An exploration of the spiritual and mystical dimensions of athletics. Quite a sincere, beautiful and even romantic book that gives you a clear idea that more--much more--is possible in life and sport than you think. A reader will need a certain level of credulousness to get maximum value out of this book, while a cynical or highly skeptical reader shouldn't bother reading it at all.
This book also offers a tremendous list of additional books to read. At the bottom of this post I share those that caught my eye.
Notes:
Ch 1: The Spiritual Underground in Sports
* Interesting examples of mystical experiences athletes have while performing. States of mind which could be described as a type of ecstasy or a type of stillness, zen-like experiences that happen through the performing of sport.
* The mystical collective intelligence of a team when it "clicks" and performs at a level far beyond the sum of its parts.
* The various psychological and emotional paradoxes that occur in sport, see for example Roger Bannister saying during his first sub 4-minute mile, "I felt complete detachment" or Jackie Stewart saying, "By race time I should have no emotions inside me at all." Or the freedom and liberation that can occur in athletes under the most stressful of performance conditions.
Ch 2: Mystical Sensations
* Athletes feeling outside themselves, a different type of consciousness, the feeling of being "carried away" by something outside of themselves. A type of trance, or ecstasy or mystic experience.
* Self mastery in the sense of power over oneself, among the primary rewards of sport.
* Being in the present rather than the past or future. Another central concept that I'm seeing in a lot of the books I've been reading lately on psychology and sport.
* On total focus on one's own performance: Ben Hogan coming from behind to beat Clayton Heafner in a tournament, but then asking Heafner afterwards, "how'd it go today?" and having no idea how his competition performed. Totally focused on himself and his performance.
* Single-minded concentration: "your focus is not on the commotion but on the opportunity ahead. I'd liken it to a sense of reverie--not a dreamlike state but the somehow insulated state that a great musician achieves in a great performance. He's aware of where he is and what he's doing, but his mind is on the playing of his instrument with an internal sense of rightness."
* The idea of instinctive action and surrender. Athletes do not act consciously when they make outstanding plays. "Remaining open and empty, and the need for surrender, also figure prominently in the religions of the world." Surrendering so the feeling of a greater self takes over: Lao Tzu "when once you are free from all seeming, from all craving and lusting, then will you move out of your own impulse, without so much as knowing that you move."
You're letting someone else take over, you're letting it happen and this is the only way you can do it. [Seems almost a quasi-religious experience during an era of increasing atheism]
* Eugene Harrigel's description of the Zen archery teacher; heavyweight champion Ingemar Johanson saying his right hand works independently at his conscious mind, etc. Anecdotes about and quotes from OJ Simpson, Bruce Jenner, Billie Jean King etc. These are all really useful anecdotes and they all serve a purpose for teaching psychological robustness and non-attachment, but it is verrrrry interesting to see them all repeatedly mined by several books on the same subject, from the same era!! How many times have I read the quote "thinking is what gets you caught from behind" from OJ Simpson? I think it's three for three.
* Feelings of invincibility and even immortality of an athlete performing at his peak. Also perhaps seeing yourself as part of a great chain of life stretching over many generations, not literally immortality, but a form of it.
Sensations of unity, of mind and body, of oneness with one's teammates, even a feeling of unity with the cosmos at its highest level.
Ch 3: Altered Perceptions
* Athletes experiencing increased clarity, increased perception, subtle heightenings of alertness, even alterations of time and space. Very similar to perceptions reported in the literature of yoga and mysticism.
* Basketball players talking about how large the hoop is, baseball players talking about how large the ball is, etc.
Altered time perception, time slowing down. Slowing your play, even slowing your swing to achieve more power--yet another paradox.
* A sixth sense, or enhanced perception. Out of body experiences, feeling like you're floating or flying, or seeing things from the distance or from a point outside your own body. Awareness of "other": apparitions, spirits, companions, characteristic often in arduous or solitary sports that tax mind and body to the limits of endurance.
Chapter 4: Extraordinary Feats
* Sport hints that human capacities may be limitless. Certain extraordinary feats of sports seem to break through to another order of existence.
* Contrasting Western and Eastern athletes: Western athletes don't have an underlying philosophy that accounts for unusual forces or unexpected energies, whereas Eastern martial art practitioners have concepts of ki, chi and prana, intrinsic energy sources unlocked by concentration and mind-body unification.
* Components of ki: relaxing and letting go, concentration, breathing exercises, emptying the mind of thought, rhythmic activity.
Using meditation to enhance these states. Also detachment/non-attachment: "Forget yourself, forget your enemies, forget winning and losing, and when you have done so, you will be in the spiritually unified state that is called mu, or nothingness, in Zen." --Masutatsu Oyama
* The book veers a bit with discussions and unverified examples of psychokinesis. At the same time, however, if you swallow the idea that reality being extremely subjective and the mind has the ability to set (or better, remove) limits on what we can do...
Chapter 5: Sport and Mysticism
* "There are certain intrinsic elements in sport that make it a vehicle for spiritual awakening." Sustained and focused attention, bringing on meditative states, even ecstasy, detachment from results, satori-like flashes of insight, near-religious states, enlightenment states, all achieved in sporting efforts.
* "God requires a faithful fulfillment of the merest trifle given us to do, rather than the most ardent aspiration to things to which we are not called." -- St Francis de Sales [another way to read this quote would be "do your kata" and stop dreaming about changing the world, change yourself first]
* "As we have seen, a wide variety of spiritual experience emerges in sport--moments of preternatural calm and stillness, feelings of detachment and freedom, states filled with invisible force... this richness of experience is paralleled in the mystical traditions by the knowledge that ordinary human nature opens into a vast and complex inner world."
Modern Western experience denies this reality, considers experiences like these as hallucinations, whereas Eastern culture tends to be more accepting of them.
* See also parallels with pre-Christian yogic practices, physical and cognitive powers, and equivalent psychological powers or experiences in modern sport. Examples: mastery of pain (both psychic and physical), exceptional control of bodily processes, of thoughts, the ability to generate heat or withstand freezing temperatures, altered consciousness, ego loss, auras or halos, the feeling of being lifted up (like manipulation of your or your oppenent's ki in martial arts), precognition or knowing what the opponent was going to do before he did it, clairvoyance among teammates or between a quarterback and wide receiver, crossing of senses such as in synesthesia, transmission of energy from person to person or group inspiration (see Vince Lombardi's inspirational powers which were legendary, even healing powers were ascribed to Vince Lombardi by some of his players), control of others through manipulation (like how Muhammad Ali or Jim Brown were legendary for psyching out their opponents).
Chapter 6: Mind/Body Training
* Can we apply some of these methods from yoga, martial arts, hypnosis, and other disciplines?
* Psychic self-regulation of the human body to control various physiological processes, like pulse, muscular relaxation, blood pressure, breathing, etc. Autogenic training, visualization and meditation training.
* The image of a lake: if the surface is lashed into waves this doesn't change the bottom of the lake which remains steady and calm. The bottom of the lake represents our essential self.
* Visualization practice: not only of sports moves like a tennis shot or a golf swing, visualization of changes you want to achieve in your own body (e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger and visualizing specific muscle changes, also visualize visualizing healing and recovery after stress).
* "Inner seeing" of your body's blood, cells, organs etc.
* Sensory and kinesthetic awareness, body awareness, waking up parts of our body as we relate to them, concentrate on them (or better put: are no longer unconscious about them).
* "Deconstricting" muscles. Note the various toll gates and barricades set up between us and having greater consciousness about our own bodies. See Charles Brooks' book (below): Sensory Awareness.
* George Leonard's idea of the energy body, see his book The Ultimate Athlete: giving students permission to sense forms of energy not generally recognized in the West. This begins with the assumption that a field of energy exists in and around each human body, a form of being. Increasing these forms of awareness increases our enjoyment of athletics.
A mind/body program for running (or any other sport):
* Begin with meditation, 20 minutes twice a day,
* Use helpful images during your performance of the sport, for example with jogging, imagine a stream flowing in the direction you were moving, or a giant sail unfurled above you helping to carry you along, etc. Apply images that are helpful to you for whatever sport.
* Then, be aware of all sensations that arise during your sport. Don't suppress them. Get to know your body and mind more completely. "This flood of sensation is something to learn from and enjoy." Become your body more fully. Listen to your dreams. See what messages they may be delivering. Remember, you're tapping into your unconscious and perhaps making new connections.
Chapter 7: Evolutionary Possibilities
Humanity's ability to surpass apparent limits: examples: placebo research, hypnosis, suggestion, mentally assisted healing, biofeedback, self-regulation... and then some other subjects that are even too out there even for me: psychokinesis, telepathic suggestion, religious stigmata, body luminosity. Even a citation here of Ramana Maharshi, an interesting very interesting coincidence given that I just read a book about him recently.
* The fact that many of these supernormal or unusual abilities exist in so many people may suggest it is a fundamental part of human nature. Perhaps we are designed to use them. Perhaps they are a part of a larger awareness and capacity that "is pressing to be born." This is a belief found in many spiritual traditions.
To read:
Michael Murphy: Golf in the Kingdom
New Yorker profile of Michael Murphy by Calvin Tomkins
Patsy Neal: Sport and Identity
Rudolph Otto: The Idea of the Holy
Kisshomaru Ueshiba: Aikido
Charles Lindbergh: The Spirit of St. Louis
Ernest Shackleton: South
Thomas Kiernan: The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff
Dorothy Harris: Involvement in Sport
Koichi Tohei: Aikido in Daily Life
Thaddeus Kostrubala: The Joy of Running
Masutatsu Oyama: This is Karate
Lama Anagarika Govinda: Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism
Alexandra David-Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet
Meister Eckhart: Meister Eckhart in Translation
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
Jimmy Demaret: My Partner, Ben Hogan
Disetz Suzuki: Zen and Japanese Culture
David Meggyesey: Out of Their League
Robert Nideffer: The Inner Athlete
Stanislav Grof: The Realms of the Human Unconscious
*** Charles Brooks: Sensory Awareness: The Rediscovery of Experiences
George Leonard: The Silent Pulse
*** George Leonard: The Ultimate Athlete
*** Mike Spino: Running Home