Esalen: In the Air - "The Kingdom of Shivas Irons"

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is Michael Murphy's long-awaited sequel to Golf in the Kingdom, the classic tale of sport and mysticism published twenty-five years ago. Golf in the Kingdom introduced Shivas Irons, a golf pro/philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf in Scotland that profoundly altered his game ÷ and his vision. The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the story of Murphy's journey back to Scotland to investigate reports of further visitations by Shivas. This quest is both a physical and a metaphysical journey, and an investigation of human potential. Here is an excerpt from The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, now available in bookstores.

It was almost ten o'clock, and the rolling hills glistened in the morning light. Stepping out from under the overhang, I was surprised how warm it was. Plumes of steam rose from MacDuff's old house, giving it a golden halo. In the breeze that followed the storm, there was a fragrance of sycamore, wet grass, and oak, and a faint whistling in the roof above me. The entire property seemed reborn.

With my clubs and practice balls, I found the stretch of ground from which I'd hit drives during my previous visit. After removing my windbreaker and slipping a golf glove on my left hand, I smoothed a patch of stubble and grass, and surveyed the field between me and the abandoned first green. It didn't matter that the rain-soaked ground wouldn't afford much roll. I would not begin by hitting for distance. My intention instead was to make as complete a surrender as possible to the presence I'd felt here before. Everything else, such as hitting balls four hundred yards, would have to give way to the comprehensive intelligence that seemed to inhabit this place.

When I'd hit about thirty balls, I realized that they were clustered in three rings around the target. Had a subconscious guidance done this? Three rings, three orbits; maybe they signified that my practice was aimed toward the Earth, the third planet from the sun. Or that this simple exercise was showing me separate spheres of my mind.

But such speculation seemed too far-fetched. With a sense of relief, I gave up my questions about the pattern. If there was any meaning in it, that would eventually become apparent. With my driver, I took some practice swings. There was new elasticity in my arms and legs, something beyond my ordinary range of movement. After adjusting my cap to screen out the sun, I hit a driver toward the abandoned first green.

For the next six hours, with just a pause to eat a sandwich, I played shots on six of the seven holes. Here are some highlights of my experience:

Nearly every hole presented illusions that caused me to make frequent readjustments of my alignment and swing. Recognizing them one by one caused the entire place to have a provisional, shifting, even transparent quality that has carried over into my perception of other golf courses.
Each hole had peculiar frustrations that forced me back to that choiceless awareness, emptiness, or "mindfulness," I'd practiced while hitting chip shots. Again and again I remembered the words of Shivas Irons. "It's always waitin'," he'd said. "Aye one field afore ye e'er swung. It's our best center because it's everywhere." In letting go of feelings and thoughts, of images and particular sensations, I discovered new freedom and energy, as well as a self-renewing pleasure. The practice reminded me of Gregorian chants and similar religious music. There was a regenerative power in its plain repetitions, a movement toward something timeless. "Perfect music contains the maximum amount of monotony that is bearable," wrote Simone Weil. Her sentence made more and more sense to me as the day unfolded.
Every hole provided opportunities for shots that were specially shaped, including fades and draws, slices and punch hooks, and airplane shots that fly low before rising to clear an obstacle. Practicing these hour by hour, my connection with the ball in flight grew steadier, closer, and stronger, stretching the mysterious envelope that passes beyond our flesh. My round with Shivas Irons had shown me the power of this extrasomatic reach, and letters from readers had confirmed it. Drawing on Native American lore, the parapsychologist William Roll had called it an aspect of the "long body." With each curving journey of the ball, this "inner body," "long body," or "subtle flesh" came into higher definition. Toward the end of the day, as it became more dense and elastic at once, I remembered Shivas Irons saying that when it "locked in" one could hit ball after ball not twenty feet from the pin as ordinary shot-mastery would dictate but "three feet, one foot, two inches away on hole after hole beyond all probabilities, beyond the ordinary powers of the brain and the ordinary laws o'physics. Someday, ye'll see it on television, and the whole world'll go 'Aha!'" On this day I vividly saw what he meant. More than ever before, I learned that golf is an exercise of "imagination with hands."
And with this stretching of the "inner" or "long body" there was a subtler process still. At first it resembled a bubble bath in something like ginger ale; later, it felt like actual nourishment from my body's secret reserves; but by the time the round was done, it seemed more than anything else as if some invisible substance was forming inside me. In certain schools of Taoism, Sufism, and other sacred traditions, it is said that humans can give birth to a body of "spirit-matter." At certain moments, especially when my focus held for every part of my swing, it seemed that the process was starting in me.

With my bag on my shoulder I started down the hill toward the fifth tee. It was liberating to leave my ball there. Perhaps like a seed it was buried in the canyon's little spring, and would be found one day by another pilgrim to Irons and MacDuff. Then I stopped. It wasn't a woman on the rise. The person standing there was a man, and the thing I'd taken to be a cape was a kite that was trailing behind him. Golden and mandorla-shaped, it rose slowly in the gusting wind, swooping playfully every few seconds. When I reached the fifth tee, it was still visible though its owner had vanished. It bobbed and circled a few seconds more, then dropped beneath the rim of the hill. Looking down the fifth fairway, I felt a streaming effervescence. It had occasionally come to awareness since I'd started hitting shots, but my shot on the previous hole had increased it. Shielding my eyes against the sun, I studied the field that confronted me. It was covered with high yellow grass, all the way to what remained of the green nearly four hundred yards away. To my right, the hill on which MacDuff's house and the abandoned distillery stood rose steeply for some thirty or forty feet.

The effervescence was stronger now, streaming as if from invisible springs. I'd collected reports of such experience. Distance runners had talked about it. Several readers had described it to me. One golfer had said it felt as if she were sitting in a tub of champagne. I decided not to hit a drive into the overgrown fairway. It was better to sit here for a while, and let the state develop. What seemed to be tiny points of light were rising to pervade my entire body.

I thought about Nadia's "spirit-matter." Was this the thing she'd tried to picture in her drawings the day before? She and I had talked about such a phenomenon reported in the sacred traditions. The Roman Catholics' "glorified body," the Sufis' "man of light," the Tibetan Buddhists' "diamond body," the Taoists' "spirit child", each in its own way represents a set of experiences that suggests we can radically alter our flesh, and prominent among these is the perception of particles, "sparks," or scintillae that revitalize mind and body. Everything now seemed charged with the radiance that rose in my cells. The clouds, the grass, the rolling fields were filled with the same aliveness. This effervescence, in which the whole world sat, was available to everyone. For a few moments I sat on the tee to enjoy it.

Then, on a sudden impulse, I picked up my clubs and carried them along the edge of the field to a mound constructed with human hands which must have been MacDuff's sixth tee.

The hole had been a dogleg right, with an undulating fairway from which one could hit all sorts of shots. For perhaps an hour I hit long and shorts irons to the abandoned green. Standing back from each shot to note the particular mental events and strengths or flaws in my swing that produced it, then clearing my mind to extend my attention span and imagine my next shot, comprised a discipline that was its own reward. Though my legs were sore and my hands were blistering, something in me knew that the pleasure and embracing awareness I experienced now had existed before I'd ever hit a golf shot. Their rediscovery was the greatest reward of practice.

It occurred to me that this was the game's greatest secret, and the reason so many people continued to play though their score did not improve. In its journey around the course, golf is a place to let go of misfortune, to start again, to return to this ever-present awareness and delight. Perhaps the worldwide embrace of the "inner game," which some commentators criticize because it threatens to interfere with the sport's simple enjoyments, was like the shift of the martial arts from killing to ways of enlightenment. I thought of my friend Glen Albaugh teaching his University of the Pacific golfers to clear their mind before each shot, to learn from each failure and success, to bring kinesthetic imagination to their swing, and to constantly reclaim the purity of the moment. He and other sport psychologists are agents of an approach to the game not unlike the one I learned from Shivas Irons.

At about four o'clock I walked along the seventh hole, absorbing its contours for future reference, then climbed the hill where the buildings stood. There I surveyed the course as a whole, imagining various shot-making experiments Shivas Irons might have tried. Conceivably he'd hit MacDuff's house more than once. Did he ever break a window? Did his formidable mentor ever reprimand him?

Shadows were lengthening now on the easterly side of the abandoned distillery. In spite of the afterglow produced by this day of contemplative golf, I felt a tinge of sadness. What a privilege to have seen Shivas Irons hit shots here. What amazement to hear his conversations with Seamus MacDuff. For a while I walked around the house and pictured the two men talking. More of the property's physical and spiritual contours than I could estimate were imprinted in my muscles and subliminal mind. It would take weeks and months, perhaps years, to assimilate what the place could teach me.

But part of that teaching crystallized sooner than I expected. As I put my clubs into the car, experiences from different parts of the day cohered into a pattern. However tenuous some of these had been, all had arisen from a common ground of latent capacity. For periods ranging from a few minutes to several hours, vision, hearing, taste, and smell, as well as extrasensory perception, had grown more acute; kinesthetic awareness, balance, and dexterity had improved; volition had grown more efficient; new powers of mind over matter had appeared; and my vitality had increased. Through most of the day these separate powers and epiphanies had been supported by the unitive awareness Shivas Irons had celebrated, that sense of "one field before ye e'er swung," and by a self-renewing pleasure that seemed to rise from something primordial. Again and again, both my body's structures and sense of self had shifted to accommodate these enhancements of functioning. Perhaps the best way to say it is that I seemed more body and soul at once.

The pattern was evident now. Every one of our parts could be transformed. Every human capacity is rooted in a greater life waiting to be born in us. This day of golf, this mysterious place, had briefly evoked that simultaneity of extraordinary attributes Shivas Irons was cultivating, providing a massive premonition of what he and his mentor called "the life to come."