Cohen: Are you familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s work and ideas on the subject of physical immortality?

Zane: I read his book Fantastic Voyage, and I have to say, I wasn’t that impressed. I already knew about antioxidants and all that, and his artificial intelligence stuff is all speculation. I mean, how does he know? Who can tell you what the future is really going to be like? What I think is really important is your faith. It’s faith in your life and what you’re doing, and it’s working to make the most out of this life and becoming as developed spiritually as possible so that your insides match your outsides.

The big goal in bodybuilding, the most challenging thing to develop, is perfect proportion. That means everything developed and everything in balance. You’re developing this tremendous body, but on an internal spiritual level, you want it to match. When you look at a person who has an incredible body, it should give you an automatic indication of what he is like as a person spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. That’s the goal.

Cohen: That’s a very Eastern way to think about the body, wouldn’t you say? Hatha yogis, martial artists, and Taoist masters equate physical development and spiritual development in ways that most Westerners rarely do.

Zane: I think you’re right. I’m very much influenced by Buddhist ideas, especially by Shin Buddhism and the recitation of the nembutsu. In Japanese, it’s Namu Amida Butsu. In Chinese, it’s Namo Amitabha. Basically it means “I take refuge in Amida Buddha.” But I translate it as “I take refuge in the sustenance of life” or “I thank the universe, which is aware of itself.” I’ve been saying that as my mantra for about thirty-five years, and I say it quite a bit. It’s one of my forms of meditation.

Cohen: How has that helped your development?

Zane: It crowds out negative thinking. Everybody’s mind is running with self-talk, and a lot of times it’s negative. We’re not in present time. We’re worried about the future or stuck in the past, imagining things, getting carried away by it. The mantra is a form of mindfulness that I do whenever I remember to do it. I work on myself every day as much as I can, and I still have a long way to go.

Cohen: When did you first discover consciousness?

Zane: I guess when I was born.

Cohen: Well, most people go through their whole lives and don’t discover consciousness. It’s only when people awaken spiritually that they actually discover consciousness, even though they’re swimming in it, drowning in it all the time. As you said, the universe is aware of itself, but we’re usually not aware of that.

Zane: I think it happened at different stages with me, as early as age fourteen or fifteen. I started bodybuilding around that age. I was sort of a shy, solitary person, but I was interested in doing a lot of things. I was in the Boy Scouts at that time, and I used to hike and camp a lot. I also learned meditation and read Patanjali’s aphorisms at age fifteen.

Cohen: What year was that?

Zane: 1957.

Cohen: That would have been quite an unusual thing for a fifteen-year-old American boy to be reading—especially in 1957!

Zane: I was in high school, and I was thinking about that stuff. I was thinking how nice it would be to develop these yogic powers called siddhis. It would be nice to be playing football and become invisible and score touchdowns or to become as small as an atom and sneak through the line. Things like that. I began practicing yoga at that age too. I used to get up in the morning and do pranayamas, and I got pretty good at it. I ran a lot, and I got to the point from doing breath control in pranayamas that I could run ten miles and not even get tired. My endurance got to the point where it was actually scary, so I stopped.

Cohen: Really?

Zane: Yeah. I started thinking, “This isn’t normal. Maybe I should do something else.” I had to come back down to earth.

Cohen: Was it that you were experiencing a sense of personal power that was more than you thought you could handle?

Zane: It’s hard to explain . . . I guess when I accomplish goals, I just tend go on to other goals. I remember another time during the heyday of Gold’s Gym in Santa Monica, where we all used to train in the seventies. There’s an exercise called Roman chair sit-ups, and I used to do a lot of them. One day, I thought to myself, “I wonder how long I could do these?” So I went in and I did them for half an hour. It wasn’t that hard. The next day, I added a half hour, and every day after that I added another half hour. By the time I got up to two and a half hours, I realized that I could just keep doing them as long as I wanted to, so I stopped. I moved on to something else.