The Operative Path – Part 3
When Discipline Becomes Display: the Illusion of Strength
This powerful essay exposes how modern fitness and psychological industries have distorted the human path by turning discipline into display and therapy into conformity. From gyms acting as chemical theaters to therapy reframing survival as success, my article unveils how contemporary society detaches body from soul, gesture from meaning. It challenges the hypertrophy myth, the illusion of empowerment through aesthetics, and the false rituals of marathons and mass events. True strength, I argue, is not visibility but clarity, earned through pain, presence, and sacrifice. Rooted in the operative traditions, my piece defends a path where action reveals essence, and where prediction, not performance, defines mastery. It ends with a sobering reminder: if society reproduces unformed lives without confronting its deeper fractures -familial, cultural, spiritual-no system or technique can save it. Only the revival of gesture, true personality, and transmission through lived difficulty can reawaken real human potential.
(continuation from part 2)
Fitness for the Mind: Diagnosing the Individual, Ignoring the World
In our time, there’s a striking parallel between the rise of the fitness industry and the expansion of psychological therapy. In both cases, the individual is treated like a technical object to be optimized, to fit in the industrialized modes of action that permeate today´s society: to be molded, stabilized, and made functional, just like a product that comes out of a factory. And in both, the underlying assumption is the same: that the world itself is not up for question. Only the individual must adapt, must fit in.
Modern psychology has become a vast engine of diagnosis. People are labeled, classified, medicated, and restructured, while the structures that condition their distress remain untouched and unquestioned. There is little interrogation of the pace of life, the loss of community, the disembodiment of digital culture, or the cybernetic logic that now governs even personal relationships. These are considered facts, not causes.
And so, therapy often becomes a training ground, not for liberation, but for adaptation. It teaches people to accept terms of life that may be fundamentally degrading. It gives tools for socioeconomic survival but not for clarity; techniques for coping but not for seeing.
In this sense, the therapeutic model mirrors the fitness model: both cultivate the individual as a unit of function, ready to perform, to respond, to fit. But the operative path does not aim to fit the world. It aims to read it, to predict it, and when necessary, to refuse it.
The Grooming of Flesh: False Initiation and the Industry of Enhancement
Gyms are today the centers where the values that truly permeate urban-industrial society can be observed with the most astonishing clarity.
In the largest gyms, a hidden logic unfolds. Young trainees -especially those who show dedication, presence, and natural capacity- are monitored not for their well-being, but for potential. Not potential as human beings, but as products and human advertisements for the sponsors and underground pharma industry that supplies the fitness industry the real cake.
Trainers observe. They track progress. They identify who might fit the brand. And then, slowly, the trap closes. A compliment here, an “advanced” plan there, a hint that you could go far. And eventually, the introduction: chemicals, “supplements”, cycles. At first subtle, later explicit. Before long, the young man or woman becomes a walking advertisement, a molded body of borrowed muscle and silent damage.
They are then showcased to others: “Look what’s possible. Look what you could become”. But the transformation was never real. It was never earned, it was manufactured for exposure, for profit, for the dream of becoming a someone, without ever having to become someone.
This environment is radically in opposition to that offered by an operative discipline. It is an industry of false initiations, selling greatness without a backup of personality, size without soul; it´s about transforming true discipline into transaction.
Imagine you’re offered a role in acting, not because you embody the character’s personality, but because you’re close enough to look the part. You’re told: “You’re almost there, Miguel, just drop from eight to five percent body fat so the abs pop. We’ll pay you $6,000 for every day you stick to the diet”. What used to be an artistic challenge becomes a financial contract. What was once discipline becomes compliance.
This is how the most profitable fitness industry works now, and it has even taken over cinema and show-business in general. The transformation is no longer internal; it’s biochemical, aesthetic, transactional. The body is no longer a vessel of presence, it is a site to be optimized, leaned, monetized. And what gets filmed is not truth, not genuine gesture under stress, but a submission that is rewarded, praised and sold.
This dynamics is far from the goals of any operative tradition, and isn´t but calculation. A performance shaped not by the needs of a role, but by the machinery of spectacle. And that’s how the last link between the body and spirit is quietly, professionally and profitably severed in today´s society.
The modern gym is no longer a place of health, it is a theater of simulation. Behind the language of discipline and molded muscles lies an empire of artificiality, bodies reshaped by chemicals, sold as transformation, and worshipped as success.
For over two decades, I’ve observed what few dare to name: that many major gyms operate as fronts for chemical trafficking. Steroids, growth hormones, diuretics, these substances circulate through locker rooms and whispers, transforming flesh into illusion. The goal is not the combination of the physical and character strength that provides power to one´s life but it is about image. And the price is often invisible: internal collapse, emotional distortion, physical burnout.
Even more striking is the rise of this phenomenon among women. What once targeted male vanity now colonizes the feminine body, repackaged as empowerment. But what kind of power requires drugs to maintain a shape that cannot last? This is not a path of becoming. It is a sacrifice of life to the gods of appearance, vanity and narcissism, an illusion of power in the case of bodies that can´t truly act.
There is another truth hidden beneath the surface of the bodybuilding spectacle, one so taboo it rarely sees the light. These massive bodies, so meticulously sculpted, so publicly celebrated, are often functionally incapable. They cannot run, jump, climb, or fight. They cannot perform well even basic physical tasks -pull-ups, push-ups- except at carefully managed peaks in their chemical cycles.
Outside those moments, they are exhausted, stiff, and dependent. Their strength is simulated, their power is borrowed, and the shame of this non-function is so great that it is buried beneath endless images, filters, and slogans. No gym wants to show the reality of its greatest “products”: that they look like warriors, but cannot act like them.
Yet this is what the industry sells as achievement. It sells image in place of gesture. Size in place of substance, and it leaves behind not empowered individuals, but bodies that can no longer serve personality development, but only the illusion of an armor that doesn’t protect against insecurity.
Why insecurity?... Years ago, I noticed a pattern among young men entering the world of bodybuilding. They often began not out of arrogance, but insecurity. Their rooms were plastered with photos of idols like Schwarzenegger, Olympia winners, shredded influencers. They didn’t believe they were enough, and they believed that becoming like them would unlock respect, love, desire.
“I’ll never have a girlfriend unless I look like that” many would say.
So they trained. They grew. They followed the cycles. Their bodies swelled but their insecurity remained, and when they returned to the girl they admired, something strange happened: she wasn’t drawn in. Because she wasn’t looking for mass, she was looking for presence and self-mastery. For something they had never trained in the gym.
And I’ve seen the contrast: men who never entered gyms, lean and unknown, but who faced real pain -emotional pain, life’s tests, sacrifice, silence- carried a power in their eyes that no gym could replicate. They had passed through something. And women, intuitively, felt it.
This is the final betrayal of the hypertrophy myth: it promises confidence through volume. But true confidence never inflates. It condenses, grows inward, not outward, and only pain -not supplements- can shape it.
Elegance Through Strain: The Lost Culture of Effort
In Spanish, bodybuilding is called culturismo, the culture of the body. It’s a word that carries a truth English lost because to cultivate the body is not to inflate it; it is to shape it into a vessel of meaning, into a form of spiritual expression and mirror of the soul.
In true culturismo, the body is the temple of the spirit but not a temple to be decorated. A temple to be inhabited, to be tested, to be made radiant through the clarity of gesture; it is not about how large the body becomes, but about what moves through it, what lives in it, what can be read from it in moments of stress.
Modern bodybuilding reduces culture to quantity but operative cultures perceive the body as a tuning fork, vibrating with inner form, responding to threat, able to predict, to see, to act in alignment with something deeper. That is true power, and this is what culturismo was meant to be: not a science of hypertrophy, but a language of being.
Bodybuilding today is not about building the body. Deep down, Iit is about destroying the organic body to fabricate a new one optimized for performance, fetish, and visibility. It is a denial of reality itself, and a perfect expression of the planetary techno-system´s final ambition: to erase the difference between the natural and the synthetic.
Before the age of performance-enhancing drugs, there were men who shaped their bodies not to impress, but to express. Figures like Sean Connery, in his youth, approached physical culture not as a pursuit of visibility, but as a discipline of presence. The body was not decoration but a place where one met resistance and revealed who one was becoming.
They trained to cope with pain, to test their mettle, to embody dignity and genuine personality. And the aesthetic that emerged -lean, balanced, unforced- was not the goal, but the side-effect of inner order. Looking good was never the purpose but the echo of a life lived according to principles of courage and self-sacrifice.
This was the essence of early culturismo: not hypertrophy, but harmony. Not mechanistic domination of the body, but alignment with its potential. It was a path of tension, not spectacle. And through that tension, character emerged. It definitely wasn´t about running in circles.
So not only modern bodybuilding and fitness, but the recent explosion of long-distance running particularly in marathons and branded “events” is not just a health trend but a cultural ritual. What we see are thousands of people performing the most basic human action: running. But they are not running as a form of escape, of war, of celebration or of transformation. They are running to find their place in the collective.
This is the psychological core of the phenomenon. In these events, you run not to become a genuine personality but to measure who you think you are within the crowd. You compete using a faculty given to you at birth, not something trained, honed, genuine or crafted. It is the absolute opposite of the operative path.
In the operative path, you refine yourself through genuine difficulty, discipline, and tension until you can do something no one else can imitate. But in the mass marathon, the goal is to do what everyone else is doing, just slightly better. The act is not meant to elevate you, but to locate you. Not to free you, but to register you in a system of scale. If you have the potential to fly, why settle for running in circles?
A society that trains bodies to conform and minds to adapt now offers a new promise: that intelligence itself can be outsourced. Artificial Intelligence has begun to replace not just work, but formation. Young people in particular turn to AI for answers, decisions, strategies, even identity. But what is missing is the inner ground on which this intelligence should stand.
In an operative tradition, intelligence is not the starting point. It is the refinement of a personality shaped by risk, hardship and adventure. One must first become someone through lived challenge before one can wield tools responsibly. But when smartphones or AI are introduced too early to teenagers they displace that very process, almost irreversibly due to their “nerve rewiring” capacity, offering the appearance of intelligence, without the formation of character.
The result may not be stupidity. It may be something worse: a vast class of technically capable, emotionally fragile, and spiritually disoriented individuals, with specialized talents but unformed, not because they lacked access to knowledge, but because they were never forced to become anything before accessing it.
Since my first Solar Warrior books I´ve been warning about these risks, but it’s no longer enough to warn about the dangers of early exposure to technique. The problem is deeper. Even the resistance to technique can become mechanical: rules without soul, prohibitions without gesture. For instance, a parent may forbid the use of screens, but if their own life is ruled by deadlines, dopamine, and disembodied routine, the child will see only contradiction, and contradiction breeds failure.
Today, society imposes technique on children without asking if they’re ready. They are flood with information, stimulation, and artificial tools before they’ve even learned how to stand alone. And then society are shocked when they become lost. But in operative traditions, nothing was ever imposed but only offered as a challenge.
For an operative discipline the world itself is the test. The temple door does not open simply because you were born. It opens because you suffered, because you waited in the cold, because you endured hunger, because you showed through your presence that you were ready. Not intellectually, but in the marrow. Only then can training begin. And only then can technique serve the soul, rather than consume it.
This is what society no longer wants to hear: the word sacrifice. Society has replaced it with convenience, access, and ease. But no one becomes whole through comfort, and no one becomes free without first choosing a path that demands something real.
As a consequence the operative path is not for everyone. It never was. It is for those willing to lose something in order to become something. In that sense, this entire article shall very likely fall on deaf ears. But perhaps -just perhaps- it will land where it’s needed: not in the minds of many, but in the silence of one who is ready
The First Gesture: Standing Inside the Pain
To anyone who still has the heart to understand the implications of the operative path -young or old- my only recommendation is this: do not flee from pain. Do not mute it. Do not medicate it. Let it speak.
Pain is not your enemy but your compass. It arrives in many forms: physical strain, frustration, injustice, confusion, disillusionment. Even the ache of seeing the world degraded, as for instance when verifying that the worst are elevated, that truth is mocked, that beauty is sold is also a kind of sacred pain. Do not turn away from it. Feel it, hold it, and let it shape your first gesture.
This is the beginning of the operative path: not mastery, not enlightenment, but the quiet, stubborn choice to face discomfort without breaking. The world today teaches the opposite: run, soothe, avoid, scroll. But that path leads nowhere. The true warrior begins with conflict and contradiction, with the fire of not belonging. And from that pain, the true architecture of personality is erected.
In operative traditions that are linked to martial arts, the peak of mastery is not the ability to react quickly or overpower your opponent but the ability to perceive before the movement happens. This power of prediction isn’t rooted in speed or strength. It comes from a clarity of being that lets one perceive the world from within, not just respond to it from the outside.
In today’s world, it’s widely accepted that thought precedes action, that if we understand well enough, our outer behavior will follow. Modern psychology is built on this premise, but this is not the view of an operative tradition. In the paths reserved for warriors and kings, action is not something secondary to thought, it is the crucible where truth is revealed.
In these traditions, it is understood that the only reliable knowledge of a person comes through their gesture, their form under pressure, their ability to align movement with meaning. Words can lie, and intentions can be masked but the body under stress can´t fake clarity.
This is why operative training is never meant for the masses. It is forged in a context where action matters, where a single misstep can cost lives or kingdoms. The merchant may live by calculation, the worker by labor, but the warrior lives by relating to the power of gesture, and gesture does not explain itself, it shows. In this sense, operative paths run directly against the current of modern psychology. They do not seek to interpret the self but seek to burn away everything that is not aligned, until only the gesture remains.
Modern sport and education reverse this almost entirely. The athlete is trained to become a perfect responder, measured by milliseconds, shaped by metrics, honed for reaction. But true freedom doesn’t lie in reaction, it lies in the capacity to step outside the visible rhythm and read the invisible. In this sense, operative movement isn’t about defeating or competing with others. It’s about transcending the entire field of competition because only from that height one sees what’s coming, and act before action is needed.
In an operative tradition, conflict is never about proving dominance over another individual. The true enemy is not the person before you but what they stand for. In traditional tournaments, the combatants are not mere athletes; they are symbolic figures, representing houses, lineages, or sacred causes. The duel isn´t personal but a form of inquiry: a test of whose gesture carried greater truth.
In that sacred space, athletic attributes alone mean nothing. What matter is the ability to sustain clarity, to predict movement, to act without hesitation. Pain and impact become tools, not of violence, but of revelation. Through the heat of conflict becomes visible which man is aligned and which is simply reactive, yet this vision is almost unrecognizable today, where sport is built on ego, spectacle, and scoring. The modern fighter wants to beat you. The operative warrior wants to read you, and through that reading, let something greater come into form.
This is why the operative path cannot be taught through personal image or influence. What matters is not who speaks but what speaks through the gesture. In an age where everyone proves themselves through metrics, bios, or social validation, the operative warrior disappears into his discipline. You don’t follow an operative path because he succeeded. You follow it because what it reveals is something you recognize, something that was already asleep within you. The proof is not in the name. It’s in the form made visible under stress.
Operative traditions teach that form is not transmitted through words. It is revealed through example, stress, and presence. A child will not become human through commands, but through the space to encounter reality, to take risks, to fail meaningfully, and to become someone.
You cannot create a true martial artist from the fitness industry. You cannot create a real dancer from mechanistic rhythm. Personality is born in life when the body, the mind, and the world meet in tension, and something invisible passes through.
This is the task: not to raise obedient citizens of a machine, nor rebels without a cause, but to make space again for human beings and human meanings.
The Challenge of Operative Transmission
It wasn´t only extremely challenging for the Operative Freemasons to transmit some of these ideas during the times of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, but for years I have also tried to transmit this knowledge, not as an ideology, but as a living form. And yet, again and again, I’ve encountered something more immovable than ignorance: inherited entrapment. Most people are not free to act. Their wills are shaped, stunted, or derailed by the unresolved lives of those who came before them.
This is not a matter of education, nor intelligence but a matter of inner structure. The modern world tells us we are autonomous individuals, unbound by the past, always moving forward. But that is ideology, not reality. The child of two unresolved lives does not begin with a blank slate. They begin inside a pattern, a gesture interrupted before it could complete itself.
And this brings us to something difficult to say: the problem is not only cultural. It is also intimate. It lies in how society form unions, how society creates life. Marriage today is often reduced to legality, convenience, psycho-emotional and sexual comfort. But in its nobler form, it is the meeting of two stories forged in difficulty, two individuals who had become someone, and who could therefore create a new being with greater inner potentials.
If society continues to reproduce itself without reflection, forming new families without confronting the crisis of meaning at its root, then no education, no philosophy, no discipline will bear fruit. Society will go on creating lives without direction, wills without clarity, children without inheritance.
Any good intention to reshape society without realizing these basic premises can easily lead to hell.
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