Psychoactive Weightlifting

In Sun & Steel, Mishima Yukio writes:

One summer day, heated by training, I was cooling my muscles in the breeze coming through an open window. The sweat vanished as though by magic, and coolness passed over the surface of the muscles like a touch of menthol. The next instant, I was rid of the sense of the muscles’ existence, and—in the same way that words, by their abstract functioning, can grind up the concrete world so that the words themselves seem never to have existed—my muscles at that moment crushed something within my being, so that it was as though the muscles themselves had similarly never existed. 

In response to this, Mishima then writes: 

As the relentless pressure of the steel progressively stripped my muscles of their unusualness and individuality (which were a product of degeneration) 

All of this is to say, that lifting has a singular purpose, identical to that of “focus meditation”, where something such as a candle or crystal orb is used as a fetish affixing the practice. The meditator stares into the glass orb with singularly focused vision-of-mind and lets the orb clear, as its chaos is clarified under the single purpose of the meditative gaze.

This concept of singularity is vital here - the singular clarity of actions ia purifying action. Hypertrophy is in many ways more lethal than atrophy, at least by volume of cases where it causes the first problem. The purpose of singular clarity is both the purging of detritus and the refinement of the useful into its potentials, thus creating beneficial products.

It’s for this reason that Mishima writes of “degeneration” as the facts of his unique body. The singularity of working out purged out the chaotic mess of his hypertrophied form, in the same fashion as a forest fire.

It’s this which is the most beneficial purpose of psychoactive effects of any kind. A singular way is driven down, thus refining and purging, clarifying in order to purify. The refinement of the physical body allows for the refinement of the soul through this process.