It is a rare individual who strives to achieve goals beyond the ordinary. It is an even rarer individual who sets such goals—goals that no one else has yet achieved—and actually succeeds. And it’s a rarer individual still who sets extraordinary goals and, after he or she has attained them, continues to set even higher goals and continues to strive for success. Now add to this picture the aging process. And then try to imagine what it would be like to relentlessly strive for excellence and higher achievements even as one passes into a phase of life that is far beyond what is normally considered one’s prime. Such individuals are rare indeed. In our ongoing cultural and philosophical inquiry here at WIE, we have been privileged to encounter a few of these exceptional men and women; we call them the “self masters.”

Driven by what often seems to be otherworldly inspiration, fueled by a superhuman capacity for self-discipline and self-control, these individuals prove what’s possible for all of us through their own passion, blood, sweat, and tears. Their demonstrable achievements speak louder than words.

My first encounter with this kind of unique individual was when I interviewed the then-eighty-four-year-old marvel Jack LaLanne at his house in northern California for our Spring/Summer 1999 issue called “The Self Masters.” I remember vividly this elderly gentleman’s joie de vivre, relentless inspiration, and infectious passion for health, fitness, and just plain positivity! The old-timer took my breath away when without warning he jumped out of his armchair, flexed his biceps, and commanded me unequivocally to punch him in the stomach as hard as I could so he could demonstrate how strong his abs were. And, he made me do it! After that, he began probing into the nature of my diet and exercise regimen, encouraging me to set goals for my health and fitness—and to achieve them.

Another example of self mastery is the phenomenal Peter Ragnar, who writes the health column for every issue of WIE and who we profiled in “Do You Want to Live Forever?” (September–November 2005). Peter, who is a hero of mine and my source of inspiration for ongoing discipline and development in health, strength, vitality, and overall well-being, boldly proclaims that he’s a senior citizen but refuses to divulge his age because he “doesn’t believe in it!” He is a radical thinker and a true pioneer in the field of diet and health, including being a master of martial arts and chi kung, in addition to being a musician, healer, shaman, and overall exemplar of what it means to live beyond any sense of limitation.

I recently encountered yet another great American self master. In the following interview with the three-time Mr. Olympia winner Frank Zane, you will have the unique experience of hearing the voice of a human spirit who refuses to know what it means to give up. In addition to being a bodybuilding champion par excellence, a health and fitness guru, a poet, and a multitalented musician, Frank is a serious spiritual practitioner and has been committed to inner evolution—in addition to his external development—since his youth. Not only does he practice meditation and chanting every day, but he’s even designed and created his own mind machine that induces meditative states by synchronizing both hemispheres of the brain.

Zane walks and talks what I’ve found to be the code of all true self masters: the profound and ultimately spiritual insight that a clear and disciplined relationship with our  minds and emotions is the only thing that makes it possible for us to have a truly empowered relationship with our bodies and, ultimately, with life itself.

To live a life of mastery is to live a goal-oriented life of self-discipline, self-control, and relentless striving for excellence. At sixty-five, Frank Zane has the kind of body that beefy eighteen-year-olds would envy. And now, even though, as he told me in a recent phone interview, it’s getting a little tougher every year, he wants to see what’s possible at seventy!

Cohen: I want to speak to you about a fascinating topic—the relationship between physical aging, the pursuit of perfection, and glimpses of immortality. Frank, how old are you?

Frank Zane: I’m sixty-five.

Cohen: I just turned fifty-two. And I think we’re living in an interesting time because many people from our generation are thinking about what it means to get older in ways that nobody ever has before. For one thing, a lot of baby boomers don’t seem to be prepared to get old, retire, and die in the same way our parents did. I certainly don’t. You’re a stellar example of someone who is on the leading edge of pushing what’s possible in this direction. So I’m curious to find out how you feel about being alive at age sixty-five. Are you as intensely engaged with the life process and your own development as you were when you were younger—say, when you were a competitive bodybuilder?

Zane: Probably more so, because at the time that I was competing, I had a different kind of motivation. In a way, it was an easier motivation because it was totally external. You push yourself because you have to get up onstage and compete against others and everything about you has to be as perfect as possible. But by age forty-one, I’d won everything I wanted to win, and I realized it was time to stop competing. The tide in bodybuilding had turned; they were favoring the big freaky monster-type guys for the winners, and I knew that my window had closed.

Now my motivation is different: I just keep training to see how good I can get, and for how long. My goal now is to improve every year for at least the next five years. I don’t know what is possible, and I’m taking it one year at a time. I just know that it keeps getting harder and harder. I have to be more impeccable in my lifestyle. My diet has to be close to perfect. I get very sore from workouts, and it takes longer to recover. But that just means my body’s changing. I’m not trying to be like I was when I was at my peak at thirty-seven, but I’m curious to find out what’s possible.

From a physical standpoint, I’d have to say there’s nothing good about getting older. People say to me, “You look good for your age.” But most people at sixty-five look like my father would look if he were still alive. And that’s not good enough for me. I want to look good for any age.

Cohen: Well, the pictures I’ve seen of you at age sixty-four are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Zane: You know, I really hope to surpass that this year. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep doing this, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Cohen: Would you say that pushing these kinds of physical limits is something that’s unprecedented for a man your age?

Zane: There are certainly others who are in pretty good shape at my age, but I’m not sure there’s anybody else with development as complete as mine. Some guys, for example, have tremendous abdominals in their late sixties, but they really don’t have much else. I’ve always had pretty proportionate development. I focus on the areas that need more work and pay more attention to them. That’s what I’ve always been known for, and I still make it a point now.

Cohen: What about the thrill of training and the thrill of accomplishment? Is it the same as it was when you were younger, or is it different?

Zane: It’s different. It was brand new then. I was seeing my body take shape for the first time, developing more and more, and then winning titles and becoming famous and all that. Now, it’s about holding on and achieving as much as I can. I’m really motivated by curiosity.

Cohen: I’ve heard that you take anti-aging drugs. Is that true?

Zane: Yes. I’m a patient of Dr. Lane Sebring, who’s an anti-aging physician in Texas. Basically, the whole idea is to restore your hormonal balance to where it was when you were younger. And the goal is to stay within acceptable boundaries, not to push them way over the limits. That’s why it’s medically supervised. I do it in a very conservative way. Actually, the way I do it is even more conservative than what the physicians recommend.

Cohen: And do you experience benefits from it?

Zane: Yes, in recuperation, fat loss, building muscle, improved cognitive function. There’s research on all this stuff, and it has a lot to do with taking a balanced approach. With testosterone, if you take too much, you can get superaggressive; fly into rages; and develop high blood pressure, thickened blood, and increase your risk of stroke. But if you take the right amount, which gets lower as you get older, you will notice improved cognitive function, lower blood pressure, reduced risk of diabetes, and faster recuperation from workouts. And I experience all these things because I don’t overindulge. I’m against drug abuse, but if you’re intelligent about it, there are a lot of things coming on the horizon that will aid longevity.

The question I’m curious about is, “How good could I look at what kind of advanced age?” I don’t know of anybody who looked that good even at seventy. Now, I’m not talking about your average, “He’s in great shape for being seventy.” I’m talking about a much, much higher standard. Who at age ninety has any kind of physique? I don’t think anybody ever has.

Now, I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know if I’m going to live that long. But what I would like to see happen is to be in really great shape when I die. I mean, it sounds strange saying that, but I would.

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

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.

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.

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.