Zyzz
If you are Australian you may
have heard of a young man popularly known as Zyzz (Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian).
Zyzz, who was born in Moscow and moved to Australia with his family at the age
of two, developed a cult following on the internet by cleverly marketing his
major product: himself. Or more accurately, his body. Through his daily regimen
of tough workouts, Zyzz transformed himself from a skinny kid into a 100
kilogram bodybuilder. He also sold protein supplements, was a part-time model,
stripper and personal trainer. In his videos (see the video tribute to him,
below) he can be seen flexing and strutting around, almost always with his shirt
off.
In his
videos Zyzz can be seen extolling the virtues of being a ‘sikunt’ (see video to
work that out), becoming ‘aesthetic’ and shredded (high muscle definition), and
having people ‘mire’ (admire) you. And of course there is the payoff that you
can ‘bang bitches’. In one blog post he wrote of walking down the street in
Bangkok without a shirt while the Bangkok women were admiring him. At that same
time he also wrote of his pride in having increased his muscle mass by ten
kilograms in the previous year, going from 90 kg to 100.
Zyzz
has a legion of die-hard followers who worship him. If you look at the comments
on his YouTube videos, many of his fans speak of him as being a god, or of
erecting statues of him, of them sensing him around them as they workout. They
encourage each other to get shredded, get aesthetic, be a sikunt, and bang
bitches.
For
those who dare to comment critically on Zyzz, his followers vent forth with a
barrage of Fs and Cs, saying he only encourages people to live a healthy
lifestyle and believe in themselves.
The big
problem is that Zyzz is now dead. He died in August 2011 of a heart attack in a
Bangkok sauna, leaving behind a 100 kilogram aesthetic
corpse. He was 22 years old. Apparently, he had a genetic heart condition. He had experienced symptoms
in the months before his death, including high blood pressure and shortness of
breath, but apparently did not take the problem seriously enough.
I have
spoken before of ego falls, the way that life – or the universe – corrects our
self-delusions. The more we go into delusion, the greater the ego fall tends to
be. In Zyzz’ case the correction was massive and fatal.
There was a big difference between what some fans try to represent him as, and what he actually was. Rather than living a life based on health and fitness as some
claim, it appears he was a walking time-bomb. He was a regular user of anabolic steroids. He denied this when confronted in the media, but he can
be seen clearly joking about his shriveled testacles in one of his videos, a common
side-effect of steroid abuse. Thailand, where he died, is where many
bodybuilders go, because steroids are legal and freely available at ten percent
of the price of most western countries, where they are illegal.
He also
smoked a packet of cigarettes a day, according to some people who knew him.
The
cult of Zyzz is a cult of surfaces. It is not the depth of the human being that
counts in such a philosophy, but the body, and the power, attention and fame it
can bring.
Yet at
a deeper level, the consciousness contained in the cult of Zyzz corresponds to
a state of psycho-spiritual development. During this phase, the individual can
become lost in self-obsession, vanity and narcissism. It has strong correlates with
the rebel archetype. When Zyzz extolls his fans that “you are sikunts”, what he
is saying is that they are rebels – people who reject the values of society,
and choose freedom. Rebellion has a healthy expression, but only when anger at
disempowerment, control and alienation is used to break the shackles that
society imposes upon us. It can be a call to break out of depression and a
sense of hopelessness. But in its unhealthy expression, it can be regressive. The
rebel can become anti-social, hateful, self-obsessed. It can perpetuate the
alienated ego state. Or become self-destructive. I am not saying Zyzz became all these things. Howevber, these are common characteristics of the problem I'm referring to.
In a
sense, the cult of Zyzz reflects that there is something vital missing in our society and education
systems. They are devoid of spiritual processes which might allow our youth to
find something within themselves that is deeper than body image. The simple
teaching of presence – being here now – would greatly alleviate this problem. When
a person exists with presence as their default position (as opposed to the the mind and ego), then the shallowness of vanity is easily recognized.
How simple it would be to teach presence tools to the young. Yet it is not
happening anywhere in public education.
This will sound disrespectful, but Zyzz'
death is a gift for the fans who worshipped him, who bought into the delusion. But
the gift will only be for those who see through the surface, and acknowledge the
lie behind the cult of Zyzz.
Indeed,
this is what lies behind all ‘advances’ in spiritual ‘development’: we see a
delusion, admit it for what it is, and choose to let it go.
