Psychologies other than our twentieth-century Western model include these dimensions of human experience, and have included them for thousands of years. It has been helpful for me to remember that. Indian psychology, for example, has much to say about the sukshma sharira, the so-called “subtle” or “feeling” body; the Upanishads describe various koshas or “soul-sheaths”; Hindu-Buddhist contemplative practice has given birth to elaborate systems of inner anatomy, full of nadis and chakras and Kundalini powers. These esoteric anatomies correspond in significant ways to similar systems in the lore of Africa, China, and the American Indian nations. Not only has there been a perennial philosophy, there has also been a perennial anatomy of the inner body. Lately, these ancient discoveries have been finding their way into the outskirts of our cautious Western psychology. They were bound to find their way there eventually, given the fundamental and irrepressible power of the realms they point to.
Now let us look more carefully at the term we are dealing with. The first word points to the subjective nature of the phenomena and also to the fact that this other body, this inner body, is somehow enclosed or placed within our ordinary physical frame. But here the term can be misleading. For as Shivas described it and as I have experienced it, the inner body is not bound to the physical frame it inhabits. It is far more elastic and free, more like a flame than a rock. The term body can also be misleading, since body connotes boundary. In Shivas Irons’ sense of the term your inner body has no final boundary, unless it is that final paradoxical line in the “bounded infinite.” It is a center to operate from, an indubitable something, to be sure, but it wavers and dances like a living flame and stretches at times to alarming proportions. It may hurtle through star-gates and openings in time. It/we may suddenly come out in another place, in another body. It/we may merge into everything at once.
Defining the term is a frustrating job. The intellect is often frustrated when it encounters phenomena like these. You need poetry, mathematics, philosophy, and music to approach them. Then your own fantasy can take on the task, drawing you into the reality itself.
We were coming down one of the final fairways toward Burningbush Town. In the silence and the softening light I felt a quiet exaltation. The golf course was still as a quiet lake and as I walked along I heard a sound—a popping of the inner ear, or a cricket—I could not tell where it came from. As I walked along the sound continued, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming from within my head or from a distance. Gentle and rhythmic, it sent tiny waves of pleasure through me.
The experience was a first lesson in boundaries, for when I got to the green Shivas asked if I could hear the evening bells from the cathedral. As he asked the question I heard that sound change place, from somewhere inside me to the old church tower. Explaining its origin had created a boundary between it and me.
A similar thing happened during our midnight lesson. As I fell into the focus Shivas wanted, my body widened until it embraced the ball all the way to the target. He had said that the club and the ball are one. “Aye ane fiedle afore ye e’er swung,” I can still remember the way he said it, and sure enough I became that field. The first time it happened, I felt the ball hit my stomach as it hit the wall of the ravine, a solid blow that felt like a child’s fist. I told him what had happened and he said that he had felt it too. Like true gravity, the inner body stands outside our ordinary Western view of things. It is real in a way conventional Western psychology will never admit—until psychologists enter these realms themselves.
Artists and poets have seen it more clearly. El Greco’s saints or his “View of Toledo” shudder upwards into the living vortex of the sky. “The gallop of his rhythms runs away with the sense,” an eminent art critic says; the energy of the inner body is breaking through, drawing everything with it, including the critic’s mind. The German painter Matthias Grünewald was more conscious and deliberate about it. Many of his figures are enveloped in aureoles and glories, you can see their subtle bodies made explicit. When he was alive, in those late medieval years, auras, halos and the occult were accessible to the common culture; the artist had seen them or knew a local witch or saint who did. Either he or someone he knew conversed with angels and demons. But as religion waned and worldly skepticism flourished, this subtle vision turned to artifice and mere convention—halos flattened into golden beanies, angels turned to dumplings. What did you do with your saint’s nimbus when he turned sideways, show it in two dimensions or three? No one knew what they looked like now.
Our contemporary artist invents his own ways of mirroring the inner man. Picasso’s “Guernica” is such a device for rendering the psychic mutilation, agony, and terror of war in the twentieth century. The inner body can be torn and rent, pieces of it can be splattered against the wall. Mental hospitals are full of such carnage, so are broken homes and ghetto streets. Have you ever felt it, a piece of your substance blasted away? Why do we say our heart is broken or our personality is split? These old clichés point to the mutilation of our very substance, to gaping wounds in the inner body that impress themselves irresistibly on our physical guts. We have all felt it. Picasso holds up a mirror to our battle-twisted souls.
Artists and poets who reveal these things may say they are only making metaphors or symbols, but the pictures they make have power because they suck us toward real shapes and forces, because they bring invisible worlds into this one. I think that is the reason some people grow weary at museums and art shows. Boredom can be a defense against dark intrusions. For:The Ghosts, and Monster Spirits, that did presumeA Bodies Priv’lege to assume,Vanish again invisibly,And Bodies gain agen their visibility.
The metaphysical poet was describing the light of daybreak—and suggesting dark transferals and passageways from this world to another.
B . AS FACT
In the Stanford University library there is an enormous collection of books on mysticism and the occult. The founder’s brother, Thomas Welton Stanford, developed an interest in these matters and donated large sums of money to the university for their study. Through the years I have explored this towering collection, spending many a day leafing through dusty books hardly opened since they were printed, and have discovered that research into the phenomena of the inner body has been going on incessantly since the founding of the British Psychical Research Society in 1882. I would estimate that several thousand independent inquiries have been conducted to see what reality there is in the ancient reports about auras, telepathy, clairvoyance, survival of bodily death, and related matters. The American and British Psychical Research societies have accumulated, in their journals, annals, and proceedings, reports that are staggering in number and impressive in method. If these people can be trusted—and many of them like William James have been respected in other fields of inquiry—the evidence is compelling that we do indeed possess another body, an inner body, a vehicle of consciousness that survives death, travels to far places during sleep and trance, and changes size and shape. It can be seen by certain clairvoyants and be made to appear to unsuspecting persons like an apparition. There is a perennial anatomy of this subtle body, and many attempts have been made to organize the knowledge about its structure and functioning. One such attempt, a kind of Gray’s Anatomy of the soul entitled Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, was compiled by Frederic Myers, the neglected genius of psychical research who invented the word “telepathy” and other terms used by parapsychologists. And there are other compilations of past research and belief about the occult too numerous to list, but you can explore for yourself by reading any book on ESP with a bibliography and fanning out from there. One book leads to another, and if you go on, you will find yourself wandering in a world of inquiry, speculation, and adventure more vast than you ever would have imagined. You will see the teeming underside of our Western rationalism and science.
C. AS LUMINOUS BODY
Shivas Irons and his teacher had elaborated a theory that for nearly every major invention in recen
t times there is a corresponding power we can develop in our own being without needing a mechanical or other external contrivance. For example, we can hit fantastic golf shots with Irish shillelaghs if we master the secrets of the “inner body.” This is an ancient idea, going back to alchemy, Gnosticism, and the Vedic Hymns.
“Oh Son of Energy,” says the Rig-Veda (VIII, 84.4), referring to the primal Consciousness-Force that underlies all things and dwells in the human soul, “other flames are only branches of thy stock.” At the heart of human consciousness is the same power that “is in the waters and the forests, in things stable and in things that move, even in the stone. . . .” The Vedic rishis believed that through this basic connection in our soul with Agni (the Primal Fire), man can evoke Its power. As you discover this profound connection, they said, you can grow into the Being from which everything arises so that certain manifestations of that Being begin to appear in your life. Your body, for example, might begin to glow with the First Light. This assumption of inward powers has been glimpsed by El Greco in his pictures of the saints, in Byzantine mosaics shimmering with golden aureoles. The emanation of light from within, in fact, became a convention for many centuries of Western art, codified in mandorlas, nimbuses, and glories, in halos of varying sizes and shapes.
Energy is another sign of this transformation, how else to account for the fact that Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff seemed rarely to sleep, starting legends about themselves throughout the Kingdom of Fife? Energy, as relativity theory and other formulations of modern physics say, has something to do with structure: this is how I account for the weird perception I had when Shivas hit his shot that day on the thirteenth tee. Something extraordinary happened there, even though a shutter in my brain snapped shut before I could comprehend it. My impression is that it had to do with the structure of the entire hole and its relation to Shivas’s body. Whatever it was that he triggered, there can be no doubt that some incredible energy had manifested itself, without the intervention of atom smashers or other machinery.
The transcendence of ordinary gravity is another privilege of the luminous body. That is the reason, I suspect, that there are many references to flying in Shivas’s notes. He tried to identify with the ball in flight for several months, to incorporate its trajectory into his inner being; he meditated on sea gulls as they skimmed the waves off Burningbush; he played with all sorts of mathematical formulas concerning gravity and its relation to music. Most of all, he was working to bring the inspiration of the inner freedom directly into his body. He called his trances “the trip up” and his work on the body “the trip down,” because his cells were slowly being altered by the primal force he brought from his ecstatic states. (There was a similar emphasis in Aurobindo’s work, hence his appreciation of the Indian seer.)
In one passage he speculates about his bodily organs being transmuted into luminous centers that would do the jobs our ordinary parts secretly aspire to do. “. . . heart into warming fire, lungs into wings, sexual organs into flaming swords of love. . . .” The body itself was being turned to gold in his joyous alchemy.
Some Notes on True Gravity
WHEN I BEGAN WORK on this book I was tempted to make a glossary of terms from the Irons-MacDuff cosmology, but soon realized that what they were talking about was too complex for straight-line definitions. What you really need to explain “true gravity,” for example, are photographs (such as the ones Shivas had in his room), mathematical demonstrations, music, and inspired chapters of poetic philosophy. But this would still be inadequate: a round of golf with Shivas Irons would finally be needed to comprehend it in depth, or a night in Seamus’s ravine with the “baffing spoon.”
There are other terms in Shivas’s private vocabulary which are roughly synonymous with “true gravity.” For example: “feeling-force,” “heart power,” and the Sanskrit philosophical word chit, which is sometimes translated as “consciousness-force.” Other related terms and phrases appear less frequently in my notes and memory, e.g., Gravity-with-Loving-Eyes, shimmering Body-Field, a MacDuff-Body, a Pythagorean Unit, a PK Field (or Psychokinetic Field), breathing baffing spoon, Galactic-Ecstatic-Hole-in-One, eighteen holes on the “milky fairway” (Shivas saw golfing figures in the starry heavens), and, of course, all the words having to do with the “inner body.”
As you can see from these various phrases, true gravity connotes the joining of awareness, delight, and embracing-force. According to Shivas, these are joined at most levels of existence, but our modern world and its dominant philosophies work to separate them. True gravity is, on the one hand, an experiential reality; it is also a force-at-large in the world, the omnipresent “heart power” or “feeling-force” that permeates all things. It is the dynamic aspect of the one Omnipresent Reality, like the shakti of the Tantric school of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It is this double nature of the idea that makes it so strange to our Western sensibility, for we have learned to internalize the ordinary scientific notion of force as something separate from consciousness and feeling. We may speak of “personal force,” “weight of character,” and “the gravity of a situation,” but these are generally regarded as mere metaphors.
Gravity as described by Sir Isaac Newton is a concept rendered with mathematical equations which are used to achieve certain feats of prediction and control in the physical sphere. “True gravity” connotes force, but it is also a highly aware entering and joining of those “swarming fields” that make up our universe. It would bring our overcontrolling manipulative ways back into harmony with nature on all its levels, animate and inanimate. It is good for man to assume power, but power joined to illumined consciousness (as Pythagoras had intended), power “in the Will of God.”
Which leads to another term in the Irons-MacDuff cosmology, namely, “the next manifesting plane.” The world is always tending toward some new and fuller being, and true gravity is a way into it. GOD IS WAKING UP was the title of one of his charts. The mentality of ordinary Western science is ultimately a dead end because it is only in touch with part of that emerging reality; it is only a thin slice of God’s Will. “How-to” golf books were part of the tendency of the modern mind to rely solely on technique, hence Shivas’s primary reliance on true gravity and the inner body in his golf instruction.
True gravity is a universal force, an ethical imperative, and an overwhelming spiritual experience.
True gravity is intentional. That is, once you enter these realms you cannot will any result arbitrarily; you must learn to join your will to the emerging will of God, or to put it another way, you must place yourself in ecological harmony with the awakening world, not the “old-static-dying-world” but to the “next manifesting plane” as it develops in and around you. Modern science is a kind of black magic that tries to lord it over nature from a limited and inadequate consciousness: like all black magic it produces an “occult backlash” that will bring the world down unless it is tempered and eventually subsumed by the kind of consciousness Shivas was aspiring for. God intends the fullness of His being in the world, not just a thin slice, so “He will bring down the modern mind like a fallen species and clear the way for His greater life.” That line sent shivers up my back when I read it. Today it seems more prophetic still.
There are endless symptoms of body, mind, and spirit, he said, when we fail to align ourselves with this beckoning power, “a thousand painful warnings that we are off the path.” Once we sense its true intention, “. . . there are always signals enough to steer by.” He was working on a “Hamartiology of Golf,” a science of our misalignment, to help his students learn the way.
It is an adventure of unimaginable consequence and splendor, this discovery of true gravity, and “we quaver in its presence.” Modern technology and hedonism, say my Scottish wizard-teachers, are defenses against its ecstasy and light. They are “hazards where the match might end.”
Shivas’s journals were full of hints about that adventure: one section described “the streamers of energy that
guide any golf shot hit in true gravity.” The paths I visualized spontaneously for my first shots at Burningbush were anticipations, I now think, of a more deliberate process of visualization he was teaching MacIver; I was picking up on his lessons unconsciously. Many golfers do this, perhaps you do; Shivas Irons was developing it into consummate art. Visualization of the ball’s path, he believed, can lead to actual streamers of energy emanating from the golfer to the target, streamers in which the golf ball travels. One reason for the quiet surrounding the game is that players and onlookers alike sense that something occult is under way and that they should not interfere. For, as the notes go on, “. . . they [the energy streamers] can be affected by the player or the gallery.”
In another journal, Shivas wrote: “. . . suddenly I have new powers and apprehensions, invisible arms like Shiva, everyone senses it. Campbell and MacIver half-sensed that I was swinging with extra legs and arms today, inner body wide as a green.”
Occult Backlash
THE WISDOM OF MY Scottish teacher suggests that there are lines of intention guiding all our human experience. These ever so gentle “psychokinetic” fields become more apparent as we grow sensitive to life’s messages and vibrations. There is sometimes a temptation to manipulate them before we know their full intent, but we can only follow their lead and yield to their unfoldment. When we do not, when we try to turn them to our small advantage (which is our large disadvantage), they come back to claim us for their larger purpose. Their occult principles are yet to be understood, the results of tampering with them are still unpredictable. When they are not approached with love and modesty they lash back.
Golf in the Kingdom Page 15
