Golf in the Kingdom

Front Cover
Penguin, Oct 1, 1997 - Fiction - 240 pages
"...for golf’s soul surfers, Golf in the Kingdom is holy scripture." -- Golf

A spiritual journey, a lush travelogue, a parable of sports and philosophy—John Updike called this unique novel “a golf classic if any exists in our day.”

Now for the 50th anniversary, a beautiful new design and an introduction from Michael Murphy himself

Paired with a mysterious teacher named Shivas Irons, Michael Murphy is led through a round of phenomenal golf, swept into a world where extraordinary powers are unleashed in a backswing governed by “true gravity.” A night of adventure and revelation follows, and leads to a glimpse of Seamus MacDuff, the holy man who haunts a ravine off Burningbush’s thirteenth fairway—the one they call Lucifer’s Rug.
 
“A masterpiece on the mysticism of golf.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A fascination . . . Golf in the Kingdom should have a long and prosperous life.” —Joseph Campbell
 

Selected pages

Contents

SHIVAS IRONS
3
GOLF IN THE KINGDOM
13
SINGING THE PRAISES OF GOLF
36
SEAMUS MACDUFFS BAFFING SPOON
72
WE ARE ALL KITES IN THAT WIND
96
EPILOGUE
121
THE GAMES HIDDEN
133
THE INNER BODY
144
THE RULES OF THE GAME AND
168
THE PLEASURES OF PRACTICE
174
The Game Is Meant for Walkin
186
SHIVAS IRONS HISTORY OF THE WESTERN
190
RELATIVITY AND THE FERTILE VOID
198
HIS IDEAL
207
SPRING 1997 THE SUBLIME
214
A BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR
221

SOME NOTES ON TRUE GRAVITY
152
A GOLFERS ZODIAC
160

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About the author (1997)

Michael Murphy began his quest into the nature of human potential in the late 1950s while a psychology major at Stanford University. After a year of graduate school, he spent 18 months in India, at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry. Aurobindo started him thinking about the relationship between the evolution of consciousness and the physical body.

In 1961, shortly after his return to the United States, Murphy met Richard Price, another Standford Psychology major, and in 1962 they founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The Esalen Institute, the leading growth center in the world, has hosted thousands of human potential workshops and conferences led by such notables as Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, Rollo May, Fritz Perls, Aldous Huxley, Carl Rogers, Ida Rolf, Joan Halifax, Stanislov Grof, Joan Borysenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Linus Pauling, to name a few.

In 1980, he helped create the Esalen Institute’s Soviet American Exchange program which, among other things, initiated the first live television space bridges and hosted Boris Yeltsin during his first visit to the United States.

Michael Murphy is the author of The Future of the Body, Golf in the Kingdom (released by Penguin Books/Arkana), Jacob Atabet, and End to Ordinary History, and co-author of The Psychic Side of Sports. Golf in the Kingdom has been translated into more than two dozen languages and sold well over a million copies. He lives in San Rafael, California.

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