Again I looked down the abandoned fairway. High wet grass stretched for some 250 yards. Any balls I hit from here were likely to be swallowed in it. Then came a first hint of guidance. I would wait before starting around the course. The silence that pervaded the place was settling more deeply into my muscles and bones. I could experience it more fully now, and open to the subtleties it contained, in the simple movements required by hitting chip shots.
After choosing a target some thirty feet away, I stood back to note the images, feelings, sensations, and thoughts that formed a steady stream within me. It is a practice of certain martial arts and many contemplative schools. From it can come new sensitivities to one’s environment, openings to inspired guidance, and a spontaneous pleasure.
When I’d hit about thirty balls, I realized that they were clustered in three rings around the target. Had a subconscious guidance done this? Three rings, three orbits: Maybe they signified that my practice was aimed toward the Earth, the third planet from the sun, or that this simple exercise was showing me separate spheres of consciousness. But such speculations seemed too far-fetched. With a sense of relief, I gave up my questions about the pattern. If there was any meaning in it, that would eventually become apparent. I took some practice swings with my driver. There was new elasticity in my arms and legs, something beyond my ordinary range of movement. After adjusting my cap to screen out the sun, I hit a drive toward the abandoned first green that sailed beyond the tall wet grass.
For the next six hours, with just one break to eat a sandwich, I played shots on six of the seven holes. Here are some highlights of my experience:
• Nearly every hole presented illusions that caused me to make frequent readjustments of my alignment and swing. Recognizing them one by one caused the entire place to have a provisional, shifting, even transparent quality that has carried over into my perception of other golf courses.
• Each hole produced peculiar frustrations that forced me back to that choiceless awareness, emptiness, or “mindfulness” I’d practiced while hitting chip shots. Again and again I remembered the words of Shivas Irons. “It’s always waitin’,” he’d said. “Aye one field afore ye e’er swung. It’s our best center because it’s everywhere.” In letting go of feelings and thoughts, of images and particular sensations, I discovered new freedom and energy, as well as a self-renewing pleasure. The practice reminded me of Gregorian chants and similar religious music. There was regenerative power in its plain repetitions, a movement toward something timeless. “Perfect music contains the maximum amount of monotony that is bearable,” wrote Simone Weil. Her sentence made more and more sense to me as the day unfolded.
• Every hole provided opportunities for shots that were specially shaped, including fades and draws, slices and punch hooks, and airplane shots that fly low before rising to clear an obstacle. Practicing these hour by hour, my connection with the ball in flight grew steadier, closer, and stronger, stretching the mysterious envelope that passes beyond our flesh. My round with Shivas Irons had shown me the power of this extrasomatic reach, and letters from readers had confirmed it. Drawing on Native American lore, the parapsychologist William Roll had called it an aspect of the “long body.”*
With each curving journey of the ball, this “inner body,” “long body,” or “subtle flesh” came into higher definition. Toward the end of the day, as it became more dense and elastic at once, I remembered Shivas Irons saying that when it “locked in,” one could hit ball after ball not twenty feet from the pin, as ordinary shot-mastery would dictate, but “three feet, one foot, two inches away on hole after hole beyond all probabilities, beyond the ordinary powers o’ the brain and the ordinary laws o’ physics. Someday ye’ll see it on television, and the whole world will recognize it.” Now I felt what he meant. More than ever before, I learned that golf is an exercise of “imagination with hands.”
• And with this stretching of the “inner” or “long body,” there was a subtler process still. At first it resembled a bubble bath in something like ginger ale; but by the time I finished the round, it seemed more than anything else as if some invisible substance was forming inside me. In certain schools of Taoism, Sufism, and other sacred traditions, it is said that humans can give birth to a body of “spirit-matter.” At certain moments, especially when my focus held for every part of my swing, it seemed that the process was starting in me.
Each of these realizations developed as the day went on. For example, when I returned to the practice of relinquishing thoughts after my attention wandered, I felt a tiny wave of pleasure. Gradually these redemptive surges increased, growing closer to that condition Eastern philosophers have called “nonreferential joy” or “self-existent delight.” It became increasingly evident that this simple restorative attention develops with practice, growing stronger with repetition.
And it occurred to me that when we practice such awareness as we practice golf, or as we practice any skill, we store something away for times when our thoughts and feelings wander. This centered exercise, which aligns body and mind with the restorative silence from which they come, makes that silence more accessible, more available when we fall from its grace. But these recognitions were not always pleasurable. My day of practice brought unexpected difficulties as well as illumination, starting almost as soon as I cleared the wet grass with my drive.
In my light canvas bag there were a driver, three-wood and four-wood, eight irons, a pitching wedge, sand wedge, and putter. Since I lay about 140 yards from the rise upon which the first green had stood, I decided to use a seven-iron. Addressing the ball, I visualized a line to the center of the rise, but hit the ball to the right. The ground had a springy, claylike texture that gave good feel to the shot. This was a good place to practice.
I hit a second shot; but like my first, it flew to the right. Again I visualized a line to the target, searching kinesthetically for the flaw in my swing. Was it the tendency I sometimes had to drop my right shoulder and block my pivot? I took more practice swings, picturing an even, flowing turn, and hit a third shot. But like the others it flew right. “God damn it!” I swore. I was filled with a sudden, inexplicable anger, made more acute by my resolution to relinquish such feelings.
After placing a ball on a patch of stubble, I surveyed the field again. The burst of anger had surprised me. In letting go of wayward thoughts, did one risk letting go of useful defenses? I addressed another ball, pictured its line to the target—but topped it. “God damn it!” I said loudly, shaking the sting from my hands. Was this a signal to stop? Maybe I needed a longer break before I swung again.
At that moment, I remembered Mortimer Crail’s book. “We are a collection of cells that behaves like a thundering buffalo herd,” the learned professor had written. “Our chief exemplar is always the person we were just a moment before.” That was certainly apparent now. Something in me wanted to throw the club, or break it, or use it to hit a tree. Though no one was watching, and I was here to discover the secret graces of golf, the herd of impulsions that called itself Michael Murphy was thundering through this empty space kicking up psychic debris. Dropping my seven-iron, I looked at the fields around me. To the north, about a half-mile distant, on a hill above the abandoned third fairway, a man stood facing in my direction. Was he watching? I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Retrieving my club, I swung it back and forth, and vowed to relinquish the images clustering around my frustration. When at last my anger passed, I hit another ball. This pattern would hold for the rest of the day. When my mental discipline lapsed, I eventually recovered it. When I let go of the thing that disturbed me, a regenerative silence was waiting.
Physiologists have shown that each mental activity is connected with particular bodily tensions, and this was confirmed again and again before the day was done. Muscular inhibitions I hadn’t noticed were more and more evident now, and with each relinquishment of a disturbing thought a tightness somewhere lessened. For example, a band of tension ran from my neck to my jaws,
causing me to clench my teeth whenever I felt frustrated, and I tended to tighten my shoulders each time I got ready to swing my driver. These unconscious armorings relaxed as they came to awareness, giving me a firmer sense of control.
But the increasing buoyancy I felt came from something more than muscular relaxation. The silence revealed when tensions diminish contains a self-existent pleasure. The emptiness in which every impulse rises is itself regeneration. Let go of ordinary feeling and thought, and you are at once more self-sufficient. It seemed incongruous that golf could reveal this.
To my surprise, it was eleven-thirty. I’d spent more than half an hour hitting these twenty shots. After picking up my clubs and remaining practice balls, I started toward the rise. The sky was almost cloudless now. A breeze was blowing from the west. The man on the distant hill had vanished.
For the next half-hour, I hit shots to the second green. But this oddly sloping hole, which still seemed 50 yards long though I knew it was 120, didn’t reveal all the secrets of its deceptiveness. Playing the right club required a willingness to override my instinctive caution, a faith that transcended first impressions, and a surrender to unfamiliar guidance. It took me more than twenty shots to swing with the conviction I needed.
Half an hour later, I sat atop the rise. Hannigan guessed that MacDuff had used esoteric geometry to design this strange little course, and I was now inclined to agree. Certainly, there was such an art. In a desert between Tashkent and Samarkand, I’d been led by a Russian-Uzbek friend to an underground mosque with cavernous vaults designed according to principles of Islamic sacred architecture. Like this innocent-seeming stretch of land, it had a presence that was hard to account for. Our group had prayed and meditated there, with an aged Sufi master who’d preserved certain mystical secrets of Islam through decades of Communist rule. Both body and soul, he’d told us, are influenced inescapably by our surroundings. We can’t help looking up at Reims or Chartres, following the thrust of spires and nave toward God on high. Again and again on every side, Gothic cathedrals lead us toward the Transcendent. But in a Zen Buddhist temple, the walls might open to gardens all around, guiding our attention to the immanence of the world’s secret splendor, and in these dark and resonant vaults, listening to chants older than the Prophet, we were led into depths of consciousness inaccessible by the light of day. If MacDuff had learned such things from his mother, who’d been raised among African Sufis, there could be resonances between this Scottish estate and that mosque near Samarkand. Though one was built beneath the ground for religious worship, and the other on rolling hills as a field of sport, in both it was evident that the contours of a physical environment exert mysterious influences upon one’s cells and consciousness. Conceivably, such influences might extend to any spirit-body in which our flesh is situated.
A cloud was passing overhead, giving relief from the sun. I wondered what lines of force connected MacDuff’s old house to me. There must have been days like this when Shivas Irons sat here, on this very spot, absorbing his teacher’s mystic geometry. As if in prayer, I asked for clues to his whereabouts. What was he doing now? Did he ever play golf, or had his practice taken him to other activities? But no hint of an answer came. After a moment of expectant but unanswered waiting, I decided to continue around the course.
During the next hour I played perhaps fifty shots on the long, curving field which had served as MacDuff’s third fairway. This part of the day comprised a learning plateau, during which I persisted with no dramatic result in the practice of golfing nonattachment. Anger was not a problem now. No insight mesmerized me. Boredom was only an occasional enemy. It was good that a gentle breeze was blowing. It gave relief from the sun. And wonderful to smell the summer grass and breathe the heather’s fragrance. Again and again the questions rose: Why don’t more people do this? How have we learned so well to avoid these simple pleasures? Why do so few of us appreciate the joys of thoughtless silence?
Around one o’clock I climbed from the abandoned third green up the hill to MacDuff’s tall house, and found a relatively sheltered spot where, for a leisurely twenty minutes, I enjoyed the lettuce-and-prosciutto sandwich I’d brought from Edinburgh. To this day, I remember the taste and smell of its thinly sliced, freshly baked rye bread, and its mayonnaise, parsley, pepper, and dill. My thought-free condition seemed to facilitate this vivid and lasting memory. Maybe the practice of relinquishing thoughts allows the brain to register olfactory and gustatory impressions with supernormal fidelity. I’ve often wondered if that prosciutto sandwich was as delicious as I now remember it. Maybe its afterglow is imprinted, and thus enhanced, in the taste buds of my spirit-body.
After this brief but memorable lunch, I stood on the narrow ledge which had served as MacDuff’s fourth tee. The narrow canyon below seemed more threatening than it had three days before. The hole’s narrow, bush-enclosed target beckoned and challenged at once. It would be interesting to see what lessons about it had registered in my golfing unconscious.
Placing my clubs at the back of the ledge, I looked for good turf to hit from. Then I paused. After the storm, the crevasse would be soaked, and any balls that landed there might be buried. As I studied the dark declivity, it seemed to wink. This was more than a passing illusion. The entire almond-shaped opening had appeared to close, then open, then close again. Though I’d blinked away the impression, the canyon stared up at me now with taunting innocence. Suddenly embarrassed, I turned to look around me. About half a mile away, on the hill from which a man had watched me, there stood a woman. I looked at the canyon again. Its eye still gazed in sly repose, beguiling, teasing, laughing at me. It was urging me to meet its playful challenge.
Both golf and contemplative exercise make us naked to the eye of the soul. Now it seemed that they worked in concert to undress me. Since adolescence, the twin attractions of sex and asceticism had crisscrossed my heart, struggling to achieve hormonal dominance. That their tug-of-war would surface now was further evidence that this was a day of initiation. How had Mortimer Crail put it? That a golf hole with a female aspect could threaten annihilation? I looked to the distant rise again. Yes, the solitary figure was a woman. She looked directly at me now, her hair and a gossamer cape flowing in the wind behind her.
“You’re an idiot, Murphy!” I exclaimed, picking up my seven-iron. “To hell with it!” With a carefree swing, I hit a ball to the left of the glen and watched it curve right for several seconds then drop into the dark declivity. This time it didn’t wink.
I stood back from the tee. The ball had split the crevasse precisely, after a delicious, curving ride, and would be played in my memory again and again, perhaps for the rest of my life. With exhilaration, I looked toward the hidden target. The shot brought an uncanny sense of release, and feeling of culmination. Why deface it with further efforts?
With my bag on my shoulder, I started toward the fifth tee. It was liberating to leave my ball there. Perhaps like a seed, it was buried in the canyon’s little spring, and would be found one day by another pilgrim to Irons and MacDuff. Then I stopped. It wasn’t a woman on the rise. The person standing there was a man, and the thing I’d taken to be a cape was a kite that was trailing behind him. Golden and mandorla-shaped, it rose higher and higher in the gusting wind, swooping playfully every few seconds. When I reached the fifth tee, it was still visible though its owner had vanished. A few seconds later, it dropped beneath the rim of the hill.
Looking down the fifth fairway, I felt a streaming effervescence. It had occasionally come to awareness during the last three hours, but my shot on the previous hole had increased it. Shielding my eyes against the sun, I studied the field that confronted me. It was covered with high grass all the way to what remained of the green nearly four hundred yards away. To my right, the hill on which MacDuff’s house stood rose steeply for some thirty or forty feet.
The effervescence was stronger now, streaming as if from invisible springs. Distance runners had talked about such experience. Several r
eaders of Golf in the Kingdom had described it. One golfer had told me that it felt as if she were sitting in a tub of champagne, and another had said it reminded her of Schweppes tonic. I decided not to play this hole. It was better to sit here for a while, and let the state develop. What seemed to be tiny points of light were rising, as if from some invisible world, from my head to the soles of my feet.
I thought about Nadia’s “spirit-matter.” Was this the thing she’d tried to picture with her drawings the day before? She and I had talked about such a phenomenon reported in the sacred traditions. The Roman Catholics’ “mystical luminosity,” the Sufis’ “man of light,” the Tibetan Buddhists’ “diamond body,” the Taoists’ “spirit child”: Each in its own way represents a set of experiences that suggest we can radically alter our flesh, and prominent among these is the perception of particles, “sparks,” or scintillae that revitalize mind and body.* Everything now seemed charged with the radiance that rose in my cells. The clouds, the grass, the trees were filled with the same aliveness. This effervescence, in which the whole world sat, was available to everyone. For a few moments I sat quietly to enjoy it.
Then, on a sudden impulse, I picked up my clubs and carried them to the long rolling field that once had comprised MacDuff’s sixth fairway. For another hour I continued to practice, clearing my mind again and again while hitting irons to various targets. Though my legs were sore and my hands were blistering, something in me knew that the embracing awareness I experienced now had existed before I’d ever hit a golf shot.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 13