The Barometer of Our Enlightenment, the World as Koan, and an Unexpected Dance

[Introductory note: This article is an homage to Michael Murphy's classic 1970 novel of golf mysticism, Golf in the Kingdom, and its legendary, crazy-wise, Yoda-like golf yogi, Shivas Irons. Highlighting their contemplations on our paradoxical, highly?“ko-anic” times, it also offers my own musings and creative elaborations on Murphy’s?and Shivas's crystalline articulations of "perennial anatomy,”?“true gravity,”?“occult transmission,” and other diamonds-in-the-rough — no golf pun intended — gems of wisdom about golf and life. It's a compilation of final passages in my?“vanity book” if there ever was one, An Unexpected Dance: And, What It Really Means to Take an Honest Swing — The?“Mental Game” for the Rest of Us.

The book voices my?attempt at golf mysticism as a Heart-activated tantric with a pretty strong inner game but never a great outer one, my enthusiasm for the sport notwithstanding. Self-published in 2003 with only a few dozen ever sold, now out of print, letter size, it was designed with an original front and back cover by my then-frequent golf buddy, -Al Porter. The pic on the front features a Callaway ball -Al hit for an eagle at a course we played in Ojai, California, and various shamanic artefacts meaningful to one or both of us. My favorite comments on the book from far better amateurs than I: a lifelong scratch, i.e. par, golfer and a dean of American trainers of actual yoga teachers, "Saniel, one thing this book makes clear — you are a true golf nut!" And a longtime single-digit handicapper who's an eminent Silicon Valley hi-tech CEO cut to the chase: "Narcissistic and delusional."

I've especially prized that one; that's what golf does to at least some of us otherwise apparently somewhat sane human beings. But the man was kind enough to invite me to play with him once at his members-only, high-end and highly demanding, Nicklaus-designed course hidden away in remote Northern California hills. When we started, he cautioned me, "Don't keep your score" — sure enough, it would've been astronomical — and afterward he gave Linda and me a bottle of super-pricey champagne that most financial mortals never hear about.

Here I go, rambling on with golf stories in what's supposed to be an introductory note! Ah well. Essential last points: the full book begins with golf journals that I kept for a few years upon taking up the game again at 50 after never playing since I was 20. A main theme is what I call "Honest Swing Golf, prescriptions for how to approach, execute, evaluate, and move on from each shot and each round in a manner that has helped me transcend what many golfers like me suffer as "the tyranny of par." An equally main theme is how the Divine Feminine, Goddess, or presence, whom I call the "She-Mystery," a primary tantric force in my life and my work since my awakening in 1992 at age 42, showed up unexpectedly on the courses I then played, especially San Geronimo in western Marin County, which has since, alas, been closed down.

So, here's how An Unexpected Dance ends. I hope you enjoy it! I have made a few edits in the text and in the one original endnote, added an additional endnote, and updated a couple of numbers in brackets. PS, the book is (c) Saniel Bonder 2003, 2010, except of course for the Murphy quotations. Otherwise, all rights reserved. ~ SB]

Plunging deeper into the mysteries of spirit and matter, and consciousness and energy, and the possibly larger esoteric anatomy of true gravity

I spoke earlier about the East-meets-West discovery of the sinoatrial node as the source-location of the heartbeat and our very life. I related the affirmations of certain great sages that this same point in the physical heart organ is also the true and ultimate seat of, or most primal point of association between, consciousness and matter in the Mystery of Being.

As we move toward the final stretch of these ruminations on the Honest Swing Mysteries, I’d like to speak of and illustrate something of my sense of the relation between true gravity as it appears in the chakra body (the yogic line of plexuses called sushumna nadi, remember?) and as it appears in both that body and the Heart-based process seated in the sinoatrial node (the atma nadi).

It was not given to take place, but it would have been interesting for a character like Shivas to meet one like Ramana Maharshi. Once he awakened, the Hindu sage played no sports, though he had excelled at soccer as a boy. But when it came to the occult secrets, he was a powerhouse. The first European to encounter him, an English army officer, described watching him sit “like a motionless corpse from which God was radiating terrifically.”

It’s worth mentioning here that Ramana and many other sages like him historically have never paid any significant attention to concentrating energy in any of the central, spinal nodes or chakras. Not that anything was wrong with all that: it just had no interest for him.

When I first contacted Ramana’s teachings, his living presence activated that same seat in my own heart in a way that changed my life from then on. This even though he as a man had long been dead and gone! But that white-hot, fiery opening was not the awakening I was seeking. It was only a precursor. It took another twenty years and more for the ground of my whole human life to be prepared for that transition. During those twenty years, I also received much from the human adept who was my primary “occult teacher” of this kind, Adi Da Samraj. In my view and experience, his breakthrough contributions to our divine and human potentials associated especially with the sinoatrial node far exceeded those of Ramana Maharshi, whose teaching and transmission in this realm were already radical innovations in the evolution of human spirituality.*

However, it was only upon leaving Adi Da's work that the awakening process really kicked into high gear for me. I thought it would be helpful to share some of the story of one particularly compelling passage. This took place in mid-October, 1992.?

I won’t go into all the background on this – it’s in my book The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart, and if you want it badly enough, you’re welcome to read it. Let me just relate the essentials.

The passage into atma nadi cannot be forced. You can’t “practice” your way into it. You can’t do meditations and techniques to make it happen. I should know; I tried for years. When I was ready – and those practices certainly helped prepare me – I just fell into it. It was like falling off a diving board into an endlessly deep and sweet lake of “consciousness-force” and “feeling-force” of my own Being.

What makes this passage possible, apparently, in a truly conscious way, is direct investigation of the conscious nature or principle in itself. And this is something that sages like Ramana and Da, and many interweaving lineages going back to the rishis who composed the Upanishads, have always taken pains to point out: consciousness and energy need to be discriminated. You can’t just develop your energetic awareness and concentration along the chakra lines and expect automatically to go beyond sushumna into atma. It is not going to happen.

Ramana Maharshi used to be adamant on that point. He would say, why bother learning all those energetic, yogic practices? Why have all those experiences, when in the final analysis you are going to have to ditch them all and let go of everything in the investigation of the conscious Self-nature?

Well, Ramana was a bit of a purist in that respect. But he had a point. He also was one of the last of the lines of sages who tunneled so deeply into consciousness itself that they were inclined to dismiss bodily existence and all human concerns and relations as virtually, or even literally, non-existent.

In my experience, in our time a whole new opportunity is opening up. It involves making “the trip down” both the atma and sushumna circuitries or channels simultaneously, and as one singular passage.

I refer to the atmic or conscious dimension of this passage as “the second conception.” It literally duplicates the wedding of the sperm and the egg that leaves the light of consciousness radiating at and from the sinoatrial node, prompting the heartbeat many times every minute we are alive. In the initial act of conception that began our lives, we were unconscious, living at the submicroscopic levels. The elements of spirit and matter, consciousness and energy, merged from our parents and made us possible. But in the second act of conception, the conscious principle and the material principle are both consciously developed.

Remember all that discussion in the journals of An Unexpected Dance about the essentially sexual mystery of the Game of Golf? This, my friends, this second conception: this is the ultimate “Galactic-Ecstatic-Hole-in-One” that makes the current of consciousness itself into a continuous, joyous flood of true gravity. It is a piercing of the atom of matter in the egg-body of human being that gives birth to a whole life of true gravity, from that point forward. When it occurred for me, I remember telling a mentor that I had fallen into my own heart, I had fallen all the way down into “my own shoes.” Not long afterward it dawned on me that I felt as if I had fallen into the very center of the Earth somehow. The “hole-in-one” quality was absolutely evident, and utterly ecstatic. Yet it was not an explosion out of myself, but a landing in myself as never before.

So I didn’t just land in some abstract state of consciousness. I also landed in my human body as never before. In that sense, the “trip down” the royal sushumna road was also part of the journey. Talk about a paradox: as a result, I realized the transcendental, impersonal, infinite condition of consciousness itself as never before, while at the same time becoming, or also realizing, my own human, personal, particular identity, dropping into being here and being myself as never before, too.

Here’s the ko-an and the joke: the work of getting here never ends until the end of life itself

That was only one stage of what I came to call the “sacred marriage” of consciousness and matter, spirit and flesh, in my own evolution. There have been so many others. And so many more are on the way.

Shivas says, of golf, “keeping score is a ko-an, a reminder of the dualities.” Over the decade and more of my Waking Down life there has been a continual revelation of ways to keep refining my participation in the realms of “the dualities.” One of the most important that’s come to me is golf itself. Keeping score — particularly when you don’t come to the Game with previously developed expertise or any special natural talents — can be an excruciating reminder of the dualities, the limitations of being here in form while also knowing or intuiting one’s limitlessness.

In the Zen tradition a ko-an is an illogical puzzle, a riddle, to be resolved only in the breakdown of our common mind, not by any successful application of it. Zen monks meditate on such ko-ans for decades, for their whole lives. A classic Zen ko-an is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Or, “What was the shape of your face before you were born?” Only breakthroughs of true gravity, of unbidden and previously untapped consciousness-force, can penetrate the riddle and reveal the logic-transcending secrets behind it.

In the Honest Swing Mysteries, based on my many years of living the particular “white-hot” condition of conscious embodiment that I do, one of the jokes is that if you just keep reading my books you are going to tend to “catch” the occult secret of my presence. I’m not boasting in saying this. It’s just a proven fact. It tends to happen for people who pay a particular level of attention to what I am doing and saying.

Another joke of this, however, is that you may already be far more proficient in the technical skills of golf than I. The ways in which my own presence tend to evoke true gravity for you may enable you to demonstrate far more prowess on the course than I can, at least to this point.

In that sense too I am more like Ramana, perhaps, than like Shivas. If you were to sit with me in meditation, you might sense what I am radiating. I am not sure it will come through very well if you watch me on the tee, on the fairway, in the rough, on the green. Not yet, anyway!

But, you see, that’s what I am working on. I am coming into greater and greater incarnation of an unconditioned dimension of joyous Being. Golf is one of my primary methods for doing so. It’s quite frustrating so much of the time, still. You’ll see why I say so when you read Volume Two, The Release.**

?But it might also be self-evident were you to fall into the Heart of Conscious Life at the source of the heartbeat and begin experiencing the regeneration of your whole existence “from” that source-place. One has to relearn life like having to relearn how to walk or ride a bike after a debilitating accident. And the physical, mental, and emotional, and also spiritual, skills that competent and excellent golf require must be learned. Some people have natural talents, but even so, when you are knowing yourself as the Ocean of all Being as well as the particular wave of your personal self, golf becomes an amazing yoga of the descent of conscious Being-force — or, as I suggested back in the journals, in some ways an ascent of super-matter, matter in the form of the human body now already charged with unending intuitive realization, in every cell, of the limitlessness of spirit.

Very strange stuff. So I am coming at the kinds of proficiency and concentration Murphy and Shivas describe, in the chakras, from a pre-enlightened condition that has not yet incarnated so well in the body and its expression on a golf course. You may be coming at the game from a much more developed degree of prowess at the sport. But you may not know very much, yet, of the true gravity that is possible when your sense of awareness falls into the Ground of Being-Consciousness in the Heart and you suddenly, with a start, know yourself quite obviously as at once totally infinite and still ever-so-finite.

“A reminder of the dualities.”

Some final notes of incompleteness, and Shivas's magnificent statement on paradox as "the barometer of our enlightenment"

A final sigh here. I had so anticipated coming to the last words of this installment of my Honest Swing writings and having something just wonderfully summary and conclusive to say. A fitting ending.

Instead, the sense of so many strings left untied, threads left unwoven.

Well, so be it.

If you go back to Golf in the Kingdom and check into those final few dozen pages of Murphy’s fragmentary essays and apparently random reflections, I hope you’ll see how much richness is there, how much unplumb-able sheer mystery he and his teacher evoke.

Murphy, and Shivas, on paradox in our times:

“'The world’s a ko-an,' he assured me just before I left, 'a ko-an from the very beginnin’ and getting’ worse day by day.' ... Shivas believed that life presented us with paradoxes every day, that if we approached them with an open, ready spirit the whole world turned to Zen training and successive revelation, that if we turned away they reappeared like Hydra heads. There is no escaping the paradoxes life presents us with ... .

"To Shivas Irons, escape was quite beside the point. Thus his stirring, epochal equation: 'Our relation to paradox is the barometer of our enlightenment.'

"Shivas was sobered by the intensification — if not necessarily the refinement — of human awareness as our populations grow while technology breaks all barriers of distance and privacy. ‘So many Gods and moralities now, so many logics and geometries, so many ways to see the world, so many ideas about running a family,’ his notes lament. ‘The Twentieth Century itself is a ko-an.’” (p. 211)

Murphy relates that on reading that last line in Shivas’s notes he became obsessed with it from then on. His stirring summation of the 20th century’s ko-anic paradoxes ends with a ferocious admission of how stripped away we all are already, and this was written three [now five] decades ago:

"... everywhere our certainties, our ideals and beliefs and most familiar perceptions are ripped away like our very own flesh, as if our souls were being skinned alive. Yes, there is no denying it, the twentieth century is a koan, pressing us to paradox until we cry uncle. When I hear Hare Krishna on the streets of the city I hear my own impulse to surrender forever to the One beyond all these incertitudes. At times I imagine our entire nation breaking into such a cry, going back to Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad — or finding a center in violence or oblivion self-induced. For there is no escaping the growing pressure. The koan is upon us with a vise-like grip and it is squeezing harder every day." (p. 212)

Murphy quotes the ebullient Shivas, who had endured many a breakdown to come into his own equanimity, as calling us to a “deeper self that thrives on the craziness of this teeming world, that ‘sees every breakdown as an opening to the original crazy shimmering dance.’” He himself ends his writings in Kingdom with a poetic celebration of the Dance of Shiva, the male god of Being in the mode of the Liberator and Destroyer, the Dancer at the heart of everything.

But ... you know me. To end here, for now, I’d rather quote an obscure passage that honors the Femaleness of It All. For the She-ness of Being gives us no endings, but only endless beginnings, changes, and deaths-that-give-new-births. This quotation from humanity’s earliest acknowledgements of paradox and mystery in India’s Rig Veda was also cited in Sri Aurobindo’s classic Life Divine:

?“She follows to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns that are coming — Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead. ... What is her scope when she harmonizes with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine? She desires the ancient mornings and fulfills their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.”

This is the One I scent in the bright dawn fog on the so-green, voluptuous fairways of my own Burningbush, whom I call “San Geroni-Ma,” and to Whom, among other Lovelies, I pray, well, most every day. (Lazy to the bone, you recall.) Unlike their ever so self-sufficient male devic counterparts, the Ladies ... well, it just never occurs to them to have a self-sufficient presence. She prefers Dancing with, not merely Dancing as. A crucial distinction, I think.

For it is not merely Her presence but Ours, all of Ours, that is heightening and deepening in the rush of human awareness toward such “communion with the rest that are to come.” Don’t you think it’s an astonishing thing that suddenly 50 million of us play this mad game we call golf? Fifty million!! [As of 2021, 66 million!] If there are six billion [now 8] human beings alive on this planet, that means that just under one percent of the entire human race is obsessed with The Game! Doesn’t that blow your mind? What are we doing out there? Who or What are we supplicating with our sticks and our hopes and our white flying orbs?

It really is mad, if you think about it. Or even if you don’t! You know, I’d been dancing with Her in other forms all those years. How curious my mind had not the slightest forethought that She’d be grabbing my ass on the golf course too. Silly me! What prevented me from that obvious anticipation?

I guess it was meant to be an unexpected Dance.

* While I speak with inexpressibly grateful appreciation here of both Ramana’s and Adi Da’s contributions to my realizations and understandings of the metaphysical domains of the inner being and true gravity, the radically life/body/earth/person-positive, Jeffersonian spiritual democrat in me begs to speak up too. In that respect I am not a devotee, disciple, or even fan of either one of them. For all his apparent compassion, including a touching love of all creatures and a continuous dedication to granting his presence to all and sundry who approached him, Ramana was one of the last of a dying breed of dissociative transcendentalists. And for all his love, humor, and groundbreaking spiritual genius, Adi Da gravitated into what we might call an imperialistic, avataric solipsism. He proclaimed himself to be the be-all and end-all of ultimate spiritual masters for all time, past as well as present and future. Literally: his self-bestowed honorific Sanskrit titles "Adi" and "Samraj" respectively mean "Original" and "King of everything and everyone," and the name "Da" means "Giver."

If these seem incommensurately strong critical statements given my great appreciation of my Heart-gurus' other contributions, what can I say? Welcome to the world of living paradox. The perennial philosophy and perennial anatomy are ever accompanied, it seems, by perennial politics. Keeps the world going around, I guess.

** Never did write The Release, and almost certainly never will. Sigh!