantly, we’ll start to feel actual love for ourselves. Not for what we look like, not for what we do, not for what we offer, but for what we are. The means and the ends. Every individuals’ process looks different, so I can’t give you exact instructions on what to do. I can’t only point you in the right direction (I am the finger that points to the moon), and relay my own experience of wrestling and waiting. What I can say, however, is that if each and every person on earth opened themselves to this type of experience, suffering as we know it would end. Of this, I am certain.
So where does the lifting come in? Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. Our bodies are quite literally our temples. They are the vessels for religious experience. By strengthening and nourishing them, we expand our capacity for what we can handle, and we lengthen the time we are able to stare into the abyss. We are dealing with pain and traumas that inhabit the body just as much as the mind, and a weak body will have a more difficult time with intense experiences. Throughout the last month of what I will call my most recent religious experience, my body has been thrashed and scourged. If I didn’t prepare it the way I did going into that experience, I don’t know if I would have been able to handle it.
I hope at least some of this makes sense to you, and I hope I don’t sound like another quack who’s off his rocker. Maybe I am, but that’s fine with me. I believe that we each deserve personal salvation, and I believe we all have the capacity to find it. All we need is a little courage and a little faith. Hopefully, I’ve given you a bit of both.