Introduction
Vitality! What a word! It spurs the imagination - all sorts of images come to mind. Ecstatic joy! The exuberance of victory! Getting the gold! Winning the battle! Living life to the fullest! Achieving the summit! Laughter around the dinner table! A feast! A toast before the meal! There is life in the word vitality.
Much attention is given to eating and exercising. We train and we diet. And if we don’t work hard at these things, most of us at least think hard about these things. We are caught by the activities of eating and exercising because we have a fantasy of the vitality we imagine they can bring us. What we are really after is vitality. We want to be alive and to feel alive! But in our modern world, vitality has been reduced to “health” and “fitness,” both words that are as tired as they are tiring, lacking imagination; words that can be defined and objectively measured. Fitness was excellently defined by Kilgore, Hartman, and Lascek in a book entitled FIT:
Much attention is given to eating and exercising. We train and we diet. And if we don’t work hard at these things, most of us at least think hard about these things. We are caught by the activities of eating and exercising because we have a fantasy of the vitality we imagine they can bring us. What we are really after is vitality. We want to be alive and to feel alive! But in our modern world, vitality has been reduced to “health” and “fitness,” both words that are as tired as they are tiring, lacking imagination; words that can be defined and objectively measured. Fitness was excellently defined by Kilgore, Hartman, and Lascek in a book entitled FIT:
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“The definition for physical fitness… is simple, functional, and measurable:
Possession of adequate levels of strength, endurance, and mobility to provide for successful participation in occupational effort, recreational pursuits, familial obligation, and that is consistent with a functional phenotypic expression of the human genotype. … The definition here clearly states that physical fitness is functional and that the elements of fitness are strength, endurance, and mobility.” |
Fitness is simply a combination of strength, endurance, and mobility. It can be measured and it can be achieved by lifting weights, jogging, and stretching.
The word health carries no more living power than the word fitness, for health is simply longevity and disease prevention. It’s merely the absence of disease. It’s how long you live and it’s how long you live without disease that makes you healthy. There’s something dead about these words. Whenever we use the word fitness we automatically conjure the spirit of Darwin and the idea of the survival of the fittest. Fitness is about surviving, not thriving. We keep fit to stay alive, not to glow with radiant life. “Health” and “fitness” don’t inspire the imagination and they don’t move the soul. A few of us have achieved fitness, but how many of us are actually brimming with vitality?
In his book The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, James Hillman, the brilliant American psychologist and one of the most profound thinkers of our time, made a life-altering statement: Fitness has replaced vitality. He’s absolutely right. We have reduced our living fantasies of vitality to the lackluster goals of fitness and survival.
Our exercising and dieting, while occasionally producing fitness results, usually fail to give us what we really want. We eat and exercise in the quest for fitness and health, but what we really want, what we really seek and yearn for, is vitality. The reason our eating and exercising has not given us vitality is that we lack imagination. Our modern viewpoint, our modern world, deprives us of the ability to really taste life, to smell it, and to hear it, for we imagine ourselves to be machines.
We do not often realize it, but we are all deeply indoctrinated with a single, overwhelming view of reality: that the universe is a massive machine. It runs like a giant clock, ordered by the specific, inalterable laws of physics. And we humans are just extensions of this machine, small machines moving about within the monstrous machine of the universe. The world is dead. It is ruled by physical laws. And since the world is dead, so are we. Our bodies are machines.
We each have a heart that pumps blood, a digestive tract that dissolves and absorbs nutrients from our food, and a circulatory system which transports those nutrients from place to place. Our nerves are simply electrical wires. Our muscles function by the electrical input from our nerves, much as a light switch does, and our muscles move our bones about axes just as a machine would do. We are intricate robots, but robots nonetheless. This knowledge and the viewpoint it engenders have led us all to a mindset in which our bodies are just machines, not living animals full of passions, energy, and life. How can we have vitality when we imagine life to be mechanical and devoid of all life?
How can eating bring us any vitality when food is imagined to be just fuel, when a meal is just ‘filling the tank,’ when calories count, and when our macronutrient ratio is more important than the taste, smell, and beauty of our food? How can exercising fill us with living energy when we jog not because it feels good, but because we need to improve the functioning of our cardiorespiratory systems, or because we need to burn a few more calories? We drink eight cups of water per day not because we’re thirsty, but because we’ve been told it’s healthy for us. For Pete’s sake, we drink wine for the tannins and not for the magnificent aroma and the wonderful, calming feeling it evokes! The mechanical imagination makes us into zombies.
When the body is imagined as a machine, it is already dead. One keeps a machine running, but a machine can never have exuberance. A machine cannot have vitality. The idea that the body is a machine creates a desolate desert wasteland of our lives. It leaves no life in our lives, rendering us no more than dried husks with rabid survival instincts.
Life should be about so much more than survival, but this can only happen when vitality regains its place of honor. Vitality must be reinstated to a position above fitness. The idea that the body is a machine must be replaced by the idea of the body as an animal - a living, roaring animal! The body is a lion roaring at the enraging desert. Only such a roar can bring water to the desert wasteland, bring the body back to life, and restore us to vitality. And such a roar is the roar of the imagination. Only by expanding our imaginations can we bring vitality back to our lives.
Fortunately, we can go back to the ancient Greeks with their wild, wise, and powerful imaginations. They had myths that spark the vital imagination that is required to see, hear, and feel vitality. They had imaginary gods, goddesses, and heroes personifying all forms of vitality. They had Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Hercules, Hades, Pan, and many, many more. In this book, we will call these gods, goddesses, and heroes the Images of Vitality, for they are imaginary beings that contain the vitality we seek. Their stories can ignite our imaginations beyond the desolation of the mechanical body. The Greek imagination is very useful for breathing life back into the animal.
It is very challenging for our modern minds, which have the tendency to take everything literally, to grasp the difference between the ancient Greek gods and the concept of God. For us, God has to do with faith and belief. The God of the Bible is a God outside of and superior to the universe. The Biblical God is not of this world. We are so used to either believing or not believing in God that we don’t have a notion, as the ancient Greeks did, of simply remembering and honoring the gods.
The Greek word for 'the gods' was 'The Immortals.' The idea is that the gods and goddesses are immortal forces. It doesn’t matter whether one believes in a force or not. A force exists regardless of whether one believes that it exists or not. For example, it doesn’t matter whether one believes in gravity or not, for gravity is a force that will act whether or not one has faith in it. The Greek gods and goddesses are much more like gravity than they are like the God of the Bible. They are the earthquakes, the power of the ocean and of thunderstorms. They are the light that shines from the sun, the passionate rage that can take hold of us, the overwhelming desire for an object, the sudden insight, a panic, a terror, a melancholy. They are the things in our lives over which we have no control. These forces don’t care whether we believe in them or not. They simply act in our lives. They are the forces of nature and the forces of human nature.
The Images of Vitality are the forces of life personified into imaginary beings, beings with personalities, beings we can get to know, beings we can begin to recognize in our lives. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in these forces, for they will act nonetheless. What does matter is whether we remember these forces and whether we honor them or not. If we forget gravity, then we might step off the edge of a building to our deaths. The forces which the Greeks called gods and which we will call the Images of Vitality are similar to gravity in this way. They must be remembered and honored, for only then will vitality return to our lives. By honoring these immortal forces, by remembering their power over our lives, we gain their living power of vitality, and we prevent ourselves from stepping off the ledge of a building, forgetting the force of gravity.
So the God of the Bible is at a completely different level than are the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks. The God of the Bible is outside and superior to the universe, while The Immortals of the Greeks are forces within and contained by the cosmos. There is no conflict between the two. One can hold to whatever faith one wishes, or to none at all, and still be able to imagine the Images of Vitality. We are talking about imagination, not religion. There is no religious conversion required. One must imagine the gods, not believe in them.
The Greeks personified the forces of life into living Images of Vitality by imagining the forces of nature and of human nature as beings. These personified images allow our imaginations to sense them more completely and to form relationships between them. But our modern, mechanically-inclined imaginations will be tempted to abstract the Images of Vitality by making them into mechanical parts of the world and into mechanical parts of our bodies. Our tendency will be to literalize them instead of imagine them. As a human, it is insulting and belittling to be described as either genetically-determined, behaviorally-determined, or as a cascade of chemical reactions. It is horrible to be imagined as a machine. So too, the gods are offended to be described in such simplistic ways, as if the passionate rage of Ares was just activation of the amygdala, the structure in our brains responsible for anger, arousal, and fear, or as if an erection was just blood pooling in the corpus spongiosum, and not the result of the seductive force of Aphrodite. Although these mechanical images may be literally true, they kill the imagination. To imagine Ares as just another part of a mechanical body is to destroy the vitality of Ares by destroying the imagination of Ares. The image of a machine can never bring us vitality! Moreover, Ares doesn’t like to be imagined in such ways. He demands to be imagined as a being, a personified image of the rage of life. The Images of Vitality lose their vitality when we lose our imaginations. James Hillman said, "... abstractions, even at best when they are personified, are without genealogies, mythologies, and elaborated symbolic particularities that give to human experience the feeling that they are agencies of determining power... that all things are full of gods." To the Greek mind, all things are full of gods. In order for us to regain our vitality, all things must become full of gods for us as well.
Many people would say that these forces are inside of us. They'd say that we all have an ‘internal Ares’ and an ‘internal Zeus.’ But imagining these forces to be contained within humans is another offensive concept to the forces. For Ares is the passion, the rage, the anger, and the energy to start and to flower and to bloom. He is the color red. He is no more inside of us or contained within us than the oceans or the galaxies are. He is a force that comes over us at times and drives us into certain thoughts, postures, and actions, but it is more that we are temporarily in him rather than that he is ever within us. The same holds true for each of the Images of Vitality. They are simply too big to be contained inside us tiny humans.
Let us not be deceived: the gods are dangerous. Each Image of Vitality is extreme. Zeus isn’t a little spark from an electrical socket, but a full bolt of lightning! Poseidon is a tidal wave! Hades is a rapist! Hercules is a murderer! The Images of Vitality are not safe, tame images. They are the deadly forces of nature. Vitality requires us to follow these dangerous images, and therefore vitality is dangerous. It’s much safer to live a de-vitalized life, so be careful where you tread. A life of vitality is not an easy one.
An Image of Vitality is like a fire. It can warm us, light our way, and cook our food, but it can also burn us and lay waste to the world. Hercules can drive us mad. Apollo can blind us. Artemis can rip us to pieces. Fortunately, the myths associated with each Image of Vitality contain warnings about the inherent dangers that they bring. The myths of the ancient Greeks can help us navigate the potentially destructive waters of vitality.
The body is not a machine! It’s a living animal, full of wonderful, powerful, and dangerous passions and energies. It’s a beast that desires food and relishes movement. It eats and it exercises. There are very few things that have the potential to bring so much beauty, life, and vitality to our lives as do eating and exercising. But unfortunately, due to our lack of imagination, few things have become so ugly and so devoid of soul that they are actually sucking the life force from our lives. We have no poetry for our eating and our exercising. This book is an attempt to change this deplorable situation. In addition, eating and exercising are interesting and fun ways to live with more vitality. In this book we will be using these two activities as paths toward more vitality. We could have just as easily chosen parenting, working, love relationships, or rock climbing for this purpose, because anything can be a road to more vitality. Eating and exercising are just wonderful topics that cry out for more life. By bringing eating and exercising back to life, we cannot help but bring more vitality to our lives.
We need to remember that vitality is a powerful word because it is a subjective word. It cannot be defined or measured. It is in this way that it differs from health and fitness. Vitality can only be felt, sensed, and imagined. Vitality belongs to the imagination. It is a fantasy after which we chase. This book provides us with images to which our fantasies of vitality can attach themselves, helping us to move toward our fantasies without literalizing them and thus destroying them.
We will first be exploring a number of the Images of Vitality in detail, each warranting its own chapter. Then we will discuss how to hear and heed the various calls of these immortal forces in Hearing the Call, Heeding the Call, and finally we will discuss how to live with more vitality in Living with Vitality.
The word health carries no more living power than the word fitness, for health is simply longevity and disease prevention. It’s merely the absence of disease. It’s how long you live and it’s how long you live without disease that makes you healthy. There’s something dead about these words. Whenever we use the word fitness we automatically conjure the spirit of Darwin and the idea of the survival of the fittest. Fitness is about surviving, not thriving. We keep fit to stay alive, not to glow with radiant life. “Health” and “fitness” don’t inspire the imagination and they don’t move the soul. A few of us have achieved fitness, but how many of us are actually brimming with vitality?
In his book The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, James Hillman, the brilliant American psychologist and one of the most profound thinkers of our time, made a life-altering statement: Fitness has replaced vitality. He’s absolutely right. We have reduced our living fantasies of vitality to the lackluster goals of fitness and survival.
Our exercising and dieting, while occasionally producing fitness results, usually fail to give us what we really want. We eat and exercise in the quest for fitness and health, but what we really want, what we really seek and yearn for, is vitality. The reason our eating and exercising has not given us vitality is that we lack imagination. Our modern viewpoint, our modern world, deprives us of the ability to really taste life, to smell it, and to hear it, for we imagine ourselves to be machines.
We do not often realize it, but we are all deeply indoctrinated with a single, overwhelming view of reality: that the universe is a massive machine. It runs like a giant clock, ordered by the specific, inalterable laws of physics. And we humans are just extensions of this machine, small machines moving about within the monstrous machine of the universe. The world is dead. It is ruled by physical laws. And since the world is dead, so are we. Our bodies are machines.
We each have a heart that pumps blood, a digestive tract that dissolves and absorbs nutrients from our food, and a circulatory system which transports those nutrients from place to place. Our nerves are simply electrical wires. Our muscles function by the electrical input from our nerves, much as a light switch does, and our muscles move our bones about axes just as a machine would do. We are intricate robots, but robots nonetheless. This knowledge and the viewpoint it engenders have led us all to a mindset in which our bodies are just machines, not living animals full of passions, energy, and life. How can we have vitality when we imagine life to be mechanical and devoid of all life?
How can eating bring us any vitality when food is imagined to be just fuel, when a meal is just ‘filling the tank,’ when calories count, and when our macronutrient ratio is more important than the taste, smell, and beauty of our food? How can exercising fill us with living energy when we jog not because it feels good, but because we need to improve the functioning of our cardiorespiratory systems, or because we need to burn a few more calories? We drink eight cups of water per day not because we’re thirsty, but because we’ve been told it’s healthy for us. For Pete’s sake, we drink wine for the tannins and not for the magnificent aroma and the wonderful, calming feeling it evokes! The mechanical imagination makes us into zombies.
When the body is imagined as a machine, it is already dead. One keeps a machine running, but a machine can never have exuberance. A machine cannot have vitality. The idea that the body is a machine creates a desolate desert wasteland of our lives. It leaves no life in our lives, rendering us no more than dried husks with rabid survival instincts.
Life should be about so much more than survival, but this can only happen when vitality regains its place of honor. Vitality must be reinstated to a position above fitness. The idea that the body is a machine must be replaced by the idea of the body as an animal - a living, roaring animal! The body is a lion roaring at the enraging desert. Only such a roar can bring water to the desert wasteland, bring the body back to life, and restore us to vitality. And such a roar is the roar of the imagination. Only by expanding our imaginations can we bring vitality back to our lives.
Fortunately, we can go back to the ancient Greeks with their wild, wise, and powerful imaginations. They had myths that spark the vital imagination that is required to see, hear, and feel vitality. They had imaginary gods, goddesses, and heroes personifying all forms of vitality. They had Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Hercules, Hades, Pan, and many, many more. In this book, we will call these gods, goddesses, and heroes the Images of Vitality, for they are imaginary beings that contain the vitality we seek. Their stories can ignite our imaginations beyond the desolation of the mechanical body. The Greek imagination is very useful for breathing life back into the animal.
It is very challenging for our modern minds, which have the tendency to take everything literally, to grasp the difference between the ancient Greek gods and the concept of God. For us, God has to do with faith and belief. The God of the Bible is a God outside of and superior to the universe. The Biblical God is not of this world. We are so used to either believing or not believing in God that we don’t have a notion, as the ancient Greeks did, of simply remembering and honoring the gods.
The Greek word for 'the gods' was 'The Immortals.' The idea is that the gods and goddesses are immortal forces. It doesn’t matter whether one believes in a force or not. A force exists regardless of whether one believes that it exists or not. For example, it doesn’t matter whether one believes in gravity or not, for gravity is a force that will act whether or not one has faith in it. The Greek gods and goddesses are much more like gravity than they are like the God of the Bible. They are the earthquakes, the power of the ocean and of thunderstorms. They are the light that shines from the sun, the passionate rage that can take hold of us, the overwhelming desire for an object, the sudden insight, a panic, a terror, a melancholy. They are the things in our lives over which we have no control. These forces don’t care whether we believe in them or not. They simply act in our lives. They are the forces of nature and the forces of human nature.
The Images of Vitality are the forces of life personified into imaginary beings, beings with personalities, beings we can get to know, beings we can begin to recognize in our lives. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in these forces, for they will act nonetheless. What does matter is whether we remember these forces and whether we honor them or not. If we forget gravity, then we might step off the edge of a building to our deaths. The forces which the Greeks called gods and which we will call the Images of Vitality are similar to gravity in this way. They must be remembered and honored, for only then will vitality return to our lives. By honoring these immortal forces, by remembering their power over our lives, we gain their living power of vitality, and we prevent ourselves from stepping off the ledge of a building, forgetting the force of gravity.
So the God of the Bible is at a completely different level than are the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks. The God of the Bible is outside and superior to the universe, while The Immortals of the Greeks are forces within and contained by the cosmos. There is no conflict between the two. One can hold to whatever faith one wishes, or to none at all, and still be able to imagine the Images of Vitality. We are talking about imagination, not religion. There is no religious conversion required. One must imagine the gods, not believe in them.
The Greeks personified the forces of life into living Images of Vitality by imagining the forces of nature and of human nature as beings. These personified images allow our imaginations to sense them more completely and to form relationships between them. But our modern, mechanically-inclined imaginations will be tempted to abstract the Images of Vitality by making them into mechanical parts of the world and into mechanical parts of our bodies. Our tendency will be to literalize them instead of imagine them. As a human, it is insulting and belittling to be described as either genetically-determined, behaviorally-determined, or as a cascade of chemical reactions. It is horrible to be imagined as a machine. So too, the gods are offended to be described in such simplistic ways, as if the passionate rage of Ares was just activation of the amygdala, the structure in our brains responsible for anger, arousal, and fear, or as if an erection was just blood pooling in the corpus spongiosum, and not the result of the seductive force of Aphrodite. Although these mechanical images may be literally true, they kill the imagination. To imagine Ares as just another part of a mechanical body is to destroy the vitality of Ares by destroying the imagination of Ares. The image of a machine can never bring us vitality! Moreover, Ares doesn’t like to be imagined in such ways. He demands to be imagined as a being, a personified image of the rage of life. The Images of Vitality lose their vitality when we lose our imaginations. James Hillman said, "... abstractions, even at best when they are personified, are without genealogies, mythologies, and elaborated symbolic particularities that give to human experience the feeling that they are agencies of determining power... that all things are full of gods." To the Greek mind, all things are full of gods. In order for us to regain our vitality, all things must become full of gods for us as well.
Many people would say that these forces are inside of us. They'd say that we all have an ‘internal Ares’ and an ‘internal Zeus.’ But imagining these forces to be contained within humans is another offensive concept to the forces. For Ares is the passion, the rage, the anger, and the energy to start and to flower and to bloom. He is the color red. He is no more inside of us or contained within us than the oceans or the galaxies are. He is a force that comes over us at times and drives us into certain thoughts, postures, and actions, but it is more that we are temporarily in him rather than that he is ever within us. The same holds true for each of the Images of Vitality. They are simply too big to be contained inside us tiny humans.
Let us not be deceived: the gods are dangerous. Each Image of Vitality is extreme. Zeus isn’t a little spark from an electrical socket, but a full bolt of lightning! Poseidon is a tidal wave! Hades is a rapist! Hercules is a murderer! The Images of Vitality are not safe, tame images. They are the deadly forces of nature. Vitality requires us to follow these dangerous images, and therefore vitality is dangerous. It’s much safer to live a de-vitalized life, so be careful where you tread. A life of vitality is not an easy one.
An Image of Vitality is like a fire. It can warm us, light our way, and cook our food, but it can also burn us and lay waste to the world. Hercules can drive us mad. Apollo can blind us. Artemis can rip us to pieces. Fortunately, the myths associated with each Image of Vitality contain warnings about the inherent dangers that they bring. The myths of the ancient Greeks can help us navigate the potentially destructive waters of vitality.
The body is not a machine! It’s a living animal, full of wonderful, powerful, and dangerous passions and energies. It’s a beast that desires food and relishes movement. It eats and it exercises. There are very few things that have the potential to bring so much beauty, life, and vitality to our lives as do eating and exercising. But unfortunately, due to our lack of imagination, few things have become so ugly and so devoid of soul that they are actually sucking the life force from our lives. We have no poetry for our eating and our exercising. This book is an attempt to change this deplorable situation. In addition, eating and exercising are interesting and fun ways to live with more vitality. In this book we will be using these two activities as paths toward more vitality. We could have just as easily chosen parenting, working, love relationships, or rock climbing for this purpose, because anything can be a road to more vitality. Eating and exercising are just wonderful topics that cry out for more life. By bringing eating and exercising back to life, we cannot help but bring more vitality to our lives.
We need to remember that vitality is a powerful word because it is a subjective word. It cannot be defined or measured. It is in this way that it differs from health and fitness. Vitality can only be felt, sensed, and imagined. Vitality belongs to the imagination. It is a fantasy after which we chase. This book provides us with images to which our fantasies of vitality can attach themselves, helping us to move toward our fantasies without literalizing them and thus destroying them.
We will first be exploring a number of the Images of Vitality in detail, each warranting its own chapter. Then we will discuss how to hear and heed the various calls of these immortal forces in Hearing the Call, Heeding the Call, and finally we will discuss how to live with more vitality in Living with Vitality.
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