Cohen: Frank, I know you’re an advocate of dream yoga. In your magazine, Building the Body, you recently wrote about a very powerful dream in which you were visited by a muse in the form of a female voice. In the dream, she encouraged you to develop your dream body in the same way that you were developing your physical body.

Zane: Yes, that’s right.

Cohen: She assured you that cultivating a perfect dream body would help you to perfect your physical body. She also said that your dream body would be the vehicle through which you’d be able to exit your physical body at the time of your death and through which you would then continue on your cosmic journey. What does this dream mean to you now, and how does it fit into your whole life philosophy and your training?

Zane: Well, I’ve studied dream yoga, especially the works of Stephen LaBerge and Carlos Castaneda, and it’s basically about everything in life being mind-created. Everything out there is an illusion created by our minds. If you can see that in your dreams and if you can become lucid and realize that you’re having a dream, then you can bring the same perception into your waking life and realize that it’s also a manifestation of your mind. I think that’s the next step in the evolution of mankind—to develop the dream body and an awareness in it and to make it more perfect and more accessible.

The Native Americans have a whole tradition of this and so do the Tibetans. Basically, what they postulate is that by developing an awareness in your dream body, you actually develop the ability to be in two places at the same time. There’s the physical body, and then there’s the next body upward, our energy body or vital body, which is our embodiment when we dream. When we’re dreaming, that’s who we are, but it’s of a finer substance. It’s as real when we’re dreaming as our physical body is when we’re awake. But it’s not as cohesive, because it’s not developed. People don’t work on it. Nobody thinks that any of this stuff is possible or even makes sense.

Cohen: What I thought was so interesting about the story was that the muse was encouraging you to cultivate your dream body and your physical body at the same time. She seemed to be pointing to a relationship between the perfection of the subtle and the perfection of the physical.

Zane: Here’s the way I take that. I’ve been practicing visualization for quite some time, and what I’ve noticed is that the more I work on it, the more vivid my visualizations become. When I was competing, I used to close my eyes and focus my attention between my two eyes on the third eye. I would visualize a sort of screen on my forehead and picture my body changing to look the way I wanted it to.

If I did that on a regular basis, the visualizations would become more and more real and my body would change more and it would change faster. Eventually, it would get to a point right before competition where I would be training hard, training and training and training, and then one day I would look in the mirror and all of a sudden—wait a second—my body would be very, very different. It was like something had clicked in from all the work I had done and suddenly manifested my contest body.

Cohen: Is this still a part of your practice now?

Zane: I work on it all the time. I’m always working on awareness in relation to everything I do. I think that if you want to be a winner, you have to win ahead of time. You have to live like the winner. You have to behave like the winner, because people need convincing. They have to see that you are the winner. The way I won is that I knew I was going to win. And you know something? I got signs along the way that I was going to win.

Cohen: For example?

Zane: I remember the first time I won Mr. Olympia; I was standing onstage with the top six guys, and one of us was going to win. I was standing up there, and I just said to the universe, “Please give me a sign right now telling me that I’ve won so I can act more confident, like the winner should.” Right at that moment, the head judge walked in front of me holding the tabulation sheets, and I could see that my name was in first place.

Cohen: Wow . . .

Zane: I knew right then that I had won, and I did. Actually, it was around that time that I first began to experience what you might call “mantric speech.” Whatever I said came true. So I had to be very careful about what I said!

Cohen: Can you give me an example of something you said that came true?

Zane: Well, right after winning the Olympia, I had a book deal with Simon & Schuster, so my wife and I went to New York City to take photos for the book. We were shooting all day, and after we were done, I got a phone call from one of the guys who was in the contest asking if we wanted to go out to dinner with him. He was a nice guy, but he was negative, not somebody I wanted to hang around with. So I told him, “I can’t do it. We’re taking photos. We’re right in the middle of it.” But we were all done with the photos. I lied. And no sooner did I hang up the phone with this guy than the photographer called me and said, “I hope you still have your posing trunks on because one roll didn’t come out. We have to shoot it again.” I just thought, “Wow, I’ve got to watch what I say.”

There were a lot of things like that. And this is what I think of as the definition of personal power. There are two maxims that I find to be true for me. One is that if you say something a certain way for long enough, eventually your word becomes law. And that’s an example of that. If you always do what you say you’re going to do—and you do it, always—then the likelihood of your saying something and it actually happening is very high. It’s called “conditional probability.”

Cohen: That’s interesting.

Zane: The other thing is that if you really hold your goal in your mind and in your faith—and it’s a reasonable goal—you will eventually get it. Of course, then we run into the challenge of defining what is reasonable and what is possible. We don’t really know. But if you go after something for long enough with real deliberation and unbending intent, it will eventually manifest. It’s just that you don’t know when it will, and you don’t know how it will.

Cohen: And that’s where the matter of faith comes in.

Zane: Right. And there are different kinds of faith too. There’s the lowest level of faith, which you might call your belief system: that which hasn’t transpired but which you believe will transpire. But the highest level of faith is something different. The highest level of faith is certainty. Even though it hasn’t manifested on the physical plane yet, you’re already certain that it will because you have all the signs. You know that old saying, “As above, so below”? It’s that kind of thing.

Cohen: Would you say that this kind of absolute certainty, which is related to self-confidence and belief in one’s own potential, would be the unique expression of someone who had become a master?

Zane: Yes, I think so. In my case at least, my rise to fame and fortune, if you want to call it that, has been a long, slow process. One of the characteristics I have is that I persevere. I don’t give up. I do things forever. I just keep doing it and doing it and getting better and better.

Cohen: How do you handle frustration and self-doubt? Because there’s inspiration, faith, and conviction on the one hand, but of course there are all kinds of negative and cynical thoughts as well.

Zane: It’s like watching television. If you don’t like the program, you change the channel.

Cohen: Good idea!

Zane: I just put another program in. I don’t indulge. I don’t roll around in it. It’s like meditation. In meditation, especially at first, your mind wanders. But you don’t get caught up in it. You realize that your mind’s wandering and you bring it back. It’s constantly bringing it back to the point.

When I was growing up and doing bodybuilding, nobody ever encouraged me. Nobody ever said anything positive. All they did was say I couldn’t do it, I would never accomplish it, and what would I do with it anyway? Then when I started competing, just about everybody said, “You’ll never win Mr. Olympia. You’ll never win the top titles.” But I kept doing it and doing it, and eventually I did. I remember when I won the Olympia the first time, there was this one editor of Muscle and Fitness who I thanked especially for writing all those negative things about me in the magazine. When somebody does that, that’s the worst thing they can do from the perspective of it not happening, because it will happen. I will show them. And I’m still doing that. I’m still out there proving myself. I think that’s the way I’m wired.

Cohen: What would you say the difference is between someone who actually becomes a master and someone who would like to, but doesn’t?

Zane: Maybe it’s the discipline involved.

Cohen: Well, there’s the discipline, but there’s also the tenacious nature of being willing to never give up.

Zane: I think it’s hard to generalize. Some people have a lot of potential, and it can happen much quicker and more naturally for them. But there’s also what’s called the “curse of potential,” which is when things come too easy and you’re never really driven to pursue them. With me, I did have potential, but I never suffered from the curse of potential. And as a result, I built up a great deal of anger and resentment over the years because I felt people had never given me my due. People never believed in me, and I had to go and prove it to them. I thought, “Why couldn’t you just believe me?” And I’m still working on that now.

Cohen: You mean even at this stage of your life, when your accomplishments are recognized worldwide, you still feel frustrated?

Zane: I’m still like that. It’s still part of what drives me, but at least I know it now! In a way, it’s easier when you lose. The hardest thing to do was to win the Mr. Olympia and then go back the next year and win it again, because you want to rest on your laurels. When you lose, at first you think it’s political. For about a month or two, you’re blaming everybody else. And then finally you come to your senses and put it into perspective, and you ask yourself the basic reframing question: “How can I use the energy tied up in this negative situation to help me improve and get what I want?” And I think in a way, we never get there. Do we ever really get what we want?

I don’t know. I really don’t know what it is that I want. I just want to keep improving, keep growing. You know, you guys don’t even know what enlightenment is. You’re asking the question as the title of your magazine!

Cohen: The whole idea was to open up the question!

Zane: You know what I think it is? To become enlightened means to lighten up.

Cohen: And lightening up would mean . . . ?

Zane: To drop all that stuff, drop all that conditioning, get rid of it. You don’t need it. You don’t have to be obsessing and thinking all the time. I notice it when I’m giving presentations to people. Things can be going well, flowing smoothly, and then I think, “Hmm, I’m up here giving a talk in front of all these people, and it’s going well.” Then I lose my train of thought.

Cohen: You mean you suddenly become self-conscious?

Zane: Yeah, you have to lose yourself. You have to become one with it. There’s no difference between you and everything else. We’re all connected by threads, by beams of energy that have consciousness. It’s just that we can’t see it.

I never saw it, you know, but spiritual sources talk about it, about the oneness of everything. I guess there have been times when I’ve seen that, in drug highs I experienced years ago. Through meditation, I accomplished that once. In the seventies I used to meditate intensively, and I remember one time I was meditating and all of a sudden I was walking around in the parking structure of Cal State University in Los Angeles. I was actually there. Then I said to myself, “This can’t be real. I can’t be out here.” As soon as I thought that, I was back meditating. So I have had experiences like that, but we’re not trained to accept them. And I’m not either. I mean, I’m part of this Western society. I suppose I’m a little bit more lenient when it comes to some of these things, but still . . .

I notice this in playing music too. I specialize in five instruments, and one of my goals as I age is to become a more proficient musician. I play at least an hour or two every day, and I’ve noticed that it’s all in what your body knows how to do. You have to learn to trust your body, because it’s always when I think about it that I start fouling up.

Cohen: I knew you played harmonica and guitar, but I didn’t know there were three others.

Zane: Yes, harmonica for a long time, over fifty years. That’s my best instrument. I’ve also been playing guitar for about eight years now, and about three years ago I started making flutes out of bamboo and got interested in the Japanese shakuhachi. I also play the Irish pennywhistle.

Cohen: You definitely don’t sound like a senior citizen to me.

Zane: I think my voice is still young, which I’m happy about. You know how you talk to people and they have old voices?

Cohen: It’s more than your voice. It’s your attitude, your spirit, your interest in life, your enthusiasm.

Zane: Well, I don’t feel like an older person. I mean, my body does sometimes, but as a person I still feel like I’m in my twenties.

Cohen: What’s so great about what you’re doing, Frank, is that you’re pushing the edge for all of us. And that’s what more of us need to do; because it’s only through the individuals who are pushing the edge that we’re all going to find out what’s possible for all of us, right?

Zane: I’m excited about that. I really am.

Cohen: Your excitement is infectious. And isn’t that the best thing we could share with each other about life?

Zane: I agree.