The following is excerpted from The Bicycle Effect: Cycling As Meditation by Carlos Kreimer and is reprinted with the permission of Findhorn Press. www.findhornpress.com

“I ride a bike just for pleasure,” many people say, and they are being sincere.

Take care, warns Alan Watts, with the word “pleasure”, which branches off in two senses. The idea of doing something just for pleasure, on the one hand, removes significance from it, making it seem trivial. In that case, perhaps, instead of pleasure, it would be more accurate to say: “I ride to live in the best way possible.” In another sense, says Watts, pleasure is far from trivial: it means to do something in the best way possible.

This covers almost the entire range of human activity. Whether you are playing a musical instrument, preparing a meal, playing tennis, fitting a dental implant, repairing an engine, weaving a tapestry, raising a child, laying bricks, designing software—anything that you do in which you deploy your technical knowledge and simultaneously commit yourself fully to the task in hand (to the point that you stop thinking of everything else) engenders a state of fulfillment.

To believe that this pleasure comes only from what you do or are able to do, is a simple way to explain things, but it hides another, much richer explanation: you enter a state in which you allow yourself to be an instrument through which energy can flow unhindered towards where it needs to go. Afterwards, having allowed that energy to flow through you, you are left with a sensation of pleasure. The vital energy takes your body and performs the task without you realizing that you are doing it. A flow of energy runs through your neurons and cells without your intervention, and without you being able to interfere. At the end of it, recognizing the state in which it leaves you, you feel a mixture of satisfaction, relief, and emptiness. You are free for another thing; you are available.

The pleasure of having been the vehicle that provided such action leaves the body satisfied. You don’t even need to be aware of this for it to occur. Any ritual in which an activity is accomplished through involvement, commitment, and a striving for impeccability is recognized by the Japanese as an art: the art of calligraphy, the art of flower arrangement, the art of serving tea, the art of war, martial arts. Art does not imply, as it does in the West, the idea of a work of literary, musical, or pictorial art, but the sense of mastery. Activity carried out with mastery.

A practice can be anything that is practiced as an integral part of our lives, not in order to do it better, but to do it for its own sake. The artists of such an art do not do it to perfect their technique, but because they love what they do; and that is why they are the best.

From this perspective, the purpose of practicing any art is not to find out who you are, as in psychotherapy, but to become your own truth; to be able to divest yourself of all self-delusion, pretense, and vanity, whether in relation to yourself or someone else. True art is not about satisfying the small ego; it is a manifestation of the “I” that transcends it and meets a “non-self.”

Ignorance, or the error of perception, is manifested in the concept of “I” created by the human mind in the attempt to know itself and in the atavistic emotional attachment to that idea. In deeply harmonizing with the experience of doing what they are doing (in a diverse range of activities), many people claim that they enter states similar to mystical ecstasy.

This notion of “not me,” or of an impersonal “I” that can occupy our awareness, strikes a blow at the heart of Western beliefs and ideas about self.

This is possibly the most difficult concept to accept for anyone born and bred in a society in which doing is intrinsically linked to results, work or activity to effort, and enjoyment to what we receive.

In the specific case of cyclists, learning involves linking this experience to a sense of broader pleasure. It is to register with your senses and your awareness that “that” which is detached from the task is, at the same time, that which reunites you with it. To make way for energy is what gives us life.

Excerpted with permission of Findhorn Press, from The Bicycle Effect ©2016, by Juan Carlos Kreimer.

Juan Carlos Kreimer is an Argentinean writer and publisher. Juan is in his early 70’s and continues to ride his bike around 20 to 30 miles a day.