Mystery and Excellence on The Human Body - Physical Education And Excellence Of The Human Body

Part IV

Physical Education
and
Excellence of the Human Body

Physical Education
and
Excellence of the Human Body

Introduction

There are three great miracles in regard to the human body. Intricacy,  complexity and automatic coordination in the body under the guiding  power of the brain is the first miracle. That human body automatically  tends towards health is the second miracle. It is this miracle that has  provided a vast field of exploration of the means and methods by which  the natural and automatic processes of healing can be aided and accelerated. That the human body can be educated and its actual and latent  capacities can be developed to amazing degrees of excellence is the  third miracle.

In the first part, we have briefly attempted to portray the first miracle by emphasising the mystery of the human body. In the second and  third parts, we dwelt upon, once again very briefly, the secrets of the  miracles of health and healing. We shall now concentrate in this fourth  part on the issues related to the education of the human body and how  that education can bring out the hidden and astonishing potentialities  of the human body.

Physical education must be viewed as a part of an integral programme of the education of the totality of the human personality. The  human being is complex; apart from the body, the human being has  also a vital aspect and a mental aspect; there are capacities of rational  thought, ethical action and aesthetic imagination and creativity. There  are also profounder and subtler presences and capacities of the Spirit.  In ancient system of Indian education, a special emphasis was laid on

the development of the powers and values of all the aspects of personality, physical, vital, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic and spiritual. But  this integrality of education was not spread over all sections of society  in equal proportions and with equal emphasis. Nonetheless, the concept of integral education played a great role in lifting the civilisation  and culture of India to extraordinary heights. In the West, the records  that we have of the system of education in ancient Greece permits us to  believe that the concept of integrality was not only recognised, but was  also practised in a great measure and by very large sections of the  society. It is true that while the recognition of the Spirit is quite discernible in the ancient Greek thought, particularly in Socrates and  Plato, yet a special and greater emphasis was laid on the powers of  Reason and on the means and methods by which Reason can integrate  the ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic and physical aspects of human personality. The impetus that was given in this great system of education  to the development of the powers of the human body was so great that  the gymnasium, chariot-racing and other sports and athletics had the  same importance on the physical side as on the mental side the Arts  and Poetry and the drama. It was Greece that made an institution of  the Olympiad and through that institution the Greeks demonstrated  some of the greatest peaks of excellence of the human body. In other  ancient civilisations also, some kind of integral education was recognised and advocated. For the purposes of our book, we have restricted  ourselves to brief expositions of Physical education in ancient India  and in ancient Greece. For our object in this book is not to trace history but to underline a few aspects of the nature of the human body and  its potentialities so as to generate and awaken interest and develop a  few important insights in the subject through a presentation of selected  writings or passages which, without being pedantic or scholarly, could  serve as stimulating and instructive material.

In our times, with the re-establishment of the Olympiads as an inter national institution the ancient spirit of excellence in physical culture  has been powerfully revived. This revival has been greatly aided by the  contemporary science and technology, and we thus see a widespread  participation in all parts of the world in the activities that aim at the  refinement and excellence of the human body. Methods and organisation of physical education seem to have reached a kind of climax, and  the spirit of excellence is happily invading upon increasing masses of

people, particularly of the youth and children.

The Greek word for Excellence was: "Arete". It meant excellence,  one could say all-round excellence, not only a maximum, but a harmony of perfection. When you pronounce this word, carefully, it casts a  spell, it sounds like a mantra. It was really a magic word for the  Greeks, who may have been, among all the many people on earth, past  and present, one of the very few who had a quasi-religious feeling for  what excellence represents. In our contemporary world, excellence,  this elevating concept, does not seem so compelling any more. Other  words, several levels below, appear to have crowded the minds and  hearts of the majority, words like competition and success, which do  not carry with them the flavour of pure seeking.

Today's world of sports and games is mostly an expression of the  urge to competition and Success. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, when he  put such energy into the revival of the ancient tradition of the Olympic  Games, had a noble goal of establishing more securely peace between  nations by making them to compete through sports and games rather  than through wars. He probably would be horrified by the blatant commercialism and the display of money-power in modern Olympic  Games. The concept of professional sportsman would also have shocked  him, who thought that excellence in sports came primarily from a passion. For him a sportsman was above all an amateur, a word derived  from the Latin word amor which means love.

Amateurism in sports has become a casualty of the formidable costs  of training and participation in most high level competitions: top athletes are usually sponsored, either by private organisations or companies, or by governments. The modern means of mass-communication  have added their powerful artificial weight as a large number of sports  and games have a great entertainment value for a large public: top  sportsmen become stars in a star system which further creates distortions in sport values. All these factors combine to create an atmosphere  around sports and games which is quite remote from the dedicated pursuit of excellence that one would expect from a great athlete.

These handicaps created by modern society around sportsmen and  athletes are hurdles on their way. It does not prevent them necessarily  to reach true excellence. Many of those who have reached the summit  in their specialities have displayed high human qualities such as  courage, endurance, fearlessness, stoic composure in defeat, even

heroism in fighting back the effects of accidents to the point of being  able to return to competition. There have been remarkable examples of  fair play, of sheer determination in the face of adversity. No one can  ever become a top athlete without discipline, not only in training, but  also in one's personal life: the demands on the body are such that  indulgence is hardly allowed. Self-control is a necessity and con tributes to the development of character. Even emotions must be con trolled. An emotionally upset athlete is not likely to be able to summon  the deepest resources in his body that he may require to reach the goal.  All these are manifestations of high spirit and belong to the realm of excellence.

Excellence is always an offspring of will. Without this element of  will, which issues essentially from spirit, excellence cannot be reached,  whatever might be the natural gifts of a person. When an athlete  feels, as they often do, that he or she has reached the limits of their  endurance, what is it that pushes them beyond, if not sheer will and  determination?

Besides will and determination, training is another crucial factor in  the effort to reach excellence: it means often harsh discipline, tedious  repetitions to master the minutest details of a starting position, of the  last thrust of an arm, of the right posture, to the point where the body  goes instinctively through the right sequence, as if not needing to be  directed. Usually, training is directed by a coach: most success stories  in athletic careers involve a deep relationship with a coach. The coach  is often the person who perceives the potentiality in his trainee, who is  able to be as hard a taskmaster as necessary and yet provide psycho logical comfort. The good coach has to be the arcane teacher: master  of techniques, yet uniquely concentrated on one or few individuals  whom he must understand deeply so as to adapt very precisely the  rigour of techniques to the ever changing ways of his pupils.

Excellence does not belong only to top performers. To be the best  does not necessarily mean to be able to reach the summit. Best means  first in a category, excellent means one who works at the maximum  point of his or her limits so as to transcend them. The best may not be  excellent, and the excellent may not be rated, in a competition, as the  first or the best. For excellence is not a concept relative to competition; it is a concept relative to an inner dimension. Excellence is produced  when one acts beyond one's range of limitations, and this springs from

the manifestation of the inner spirit which always burns upwards and  pushes the individual towards what may be called perfect perfection.

Excellence can be a secret recognition within oneself: whatever the  external results, inwardly one may know the real achievement. So many  sport amateurs in the world stand no chances to reach the top or even  secondary summits. Yet they go on practising and they too are exhilarated when they feel they have given their very best or when suddenly  they break through a higher level of their sport or game. At any level,  excellence requires a gathering of oneself and an all-out effort which  carry their reward in themselves, even in the absence of public recognition. The results of such endeavours, when taken up by many and particularly the youths, translate into a vast training of entire populations  towards more courage, hardiness, energetic action and initiative, as  well as skill, steadiness of will or rapid decision and action. One could  also say that the greater the recognition of excellence of athletes, the  greater is the inspiration provided-to increasing numbers to enter the  field.

The public image of many top performers is often misleading. To  satisfy the superficial yet avid curiosity of the modern crowds, those  details of their lives which are either sensational or at the level of gossip are being tossed around and much repeated to the point of casting  a thick shadow on the real man behind. Yet it is not rare that, when  one comes across deeper and more complete exposition of their lives  and workings, largely different pictures begin to emerge. To take a  few examples, on the face of it, not many people may see Arnold  Schwarzenegger, the famous body-builder-cum-actor, as a seeker of  something deeper than mundane success through his physical discipline. And yet, as may be seen in the few excerpts that we are presenting of his autobiography, there obviously is a quest, a striving towards  mastery on the body, which, in its austerity, may resemble at times a  Zen discipline! Muhammad All — alias Cassius Clay — is mostly  known, besides his remarkable boxing career, for a highly egotist character. But again, despite this, reading an account of his life shows what  courage, what determination he possesses. Even a lot of moral courage  when he took the risk of defying the American authorities about the  Vietnam war: he stood to lose everything. We felt that it was interesting  to show through excerpts of his autobiography the real man of excellence behind the star.

The few stories that we. are presenting in this part show, in one way  or another, in one physical discipline or another, the kind of qualities  that lead to excellence. Their common characteristic is to describe  excellence in relation to bodily expression, whether in athletics, in  body building, in boxing, or in games like cricket, or in more artistic  manifestations like dance. Of course, ours is a very limited selection,  but we do hope that it will convey what we find so deeply moving,  namely the true flavour of excellence.