Golf in the Kingdom

by Michael Murphy

  Pondering the question, I have come to think that a person grows in his regard for the rules as he improves his game. The best players come to love golf so much they hate to see it violated in any way. In that they are like anyone who is consummately skilled, be it in the arts, science, or loving their wives. A scientist loves the procedures that give birth to discovery, an artist loves the skills that go into his art, the good man loves the moral dimensions in every act. So Shivas loved the rules and skills of golf. It was a mark of his commitment.

  And yet all these explanations, compelling as they may be, do not completely satisfy me. Underlying all the other reasons for his devotion to the game’s restraints, I think, is the fact that golf is simultaneously a doorway and a prison, the very mirror of life in that regard. It provides us a jail to be broken out of, but a jail we can clearly see rather than the often invisible one that holds us in our daily life. Shivas always seemed subdued to me when he was indoors, but it was then that his spirit soared in conversation or ecstatic trance to spaces far beyond those enclosed by the room he was in. So it was, I think, with his surrender to the game; its constraints dramatized the situation in which he found himself in this bounded world, it was a place from which to effect a marvelous transcendence.

  But there is more to it than that, more than escape is involved. I think of his words about “the trip down,” that movement of his soul from the mystic heights “bringing fairy dust into the world.” On the practice tee and on the links he was opening himself to subtle energy transferals between the inner and the outer worlds, entering by slow steps into the “luminous body.” This amazing alchemy, practiced so faithfully for so many years, was leading to a transformation of his very substance, he said, not a mere escape from this painful earth. Golf was a place for the transformation to unfold.

  You might know that the beginnings of this mighty work would occur in such unlikely circumstances, this being such an unlikely world.

  On Keeping Score

  KEEPING SCORE IS A koan, a reminder of the dualities.”

  “Our relation to paradox is a barometer of our enlightenment.”

  These two sayings from Shivas’s journal give the essence of his attitude toward keeping score. He was scrupulous about counting every stroke, but he was just as insistent that his pupils let the awareness of it recede to the “back of their minds.” He sometimes instituted a “second scoring system” for pupils who were having a difficult time with this. He would give them points for certain attitudes and behaviors, to reinforce the changes he wanted. This reconstruction of the scoring system was always done with the player’s consent, he said, “to preserve his dignity.” For example, MacIver was getting points that day for his unflappability; it “was the strength he had to build on.” You will remember how inexorable that golfing tortoise was as he showed me the way to a fine equanimity; well, he was being rewarded for that by Shivas’s unforgettable smile. Experts in behavior modification and operant conditioning would have been proud of my obscure Scottish professional’s grasp of their science.

  You might try making your own “second scoring system,” giving yourself points for a calm and centered attitude or for sweetness in the rough. Perhaps a smile after a double bogey or a gracious remark to your playing partner when he beats you would be worth a point. If you know an expert in “behavior mod,” as it is called in the trade, you might bring him in.

  It is important to remember that your handicap is not an exact mirror of your soul. It is your relation to your score that really counts. A gracious acceptance of your place on the golfing ladder might even help the world in unexpected ways. Many of Shivas’s pupils were British men of affairs, he said, secretly swallowing their pride as the Empire dwindled, and since the reconciliation of infinite hopes and limited means was at the heart of all his instruction, he conjectured that he had helped Britain through its painful transition to a humbler, more humane role in the world.

  The Pleasures of Practice

  SONNY LISTON IN REMINISCING about Shivas said that our departed friend often drew a small crowd of caddies and club members around him when he practiced. “There was somethin’ hypnotic about the way he hit those shots,” he said. “Worked himself into some kind o’ trance out there. Sometimes he would hit balls all day, tradin’ stories wi’ the boys and givin’ ’em tips from time to time. A special provision was made for ’im to use the extra fairway, the members liked his practicin’ so much.” Seven years after Shivas left Burningbush, Liston was still thinking about how he looked on that practice tee, about the look on his face.

  I can imagine what an experience it must have been to watch the subtle transformations that were taking place. That magnificent swing being refined even further, a piece of earth being slowly enveloped in the subtle stuff of the inner worlds. Though most of his onlookers had no clear idea about what he was doing, they must have sensed the majesty and artistry involved. It would have been a meditation just to have been near him. Liston said that one of the special pleasures in watching him came when he put on a demonstration of “ball steering” in which he would hit deliberate fades, draws, and other special shots. I wonder how many in his audience realized what experiments were being conducted then!

  He loved to practice as much as he loved to play. That night in the ravine he told me there was little difference any more between the two activities, “the pleasures of practice had become so profound.”

  If I had stayed in Burningbush I might have learned more about “the second art” of golf, as one professional I know has called it. But I have salvaged some wisdom on the subject from Shivas’s notes and some discoveries of my own. These I present below, with the hope that I will fulfill at least some of the Boswellian task destiny has given me.

  We play the game at many levels. Every golfer knows this once he begins to examine himself from the point of view of the inner body. To some extent we all go in and out of those extraordinary states I experienced that day in 1956. But how deeply we do depends upon us. We must deliberately cultivate the attitudes and faculties that support such experience; we must practice these things as Shivas did. We need not limit our practice to a golf course, however; we can develop the “inner eye,” for example, “at home on a rainy day.”

  Golf is first a game of seeing and feeling. It can teach you stillness of mind and a sensitivity to the textures of wind and green. The best instructional books have always said this. Golf is also a game to teach you about the messages from within, about the subtle voices of the body-mind. And once you understand them you can more clearly see your “hamartia,” the ways in which your approach to the game reflects your entire life. As Peter McNaughton said, “Nowhere does a man go so naked . . .”

  Beyond such openings to the immediate worlds inside and around us lie “true gravity” and those “images that become irresistible paths.” I have devoted a section to them below. They are powers that bring the most inspired golf and give us hints of what we may eventually be.

  And finally, underlying and interfusing all these is the one presence and delight, the “Higher Self” and its transforming power that “we are looking for through all the others.”

  Golf is “a game for taking off the seven veils,” said Shivas. “Never think yer first glimpse the last, for there are aye another six.” When I told him about my experience on the thirteenth hole he spread his arms as if he were opening a curtain and shook his hands to say the World-to-be-Seen was shuddering with glory. “Ye only saw tha’ much,” he added, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to suggest how small was the rent in the veil I had seen through.

  KEEPING YOUR INNER EYE ON THE BALL

  Imagine a golf ball. Make the image of it as vivid as you can. When anything intrudes upon the image, let it pass. If the golf ball disappears, imagine it again. If it wavers, make it steady. Doing this you can practice keeping your eye on the ball. You can practice in your room on a rainy day.

  If you cannot keep something out of your m
ind, some hive of your soul-skin, when you are practicing this inner sight, get to know the intrusion. What does it show you about yourself and your situation in the world? Exploring the invader can be helpful to your game.

  These are two paragraphs from his notes. They describe a technique for developing concentration and stillness in the disorderly mind. As soon as I saw the words I stopped to visualize a golf ball: I could see the word “Titleist” printed on it. Then the image turned to a little spot of dancing light, and I felt myself rising gently upward. I told him what I was experiencing. He said that any image might take on one’s latent mood, the feeling that wanted to come to the surface. In my case, it was the effect of all our “galavanting” that caused my inner eye to dance, for my organism wanted to turn toward the restful light of the “higher self.” He said to follow its impulse for a moment, then recreate the image of the ball and try again. It was a surprisingly restful and pleasurable experience.

  Lately, I have begun to practice the method with regularity and find that it has a definite carry-over onto the course. When I practice seeing the club and ball as one, following his first instruction to me, I sometimes experience the kind of intrusions he described. Letting them pass in meditation has helped me let them pass on the golf course when I am addressing the ball. My awareness of them, of the way they sneak in when I least suspect them, has grown more acute. It is easier now to see the ball and the golf course as one unbroken field, “Aye ane fiedle afore ye e’er swung.”

  BLENDING

  Aikido is a Japanese art of self-defense. Robert Nadeau is a teacher of this subtle art who lives and works near San Francisco, and in recent months he has helped me bring the principles of it into my golf game. Although he has never played the game himself, he has an amazing grasp of its problems and opportunities. “Blending” for example is a way to join yourself with your opponent’s strength in order to divert his attack; when used correctly it turns a fight to a dance. He has shown me how to “blend” my strength with club, ball, and terrain on the course, in the same way I join with attackers during an Aikido class. It works surprisingly well. Perhaps the most impressive thing about it has been the way in which it has helped me adapt my swing to every situation. My repertoire of shots has grown because I have learned to go with the dynamics of air, wind, and slope, using the energies of the situation to help rather than hinder me. Shivas had said to find my “original swing” in every situation, claiming that he never swung the same way twice. It was hard for me to see the deviations in his strokes, but he claimed that they were there. The “blending” principle has brought that subtle adaptation of method to situation into play for me.

  An old letter Shivas had never mailed to some student or friend was among the papers I photographed in his apartment. It is a small essay on blending.

  “Can you see the brook that golfers fear and not fearing but feeling can you put that flowing water into your swing,” what a beautiful way to say it. I think of his swing as I read these words and realize what grace and what strength there is in such blending.

  There may also be certain unexpected results from a discipline like this. Shivas for example had learned the art of dowsing while meditating on his union with nature. Burningbush Links had begun to dry out after the war and for the first time in its history had required a watering system. During all the centuries of play upon it, rain and mist had preserved its subtle textures, but now with the postwar golfing boom players from every continent were wearing its resilient fairways down. There was violent disagreement in the club over the measures required to keep the course green. Then, at the very height of the crisis, Shivas discovered water at several places on the links themselves. The knowledge had come to him, he said, “through the handle of his five iron”: he felt his golfing stick twitch whenever he approached a potential well. He prevailed upon one of his rich admirers to finance a drilling at one of the sites he had found, and, sure enough, water was there. The discovery settled the club dispute, for now there was plenty of water for little expense. The members had given him a plaque for his help. He told me that the first twitch of his five iron came when he was practicing the kind of blending I have just described.

  BECOMING ONE SENSE ORGAN

  There is a psychological phenomenon in which one sense modality is stimulated when an impression is received by another, as for example, when the feel of a well-hit golf shot starts a melody in your inner ear. Poets have written about seeing bird songs or hearing flowers blossom. Last season at the San Francisco Forty-Niners–Atlanta Falcons football game I heard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as the Forty-Niners rallied to win in the fourth quarter. Religious literature is full of similar reports, such as the Italian saint’s description of colored lights when he heard songs of worship in the village church. For Shivas Irons this mingling of the senses was one of the pleasures of practice.

  In his journals he recommends that you try to cross your senses deliberately, as when he says to see and feel “the club and ball as one unbroken field” or to “hear the breaking waves when you hit a bag of practice balls.”

  Bobby Jones often heard a melody through a round of golf and followed its rhythm when he swung; Shivas recommends something like that when he says to “hear the inner sounds and rhythms and let them enter your play.” Sometimes such synesthesias carry an informative message, sometimes they are simply there to be enjoyed. I will never forget that experience on the thirteenth hole at Burningbush, when all my senses joined. For a moment then I was one sense organ: the world was a single field of music, joy, and light.

  Some of Shivas’s exercises remind me of the centering techniques in Paul Reps’s little book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. These are taken from Tantric disciplines which used the natural impulses as pathways to enlightenment: behind each impulse there is a higher possibility, the Tantric philosophers said. For example, the journal notes suggest that “when the fear of failure steals over you imagine the bottom of your mind dropping out as you fall into the Void.” The fear of failure may be a premonition of the liberated state.

  Or, “sometimes a path appears in your mind’s eye for the ball to follow: let it blend with your body.” That, of course, is what happened to me on the very first hole I played with him. But my greed for par blotted the image out.

  THE VALUE OF NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

  One night I was ruminating about my adventure in Burningbush, counting the shots I took during our round of golf (only 34 of them on the back nine), recalling the remarks that were made around the McNaughtons’ dinner table, visualizing Shivas’s room with its butcher paper charts and arcane books. As the impressions of that crowded day mingled in my memory a clear gestalt began to emerge, taking for its central image the chart on his wall entitled,GOD IS WAKING UP. Remembering it and the photographs and his memorable sayings, one central theme emerged: that everything in life is potentially something more, that every person, every object, every event is waiting for transformation. Or to put it like he sometimes did, “from your deeper mind everything has an aspiring face.”

  Now, for most of us, this is a difficult truth. Perhaps because we are not in touch with our “deeper mind,” most of what we are confronted with on a given day has no special meaning at all. At best it looks like a battlefield between God and the Devil, with the Devil winning at least half of the time; more often it seems like one damned thing after another. The profoundly optimistic vision underlying the phrase “God Is Waking Up” seems to have little basis in fact, at least the facts as we perceive them. Ah, but there is the catch! If we are honest, we have to say “the facts as we perceive them,” thus leaving open the possibility that they may be seen another way.

  For him everything was full of messages. Nowhere was this so apparent, he said, as it was in golf. And nothing is more informative during a round of golf than the so-called negative thought.

  There are two attitudes you can take to these, he maintained; one of detachment and disidentification or one of listening to t
he perverse voice to see what it may tell you. Many thoughts that arise as you are playing must be brushed aside: there are ways to do that, ways to strengthen “the inner eye.” But certain ones that will not be brushed aside must be understood, otherwise they will haunt you until your golf game and your disposition suffer. Some years ago a thought like that began to torment me.

  It began entering my mind when I was putting. It said, “You are not lined up straight, line up again.” It occurred to me over and over that the angle of my putter face was slightly askew. I would stand back and try to line up at a better angle, but still the thought was there. It kept coming back through the entire round. When I played again, a week or so later, the same voice began again—“You are not lined up straight, line up again,” it said, creeping into my mind on every green and eventually as I was addressing the longer shots. I adjusted and readjusted my stance, waggled the club endlessly, the greens and fairways began to look like cubistic drawings as I surveyed them for a better line. Then it slowly dawned upon me that the thought was coming from some deep recess of my mind, that it was one of those thoughts Shivas had said I should listen to. What did it have to say? I let it run through my mind after that second round, let it play itself out, “You are not lined up straight, line up again.” Slowly, inexorably, the meaning came clear: indeed I was not lined up straight, in my work, with my friends, during most of the day. I was sleeping in my office then, rising to telephone calls, doing business over every meal. I was as disorganized as I had ever been and my unconscious knew it, and now it was speaking to me clearly on the golf course. I needed to realign my life, it said, not just my putt or my drive. Only during a round of golf did I slow down enough for the word to get through.