In part 1, I spoke about how I used the pop psychology Darkness Integration techniques taught by Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, and David Goggins to harness rage for fuel in the gym and tap into raw sides of me for motivation.
I operated on this system for a couple of years, then the super toxic relationship I mentioned in pt.1 broke down right as covid lockdown began and threw me into another vortex of darkness, with no occupational routine to take my mind elsewhere.
I would go to bed shaking like a withdrawn heroin addict, because that’s probably how my brain was working. Toxic love does this to you. It consumes all of you.
All I had was my humble home gym: the adjustable bench press & dumbell set, the treadmill, some resistance bands and my all-time favourite torture device: the ab wheel.
My spirit was getting uglier, but at least I wasn’t. Natty lockdown gains were real.
Like any young man with identity issues who was seeing results from self improvement, Narcissism and Self Hatred raced for pole position in my version of Inside Out, swapping places in the control seat of my brain several times a day.
I’d get on the apps and chat with baddies, feel good for 0.0026 seconds, then get hit with a voice that said “but it’s not her… ”.
I couldn’t take my shit and drop it on someone else’s door. I needed to heal. Or get her back. Or both. Or neither and become more. I needed a redemption arc, and the tools available to me weren’t cutting it.
In my desperation, I understood the operating system of my brain urgently needed an update. In my late teens I’d exhausted all the Fitness and Dating information resources available to young men. I already knew everything out there. But I knew this wasn’t another module to install. This was a total system reboot- an issue of the soul.
My whole world view would need to change. And what better place to start than by looking into the mystical wisdoms I always dismissed as nonsense.
The Road To Zen Mastery
Those disgusting, dirty, yoga hippie, skin-and-bone “namaste” vegan grifters, if anything, seemed happier than me.
‘Maybe I can learn their secret without paying a king’s ransom to inhale DMT-infused wheatgrass through my dickhole.’ I thought…
I sat on my bench press staring into the garden. A Thai Buddha garden miniature stared back at me. Daring me.
I prefer Thai Buddha to Chinese Buddha. He’s lean and radiates excellence. I remembered the 8-step wheel of Buddhism I learned in my EU funded school.
…after we learned how cool and misunderstood Islam is… and how bad the Jews always had it… in the same textbook that made them the biggest villains of the first century.
I learned mental flexibility early.
The eight steps seemed like a lifelong journey. The kind that makes you skip showers under a tree. I needed the juice now.
…So I did guided YouTube meditations, and when I wasn’t getting jumpscared by ads, I made some decent progress- I was calm, grounded, present, and able to make the intrusive thoughts go away.
When the affects lasted long after the videos were over, I actually thought I was “cured”.
I actually thought I was Zen. What I had done was built a Zen house on a marsh of lava. It collapsed almost instantly, but I had tasted peace and needed the real deal.
If I was going to go balls deep, it needed to be the right flavour of Buddhism. I did not wish to become content with being weak.
Then I discovered Takuan Soho(1573 – 1645), Zen Master, and friend of Miyomoto Musashi (1584-1645), the greatest Rōnin Samurai duellist who ever lived.
Takuan wrote a series of letters to Miyamoto, outlining where to put his mind in order to be fully aware yet fully at peace. His teachings were for warriors and even touched on the metaphysical.
The letters were collected, translated, and became the book the unfettered mind.
I binged the 2.5 hour audiobook several times back-to-back on audible, unlocking new insight and depth from the metaphorical and poetic language each time while lifting, grinding GTA Online, and pimping my room with crappy DIY projects from AliExpress. I cannot recommend this book enough.
It’s one of those books where each line can generate 100 different thoughts. Compact and potent.
The main concept is Zen No-Mind, which unlike standard meditation, is about disciplining the mind with the goal of unleashing it, unlocking Flow State whilst being calm and hyper aware, completely present in the task at hand.
If the mind is fixed in any single direction, it’s blind in all others. Flow state for me is leaning into autistic overstimulation, turning off the conscious mind, being Zen in my core, and trusting my instincts to take the wheel.
I give my subconscious mind all the data available to all 5 senses, not overanalysing any one thing, then give it the keys to drive the machine. Self-Trust is a large part of the process.
I felt the blood in my muscle fibres, I felt the roots of toxic thoughts before they grew, I felt the point where my mind limited my muscle power like an ECU limits a car’s horsepower, aware I had more to give if I can disable the neural programming.
Most importantly, I felt firmly grounded to the planet, like reality and fate itself was a liquid I could bend with my will, no longer arrested by doubt and weakness.
I made half hearted plans to move to Canada while the borders were briefly open before I realised how brutal the rent crisis is there and I couldn’t just show up empty handed and make my way with hard graft.
I called her back and had some fun conversations without desperation ruining it.
I did gruelling garden work and my fried attention span was replaced by having the time of my life.
I hit PR’s every other day and recovered from muscle soreness faster, because I could sense exactly when and how it would show up, so I prepared real recovery strategy, and overcame the pain better mentally.
But I still had a limiter on my power. I could push an extra 10-20% by imagining nightmare ragebait scenarios that demanded I lift the weight.
Occult Power
In the two years I spent with her, she was actively practicing witchcraft and swore by it, but to me it was always a joke. But I was open to new experiences now and felt high on my own supply after applying other mental concepts so quickly. Surely if there’s something to it I could prove or disprove it quickly.
I always took her tall tales of successful hexes and luck spells as premium quality, entertaining bullshit. “Haha ok that’s crazy” was my response to her silly delulu streaks.
What did I have to lose by giving this a go?
After some research I found a flavour of occultism I could fuck with: Chaos Magick.
Chaos Magick is for those who do not believe in the occult. It operates on the assumption that it’s all fake, but with enough belief, the mind makes it real, and sometimes, this belief actually has inexplicable effects over there from something you did over here.
It’s not a religion or a belief system. It’s a tool for weaponising belief itself for your own gain and places you as a DIY Lab Tech collecting evidence of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s the power of belief/manifesting/the secret but on crack. No, on east-German pharmaceutical-grade performance enhancers for Olympians.
I was sold on the premise of mind over matter since I had experienced it with Zen. Maybe there was something to this too.
At worst, I would waste my time. But it was lockdown and time was all I had.
The phrase “nothing is true, everything is permitted” didn’t come from Assassin’s Creed. It came from Chaos Magick decades before.
The basic premise is to:
set an intention or goal,
Enter a trance state called “gnosis” where your brain is more suggestible to commands
charge the intention with intense emotion to sear it into the mind
Exit the Gnosis state and forget about the ritual completely, get on with life
allow the subconscious mind, which has the goal Seared into it, lead the way.
I started small and saw results pretty much immediately. The Zen training meant I could slip into gnosis straight away and with high intensity.
To charge intents, I bit my tongue or put my hand over a lighter. Something sharply painful did the trick.
The Zen No Mind training meant I could forget the rituals quickly and easily follow my subconscious. Actively thinking about your intentions makes it less likely to work.
So what happened?
I made good luck charms from keys and chains that worked scarily well
I predicted unpredictable events
I kept finding money in the street
I had spiritual experiences, OBE’s, astral projection, and spoke to entities, deities, and spirits
Despite looking, dressing, acting, and talking like a normal person when I went back to college, other spiritually active people kept showing up in my life by coincidence. I didn’t advertise it all all.
I “bended reality” by getting specific, intentionally chosen people to talk to me without any actions on my part.
I do not take drugs nor do I have schizophrenia. This was all raw brainpower.
After doing all the standard witchcraft activities, I got bored. Yes, bored of having occult powers. It was a lot of effort for results I could’ve just more easily gotten in person with Real World actions.
I used the ability to get her talking to me again. She was interested in me again. I felt unethical, slimy, and came clean, allowing her to move on with her life. I accepted she was gone. I let her go.
There was only one final goal: Delimit my muscle power.
Berserker Viking Powerlifting
So I had been practicing Zen No-Mind for a year and could easily snap in and out of it at will, then I saw the movie The Northman in cinema and there’s a Berserker Viking scene where he goes full occult trance to prepare for the raid.
Historically, Berserkers were Viking warriors who intentionally became insane to de-limit their bodies and become killing machines possessed by the spirits of savage animals.
That got me thinking if this could be applied to the gym as I was already combining No-Mind with Focussed Aggression for controlled power boosts.
Long story short,I entered Zen No-Mind as a Protective Container for my psyche, like a Virtual Machine on a PC. I then temporarily and psychologically safely convinced myself I could talk to Odin (No ritual, just mental gnosis/Chaos Magick) and asked him for proof he existed by giving me all the power my body could handle.
In short, I was allowing myself slip out of sanity whilst containerising this version of myself within a reversible shell, meaning I could revert to sanity at will. It wasn’t “playing pretend” I actually convinced myself it was real, but retained the ability to “turn it off”.
This is chaos Magick in a nutshell but the Zen Meditation gave it more purity and potency.
So anyways, with the Vikings OST playing, Odin strikes me with lightning and I feel it electrify all my veins and muscle fibres. He tells me to prove I’m worthy of his power.
I pick up the 35kg barbell (at most I could do 10 bicep curl reps at the time) and it felt weightless.
I added more plates until the thing weighed 65kg and bicep curled it for 8 reps, rested 5 seconds, and pushed out another 4 reps.
I did another 3 sets with less reps each time. My body was shaking and my mind was getting twitchy so I snapped out of it back to sanity mode.
The muscle pump was insane and it was the fastest arm gains I ever made. For some reason I recovered well from this overtraining pretty easily. Muscle soreness lasted 1 day.
I felt superhuman. Mind over matter is 100% real.
I sometimes swapped between mythologies and deities to keep it fresh. Today I was Thor, tomorrow I was Doomslayer abusing Hell Energy, then the next day I was lifting for Jesus.
It was too psychologically intense to train this way every other day though, so I slowed down to once a week and as more of a plateau-breaker technique.
When I went back to college a few people asked me how I train and if I was on steroids.
I took sick Sprezzatura joy in saying “yea I do a few push ups in the morning and eat whatever I want that’s it really.”
Hilariously, my early 2020’s natty physique is considered small by the SARM-munching gymbros today, but being shredded was more important to me than size:
Would I do it all again?
No.
But there’s no correct path to rejecting limitation and becoming more.
Just the path you take and what you take from it.
Thanks for Reading.
Be Good.
Thumbnail Image by Rob Griffin