The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  But this was a welcome respite. Besides the afterglow of wind and sea and astonishing golf shots, there was an elevation that came from less-definable places. To the physical graces of our round, another exhilaration was added. As Stuart signed his name on caps and golf cards, I lifted my tall glass of beer, enjoyed its amber light, and savored its sharp effervescence. There were vistas beyond this room which anyone could experience with practice, and a joy that arises from challenges met with an attitude of soul instead of ego.

  “You turned it around,” said Stuart when we finally had a moment alone. “After the sixth hole, you were, what?—five under par?”

  My caddie had gotten it right. Without saying so, Stuart had been comparing our scores. “It’s your influence,” I said. “I’ve never played Pebble so well.”

  “What did you have on the first five holes?” He seemed genuinely curious.

  “I was 15 over. I shot an 82.”

  “Well”—he feigned modesty—“on the last twelve holes, playing my first ball, I was only one shot better than you.” Perhaps modesty kept him from telling me that with his first ball he’d shot a 62, but it didn’t compel him to say that from the seventh hole on, he’d lost our secret match.

  He paused as if searching for words, and I felt a sudden gratitude that on the first holes he hadn’t let me quit. “There was something happening out there,” he said at last. “The game’ll do that. Get out toward the edge—you know what I mean? Like something else is going on.” He smiled with a warmth I hadn’t suspected, then eyed me steadily as he sipped his beer. Something unspoken was passing between us, a feeling of comradeship, a genuine liking, and a recognition of something we secretly shared.

  But word had spread about his shot to the eighteenth green. Someone loudly announced the double eagle and predicted that Stuart would win the tournament. “It’s been too long,” another shouted. “John, it’s your turn now!”

  * I gave the speech at the Second International Resort Conference, which was held in Kyoto in November 1991. My talk preceded one given by Robert Trent Jones, Jr. on golf-course design. Zbigniew Brzezinski and the eminent psychologist Richard Farson also addressed the conference.

  † In Japanese, do (with a long “o”), or michi, means road, path, way; journey; course; duty, morality; teaching; specialty. Jodo (with two long “o’s”) means attaining the way, or Buddhahood.

  AFTERWORD

  WHEN PEOPLE ASK me now if I know how to find Shivas Irons, I warn them about useless meanderings around the Links of Burningbush, or in the hills above Loch Awe, or across Scotland’s Western Isles. Those are among the most beautiful places on Earth, but not his likely refuge. All the evidence we have of his nature and whereabouts points in a different direction.

  Nor would I advise you to look in Moscow. If you think he resembles Wilson Lancaster, the intelligence man I saw in Red Square, you are greatly mistaken. I met Lancaster in London last year, and after a remarkably frank conversation about his Russian activities, can tell you for sure that he isn’t Shivas Irons.

  And don’t look at Pebble Beach. All my research indicates that if he sometimes makes a visit there he doesn’t stay for long. It’s better to start looking for him in the way Boris Ryzhkov suggested, by imagining him as well as you can, by practicing the awarenesses and virtues he practiced, and by opening to the leadings such practice brings. In such an effort, you can build on those “premonitions of the life to come” he celebrated. A sample of these can be found in the pages that follow. If Ryzhkov is right, by imagining the transformations of my extraordinary mentor and living as he recommended, we join one of the world’s most promising thought experiments and adventures of embodied spirit.

  And how might we characterize that adventure? One way to start is with something he told me as we parted in 1956. “Michael,” he said, his disappointment plain to see, “ye’ll forget a good part o’ what happened here. I think some of it’s gone already. But remember this. Ye can always recollect yerself, and start again. There’s a fire in yer secret heart, and in all the world we see, that’s stronger than the sun. It’s been burnin’ since the world began.” As soon as he said them, I knew the words would haunt me. “Science is showin’ us that our universe has come a mighty journey, from hydrogen and stone to livin’ creatures and this human brain. Think of it, Michael, think of its prodigious course. From atoms at the world’s birth to heather on these fragrant hills to Beethoven, Burns, and the love o’ God.” He leaned close. “But I’ve got a secret for ye. The journey’s only gettin’ started! Ye had glimpses o’ that last night, glimpses of where it could take ye. The fire, the joy, the glory’s waitin’, always there to lift ye up, to be yer companion on the road, to show ye who ye really are. Remember it. Practice it. Live it with yer body, heart and soul!” He shook my shoulder. “And when ye forget … start again. With all its meanderin’s, that’s what the world does. It always starts again! The fire in yer secret heart will always find an answerin’ grace, and take ye further than ye dreamed.”

  Forty years have passed, but the power and truth of his words still grow. He had it right. Science increasingly reveals the terrible beauty of our world’s advance and human nature’s capacities to drag it down or take it further. And he correctly saw I’d forget the way he showed me. But I’ve always been able to start again, and claim something more of the secret fire that burns in the world around us. I finished my book about metanormal experience, am exploring practices not unlike those he showed me, and enjoy vigils that bring me closer to the presence I felt in Ryzhkov’s tower and again at Pebble Beach.

  And all the while Shivas Irons goes ahead—of that I grow more certain—to a place beyond life and death as we know them. If he is at one remove, he is freer to enter, enjoy, and inform the Earth’s remotest places. If he seems to have passed away, he dies and rises more quickly. If he is more spirit there, I suspect he is more body, too.

  And Nadia Kirova follows: I know because she stays in touch like a pathfinding angel. Though I hear from her only once a month, and haven’t met Shivas in the flesh, they draw me in their wake. Even without their transformative gifts, we can find ways to go in their direction. We can open our hearts as they have done, turn to our secret source, and bring from it gifts for our families and friends and people who will never meet us. With each act of this kind, we move the world a little closer to that place which, in the spirit of this book, we might call the Kingdom of Shivas Irons.

  APPENDICES

  PREMONITIONS OF THE LIFE TO COME

  FOR SHIVAS IRONS, the phrase “premonitions of the life to come” referred to both life after death and the more luminous embodiment he and his teacher envisioned for humans on Earth. Such premonitions come from earliest infancy until we die. In one of his journals, he had listed more than a hundred of them. Here are a few from that list, with my brief commentaries. His words are in italics.

  • clarities and clairts, on golf courses, in the mind’s eye, in a divided heart, at Loch Awe. According to The Scots Dictionary compiled by Alexander Warrack (1911), “clairt” is a Scots word meaning “any dirty or defiling substance” or “any large, awkward, dirty thing.” Irons sometimes used it in marginalia and journal notes in conjunction with the word “clarities” in referring to extraordinary moments of perceptual, emotional, or volitional lucidity that are subsequently obscured by inhibitions or densities of our habit-ridden nature. These moments occur, often when we do not expect them, as sensory events (for example on golf courses), in the mind’s eye (perhaps while reading a book), during illuminations of the heart (as when a friendship is magically restored), or at places with numinous power such as MacDuff’s property on the hills of Loch Awe. Since the publication of Golf in the Kingdom, I have received many reports of such clarities in golf. A woman leaving her course at sunset saw the light of the setting sun “replaced by another light.” A man on the tee of a four-hundred-yard hole saw a ball marker on the green. Think of such moments in your life, when some dim
ension of the inner or outer world opened up. Shivas Irons believed they are expressions of metanormal perceptual capacities pressing for birth in us. Once acknowledged, they can be cultivated.

  • elevations and levitations, beginning with our mother’s and father’s arms. These begin in the very first moments of life as we are held in the nurturing arms of our parents, or doctor, or nurse—and even sooner as we float in our mother’s womb. They are reflected in phrases such as “I was walking a foot off the ground” or “I rose above myself” or “my heart was lifted up” (sometimes just a part of us is elevated). Though typically such elevations come when we don’t expect them, they can be deliberately evoked, for example by skipping across a schoolyard (children instinctively know this), or in dance, or floating on a summer day in a lake or quiet sea. In golf they can happen when our mind sails high with a monster drive, which is why most of us love big hitters.

  • self-existent joy, in good times and suffering, sometimes when we least expect it. Shivas Irons had a remarkable eye for joys that go unnamed in English, some of which he gave Sanskrit or Gaelic names. In one of his margin notes, for example, he called a shank an opportunity for raudrananda, which in Sanskrit means the conversion of pain to pleasure.

  “Ananda” is an important word in the Irons lexicon. As used in Indian philosophy, it generally refers to the self-existent delight revealed by contemplative practice, but it can also blossom within a familiar pleasure, or on a dreary day, or as we suffer with a friend, lifting us beyond the contingencies of our internal and external environments. During our midnight talk in 1956, Shivas Irons predicted that medical science would never pin down its mediations. “They’re finding the molecules of certain pleasures,” he said, “but not the ultimate joy they come from. It’ll outjink ’em, because it came first and is inside and outside and way, way bigger than any arrangement o’ physical elements.”

  • music, voices, and rhythms of the inner ear. In his monumental Phantasms of the Living, Edmund Gurney, a founder of modern psychical research, cited several cases in which a person, couple, or group heard music with no apparent cause. Similar auditions have been reported by Catholic and Orthodox saints, Sufis, shamans, and Taoist sages. Hindu contemplatives have celebrated nad, the supraphysical music that secretly informs us all, which can be heard by means of yogic practice. Shivas Irons told me that Bobby Jones was using his “inner ear” when he grooved his swing to the melodies and rhythms that rose spontaneously in him. Such hearing gives us a foretaste of auditory powers we will have in the life to come.

  • disappearances—in a mirror, looking into the eyes of a friend, falling into deep sleep, or alone in the gloaming after 54 holes. With this one I identified immediately, for as a child I had sometimes been threatened by a sense that I was more than the big brown eyes and freckled face staring back from the mirror. Who am I? The question would arise with the beginnings of panic. I wasn’t the thing in the glass. I wasn’t my body. I wasn’t my name. There was nothing left to tell me. Only when I learned about the observing self of contemplative meditation, and how it can relinquish any thought or image or sensation, did I realize that my childhood recognition was a premonition of that liberated condition in which our deepest identity resides. Perhaps something like this has happened to you, looking into the eyes of a friend or lover, or falling into a clear deep sleep, or after a long day of golf that left you empty as the sky.

  Seamus MacDuff and Shivas Irons believed that these five kinds of “premonition,” and many more, arise from our latent supernature. They are first signs of greater attributes pressing for birth in us, the budding limbs and organs of our life to come, and primary pointers for a comprehensive transformative discipline. By cultivating them, we can find where we secretly and most deeply want to go.

  In tantric disciplines of the East, natural impulses are used as pathways to enlightenment. Hasidic mystics have taught us that the zohar, God’s splendor, can emerge in our everyday acts. “Ye can turn an impulse into an exercise,” Shivas Irons told me. “Every premonition of the life to come shows us a way to practice. It gives us a way to grow. Every part of us harbors a greater possibility.”

  THE LONG BODY

  Ben Hogan and other great players have wondered whether something beyond their usual skills supervenes during certain rounds of golf. Having made practice an art, Hogan was acquainted with the further reaches of shot mastery, but there are times, he said, when balls end closer to the cup than seems possible for merely physical abilities. When this happens on hole after hole, the phenomenon is usually attributed to luck.

  But there is reason to think that during such streaks of wondrous play something more than luck and physical skill is involved. Parapsychologist William Roll has cited Native American lore in regard to the “long body,” an extrasomatic relationship among members of a group, or between two persons, or between a person and an object, that brings the parties involved into supernormal coherence. Such rapport is evident in musical ensembles, sports teams, and lovers when their creativity reaches new heights, and in golf when shot after shot ends not twenty, but three feet, one foot, or a few inches from the pin. Hogan said that “the more you practice the luckier you get,” but we can develop the “long body” as well as our swing. By exercising the awarenesses and energies that reach beyond our flesh, as it were by “becoming the target,” we increase our chances of playing self-transcending, odds-defying golf.

  PARANORMAL PHOTOGRAPHY

  Since the 1860s, many people have attributed certain images that appear inexplicably on light-sensitized surfaces to disembodied spirits or telepathic transmissions from living persons. Many examples of this phenomenon have been produced by Ted Serios, an American who for many years made images on unexposed film, apparently by mental influence alone, in the presence of skeptical witnesses; and reports of similar anomalies have been noted in English, French, German, and Japanese journals of photography and psychical research.* In the fall of 1994, I turned to the literature on the subject after Hannigan received this letter with a photograph that showed a partly transparent human figure:

  Dear Mr. Hannigan,

  At Archie Baird’s museum at Gullane I was told of your interest in golfing anomalies, and for that reason enclose this photograph. It was taken by a friend on Gullane Hill this June, at about seven o’clock in the evening, as he, I, and another friend were about to play the seventh hole. He had taken the picture to capture the hill’s incomparable view. There is no possibility whatsoever that it is a double exposure.

  The ghostly figure is strange enough, but is made stranger by the experience our threesome shared shortly after the picture was taken. Have you read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw? We felt something like the uncanny presence featured in that story. It was so intense that we joked about having a foursome.

  Over drinks at Greywalls later, not knowing what the photograph would reveal, we wondered if a deceased golfer had tried to join us, or whether he might be enjoying the view. As you know, it is one of golf’s very finest, and on this evening was surpassingly beautiful. Curiously, none of us felt that the mysterious presence was a woman, and indeed, the thing in the photograph looks like a man. In any case, I am glad to send it along. Make of it what you will.

  In the spirit of inquiry,

  Anthony Hamilton

  Hamilton’s picture resembles other paranormal photographs in its half-congealed look. The figure’s torso is solid through the waist, with an open-necked stiff-collared shirt, but the rest of it is transparent. Through the ghostly outline of its trousers, one can see the Firth of Forth, and through its face the hills of Fife.

  OTHER DISCOVERIES OF

  PARAPSYCHOLOGY RELATED TO

  SHIVAS IRONS

  In the early 1970s, the American parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt developed a “random-event generator” to study psychokinesis, the power to influence objects by mental influence alone. His device comes in different versions, but typically has a patterned display of
moving lights triggered by random events caused by electronic noise. A subject can alter the lights, presumably by introducing order into their random triggers, simply by “willing” such change, or holding an image of it, or in some other way affecting the machine without physical manipulations. In many hundreds of experiments, all sorts of people have gotten statistically significant results with Schmidt’s generator, to such an extent that some researchers of paranormal phenomena regard them to be the best experimental evidence for the power of mind over matter.

  I have been a subject of Schmidt’s research, have read his reports for more than twenty years, and have experienced the unmistakable rapport reported by many of his subjects with different versions of his little black box. During a party at my house, for example, in high spirits with my friend George Leonard, I felt a powerful connection with a machine that Schmidt had sent us. Inspired by a sudden affection for this inorganic yet lively friend, I watched its circling lights reverse—not once or twice or three times, but in a continuous revolution. To the astonishment and delight of those who watched, this went on and on and on, producing results significant to a level beyond calculation. If you’ve ever been the subject of a parapsychology experiment, you might know what I mean by “certainty.” There could be no doubt that the flashing display was responding with vigor to me. If you will forgive me, the best, most exact way to say it is that for a moment we seemed madly in love.

  Other results of parapsychology experiments have a bearing upon phenomena related to Shivas Irons. For example:

  • Several researchers have found that subjects placed in the same locations as previous targets of spiritual healing experiments frequently exhibit more paranormal influence than subjects in other places. This phenomenon has been called the “linger effect,” and has been attributed to haunted houses, sacred grounds, and “power spots” in which people encounter a special presence. If it is possible to influence machines or particular locations by mental influence alone, it is plausible that such influence can linger in a house after its owner dies, or in a monastic cell where a saint has prayed for many years, or in a cave where shamans have conducted ecstatic rituals. This surmise is supported by the lore of contemplative life and sport. There are legends in every land about places where holy persons lived that uplift visitors for decades or centuries afterward, and many writers have described the uncanny influence of certain sports arenas. Even implements have been said to exhibit the linger effect. In Zen and the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel claimed that his teacher’s bow helped transfer secrets of inspired action.