Golf in the Kingdom

by Michael Murphy

  As I put my days in better working order, with the help of a “time analyst” named Alan Lakein and some invaluable help from my friends, the obsession left me out on the course. Golf had been my therapy.

  It is hard to protect yourself from a nagging impulse during a four-hour round of golf—your mind is rarely so exposed. When such a voice begins to speak, it is wise to let it deliver its entire message.

  There are also happy obsessions. The other day I could not repress a smile each time I addressed the ball. The higher self was smiling down, telling me to swing just the way I wanted to. I shot a tremendous round and grinned like a kid all the way back to the clubhouse.

  “All life is yoga,” said the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. “All golf is yoga” might have been a line from the journals of Shivas Irons. Yoga means joining our deepest self. We may be tending that way, he said, but we need to give the process our deliberate assent to get the ball rolling well. We have to go with all our negative and positive urges, wisely following or guiding them in the Godward direction they want to go.

  “. . . ugly images are like peyote buttons, they turn into vision.” Shivas Irons, curandero, with his bag of peyote balls, teaching the unsuspecting people of Burningbush the fundaments of visionary golf!

  “The psyche never quits. The messages are always coming. Life is taking us on a mighty journey, if we will only go.”

  “Driving downwind, follow the shot to infinity.” Have you had that sense of it, just for a fleeting second?

  Or—“Driving directly into the wind, become the calm solid center.” That’s a tougher one, but haven’t you felt it once or twice? (Among professionals there is an expression “turning the wind around” which refers to the possibility of hitting a long ball into any wind.)

  “Walking downhill, become weightless. Walking uphill, slowly become your strength.”

  There are endless ways to turn an impulse into an exercise. Each of us is given the opportunity every day.

  “Imagine the golf ball as a hole in space.” The memory of that sentence sprang out at me one day at Lincoln Park, a course on a cliff looking down on the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Fog was rising in slow spires around the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and rows of pine and cypress trees lined the fairways like monastery walls. Through half a round I remembered times when things were giving way: when I was a child locked in a closet shouting for help and the question came “Who am I?” then feeling that I would vanish—“Who am I?” the question was overwhelming me and I repeated my name to hold me there; or fighting a psychic duel with a superior in the army, thinking I would disappear then; and making love with my head growing dizzy and boundaries falling; these and other images passing through as I walked the fairways between those green sentinel walls and listened to the foghorns in the Golden Gate and watched the ships come into the sunlit sea. Remembering Shivas’s words, I saw the ball become a porthole into empty space, with memories of all those fearful glimpses of the Void sorting themselves out for my inner eye. Emptiness within emptiness, protected all around by green grass, good friends, and the blue Pacific hundreds of feet below.

  It turned to a crystalline day. And that night another sentence of his pulled the curtains back. “Imagine the stars beneath your feet,” I could hear his voice in the ravine as we waited for Seamus.

  ON BREAKTHROUGHS

  The greatest breakthrough, Shivas said, was taking your own sweet time to reach the goal, be it par or enlightenment, working all the while with the attitude that any sudden opening comes like Grace, that it is given when the time is ripe and not before. (“The greatest breakthrough is taking forever,” was the way he put it.) That does not mean you need practice or aspire any less. On the contrary, it means you can work at your game even more because you will work at it in a way you enjoy.

  “Ohne Hast, ohne Rast,” he quoted Goethe, “without haste, without rest, be ye fulfilling your God-given hest.” I can see him now sauntering down that final fairway with a deep and glowing look, not overly excited by his 320-yard drive to the green, for some new adventure was coming soon.

  AGAINST OUR EVER GETTING BETTER

  But now, before we go any further, let me raise a glass with Shivas as I did that night in Burningbush, and say with all my golfing brothers and sisters, “Fuck our ever getting better.”

  “Ye’ll niver improve yersel’, my boy,” he roared with glass held high. “How could golf e’er make ye a better person? Just look a’ all the ones ye know.”

  “But that’s all you’ve been talking about,” I protested, “our getting better.”

  “Aw, niver, niver this shitten-gemme,” he said with that manly smile. “Just look at Evan thair.” He pointed toward the drunken figure across the room, playing an invisible violin. “Do ye ca’ tha’ self-improvement now! Tae enjoy yersel’, tha’s the thing,” he said, “and beware the quicksands o’ perfection.” Then he raised his glass of whisky up and shouted, “I say fuck oor e’er gettin’ bitter!”

  I bring this up because the application of these many exercises in personal growth can lead to a piety and fanaticism he never intended. Crazy for God my teacher may have been, but a gray and lonely one he never was.

  As he often said, trying too hard is the surest way to ruin your game.

  THE GAME IS MEANT FOR WALKIN’

  “Ye’re makin’ a great mistake if ye think the gemme is meant for the shots,” he said with his penetrating look as we sat before Liston’s fire in the Burningbush clubhouse. “The gemme is meant for walkin’.” He pointed to one of the great Victorian portraits that hung on the wall above us, “And that man there showed us how.” The portrait showed an erect, fierce-looking man with a Vandyke beard staring straight ahead like an Indian scout. I imagined him striding down the fairway with that very look, stalking the heathen natives with his shoulders back. He had been a colonel in Queen Victoria’s Indian regiments. Shivas could see that I was puzzled.

  “Ye see,” he continued, “tha’ man got to be famous heer for his walkin’. ’Twas said tha’ if ye played along wi’ him for very long ye’d get the spirit o’ it yersel’ and learn to enjoy each and every step. ’Twas said tha’ he sometimes forgot his shots, the walkin’ got to be so good. Had to be reminded by his caddy to hit the ball.” He motioned Liston over from the bar and asked him if he had ever known the man in the picture. The jovial barman looked up at the imposing figure and shook his head. He could not remember him; he had come to Burningbush after the old man had died. Shivas went on with his story. “I played with him once when he was ninety yeers old. ’Twas an experience I’ll niver firget. He was still walkin’ and enjoyin’ wi’ his clear blue eyes, said he learned to walk like tha’ from an Indian yogi back in the 1880s. Went on a walk wi’ the yogi into the Himalayas and niver got ower it. Said that a walk like that could be as good for the soul as a day in church, and that was somethin’ comin’ from him since he was a good Presbyterian. I notice ye hardly pay attention to the walkin’ part.”

  I admitted that I didn’t. The next shot usually preoccupied me. Indeed I still have trouble remembering his advice.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he said as he looked into the fire, “not many people do. ’Tis a shame, ’tis a rotten shame, for if ye can enjoy the walkin’, ye can probably enjoy the other times in yer life when ye’re in between. And that’s most o’ the time; wouldn’t ye say?”

  VISUALIZING THE BALL’S FLIGHT:

  HOW IMAGES BECOME

  IRRESISTIBLE PATHS

  When Shivas told me the story of his conversion he said that his obsession with epilepsy and dismemberment was a “prophetic image,” a “psychic body” as real as any body we can see. It had emerged from the unconscious, he said, with a power to transform. Such visitations may come to us all at crucial moments of change in our lives. But we do not have to wait passively for their coming; we can deliberately cultivate them to support a discipline, or help us hit a golf shot.

  I have already
discussed the value of negative thoughts like the one that was telling me to straighten out my life: by letting that voice speak to me clearly, I learned a valuable lesson. Shivas did the same kind of thing when the image of epilepsy exploded in his inner eye and he fell into the ecstatic state that changed his life forever. In both cases the “prophetic image” had to be recognized and accepted before it could do its work.

  But images that we deliberately foster without any obsessive inward leading can also have a transforming power. Meditation on a golf ball may help you get a sense of life’s wholeness, for a sphere is an archetype of perfection (Parmenides thought Being Itself was a globe); or contemplating its diminutive size, the fact that it weighs just an ounce and a half, may lead you to see that in some sense this world is light as a feather, that all life is, as Shivas said, “an earthy nothingness.” In his journal he had written that “meditation is an art we need—we lose our way so easily in this teeming world. . . . with eyes open and with eyes closed, on prophetic images and the consequences of our acts, until true gravity takes us up.” Along with our inward turnings he would have us stay open to all around us, including the disarray our acts so often bring. On a golf course he was insistent that we follow the flight of every shot to the very end—no matter how bad that shot may be. That is the only way to learn from our mistakes and our successes. It is the only way our unconscious mind can absorb the information it is given; and “we blind ourselves by turning away too soon.” (What lessons there for the rest of our life!)

  But the most basic kind of meditation during a round of golf is the visualization of our shot as we stand up to the ball. An image in our mind can become an irresistible path—it happened to me at Burningbush on the very first hole and later in that round after my greed for par had subsided. Many players will tell you they often see their shot before they make it. Many well-known teachers recommend visualization as one of the game’s most important secrets.

  Shivas said that as you practiced this skill of the inner eye, you would develop a capacity which put forth “streamers of heart power for the ball to fly on.” At times it has seemed that my mental picture has changed the direction of a shot after it has left the ground, as if I were steering it from afar.

  But these living and tangible images cannot be forced by brute will. Sometimes they form themselves as if guided by a superior intelligence. For example, I saw the path of my ball on the first hole at Burningbush going down the right side of the fairway with a draw, not down the middle as I might have seen it, and so it flew—to the best part of the fairway for an approach to the green. Some invisible radar of my inner body had superseded my ordinary judgment. This has happened to me many times. Through experience you can learn when to stay with your original image and when to yield to the new one.

  Whether or not these “streamers” are real remains a question you will have to decide for yourself. They are certainly real in some sense. Reality as we ordinarily perceive it is much less rigid than our recent past has taught us.

  Shivas Irons’ History of the Western World

  In Shiva’s journal notes there was a triple list that went like this:

  Inventions

  Airplanes and Automobiles

  Telephones

  Radio

  Heating Systems

  Clothes

  Food Industries

  Newspapers

  Orchestras

  Hospitals and Medicine

  Atom Smashers

  Rocket Ships

  X-Rays

  Hydrogen Bombs

  What Could Soon Be

  Ravine Jumps

  Urgent Telepathic Messages

  Sensitive Listening

  The Tumo of Tibetan Golfers

  A Lovely Body

  Little Need for Food

  Intuition of the World’s State

  Melodies in the Inner Ear

  Bodily Harmony

  Baffing Spoons

  Astral Flight

  Body Reading

  Psychokinetic Blasts

  What Will Eventually Be

  Full Flight in True Gravity

  The Divine Silence

  Universal Clairvoyance and Psychic Mobility

  The Primal Fire in the Living Soul

  The Power of Emanation and Invisibility

  Constant Energy Interchange

  Omniscience and Self-Existent Delight

  The Music of the Spheres

  The Luminous Body

  Knowledge of the Cracks in Space-Time

  Materialization in Another Place

  Universal Transparency

  Explosions of Ecstasy

  His handwriting wavered across the page, as if he had been drunk when he wrote it. Maybe he had conceived the list after a rousing night at the McNaughtons’. But whatever the case may be in that regard, it was an example of the kind of thinking he and Seamus were likely to indulge in. For they believed that the direction of Western scientific mastery was only one of several our human race could have taken. In a way, their thinking anticipated that of long-range planners who like to think about alternative futures. Their main idea about our recent history was that as we accumulate extraordinary inventions to do our work and even some of our play, we gradually lose our latent powers of world-mastery and enjoyment. Behind every invention stands a withered human faculty.

  However, when scientific inquiry began in the West, with Pythagoras and other pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, there was a first sense of the inner-outer joining: Pythagoras had enjoined his followers to grow in soul as they grew in world-knowledge, to “ken the world from within.” The Greek sage talked about the music of the spheres, meaning that realm of sound the mystics hear, the Omkar, the Original Voice, the birth-song of all the world. Hearing that music you comprehend the octaves and rhythms interfusing all the rest. But to hear it you must surrender, giving yourself over to its pulse of ecstatic love. There is no seeing the world as an object then, for you are joined to the ravishing heart of things, with a memory of God burned in your brain.

  But our science only sees the edge of that primary fire, hears only the faint reflection of the primary sound, and so its grasp on the world is mixed and muddling, its outcome still in doubt. “It is a poor lover to this trembling world. Our hearts cry for deliverance and will not be mocked by half-knowledge, however grand.”

  “The world is a passage back to God, that is the only reason it is here.”

  “Hardest matter is consciousness going back, breaking all the bonds as it has for a billion years.” The story of our science is a story of mutilated vision, said Shivas Irons. On one of his charts there was a list of “men who knew,” a mind-bogling list running from Pythagoras and Plotinus to Einstein and Henry Ford. It was the crooked golden river of true knowledge running fitfully through our Western centuries. Its title was DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS. The impression you got when you looked at it for a while was that the wires joining our world to God were hopelessly tangled. But at the very bottom there was one hopeful sentence, written in tiny letters: “There is still time,” it said.

  The Crooked Golden River

  A LIST OF PEOPLE WHO KNEW

  THE FOLLOWING LIST OF people is taken from Shivas’s journal notes, and it bore the title I have used above. I do not know what it means exactly, though it seems fairly certain that most of the people listed believed in reincarnation and the evolution of the soul. The list resembles the one on his chart entitled

  DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS.

  “Consider: Lao-tzu, Henry Ford, Mark Twain, Plato, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Thomas Edison, Thomas Wolfe, Aurobindo, Charles Lindbergh, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Salvador Dali, Henry Miller, John Woolman, James Joyce, Yeats, AE, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Gen. George Patton, Hermann Hesse, Jack London, Rilke, Klee, Kandinsky, Steiner, Mondrian, Sibelius, Lloyd George, Gustav Mahler, Emerson, Thoreau, Ramakrishna, Walt Whitman, Saint Teresa, Joan of Arc, Saint John of the Cross, Boehme, Eckhart, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Herma
n Melville, Richard Grossman, Richard Wagner, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Beethoven, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Thomas Carlyle, Heinrich Heine, Bishop Isadore Balls, Bronson Alcott, Shelley, Hegel, Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Spinoza, Benjamin Franklin (The body of B. F., Printer, Like the Cover of an Old Book, Its Contents Torn Out and Stripped of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies Here Food for Worms, But the Work shall not be Lost, For it Will as He Believed Appear Once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author), Voltaire, Dante, Swedenborg, Leibnitz, Thomas Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Henry Moore, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, Hippolyta, Proclus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, the late Roman emperor Julian, Ammonius Saccas, Origen, Plotinus, Plutarch, Ovid, Lucretius, the Buddha, the authors of the Upanishads and the Vedic Hymns and the Bhagavad Gita, the Druid priests, American Indian tribes, Siberians, Patagonians, Peruvians, Eskimos, Aruntas, Tahitians, Okinawans, the people of Madagascar, Zulus, Bantus, Ibos, Yorubas, Freemasons, Theosophists, William Judge, Socrates, Madame Blavatsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Jalal Rumi, Sufis and World-Poles, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Essenes, Mozart, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Jesus of Nazareth, Vivekananda, Amenhotep IV, Bodhidharma, Milarepa, Marpa, Ramana Maharshi, Averroës, Hermes Trismegistus, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Houston McOstrich, Alexander the Great, Calanus the Gymnosophist, Picasso, Maimonides, Typhus Magee, Ben Hogan, Richard and Hugh of Saint Victor, Sherlock Holmes. But we forget and we forget. Down through the ages we turn away from light!”