July 2007

Speed Masters Throttle Up:  Space, Time and the Sacred Journeys of Recreational Motorcyclists

Richard Hutch

Ever since the appearance of the popular book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig in 1974, an association between motorcycles and inner personal change has existed.  Furthermore, motorcycles have been associated also with revolutionary political change, as the South American diaries of the Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, suggest.  Commentators, such as Cintio Vitier who writes the introduction to the diaries, locate this story squarely within the development of Che’s political radicalism, itself originating his “wholehearted and spiritual” quest on the noisy motorcycle, La Ponderosa II (Guevara 16).  A good deal of the popular literature about motorcycles could be thought to be strung out on a trajectory that stretches from a sense of what life ordinarily is to what it might become, a movement of awareness and thought towards something unnamed that will outlast the “here and now,” or space and time as currently understood. 

Most sporting activity is not about long-term activity, but about the “here and now,” and how a person performs in a particular configuration of space-time.  By means of studying the “here and now” in a number of significant moments, an historical understanding of sporting performance builds up, just as individuals and societies undergo development in an open-ended manner over time.  Training for performance in sport, like history itself, appears to be a one-way street:  it moves forward at least in some direction, or so one is accustomed to assume.  Some would say that such movement moves beyond the past, making progress on all that has been before; others would disavow such a progressivist view of history.  A “personal best” (PB) in sport usually is considered to be the result of steady improvement over time.  However, some might say that achieving a personal best was merely “lucky,” eschewing the tendency to construct such an achievement as a result of gradual growth in expertise and skill.  Whatever the interpretation of history—progressive or regressive—the continuous accrual of the “here and now” from moment to moment is always basically terrifying, however subtle that terror of history may appear.  History means not only beginnings, but also endings.  In sport, negotiating the “here and now” may involve the so-called “thrill of victory,” but it may also bring about the “agony of defeat.”  Crash a motorcycle and you may realise this, if you survive.

However, an historical rendering of space-time may not actually be congruent with the lived experience of sport with its emphasis on the moment.  Take the case of motorcycling, whose essence is speed in a world where time itself seems to be accelerating and in which a rider becomes one with his or her machine, a “cyborgian unity” that becomes central to self-understanding in a world in which machines such as pacemakers, drug dispensers, electrodes and the like are embedded in our bodies (Alford).  Says Steven Alford, a scholar who studies recreational motorcyclists and motorcycling culture,

Motorcycles bring people together.  Motorcycles are like being naked.  Just as everyone exists on the same level naked, riding one unites you with other riders, whether they be mechanics or stock brokers, professors or construction workers.  Motorcycles highlight the essential and significant tacit dimension of our lives, revealing to us the limits of language in expressing what’s most important to us.  Like conveying the taste of a fine wine to a teetotaler, or the experience of sex to a virgin, language experiences its limits in trying to describe what it’s like to ride on a motorcycle.  The sensation of being on a motorcycle embodies what we’re all seeking in life.  Freedom.

Many riders believe that realising the “tacit dimension” which is pointed out by Alford is to access human spiritual potential.  This is “almost a mystical experience,” according to Wendy Moon.  Studying what happens when motorcyclists ride can mark the boundaries between “what can be understood and what cannot be,” and “far from reducing the mystery, points the way to what is the core, inexpressible truth of the experience” (Moon).  A paradox is evident in most sport, namely, that during sporting activity it is the moment that counts most, not the build up to it.  To the athlete, time feels at a standstill, punctuated by the held breaths of spectators as that moment of victory or defeat assumes a powerful impact all its own. 

What, in the context of accessing human spiritual potential, is meant by saying that history is terrifying?  How is the terror of history somehow associated with recreational motorcycling?  How might sport somehow lessen such terror, which usually is demarcated quickly by a fine line between the “thrill of victory” and the “agony of defeat?”  Motorcycle riding has often been said to be terrifying in its own right, and in this sense it could be said that recreational motorcyclists fight “terror with terror.”  However, in this case the terrifying antidote to the terror of history is speed and a faith that one will not be injured or die whilst throttling up in the moment.  The view put forward in this essay is that speed is an idiom of transcendence.  Speed itself transforms ordinary space and time as an historical flow, with its beginnings, middles and endings, into the “here and now.”  The “here and now” is an experiential reality in which time stands still and, in doing so, confers a sense of sacrality upon the place where such interruptions to ordinary temporality occur. 

The principle involved here can be analogised to introductory explanations of Einstein’s theory of relativity:  the faster a body travels the greater will space and time converge and, paradoxically, “slow down” for those persons travelling at increasing speed.  Physics has demonstrated that as the speed of light is neared the movement of a body slows down.  At some theoretical point of increased speed the “here and now” could be said to stop.  The theory of relativity has been illustrated in popular renditions by pointing out that if one of two identical twins boarded a rocket and traveled at a speed near that of the speed of light, then after about ten years that twin would return to earth to discover that he or she was actually younger that the other twin.  In such a hypothetical case, space-time would not only be slowed down, but also partially “reversed.”  Religious myth and ritual complexes function in a similar manner, seeking to slow down and create a sense that the “terror of history” can be reversed, or that all human limitation, including death itself, can be annulled.  One comes to sense “dwelling in eternity,” and thereby also to sense standing on “holy ground.” 

When time stands still in this way, a person’s worldview is structured by a unitary cosmos (an orderly “freeze-frame” of one’s outlook), which replaces the linear flow of ordinary consciousness from moment to moment, accruing “history” over time.  A statement by a reviewer of The Perfect Vehicle by motorcyclist Melissa Holbrook Pierson picks up on this theme in terms of a mind and body balance that signals transcendence: 

In reading her chronicle I imagined the author confronting her fears and then gradually moving through them, as the animal body took over and became aware of, comfortable with, and proactive in addressing actual threats to the physical self.  In essence, her psychic fears are confronted and normalized in the face of real physical threats.  Riding is a risk, which demands a balanced integration of mind and body.  Her book illustrates, once again, that the love of riding and motorcycles is about the heart and body rather than the mind.  Motorcycle riding is illogical: it is precisely the need to transcend rational-linear confinement that is part of its draw. (Garber)

Following from such a sense of transcendence in life, it can be said that once a person’s captivity by historical consciousness is recognised and understood as such (a “death warrant,” one that usually is less than a conscious realisation), then efforts to manage the impact of history, especially the subtle existential terror of ageing, suffering, dying and death that it bears, become crucial.  Sporting activity is a clear lens on the matter of the human actor on the stage of life.  Crucial efforts to manage the ups and downs of “thrills of victory” and “agonies of defeat” derive from lived experience.  So-called “Baby Boomers,” who may just now be purchasing and riding powerful motorcycles as a warm up for retirement, illustrate such existential “rehearsal zones” and their implicit spiritual bearings.  Especially in the rehearsal zone of recreational motorcycling, speed becomes a key management strategy by which the “here and now” is punctuated and history is experienced as slowed, stopped or even reversed.  In effect, sport becomes a death-defying ritual process for transcending history and seizing the moment as a vitalising source of human spiritual value.  Accessing this source can become a repetitive activity, with the conferral of human spirituality being a resulting intrinsic value.  This value results from an “eternal return” to a person’s existential foundations (Eliade, Cosmos 85-90, 122).  This lends overall meaning and purpose to living, notwithstanding the ever exacting tug of human finitude.

More needs to be said to make clear why history is terrifying.  Human consciousness has been structured by Western culture since ancient times to be terrifying.  Such cultural inertia is difficult to resist, but resisting it is the heart of spiritual formation.  History is terrifying because for individuals it moves in only a linear direction, the end of which is the wearing down of oneself, suffering, dying and death.  The high existential stakes involved in an affirmation of historical consciousness are captured by the often heard paradoxical statement, “We are born to die.”  This paradox is a serious worry for pensive individuals because its inexorable force cannot be arrested, or so one assumes.  However, spiritual adepts amongst us ask the question, namely, in spite of the terror of history, can its effects be somehow slowed, stopped or even reversed?  The key question for those persons who would aspire to higher spiritual awareness is based on the assumption that the predominance of historical consciousness can be resisted.  Indeed, they would hold that the terror of history can be slowed, stopped and even reversed.  We must ask not whether this is possible, but how the terror of historical consciousness might be lessened, and how might the sport of recreational motorcycling contribute to this?

Lessons from the Academic Study of Religion:  History or Cosmos?

In his well-know book, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, historian and phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, takes up the problem of how Western societies have constructed historical consciousness, and why this is itself a terrifying development in the history of evolution of human consciousness.  Historical consciousness masks its truly terrifying nature, and to wear such a mask of this sort of consciousness leads only to soul destruction, suggests Eliade (139-62).  He juxtaposes a Western view of history to that of archaic consciousness which he believes typifies people living in preliterate, small-scale so-called “primitive” societies, in which history as it is known in the West is mostly disregarded.  Instead of a one-way linear trajectory framing the “here and now” (space and time as lived experiences of individuals), archaic societies organise the “here and now” as a cycle of repetition, or a getting back to the way things truly are by means of periodical regeneration ad infinitum.  Consider the analogy of wheels: while wheels may take a motorcycle down a long and distant road, they themselves do so only by going around in a cyclical manner, fixed gyroscopically in the “here and now.”  That is, space and time may ordinarily degenerate and lead to death as we move linearly down the historical road to the end of our personal and collective lives.  However, this only is because the “here and now” has been allowed to degenerate in this way.  In words perhaps more familiar to motorcyclists, it may take good “counter-steering” to break the gyroscopic force of history and to turn a corner back to our primordial cosmic origins. 

So, we may ask, what must be done to annul history, or to reverse such degeneration and bring the “here and now” back to its original and unchanging state by means of activities of regeneration?  Whilst the “here and now” may always degenerate and lead to the death of individuals, space and time must somehow be brought back to an immemorial or primordial condition as a collective and shared vision of Life Eternal, or making sacred the ground upon which one stands with others.  This is a movement from the “chaos” brought about by a solitary individual historical consciousness to the “cosmos” of a connected and socially shared primordial space and time, or a repetition of people’s self-understandings that outlast the “moment” and go beyond “this place.”  Recreational motorcycling is one means by which a lived experience of such a “reversal of history” can be accomplished.  Recreation itself becomes a touchstone of cosmic Creation in a spiritual sense, whether those involved are conventionally religious or not.[1] 

The process of seeking Creation is to engage human spirituality writ large.  A well known scholar of religious studies, Frederick Streng, analyses the religious traditions of the world, including Buddhism, Christian, Islam, and Shamanism.  His aim is to crystallise what cuts across all of them as common features.  He proposes that overall, religion is “a means to ultimate transformation” (2).  Transformation can come about by a variety of means, chief of which are what he calls four traditional ways of being religious:  “personal apprehension of a holy presence”; “creation of community through sacred symbols”; “living in harmony with cosmic law”; and “attaining freedom through spiritual discipline” (v-vi).  Let us call ultimate transformation of the self a quest for Creation, or an inner spiritual reach for all things that outlast the “moment” and go beyond “this place,” at least briefly.  Once such a centre can be approximated in selfhood, then a person is said to have struck a chord of transcendence, this sense of outlasting time and being beyond the confines of ordinary space-time.  As Eliade puts it about the road to the self, or to the “center” of one’s being,

The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity.  Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective. (Eliade, Cosmos 18)

A re-valuation of the self takes place, which amounts to a “valorisation” of space and time inhabited by a person.  A spiritual seeker dwells in this habitat, mainly in order to slow down, stop and even reverse the personal pinch of history’s terror. 

However, how can such convergence come about?  What means are available to travel that road which may take us back to where we belong, an “arduous” road “fraught with perils,” says Eliade, but where we might embrace our largely unconscious archaic consciousness and engage with our existential foundations?  I would now like to suggest that something akin to a “shaman’s ascent” comes into play as a specific spiritual process associated with a number of sports, especially recreational motorcycling.[2]  A shaman is a sole religio-spiritual operative evident in so-called “pre-historical” human societies.  Shamanism is really a form of play that has undergone ritualisation in a cosmic framework: 

Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside of ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.  It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.  It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.  It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. (Huizinga 32) 

Indeed, the play element in sporting activity and its association with human spiritual and religious activity is often overlooked.  The characteristic shaman’s ascent (the key to all shamanic religio-spiritual practice) picks up on this neglected aspect of ritualised activity in a sport like recreational motorcycling.  This is a form of lived transcendence (a “going beyond”) which is particularly apt in regard to motorcycle enthusiasts and other sporting people who have discovered the elixir of speed as an idiom of personal transformation.  The moment of transcendence is one of thought-suspending embodiment.  There is a sense of melding into the world of nature with fresh awareness.  On a motorcycle at speed, it is acutely clear that riding is always a matter of “life and death.”  Can this centre of body awareness, apparently beyond words, be structured within the lived experience of a ride?  Eliade questions whether such a personal centre can be found by people living in non-archaic or non-pre-historical (i.e., historical) societies:  “It would require a most uncommon degree of perspicacity for anyone to be able to say to what extent those who, in the modern world, continue to repeat construction rituals still share in their meaning and mystery” (Eliade, Cosmos 77).  However, it is at this point that we must part ways with Eliade and his pessimism about our modern spiritual prospects and progressing these by means of our two-wheeled sport. 

It is a curious fact of the culture of recreational motorcycling that the “long, straight road ahead,” itself analogous to the linear, one-way trajectory of modern, Western historical consciousness, is not the lure for most riders I know.  Whilst it is perhaps acknowledged that the riders of machines that cruise low to the road, such as Harley-Davidson Dynas and Softails, readily frequent highways and modern interstate freeways, riders of most other kinds of motorcycles choose to head into the country or “go bush.”  There they find small mountain roads with interesting bends and twists, and travel in a circuit through those roads back to where they set out riding early in the morning.  The fact of a repeated ascent and descent back to where a ride started, which is typical of most recreational motorcyclists, is a key to understanding the spirituality that is inherent in recreational motorcycling, mostly on weekends, perhaps quite apart from the “outlaw” image of riders who take most to long stretches of bleak highway and are prone to falling foul of the law in doing so.  Indeed, Frederick Streng’s typology of ways of being religious is approximated generally in groups of recreational motorcyclists and their distinctive practices.  It could be said that a holy presence, mostly of joy and challenge, is felt uniting the rider, the motorcycle and the “here and now” of the experience of riding at speed.  Community is clearly created by use of symbols such “tags” (adopted nick-names), motorcycle manufacturers’ brand symbols, club dress, and so forth.  Harmony with cosmic law of a sort is linked to the unity of the riding experience and doing this successfully along a shamanistic-like trajectory of ascent/descent.  This articulates a freedom found if proper techniques and developed skills on the road contribute to a disciplined riding experience.  The “cultic” nature of groups of motorcyclists often has been said to be like the ethos that reinforces the lineage of strong social bonds amongst people living in so-called archaic societies.  Although recreational motorcycling can be considered a spiritual activity in general, it also may evidence a specific kind of religious process known as shamanism.

Speed Here Now:  Shamanistic Ascent in the Hinterlands

Quite apart from traditional religions, alternative expressions of religious experience appear dressed in contemporary clothes but are not usually recognised as bona fide spiritual activities by most scholars of the world’s religions.  Many of such scholars would discount the study of New Religious Movements as worth the time of day in contrast to the study of world religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.  However, sport has recently become one non-traditional sector of study that invites religious thought.[3]  Group sporting activities rely heavily on bonding, or feeling a sense of solidarity amongst participants.  Solidarity as a characteristic of religious groups has long been studied in the sociology of religion.  A good deal of literature about recreational motorcyclists picks up on this theme of groups of motorcyclists as a “gang” which could well have “cultic” overtones.  Recreational motorcyclists have most of the benchmarks identified by Eliade as befitting the spiritual seeker who would by some sort of ritualised means try to reverse the “terror of history” and to generate a sense of a sacred personal centre within oneself.  Not only do such groups foster a sense of human solidarity that often stands the test of time, but they also take steps to slow down, stop or even reverse ordinary space-time, laced as it is with the terror of historical consciousness (ever-present spectre of human mortality).  Such groups can be said to offer participants personal space that organises a worldview in which the “here and now” can be located.  In this kind of space-time, degeneration and death have scant place.  Their purchase on life means little.  This is to place oneself amidst sacred space and time, where history gets ritually reversed, terror is transcended and life undergoes renewal.  Recreational motorcyclists end their days of riding together always planning on “next time,” an expression of nostalgia for the cosmos they shared as the daily round of history for each rider takes hold again with the beginning of a new week of work. 

The RATbags of Southeast Queensland, Australia, frequent the hills of the hinterlands of the Sunshine Coast to the north of Brisbane, the hinterlands behind the Gold Coast south of Brisbane and the extensive network of bends and twists around and about the numerous ancient volcanic craters and lava cores of Northern New South Wales.  The group numbers anywhere from fifteen to fifty riders at any one time (as of early 2007).  The club is a local offshoot of “Riders Association of Triumph” (RAT), the Triumph motorcycle manufacturer’s international riders club with its headquarters in Hinckley, UK, where Triumphs are made.  The fewer highways and freeways it takes to get to such mountainous hinterlands for riding the better.  A chief value is aesthetic:  the roads through the hills remain a delight to the eyes and a stretch to the body; roads often pass through fern-filled rain forests; the body can be made to “fit into” the sways and turns so that a sense of being fused to the motorcycle and embedded in the natural environment is generated in so far as one attends to these things, generating a refreshing, sensate awareness.  The aesthetic dimension of riding through the hills loosens the symbolic associations that drive one’s awareness of the landscape:  mountainous terrain is central, as mountains get riders to the sky, so to speak.  Mountains share in the spatial symbolism of transcendence in so far as they are “high,” “vertical,” “supreme,” and so on; they are, says Eliade, the “especial domain of all hierophanies of atmosphere, and therefore, the dwelling of the gods” (Patterns 99).  This is to say that in the history of religion, appearances of the sacred (Greek:  hieros, the holy or sacred; phantos, appearance), or experiencing ultimate transformation, have long been associated with mountains and mountain peaks, for example, Moses’ encounter with God on the top of Mt. Sinai and the sacrality associated with the Himalayas and mountainous Tibet. 

The symbology of mountains is filled with potential.  They draw a person upward in fact and feeling, which parallels ultimate transformation and can lead to transcendence.  Mountains can be thought of as the place where sky and earth meet, a central point through which the Axis Mundi (an axis through the centre of the earth, or “centre of the world” in a cosmological sense) passes, bringing with it a symbolic spot where it is possible to experience passing from one zone of awareness to another, or from historical to cosmic (“pre-historical”) consciousness at best.  As riders twist and bend their bodies further through mountainous regions they rehearse such ritual passages from the ordinary space-time below, a zone of the work-a-day world, to something higher in  which their outlooks are broadened by the ascent.  Riding fuses together heaven and earth.  By means of thundering in a pack through the mountains, a virtual whirlwind of power is summoned and draws one forward as the bikers throttle up, taking their machines further and further into an extraordinary cosmic zone so different from the flat plain and the long, straight highway below.  Indeed, if the long, straight highway is analogous to historical space-time, with its inherent terror that leads to destruction and death, then touching the sky on one’s motorcycle is a clear reversal of such symbolics, a recapturing of “cosmos” and a temporary replacement of soul-destroying “history.”  The archaic centre of life is touched anew, albeit fleetingly. 

A motorcycle rider dies to the old world in so far as he or she ascends beyond the ordinary human state, a sacred ascent “passing to what is beyond,” so to speak (Eliade, Patterns 102).  As one RATbag said, “When I throttle up my Triumph Rocket III [2300ccs, currently the largest capacity production motorbike manufactured in the world], it feels like being in a jet plane going down the runway and then comes this moment of magic, lifting off the tarmac in a surge of power.  There’s nothing like it going up to full speed fast.  I’ve been to 250 km/hr in less than eight seconds on this bike, mate.”[4]  A shamanistic understanding of ascending mountains on motorcycles readily comes to mind in this illustration.  Perhaps the clearest example of a sporting activity in which the dynamic of “ascent and descent” is evident is mountain climbing.  This sport can deliver a shamanistic accomplishment par excellence for those climbers who successfully make it to the top and come safely back down again.  The mountain serves as the axis mundi of a climber’s spiritual orientation in the cosmos, usually providing the occasion for personal change and overall transformation of the self into a more resilient kind of character.[5] 

The history of religion is peppered with instances of shamanistic practitioners the world over making spiritual ascents, curiously in association with horses.  This is also the case in psychotherapeutic analyses of dreams, which are windows on the world of the unconscious.  Horses in dreams point to journeys involving life and death issues (Despenser).  A notable example of horses and spiritual ascent exists in Islam, where the founder, Mohammad, not long before his death, is said to have undergone a grand “Ascension” to come before god, Allah, in heaven.  He was carried upward by the powerful white horse, Buraq.  Perhaps on a flip side to this example, we note that Jesus descended into Jerusalem on a donkey, not quite like Buraq but similarly associated with communicating the “here and now” of human spirituality.    Of course, a popular association has existed between horses and modern motorcycles in late nineteenth and twentieth century folklore, especially in America.  The film Easy Rider hearkens back to the nineteenth century and the old west in America.  The motif of the solitary “high plains drifter” on horseback remaining free and unencumbered at all costs is paramount in such a movie, as it could also well be for a number of motorcyclists we may know these days.  Also, in Australia and elsewhere, off-road motorcycles (trail bikes) are often used instead of horses to move cattle stocks.

Other perhaps more familiar stories of ritual ascents are well known, for example, Jacob’s Ladder, Dante’s descent into Hell and the ascent through Purgatory to Heaven, popular spiritual pilgrimages to Kathmandu, and so on.  Also, there is that famous line of the psychedelic-laced rock artist, Jimi Hendrix, which suggests a parallel shamanistic dynamic:  from the album, New Experience, in the song called “Purple Haze”—perhaps indicating having entered into a new zone of awareness in which ordinary space-time have been radically altered to a new “here and now”—he sings to the sound of an ascending shrill of his electric guitar, “excuse me while I kiss the sky.”  Hendrix himself becomes a touchstone of sacrality, an Axis Mundi incarnate.  (Many would still consider Hendrix an outstanding example of a modern shaman who pointed the way forward to larger vistas for living together in a world increasingly held in the tightening grip of contemporary history.  And, too, his untimely death is not uncharacteristic of many a shaman’s life in so far as they, like Hendrix, usually seek to go into trances that take them higher into the realms of spirit-beings than ever before, by whatever means.)

The faster the climb, the greater becomes the connection between “heaven and earth” in the entire shamanistic process of up-lifting ascent that is the experience of riding for most RATbags.  Often in world symbology a strong association is evident between spiritual messengers like shamans and birds.  Sometimes, a person’s soul is pictured as a bird, and angels are but a modified version of personified birds.  One scholar who thinks like Eliade says, “But the bird of the shaman is one of a particular character and power, endowing him with an ability to fly in trance beyond the bounds of life, and yet return” (Campbell 258).   Space-time is compressed by means of paying strict attention to the ride and concentrating intensely on riding properly without unnecessary risks that would impede or end one’s ascent up hinterland mountains and descent back home.  This same sense is captured in the introduction to Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries written by Vitier:

These youthful adventures—veined with cheerfulness, humor and frequently self-directed irony—see the spirit of the landscape rather than merely the scenery.  That “spirit” was found in the sudden appearance of [a] deer:  “We walked slowly so as not to disturb the peace of the wild sanctuary with which we now communing.”  Che writes with none of the sarcasm he dedicates to the topic of religion:  “Both [of us] assistants wait for Sunday [and the roast] with a kind of religious devotion.”  So while being unbelievers, they were able to feel the metaphorical presence of a “sanctuary” in nature, where they were in close rapport with its “spirit”—immediately reminding us of analogous images from the freethinking Martí, such as this from his Simple Verses:  “The bishop of Spain seeks / Supports for his shrine. / On wild mountain peaks / The poplars are mine.” (21)[6]

This implies a scenario of flight.  The youthful adventures on his motorcycle prompted the budding revolutionary, Che Guevara, to associate in his worldview the shaman’s spiritual ascent to mountaintops (a form of resurrection) whilst using a sense of being embedded in natural surroundings as a vitalising source of reality.  So, it is critical that a story of “eternal return” play itself out on each ride; a zone of safety and upholding the law are maintained.  However, on the analogy of compressing space-time by using religious rituals of ascent, it is the elixir of speed that carries motorcyclists on their spiritual flights.  As philosopher Paul Virilio puts it, “Stasis is death really seems to be the general law of the World” (67, original italics).  His analysis of the constant circulation of power and representation as a kind of “political pleasure principle” applies very well here, especially in the context of the “paradoxes of rebellion versus commodification or speed versus crashing” (Sutherland).   In one of the finest personal testimonies of the transformative effects of motorcycle riding as an experience of transcendence and embodiment all at once, Melissa Holbrook Pierson summarisies, “Riding is an occupation defined by duplicities” (9).  A reviewer of Pierson’s book adds, “How acceptance and progressive metabolization of psychic terror, in the face of physical peril, is healing and becomes pleasurable is one of the mysteries and the magic of the motorcycle meeting its perfect rider” (Garber).  Cultic transcendence during the ritual of riding high into the mountains is the essence of the spirituality of recreational motorcycling.

Sport as Spiritual Practice

Three characteristics of human spirituality have been described.  First, there is the backdrop of modern secularity, or the “post-enlightenment project,” a construction of culture since the seventeenth century in the West in which historical consciousness, rational thought and self-control command the highest value in society.  There is a slow gnawing away of religious vision and faith brought about by the trends of modernity.  Death is ignored as irrelevant to the conduct of life. 

Second, modern secularity, in particular its emphasis on historical consciousness, has been criticised by scholars of religion, not the least of whom is Eliade, founder of the so-called “Chicago School” of religious studies.[7]  He is a proponent of the ubiquity of religion in everyday life, if only people have the intuitive capacity to grasp it.  He believes that he can get modern secular people to realise that they are already religious.[8]  His critique is based upon championing archaic consciousness, or those existential foundations of human awareness that are mostly unconscious.  Those foundations consist of archetypes by which thought, feeling and behaviour are configured in the psyche, much in the manner of how a computer software program configures the work to be done on the screen.  The Chicago School of religious studies is subversive.  The approach Eliade advocates is neither strictly historical (as, say, in the history of religions) nor reductionistic (as, for example, a Marxist critique of religious belief and practice).  Rather, it approaches the study of religion as undermining the modern consensus about the character of human knowledge in order to bring about a higher gnosis, or a grasp of the “whole of symbolism,” which articulates all things primordial about human consciousness (Eliade, Images 63).  Rejected entirely is any notion about the so-called “post-modern” condition of human knowledge. 

Third, the major feature of archaic consciousness (itself defining the essence of human spirituality) is a ritual process, one that happens automatically without thinking about it or deliberately as in traditional religious rituals.  Such ritual process aims at “reversing” historical consciousness and thereby “suspends” the flow of time, which grants a person a sense of being beyond the reach of death.  In effect, “time stands still,” and where this occurs becomes “sacred space,” generated by ritual reversals of historical consciousness and the invocation of the “sacred time” of archaic consciousness.  Valorised anew is the “here and now.”

These three characteristics of human spirituality (homo religiosus) are evident as themes in what recreational motorcyclists say in describing their experiences, mainly in a shamanistic mode of ascent, or seeking a sense of transcendence by means of riding, and riding at increasing speeds.  One rider puts it this way:

For me, the attraction of riding motorcycles comes from achieving total presence on the bike. At these moments, the past only contains the last few corners, the future exists just as far ahead as I can see, and the present consists of me, the motorcycle and the road. All are one in a dance; the air streaming past, my senses consumed by the exquisite instant at the threshold of being. Time stretches to encompass the sensation of the surface of the road, the subtle changes within the machine, the taste of the wind and my inner focus and calm. (Brasfield)

Although historical consciousness initially frames this rider’s appreciation of his experience on the road, all is compressed in so far as he throttles up into the “here and now,” with the past containing only the “last few corners” and the future existing only “as far ahead as I can see.”  In effect, the faster one goes the more time and space compress, the past and the future colliding in moments of sacrality.  An emphasis on the present tense points to sacred time, and also to the configuration of the rider, the motorcycle and road as sacred space:  “the present consists of me, the motorcycle and the road. All are one in a dance; the air streaming past, my senses consumed by the exquisite instant at the threshold of being.”  Riding is the ritual that brings about a reversal of history.  It makes space-time sacred in a way that transcends ordinary space-time.  Speed and increasing speed constitute the magical elixir that makes it all happen.  This could well be intensified in so far as the place where riding takes place gets closer and closer to hilly peaks, with riders bending and twisting into the road ahead in pursuit of the “here and now.”  Their actions serve to link together heaven and earth as one, a virtual new Creation which does not perish but lasts forever.

Recreational motorcyclists often experience the difficulty trying to explain why they ride motorcycles.  This difficulty comes from the dichotomy of the tangible, possible physical results of the hazards of motorcycling and the intangible benefits derived from the sport.  Riders generally attest that they achieve a level of mastery in a challenging activity that they have never experienced before, and riding often has allowed them to explore the subtleties of motorcycling in ways that are able to be carried into other areas of life.  In effect, they are able to carry into other areas of life a sense of “flow,” a creative capacity to move beyond the mundane realities of the daily round of work, family life, and so forth.  According to researchers in the area of optimal sporting experience, Susan Jackson and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, “flow” as a form of awareness is “a state of consciousness where one becomes totally absorbed in what one is doing, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and emotions . . . a harmonious experience where mind and body are working together effortlessly, leaving the person feeling that something special has just occurred.  So flow is about enjoyment” (5).[9]  In critical literature about sport, “flow” is synonymous with Eliade’s notion of archaic consciousness:  an altered state of consciousness that is a hedge against death.  Flow is a personal capacity to access—by means of linking introspection and ritual activity—primordial human awareness, a sense of larger meaning that serves to frame the moment in a higher key.  Motorcycle riding as a spiritual activity must articulate the three characteristics of human spirituality summarised above.  Being in the “here and now” by means of speed on a motorcycle converts ordinary space-time into sacred time and space, or in other words, pushes the recreational motorcyclist into a “zone” of experience that lends spiritual value to the rest of living.

Notes

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