Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy is an older book (fist Ed.: 1972) written by Michael Murphy, one of the founders of The Esalen Institute. Why I first looked at the title, I said to myself: What is this, is it about golf in Saudi Arabia or something ? No, it is not.
Michael Murphy talks about his revelations after playing golf at Burningbush, Scotland with a golf mentor character, Shivas Irons. This book is a mystic view of the sport of golf and what playing the sport revealed to the author. It is about the game’s “hidden but accessible meaning.” It is not a golf technique or instructional book.
According to Murphy, everything in golf has a deeper meaning: the whiteness of the ball, the moon shot, the hole.
His mentor, Shivas, quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, who says at its origin the golf hole is “one of the most fundamental tendencies of human reality -the tendency to fill… A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places, in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude.”
“True gravity is intentional”.
“Golf is simultaneously a doorway and a prison, it provides us a jail to be broken out of, but a jail we can clearly see rather than the often invisible one that holds us in our daily life.”
Shivas says that golf is a “game for taking off the seven veils. Never think yer first glimpse the last, for there are aye another six.“
One of Shivas secrets is to follow the flight of every shot -no matter how bad that shot might be. It is the only way our unconscious mind can absorb the information it is given and we blind ourselves by turning away too soon.”
Shivas maintains a whole list of “journals.” Shivas believed in streams of energy visualizing the golf ball’s path. “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.
Star-gate and the golf hole, are they two symbols of the same thing ?
“Take a man who aye looks down the fairway before he’s e’n turned into the ball, and I’ll show you how he does it in everything else in his life.” -Shivas Irons, Golfer and Mystic
Michael Murphy wrote a sequel to this book, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons. He also more recently wrote In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports and The Future of the Body.
New book alert:
My friends have signaled out a new venture capital book release, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. by Scot Kupor and Eric Ries. If you’re in the investing space or are an entrepreneur, you should get.
Compound movements are essential.
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