God and the Evolving Universe
The Next Step in Personal Evolution
by Michael Murphy, Sylvia Timbers, James Redfield
(paperback: Bantam Press, 2003)
(hardcover: Tarcher 1st ed., 2002)

In a world racked by violence and conflict, James Redfield and Michael Murphy-leading cocreators of today's spiritual boom-present a message of hope and a vision for the future.

It is no accident, they argue, that the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a revolution in new human capacities. Daily we hear and read about supernormal athletic feats; clairvoyant perception; lives transformed by meditative practices; healing through prayer-and we ourselves experience these things.

The authors contend that thousands of years of human striving have delivered us to this very moment, in which each act of self-development is creating a new stage in planetary evolution-and the emergence of a human species possessed of vastly expanded potential.

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons
(paperback: Broadway Books, 1998)

In the final moments of the 1995 British Open, Michael Murphy sees something shadowy on his television screen. The unlikely word visitation juxtaposed with golf? But this is the Michael Murphy of Golf in the Kingdom, his 1972 bestselling novel in which he discovers a guru in Scottish golf master, Shivas Irons. Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute (1962), which in turn launched the human potential movement, has a good handle on the transforming experiences of human consciousness. 

Written as an old-fashioned quest story but with the new-age questor's theme, this novel picks up where Kingdom left off. There the initiate was serendipitously drawn to the teacher; unable to handle the mystic experiences, he fled the scene, only to recollect in tranquility the extraordinary nature of the lessons and the bond. In this sequel, Murphy returns to Scotland to explore the myriad Shivas sightings; here he determines that the old master is indeed engaged in much more than golf--rather, an experiment in consciousness. "The game," Murphy reads from a 1893 tome he unearths while in Scotland, "irresistibly leads to prayer."

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons has much for readers to relish: there is Scotland; mystery, atmospherically evoked; Plato and Kant; whiskey; and for golfers, an enchanted journey to some of the world's most famous and odd golf courses, from Scotland and Russia to Pebble Beach in the U.S.

Golf in the Kingdom
(paperback: Penguin, 1997)
(hardcover: Viking Arkana Ed., 1972)

When a young man en route to India stops in Scotland to play at the legendary Burningbush golf club, his life is transformed. Paired with a mysterious teacher named Shivas Irons, he 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.

Esalen Institute founder Michael Murphy's divine meditation on the royal and ancient game defied categorization when it was first published in 1972, and it still does. Instantly hailed as a classic, Golf in the Kingdom is an altogether unique confluence of fiction, philosophy, myth, mysticism, enchantment, and golf instruction. The central character is a wily Scotsman named Shivas Irons, a golf professional by vocation and a shaman by design, whom Murphy, as participant in his own novel, meets in 1956 on the links of Burningbush, in Fife. The story of their round of golf together culminates in a wild night of whiskey and wisdom where, as Shivas demonstrates how the swing reflects the soul, their golf quite literally takes on a metaphysical glow. The events alter not only Murphy's game, but they also radically alter his mind and inner vision; it's truly unforgettable. For a golfer, Murphy's masterpiece is as essential as a set of clubs.

The Future of the Body
Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature
(paperback: JP Tarcher, 1993)

The author of Golf in the Kingdom writes a magnus opus that Darwin would have written if he had looked to the future instead of the past. By synthesizing more than 30 years of research from more than 3,000 sources, including ancient and modern records of sports, medicine, the arts, and religious practices, Murphy identifies the techniques that all transformative disciplines use and forms them into a coherent program for personal transformation.