Michael Murphy is perhaps best known as the co-founder of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, the first and foremost of the growth centers to emerge in the '60s and since. He is the author of several books, including In the Zone, The Future of the Body and co-author with George Leonard of The Life We Are Given. Notable, however, among the growing numbers of metaphysical golfers and other sports mystics is his book, Golf in the Kingdom. The publication of his newest work, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, the long-awaited sequel to Golf in the Kingdom, precipitated this interview. Golf as a metaphor for life is an exercise in consciousness. We can all learn to live in the zone.
The Monthly Aspectarian: Michael, I've wanted to talk to you ever since I read Golf in the Kingdom the first time. I know I'm being silly, but is there any chance the Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff are historical characters?
MM: No, they're both fictional.
TMA: I'm crushed.
Michael Murphy: [laughs] Oh, that's great . . . they were [based on] real people. Ever since I started writing Golf in the Kingdom -- you know, I wrote it in 1970 and it was published in '72 -- the character of Shivas Irons has grown in my mind, and he took on a life of his own. That's how it can happen with fiction.
TMA: So this map of Seamus MacDuff's seven-hole golf course is fiction.
MM: Yes.
TMA: That's terrible. I wanted to take up a collection to buy the land.
MM: There is that piece of land, and I have stood on it, and the views are just as I've described them. There's a little map in the front of the book . . . and if you look there, that map can get you to that piece of land. But by the end of the book, the golf course has been bulldozed away.
TMA: Which was heartbreaking.
MM: It was heartbreaking, and I really am delighted that you care so much. I really do appreciate that a lot. You can go there and look wistfully and dream of what was and what might one day be.
TMA: When I read the interview that's up at the website for the Shivas Irons Society [http://www.golfweb.com/shivaslives] where you said, "The book, of course, is fiction," I thought, Well okay, that explains that 450 yard drive.
MM: Yes, some of my friends say that's the greatest weakness in the book -- some of these prodigious shots I get off, but heck, if you can't get them off in your own book, where are you ever going to get them off? It's the one chance I've got!
TMA: Just before I discovered Golf in the Kingdom, I read Tim Gallwey's work -- you know, the "Inner Game" books. The principles he talks about are much the same, getting in touch with the inner body or the luminous body. I'd already been practicing. But Golf in the Kingdom was just so right, I really wanted Shivas to be real.
MM: Well, Clint Eastwood is making a movie, so it will get one other incarnation there. I don't know who's going to play Shivas. Eastwood's talked a lot with Sean Connery, and I've played golf with Sean Connery -- so we'll get that incarnation. But of course, movies, like illustrations, can sometimes disappoint the readers who in their own minds have apprehended a figure that is far more luminous than the actual flesh and blood person rendered in the drawing or in the movie. But such is life. It has multiple incarnations. But it looks like Eastwood is definitely going to make the movie.
TMA: I was struck when I was reading Golf in the Kingdom by the similarities to Carlos Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. Was there some inspiration there?
MM: No, not directly. The book was pretty formed in my mind ten years earlier at the time I was starting Esalen Institute, and that was before Carlos. So the idea was all there, and the characters. So no, my primary inspiration did not come from Carlos, but of course they're both what you would call a quest novel. In that sense it shares with Castaneda's books -- you know, the seeker and the teacher. There have been so many of them. It's an ancient form.
TMA: These luminous experiences that happen on golf courses -- they are real.
MM: Let me just say this: both these books, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons and Golf in the Kingdom are fiction, but the core experiences -- not only have they happened, they happen quite a bit! But when I wrote Golf in the Kingdom, I had no idea that there was so much of it going on, on golf courses. There's more of it there than I had realized.
TMA: Well, for instance, when I prepare to putt and stand behind the ball to line it up, I see a lit path. First I silence my mind and look at the space between the ball and the hole until I see it. The path may or may not make sense based on how the breaks on the green seem to lie. But if I can stay centered and silent while I walk up to the ball and wait to feel the speed of the stroke, the ball will almost always go in or be within inches.
MM: You know, you're in touch, Guy. Yes.
TMA: It's not always there, but when it is, it's a very real thing.
MM: Well, I know. I met Lyle Nelson, who carried the flag for the Olympic Team in 1988 and was on four Olympic shooting teams, and he told me that among shooters there's this same lore. You can hit things you cannot see. It's a great mystery how we can do this. The best explanation I have found, and it's worldwide, across cultures, is that we have these super senses. There is lore everywhere [in the metaphysics of the world's religions] about these capacities we have that are scientifically inexplicable, that fall outside the paradigms and conceptual systems of mainstream science.
TMA: That can't be weighed and measured.
MM: Right. So what I'm trying to do is to collect the lore from the different traditions. I did a more systematic treatment of all this in The Future of the Body.
TMA: I saw that that was what you were doing in The Kingdom of Shivas Irons because you did mention it . . . trying in various ways to help people learn how to get in touch with these possibilities.
MM: Yes, that's right. And if you can see those things and sense them, there's a kinesthetic apprehension of them as well as a visual one. And a lot of people get into this stuff through auditory means. So in all these ways.
TMA: Well, I can't yet hit a fade or a draw at will, so seeing a lit path on a drive --
[laughter]
MM: It takes a lot of practice.
TMA: Would you agree that every golfer, at least once in a lifetime, has to make "the hajj" and play St. Andrews and some of the other ancient courses?
MM: Absolutely. And if you play there for two weeks wholeheartedly, and don't see the "wee people," you should go into another line of work. Seriously.
TMA: Have you run across a book called The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield?
MM: I haven't read it, but the New York Times reviewed it along with that other book, Follow the Wind by Beau Links. Both of them have a protagonist who's a Scottish professional shaman, and both of them have a magical golf stick and they're close to Golf in the Kingdom.
TMA: The Legend of Bagger Vance is the Bhagavad Gita on a golf course. I was hoping it would get more notice than it did, but it seems to have pretty much disappeared. What other books are there along those lines?
MM: Well, the three fiction books -- there's The Legend of Bagger Vance, there is Follow the Wind and there's another one called Miracle on the 17th Green by James Patterson and Peter deJonge. But then, of course, there's all the non-fiction stuff on sports psychology . . . there's been a lot of that. But not going as far into the luminous body as Golf in the Kingdom or The Kingdom of Shivas Irons.
People have asked me what kind of book The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is, and I say first of all that it is a metaphysical fantasy. Secondly, I say it is a journalistic or anthropological account of the meta-normal, the extraordinary on golf courses and in sport and, by extrapolation, it's about the mysticism of everyday life. Thirdly, it's as we just said, a quest novel in addition to being merely a metaphysical fantasy. And fourthly, it's part of my ongoing thought experiment about human possibility that is there in all my books, fiction and non fiction, which arose first out of the work of Sri Aurobindo. He was a great influence on me with his evolutionary vision and prophecy, if you will, and exploration of this greater human nature that we harbor.
TMA: Did you really stop off to play golf in Scotland on your way to Auroville?
MM: Yes, except that Auroville did not exist. It was the Sri Aurobindo ashram. So yes, and when I got to the ashram, there was no golf obviously; it was deemed a trivial activity. In a sense it's also a travel book. There are a lot of scenes in Scotland, and there's also the travels in consciousness, the inner world. It's about the intersection of the inner worlds and the outer worlds. To characterize the book, it comes straight out of my life work. All my books are about these subjects.
TMA: I loved your line about golf being a mystery school for Republicans.
MM: It seems to be true, doesn't it?
TMA: I didn't take the game up until my middle thirties because -- I mean, I was born in '52, so I grew up right in the thick of things and you didn't play golf. It always secretly looked interesting to me, but I am one of the newcomers that's messing it up for all you guys who have been playing it all along. [Both laugh.] But it does seem as if we are evolving to a new stage in a lot of ways -- the new science and technology and the amount of information that we're forced to process. . . .
MM: This possibility for further and further development stands there as a great frontier. There's so much work to be done in theory, research and practice, and I'm working on all three fronts. My book, The Future of the Body is more about the theory of all this. The book I did with George Leonard, The Life We Are Given is about our own attempts to create groups in which this stuff goes on and in which all these meta-normal, and just personal growth can be cultivated in a balanced, integral way. And then we want to promote research into all this, which we are doing. This is another story, but definitely these possibilities confront the human race. It's the reason I started Esalen thirty-five years ago, it's the reason everybody's doing all this exploration right now.
TMA: This luminous state one gets into when you hit that near perfect shot -- when I see that lit path or when all the different experiences that have been described to you happen -- do you believe that this is a state we can be in on a more constant basis?
MM: Yes, and here is where you've got to do more than play golf. We need systematic or integral transformative practices. I've written so much about this, Guy, in The Future of the Body and in The Life We Are Given most particularly, but the seeds of it all are in those two golf books. And yes, we can cultivate them.
TMA: The perfect swing is already within you -- how would Shivas say that?
MM: Well, he says, even before the perfect swing, "Aye, [one field] afore ye e'er swung," what he's referring to is that emptiness, that primordial being, you know, the being of being, the Atman, Brahman. It's down to that level. That's what he's talking about. In other words, if we can live out of that presence more and more as all the great esoteric traditions teach us, the more we can discover this luminous body, these luminous paths, these wonderful swings and general goodness and power in life. Now the question is how to do it -- and for that I believe you need meditation practice, you need what George Leonard and I called integral transformative practice. That's the language I used in The Future of the Body . . . "integral" meaning an embrace of the physical, the psychological, the spiritual and the mental. Body, mind, heart and soul. That's the core message of The Kingdom of Shivas Irons.
TMA: There's another bit that really stuck with me, and I'm paraphrasing badly: that you can turn it around any time.
MM: Well that would be the other thing. You're absolutely right, Guy. It's really about getting started again. And of course that's fundamental to all transformative practices. Because you can't maintain it . . . you have to start again . . . but the minute you do, it's back.
TMA: Well, you know you can top the ball on your drive and slice your second shot into the rough and still hit the third shot on the green and one putt for par.
MM: [laughs] That's well said. That is great.
TMA: We've all done it.
MM: Generally speaking, that's a great parable and paradigm of what we can do in life.
Michael Murphy was the co-founder of Esalen Institute in 1962 and is the author of Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, An End to Ordinary History, The Future of the Body, In the Zone (with Rhea A. White), The Life We Are Given (with George Leonard), and The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation (with Steven Donovan).