Golf in the Kingdom

by Michael Murphy

  The Higher Self

  SHIVAS IRONS USED THE term “higher self” in reference to our most fundamental subjectivity and identity, which in his view are simultaneously one with the Transcendent and all created things. In a journal passage, he wrote: “As we come closer to God, we return to ourselves, and grow more unique though one with all, more mind and body and soul at once, and can more fully join this world’s adventurous fellowship.” This sentence was written in a journal section that contained citations from the Isha Upanishad, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, the Rig-Veda, and other sources, among them the following:

  God is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break away from Him, or rather from ourselves; what we turn from, we cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a child distraught will not recognize its father; to find ourselves is to know our source.

  —Plotinus

  One unmoving that is swifter than Mind. That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run.

  But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from anything.

  —Isha Upanishad

  God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.

  The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

  —Meister Eckhart

  The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame;

  Like space it knows no boundaries,

  Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness.

  It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;

  You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it,

  And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way.

  You remain silent and it speaks; you speak, and it is dumb;

  The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.

  —Yung-chai Ta-shih

  I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,

  and the evolutionary intelligence, the lift

  and the falling away. What is,

  and what isn’t.

  You who know me,

  You the one

  in all,

  Say who I am.

  Say I am You.

  —Rumi

  She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming—Usha widens, bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead. . . . What is her scope when she harmonizes with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfills their light; projecting forward her illumination, she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.

  —Rig-Veda (I, 113.8, 10)

  Relativity and the Fertile Void

  SHIVAS WAS EXPLAINING A line in his journal which I had asked him about. It read, “Golf is an exercise in perspective: every shot requires that you estimate where you are in relation to the target. Enough golf springs you free.”

  “Free from what?” I asked.

  “From yer attachment to any point. Some part o’ yer mind begins to sense the relativity o’ things and the fertile void.” The “fertile void” had come upon him, as I have said, when he was nineteen and playing golf through those northern summer evenings. He believed that somehow, by some unconscious process, the constant exercise of the sense of perspective required in golf sends a message through to our higher centers that you can never be in the same place twice in relation to the target. Every moment on the course, like every moment in life, is to some degree unique and unrepeatable. And from that realization the mind begins to grope, perhaps unconsciously, for some secure place that never requires a final standpoint in this always shifting world. The mystics have described such a place, or such a no-place, and have called it by names like the Godhead or the Brahman or the Fertile Void.

  Such exercises in perspective are a good thing, he said, “for nothing seems satisfying to us short of that. And this Western world is finally getting the message—just before the game is over.” Apparently our entire Western culture is learning the lesson in its journey round the globe. It has been forced to change its perspectives so many times.

  Not that he was against a sense of duty and doing our work in the world. Far from it. But “part of our human duty is to bring Being into higher definition and not save it any more for the Sabbath or the Judgement Day.”

  Postponement can get to be a disease.

  Universal Transparency and a Solid Place to Swing From

  TRADITION HAS IT THAT contemplative masters, be they yogis, shamans, Sufis, or Neo-Platonic seers, can read another’s mind and heart. As cosmic consciousness develops, the hidden side of things becomes transparent. The deepest Self begins to show itself to itself (Atman in Sanskrit is a reflexive pronoun). The world becomes the Net of Jewels in which each jewel reflects every other. We need not be mystics to have glimpsed this possibility, however: how many times have you read your friend or lover in a moment of clarity or high careless embrace? You know you cannot gossip about a friend without his somehow knowing.

  Shivas confided to me during our final conversation that a few of his pupils had become so open to hidden influences while developing their game under his tutelage that he had to teach them how to close off and shield themselves again. “Ye must have a solid place to swing from, before ye open up so wide,” he said, “otherwise ye’ll be swept away.” He made a big distinction between “Mind-at-Large,” which included all the invisible worlds around you, and the Higher Self. He said that it was wise to know the latter before you opened to the former, otherwise you could drown in the sea of forces and impressions forever enveloping you and pressing to enter. That is the reason for discipline in the contemplative life and for monastery walls to protect you. That is the reason nearly every great teacher has stressed the importance of a healthy body. The old explorers knew what dangers lay in wait once the familiar psychic boundaries had been crossed. Nowadays this wisdom is often forgotten. Many a seeker, opened up and made bold perhaps by LSD or some other plunge to the inner depths, has mistaken each new experience for enlightenment, each hot pleasure for the kiss of God. Moral entropy is often mistaken for nirvana.

  “Ye need a solid place to swing from,” a place above and beyond these teeming worlds. “ ’Tis a thin line,” he said, “ ’tween the madness of God and the madness of the Devil.”

  Humans Have Two Sides, or Dualism Is All Right

  SHIVAS WAS LEFT-HANDED. I did not consider it an important fact until I heard about discoveries concerning the distinctive roles of the left and right sides of the brain in mediating different types of mental activity. Shivas also had that disconcerting left eye, focused slightly to the center except when he came back from his trance that morning. Was that eye always watching for messages from the non-verbal hemisphere of his brain (located perhaps on his right side), and was it content to look straight ahead only after he had received some deep inspiration? Then I remembered that he had originally played the game from the left, changing over to conventional right-handedness about the time he reached puberty. (In that he was like Ben Hogan, who had also begun from the deviant side.) Did his muscle memory and golfing unconscious carry all that left-handed perspective still? Was his intuition informed by all those thousands of left-handed shots? (I remembered that Hogan had shifted from a tendency to hook to a deliberate fade when he reached the peak of his game: was he still wrestling with the left-hander in his soul?) I don’t have the answers to all these questions, but some things he said make more sense now in the light of recent brain research. For example, he commented on the game’s asymmetry and said that it reflected our essentially human imbalance. “The Fall was a fall from the Right,” I seem to remember him
saying with that sly, hard-to-fathom look he was wont to give me whenever he was making an especially significant remark. “That the game is played from one side always reminds us that we’re still lop-sided and incomplete.” Indeed, humans are perhaps the only animals on the earth whose brain function is asymmetrical: no other creature must wrestle with the angels and demons of speech and elaborate conceptualization.4 Mystics have always said that words can be a barrier to enlightenment. An Upanishad says that liberation lies beyond “the golden lid” of thought. Men have long felt this separation from their fuller being as a fall and have told the tragic story in their myths. Golf reflects the Fall, said Shivas, “the fall from the Right.”

  But the game also shows us a way out. Some of the psychologists studying these things maintain that all contemplative disciplines are “strategies for getting around the left lobe of the brain.” They point to the fact that certain gestures used in meditation, the mudras of Hindu-Buddhist practice for example, play on the left-right aspects of life (the “left-hand path,” a “left-handed blessing”), that certain ritual proceedings make a big thing out of which way the devotee turns or faces, that the dances of the dervishes turn to the left and then the right. Shivas had said that each golf shot involves a small turn of the body to the left as one comes into the ball (if one plays right-handed) and that this subtle turn has something to do with inspiration. Once again his largely untutored genius had sensed an important connection—with dervish dancing no less! For in those Sufi whirlings one can open to Mind-at-Large if one turns with attention centered on the heart or inner eye. That is not unlike the centered turnings of golf, or so at least our philosopher of the links suspected.5

  The left-right dimension of the game is also involved in the relationship between voluntary and involuntary controls. All skill involves a certain measure of spontaneity and unconscious functioning: no one can create beauty, be it in a work of art or on a golfing link, unless he has both disciplined control and the ability to let go to the sudden glimmer. In following the leadings of the “inner eye” while visualizing a shot or sensing what club to use, one must draw upon all the unconscious stores of learning one possesses. We all know that. We all know that we could never plan each shot exactly without that immediate tacit knowing which comes from immersion in the game over years and decades. Every shot has a conscious component and an unconscious one, a voluntary control and one that is involuntary. To know how to strike the balance is the very essence of golfing skill. The greatest champions, while having grooved swings to envy, come up with surprises that astound us. They pull off the unbelievable shot in the midst of contingencies too numerous to calculate ever. How else to account for Shivas’s hole-in-one that night on the thirteenth hole? Or, if modesty allows me, my own shot there that afternoon? One of the beauties of sport is the inspirational heart-stopping move that reminds us of possibilities yet unguessed.

  Inspiration and spontaneity must be given their place if any game is to be mastered and enjoyed. But, alas, there is a tendency in many golfers to repress all wellings from within and all the delicate leadings in their devotion to some steely program of the will.

  Not only must one learn how to strike a fine balance between the disciplined and the inspired, but one must know when to quit, said Shivas, “and even when to collapse. . . . There is a time for lettin’ the bottom drop out,” he said, “for forgettin’ yer score entirely, for forgettin’ yer mental tricks and devices, for just swingin’ any ol’ way ye please.” If we don’t do this from time to time, he said, “our game goes kaflooey” anyway. Indeed if you were an absolute perfectionist on the links, if you could not stand to see a single bad score on your handicap card, you would never have come as far as you have with the game. When you allow yourself to fail on the links, the golfing unconscious learns the lessons which such unwindings teach. Perhaps the left and right sides of your brain are readjusting their marriage, perhaps some tangle in the nerveways of the autonomic system is shaking itself out; whatever the specifics of this “positive disintegration,” renewal may be on the way. “One of the joys of self-knowledge,” say Shivas’s journal notes, “is the increasing sense one gets of the soul’s wise rhythms.”

  The process is trying to work all the time, even when we are unaware or refusing assent. Then collapse may force itself upon us. Gambling, he said, is one unconscious way of tempting collapse, a “positive disintegration” that doesn’t renew. It is a way of calling in the inexorable powers of chance to ape the experience of being overwhelmed. To lose a bundle brings secret relief, I know from my own experience and that of certain relatives who carry the propensity. (My brother, for example, had already lost the family’s grand piano when he was fourteen: I will never forget the astonishment on my parents’ faces when a Bekins van moved up to the house and the movers announced they were taking it away.) But gambling is not the only way of escaping through the back door of our psyche, there are endless ways of downward transcendence and dark dissolution. Murder, conspiracy, drugs, the orgy: we have only to read the daily newspaper to see such collapse all around us. And there will be more. I do not think I am stretching a point when I say that all of these are ways to effect the release our psyche periodically needs. There are various kinds of transcendence. Some lead to God and others to the Reign of Hell on earth.

  But golf is still our business. For on the links there are ways to give way gracefully, to collapse with grace under that pressure from within. With Shivas I did it and shot a 34 to boot. It can be done even while shooting your loveliest golf, especially if you follow true gravity’s subtle leading.

  “The Fall had its place and always will,” might be a good line from the notes to end this section with, “for everything human has two sides.”

  Even Dualism is all right in his plural theology.

  4 Such wisdom of the body is there in our language: the word sinister derives from the Latin word for left, and remember that the left side in action connects to the inspired right brain; the word right has meanings to stretch across an entire page of a modern dictionary, all of them pointing to the structuring and proper aligning of life’s many aspects in the linear mode of civilized order, e.g., mathematics’ right angles, civil and legal rights, what is fitting and desirable, genuine and authentic, straight or perpendicular, ethical and sound, at the right time and right place, etc. Our language is deeply informed by our ever-present two-sidedness.

  5 Of course, the golf swing is an incomplete dervish turn. Obviously this aspect of the game needs more research.

  His Ideal

  A FEW OF MY FRIENDS have asked me to explain in some clear and fundamental way just what it was that Shivas Irons was finally hoping for. What is his ideal? they sometimes ask. George Leonard, with whom I share leadings like these more than I do with any other living person, has asked me time and again to characterize the goal my golfing teacher held up for us. It has been a difficult question to answer, for there is a certain amorphous and undefinable quality to his teaching. When I come to putting it down on paper, I have a feeling that I am forcing his vision; that no matter how I state the goal he would set, there is something left over that words will always leave out. So having warned you that this is the case, I will now proceed to lay out some first thoughts about the High Ideal of Shivas Irons (with all credit to Seamus MacDuff) concerning the Way We Should and Someday Will Be in This Fallen but All-Promising World of Ours.

  “The world’s a koan,” he assured me just before I left, “a koan from the very beginnin’ and gettin’ worse day by day.” A koan, as you probably know, is the paradox-invoking question Zen masters give their students to open up their minds; a famous one asks, “Before your parents were, what is your original face?” It is intended to reveal the Buddha-Mind underlying all the seeming paradoxes of our ordinary existence. Shivas believed that life presents us with koans every day, that if we approach them with an open, ready spirit the whole world turns to Zen training and successive revelation, that if we turn a
way they reappear like Hydra heads. There is no escaping the paradoxes life presents us with; we can only choose whether to embrace or escape them.

  The sense of paradox is growing more intense as human awareness develops and people crowd together around the globe; that is what he was referring to when he said it was “getting worse day by day.”

  “So many Gods and moralities now, so many logics and geometries, so many ways to see the world, so many ideas about running a family,” his notes lament. “The Twentieth Century itself is a koan.”

  The twentieth century as koan! The thought has obsessed me ever since I read it there, in Burningbush, fifteen years ago. It has set me thinking about the way our knowledge and art have turned the world into a roller coaster and a prism: how anthropology has revealed a thousand ethical codes and endless variety of sexual practice, how the study of families all over the earth has given support to a thousand deviant experiments in the U.S.A.; how Freud has shown us as much deviance and urge to break free in the psyche of the solid American citizen; how while this undermining of taboo is taking place, the intellect’s certainties are giving way—to endless systems of logic and geometry, to playful models of the nature of matter, to the strong solvent of linguistic and philosophic analysis, to theologies that God is dead; how, while our moral and philosophical certitudes are dissolving, the artist breaks our perceptions down—into cubes, circles, and squares, into points of light and toilet seats, into the very vibrations of our retinal nerves, showing us once and for all that distance is nowhere fundamentally proper, that there is no right place to stand any more (for a cup is a cup in its middle or its edge, from a foot away or underneath a garbage can—a cup and the moon can look the same once you look more closely), and even sound fragments as melody and harmony go into microscopes and magnifications of sense and come out like Stockhausen; how, while our morals and beliefs and perceptions proliferate, the commonalities of a given day take on a melting surrealistic uncertainty and our trusted friends and lovers are filled with sudden new intensities and challenge us in the middle of the night (the newspapers are full of it, so are the movies and the books and conspiracies all around); everywhere our certainties, our ideals and beliefs and most familiar perceptions are ripped away like our very own flesh, as if our souls were being skinned alive. Yes, there is no denying it, the twentieth century is a koan, pressing us to paradox until we cry uncle. When I hear Hare Krishna on the streets of the city I hear my own impulse to surrender forever to the One beyond all these incertitudes. At times I imagine our entire nation breaking into such a cry, going back to Jesus or Muhammad—or finding a center in violence or oblivion self-induced. For there is no escaping the growing pressure. The koan is upon us with a vise-like grip and it is squeezing harder every day.