The long-awaited sequel to Golf in the Kingdom takes Murphy back to Scotland in search of another encounter with the mystically enchanting Shivas Irons, a man--if that's indeed what he is--who's part golf professional, part shaman, completely wise, and thoroughly fascinating. Filled with myth, mysticism, metaphysics, advanced string theory (courtesy of fellow searcher and friend, physicist Buck Hannigan), and at times other-worldly golf sequences from Scotland, to Russia, to a climactic round at Pebble Beach, Kingdom resolves its quest in the most unlikely and hard-to-find place of all. "Keep coming," Irons implores his seeker. "Imagine. Practice. Start again. I'm not so far away." Indeed, more than fairways that glow in the dark and drives that can fly 450 yards, it's Irons's ultimate whereabouts that infuses Kingdom with its magic and its mystery.

From Library Journal
In this sequel to Murphy's mystical Golf in the Kingdom (1972), the author returns to Scotland to find out more about his mentor, golfer Shivas Irons, who spouts philosophy in between swings.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Mark Lindquist
Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom is the best-selling golf novel ever published, maybe because it's as much about metaphysics as it is about golf--about golf as spiritual knight errantry.... Even the most earthbound N.F.L. lineman knows there are moments when we're in "the zone," operating well beyond our everyday performance levels. Though The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is ostensibly about Murphy's search for the elusive Shivas Irons, its true concern is our quest for these moments of transcendence, and the book succeeds as a handbook for spiritual adventure.

From AudioFile
This book, fiction disguised as memoir, has something for everybodyÐmind fodder for the credulous, high satire for the skeptical, palliative for golfers, Scots travelogue for armchair travelers. Echoing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the bestselling hoaxes of Carlos Castaneda, Michael Murphy seeks nirvana on the golf courses of Scotland. His quest involves a hodgepodge of Eastern mysticism, ersatz Platonic philosophy, spiritualism, white magic, hauntings and ESP. Oh, yes! Golf, too! Murphy admits poking a little fun at duffers, but his mind-expanding passages seem to send-up the whole Esalen human growth potential movement, which he helped found. Is he trying to be funny? Narrator John Hannah takes him at face value. He plays it straightÐand adeptlyÐin authentic Scottish tones, giving us all the drama and epiphany of Murphy's striving while letting the humor, intentional or otherwise, fall where it may. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
A couple of decades before before golf literature became a growth industry, Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom (1972) was one of those special books that a certain kind of golfer, comfortable with mysticism and philosophy, would recommend to like-minded friends. That book has now sold more than 750,000 copies and has become godfather to a whole tribe of lesser books that take a similarly meditative approach to golf. Given the sport's popularity today, a sequel seemed inevitable, and sure enough, here it is. Like its predecessor, this novel-as-memoir purports to be based on real events but is cast as fiction to allow the "re-creation" of dialogue. Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute when he wasn't searching for meaning in a five iron, bases this second effort on his "search" for Shivas Irons, the philosophy-spouting Scottish guru with whom Murphy played an inspirational 18 holes in the first book. His search takes him back to Scotland, where he encounters other Shivas followers, and on to Russia, where, improbably, still more New Age linksters lurk. The search finishes at Pebble Beach, where Murphy convinces an unnamed touring pro (seemingly Greg Norman) that golf really is an inner game. Yes, but, Murphy's heartfelt sincerity aside, this sequel is neither enough of a golf book to please flesh-and-blood golfers nor enough of a feel-good meditation to arouse the Celestine Prophecy crowd. Too much philosophizing nearly ruined baseball literature; golf is now on the critical list. Bill Ott

From Kirkus Reviews
Ghosts on the golf course! Phantom visitations on the ninth green! Platonism, the paranormal, and psychedelic whiskey at Scotland's most famed but fictional golf course! Yes, Murphy, golf's greatest mystic, humorist, and founder-director of the Esalen Institute, has at last spawned a sequel to his otherworldly Golf in the Kingdom, which has sold 750,000 copies since 1972. In volume one, Murphy went to the fictitious Burningbush course in Scotland's County Fife (``The Kingdom''), where he had a metaphysical encounter with Shivas Irons, a guru/pro of supernatural perfection whose line of mystical palaver would leave Madame Blavatsky drooling enviously. Since that encounter, many parts of which, Murphy explains, he could not put into volume one because they'd not fully matured and developed (such as Murphy's sighting of Irons's own guru, Seamus McDuff, three years after McDuff's death), Murphy and his buddies have been hyperaware of luminous bodies on the green--paranormals guiding balls through shots only a witch could make. He returns to Scotland once more to seek out Shivas Irons. There, he finds himself well-known, his book read to tatters by the locals, all of whom try to wheedle from him how much of his account is true. Meantime, Murphy falls in with Buck Hannigan, a James Joyce look-alike and theoretical physicist hooked on the paranormal, and together they visit the late Seamus's glowing house and his preposterously difficult seven-hole personal golf course, designed to help raise otherworldly spirits. A visit to Hannigan's mistress, a Russian mystic and channeler, shows the ties between angels and eros, while all comes to a head at the '93 National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. Do they find Shivas? Well, spiritually. A big hit? Doubt it not. These are the occult dimensions of golf, straight from the Easter bunny. ($200,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
The long-awaited sequel to the classic tale of sport and mysticism, Golf in the Kingdom.

"Michael Murphy has achieved a rare feat; he has penned a sequel that not only amplifies and extends his earlier masterpiece but creates a new vision of future possibility."
--James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy

"The Kingdom of Shivas Irons takes you on a quest of altered states.  It will catch your imagination and proffer the questions of golf and soul."
--Gary McCord


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review
The long-awaited sequel to the classic tale of sport and mysticism, Golf in the Kingdom.

"Michael Murphy has achieved a rare feat; he has penned a sequel that not only amplifies and extends his earlier masterpiece but creates a new vision of future possibility."
--James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy

"The Kingdom of Shivas Irons takes you on a quest of altered states.  It will catch your imagination and proffer the questions of golf and soul."
--Gary McCord


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Book Description
Originally published in 1972, Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom has become one of the bestselling golf books of all time, and has been hailed as "a golf classic if any exists in our day" and "a masterpiece on the mysticism of golf". It also introduced Shivas Irons, the golf pro and philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf on Scotland's Burningbush links, a round that profoundly altered his game and vision. Shivas's insights about competition, life, and "true gravity," all instilled in him by his elusive mentor Seamus MacDuff, captured the imaginations and the devoted following of students of the inner game of golf.The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the enchanting story of Murphy's return to Scotland to investigate reports of further visitations by Shivas Irons, and to answer questions about him and MacDuff that have haunted Murphy since his original trip to Burningbush some thirty-one years before. Murphy and his companion Buck Hannigan, a skeptical physicist fascinated by Shivas's connections to metanormal events, embark on a magical quest for Irons and MacDuff--and their wisdom about golf and human potential.From the mystical golf course surrounding MacDuff's estate in Scotland, across the world to the first Russian Open Golf Championship and finally to Pebble Beach on the California Coast, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is a delightful exploration of the deep truths about the game of golf and a provocative inquiry into our remarkable possibilities for growth and transformation.John Hannah, an accomplished stage actor, has appeared on television and in the films Madagascar Skin, The Final Cut and Four Weddings and a Funeral. He can be heard on the audio production of Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom, also available from BDD Audio.

Download Description
Thirty year, after the publication of Golf in the Kingdom, the bestselling classic that defined the inner game of golf, Michael Murphy returns to investigate further visitations by the mythic golf pro and philosopher Shivas Irons and his elusive mentor Seamus MacDuff. Confronting questions about Shivas Irons and MacDuff that have haunted readers for decades, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons takes us on a mystical tour from revered Scottish links, to Moscow for the first Russian Open Golf Championship, and finally to Pebble Beach on the California coast. This marvelous exploration is a provocative inquiry into the deep truths about the game of golf and the possibilities for personal transformation.

From the Publisher
The long-awaited sequel to the classic tale of sport and mysticism, Golf in the Kingdom--in a limited, leatherbound edition signed by the author.Acclaim for Michael Murphy:The Kingdom of Shivas Irons:"Michael Murphy has achieved a rare feat; he has penned a sequel that not only amplifies and extends his earlier masterpiece but creates a new vision of future possibility. The Kingdom of Shivas Irons describes a new place of mystical golf and unfolding spiritual adventure, and it could be our own kingdom. . . if we have the courage to enter it."
--James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy"A brilliant and beautiful narrative of human possibilities. Murphy has written a spell-binding tale--provocative, compelling, immensely enjoyable--of the search for a deeper order, a more profound meaning, lying just within, and just beyond our grasp. It's about golf, yes, but it's really about the possible human being, struggling to grow into its own frightening greatness."
--Ken Wilber, author of Grace and Grit, The Eye of Spirit, and A Brief History of EverythingGolf in the Kingdom:"Murphy's book is going to alter many visions. He's written a mystical tale capable of winning a constituency. I totally believed it and loved it."
--Nancy Weber, New York Times Book Review"Golf is of games the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest. There is much wit and good will in Golf in the Kingdom."
--John Updike"A peculiarly charming story."
--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

From the Inside Flap
Originally published in 1972, Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom has become one of the bestselling golf books of all time, and has been hailed as "a golf classic if any exists in our day" and "a masterpiece on the mysticism of golf".  It also introduced Shivas Irons, the golf pro and philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf on Scotland's Burningbush links, a round that profoundly altered his game and vision.  Shivas's insights about competition, life, and "true gravity," all instilled in him by his elusive mentor Seamus MacDuff, captured the imaginations and the devoted following of students of the inner game of golf.

The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the enchanting story of Murphy's return to Scotland to investigate reports of further visitations by Shivas Irons, and to answer questions about him and MacDuff that have haunted Murphy since his original trip to Burningbush some thirty-one years before.  Murphy and his companion Buck Hannigan, a skeptical physicist fascinated by Shivas's connections to metanormal events, embark on a magical quest for Irons and MacDuff--and their wisdom about golf and human potential.

From the mystical golf course surrounding MacDuff's estate in Scotland, across the world to the first Russian Open Golf Championship and finally to Pebble Beach on the California Coast, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is a delightful exploration of the deep truths about the game of golf and a provocative inquiry into our remarkable possibilities for growth and transformation.


John Hannah, an accomplished stage actor, has appeared on television and in the films Madagascar Skin, The Final Cut and Four Weddings and a Funeral.  He can be heard on the audio production of Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom, also available from BDD Audio.

About the Author
Michael Murphy, who cofounded The Esalen Institute in 1962, is the author of Golf in the Kingdom and The Future of the Body.  He is the coauthor of In the Zone and The Life We Are Given.  Murphy lives in San Rafael, California.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the road Hole at St. Andrew's Old Course, Costantino Rocca's ball rested on pavement near the green.  Lying two, Rocca needed a four and then a birdie on the eighteenth hole to tie John Daly in the final round of the 1995 British Open.  He chose a putter for his shot.  Watching on television from my home in California, I sensed the first tremors of the uncanny.  In ways I couldn't predict, the Old Course was about to make itself known as a theater of the occult.

In my office on the floor below, the fax machine was ringing.  Rocca putted, and his ball bounced off the pavement and rolled over a path and grass-covered rise to within four feet of the hole.  With wonder in his voice, Jack Nicklaus asked the television audience if Rocca could do it again in ten or a hundred tries.  A telephone sounded in the kitchen.  As commentators noted the long odds against his tying Daly, Rocca sank his putt.

During a commercial, I went downstairs, found two messages in my fax machine's receptor tray, and carried them back to the television.  Rocca had driven, and excitement was building at the Old Course.  I looked at one of the messages.  It was from a friend in Vancouver, British Columbia.  "Are you watching the Open?" it read.  "Something's going to happen!"  Rocca had reached his ball now and was appraising his shot calmly.  From his slightly bemused expression and jaunty carriage, it was hard to tell what demons raced through him.  As he took his practice swings, I looked at the second fax.  It was from Buck Hannigan in Edinburgh.  "Watch the Open.  We have a visitation.  There's been another Shivas sighting."

Startled, I looked at the screen again.  Since 1987, Hannigan and I had studied moments like this when hints of the uncanny appear in sport, but the word "visitation" had a meaning for him beyond suggestions of telepathy or mind over matter.  I knew he would send me another message.  There was a hush in the gallery.  Would Rocca play a bump and run, or pitch onto the putting surface?  Reading Hannigan's fax, I hadn't heard the commentators say what club he was using.  The silence deepened.  Millions watched.  How would the energies of their attention affect him?

A shadow slowly crossed the green, or was it my imagination?  An image arose of the Masters that year.  On the last few holes at Augusta there had been something like this, some presence I couldn't quite see, and in the days that followed, there had been stories that some of the players had felt the ghost of their mentor, Harvey Penick.  As I pictured Crenshaw's emotional victory, Rocca stubbed his shot.

His ball rolled into the Valley of Sin, a treacherous swale in front of the green, and a groan passed through the crowd.  With uninhibited anguish, Rocca looked skyward as if asking for help.  My kitchen phone was ringing, but I didn't answer it.  The camera was panning across St.  Andrew's famous eighteenth green, and I thought of my own visitation on the last hole at Burningbush.  Did Hannigan have reason to think that something like that was happening now?

Rocca regathered himself.  He could still tie Daly to force a playoff, but faced an uphill shot that would have to roll out of the swale and across some seventy feet of slick and undulating putting surface.  One commentator said that the best players sometimes flubbed their shots, and another reminded the audience that Rocca had missed a short putt to cost Europe the Ryder Cup.  The Old Course was charged with silent expectancy.  Like a supersaturated solution, the atmosphere around the eighteenth green might crystallize into something extraordinary.

The Italian player stroked his ball, and it rolled swiftly from the Valley of Sin over a rise and across the huge green into the cup.  The crowd exploded, and Rocca went down on his face, pounding the ground with both fists.  Like his shot on the previous hole, this one had defied enormous odds.  The game's best players would have trouble duplicating it in a hundred or a thousand tries.  It would be talked about for years.  It would live in golf's history books.  Italy's best player had won a place in our hearts.

But had there been a visitation?  Some barely tangible presence, like a shadow, had crossed the green, but I hadn't sensed more than that.  For the third time during the last fifteen minutes, the phone in the kitchen rang.  Not wanting to get trapped in conversation, I waited until it stopped then picked up my voice mail.  Three friends had left messages urging me to watch the tournament.  The last was from Steve Cohen, founder of the Shivas Irons Society, reminding me that the eighteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet represented holiness and the goodness of life.  Remember, his recorded voice said with soft insistence, golf courses had 18 holes because the Old Course had 18 when the Royal and Ancient set the game's standards.  And this eighteenth hole was built on a grave.  Rocca had died and been reborn.

Resolving to disregard further calls, I watched Daly win the playoff.  But nothing either of the players did gave evidence of the occult, and no one reported inexplicable sightings.  Yet I couldn't stop thinking about Hannigan's fax.  In the last few months, several people in the Kingdom of Fife had experienced visitations related to Shivas Irons, and now Buck was reporting another.  Was this strange phenomenon going public?  Was it pressing to be recognized in the world at large?  At that moment, holding Buck Hannigan's enigmatic message, I decided to write this book.  Our findings were too important to keep to ourselves.  Since 1972, the year that Golf in the Kingdom was published, more and more people had told me about their mystical experiences in golf.  Their reports had convinced me that the game was more than it appeared to be, and provided reason enough to write a second account of Shivas Irons, the mysterious golf professional I'd met in 1956.

But there was more reason than that for a second book.  For eight years, Hannigan and I had collected data in several countries from religious scholars, research librarians, anthropologists, and other people that, when assembled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, suggested that Shivas Irons and his teacher, Seamus MacDuff, were involved in a momentous transformation.  Our language is poor in describing this.  Taken as a whole, our findings indicated that the two men might be realizing a new condition of body and soul, an unexpected power and beatitude that points the way to a greater life for those of us willing to follow.  It was time to tell the world about our discoveries.



"Where is Shivas Irons?"  The familiar question echoed off the cliffs above me.  "Is he down there?"  Looking up, I saw a man some thirty feet above me on the fairway that borders the beach.  "Do you want a line to the flag?" he shouted.

"It's okay!" I yelled back.  "I can see it!"

"Good luck!" he yelled, disappearing beyond the cliff edge.

The incident was a little odd, but not as strange as some of my meetings with people who wanted to know the whereabouts of Shivas Irons.  It was 1987 now, and they'd been asking for fifteen years.

Where is Shivas Irons?  It was hard to imagine him here.  Though he'd called Pebble Beach one of the world's greatest golf courses, it seemed too glamorous a place for his ascetic, solitude-loving nature.  He belonged in Scotland, in a town like Burningbush that was swept by winds from the North Sea and wrapped in long winter nights. . . .

We'd met there in 1956, played a mind-altering round of golf, enjoyed a memorable supper with some of his friends, searched at midnight for his mysterious teacher, and spent the next day in conversation before I left abruptly.  Later I would realize that my sudden departure was driven in part by fear of the things he had revealed to me, but at the time I told myself that a longer stay would be a diversion.  I was headed for India to study philosophy and practice meditation.  Though Shivas Irons was giving me the very things I sought, I was conditioned to think they couldn't come from a golf professional.  That belief was strengthened at my ashram retreat where golf was held to be a frivolous activity.  I remember telling a friend that my trip to Scotland had an illusory quality induced perhaps by the large quantity of whiskey I'd drunk.  Today, I can see that this shift of attitude permitted a deep relaxation.  My adventures in Burningbush had produced a shock I wasn't prepared for, whereas the slow pace of India provided relief and comfort.  Ironically, the protection from threatening change I found in my contemplative community provided a largely unconscious defense against the transformative consequences of a relationship with Shivas Irons.  I was no longer challenged by memories of the man.  Questions about his teacher faded.  A firebreak against recollections of Burningbush was established in my subconscious mind.

Then in 1962, on a piece of family land on California's Big Sur coast, I started an institute with my college classmate Richard Price.  This enterprise, which joined laypeople and experts in many fields to explore the human potential, was sometimes contradictory to the transformations I'd looked for in India.  In the late 1960s, Big Sur was a gathering place of the counterculture, much of it serving as a campground for uniquely American experiments with Buddhism, yoga, and shamanism heavily flavored with sex and drugs.

In these, the most tumultuous days of our institute, I began to think about the remarkable golf professional I'd met in Scotland.  His glowing presence suggested a balance between the austerity I'd experienced in India and the drunken mysticism now prevalent in Big Sur.  The fire that began in 1956 hadn't been fully extinguished.  It had gone underground, and it flamed up again when I revisited Burningbush in 1970.  Shivas Irons was gone, but I was flooded by memories of our day together.  Recalling our magical golf round and spirited conversations, I marveled at my failure to recognize the extraordinary gifts he had offered me.  It was depressing to think what my life might have been if I'd accepted his invitation to study with him.  I left Burningbush with a sadness that did not lift until I decided to write about my Scottish mentor.  A book, perhaps, would summon his presence and bring me closer to the joyous freedom he embodied.

In 1972, following the publication of Golf in the Kingdom, readers started to tell me about their own extraordinary golf experiences.  To my astonishment, some of their reports called up further memories of Burningbush.  When, for example, a New York lawyer wrote to tell me that from the tee of a four-par hole he'd seen a ball marker the size of a dime on the green some four hundred yards away, I recalled my frightening visual acuity after glimpsing a figure I later took to be Shivas's teacher, Seamus MacDuff.  Recalling the incident, I saw that I had suppressed my new perceptual ability because it threatened to reveal the terrifying nature of the thing I'd seen.  And when a woman correspondent described a round in which her surroundings became transparent, as if they were "God's silken robe," I remembered my similar perception.  Everything had become diaphanous as I played the eighteenth hole at Burningbush, to such an extent that it seemed I could pass through solid objects.  I'd repressed the memory all these years: For fifteen minutes or more, everything around me--the fairways, my body, each blade of grass--had seemed to be nothing more than a radiant pattern.

These restorations of memory were both exhilarating and disturbing.  That I had suppressed, overlooked, or simply forgotten so much made me wonder what else I was blind to.  For several years, I'd been writing a book that involved research into areas of human functioning that were as strange as my experiences in 1956, but this hadn't revealed failures of memory comparable to those I'd experienced in relation to Shivas Irons.  Why had my adventure with him triggered so many of my psychological defenses?  To answer this question, as well as to overcome my lapses of consciousness, I started to record certain striking discoveries related to my day in Burningbush.  By 1987, these had cohered into a pattern which suggested that Shivas Irons was engaged in an experiment with implications far beyond golf.  And like the man on the cliff, more and more people were asking:  "Where is Shivas Irons?"  It was time, I decided, to begin a systematic search for him.  In June of that year, I went back to Scotland looking for leads to his whereabouts, and there met the spirited, skeptical, and adventurous Buck Hannigan.

It was one of those long June days that lovers of Scotland treasure, when Burningbush alternates between sunlight and fog-shrouded mystery.  Though I had been there only twice before, the town seemed deeply familiar.  With its winding streets, cathedral ruins, and stone houses built in centuries past, it cast an immediate spell upon me, and I enjoyed a leisurely walk from the train station reminiscing about my previous visits.  On my way to the inn where I would stay, I stopped at a store recommended by a friend to look for golf memorabilia.  The owner, a lively, sweet-faced lady in her seventies, was disappointed that she didn't have a photograph I wanted of Bernard Darwin as a member of the 1922 Walker Cup team, the first to visit America.  He was her favorite golf writer.  Did I know that he was the grandson of Charles Darwin?

"Yes," I replied.  "Have you read his Links of Eiderdown?"

"Isn't it beautiful!" she said, looking over her horn-rimmed glasses.  "More people should read it.  And do you know The Mystery of Golf by Arnold Haultain?"  When I said that I did, she seemed impressed.  "Do you enjoy philosophy?" she asked.  I said I'd written a book about golf that had some philosophy in it.

"Oh!" she said brightly.  "What's it called?"

"Golf in the Kingdom.  But it was published fifteen years ago.  You wouldn't have heard about it."

"Now Mr. Murphy!" she scolded.  "It's set here in Burningbush.  Of course I've heard about it."  I was flattered, but afraid to ask if she had any copies for sale.  "Have you read it?" I asked.  She said that she had, and I asked if she'd known Shivas Irons.

"No," she sighed.  "I moved here after he left.  What an extraordinary man he must have been.  Was he everything you said he was?"

"As the years go by, he seems even more amazing.  I'm looking for clues to his whereabouts."

"So you think he's still alive?" she asked.

"I'm not sure.  When I was here last, in 1970, no one knew where he was.  He'd be in his late sixties or early seventies now."

"Well," she said, "I might have a lead for you.  A gentleman from Edinburgh, a Mr. Hannigan, comes here for books from Mr. Irons's collection.  I have his address."

Startled, I asked how such books came into the store's possession.

"People have them.  Every now and then we get one.  Each has that special mark."

"What mark?"

"Didn't you see it?  That insignia?  Didn't you describe it in your book?"

"No.  I didn't know his books were marked." I was amazed at


From the Trade Paperback edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Golf in the Kingdom introduced Shivas Irons, the golf pro and philosopher with whom Murphy played a mythic round of golf on Scotland's Burningbush links, a round that profoundly altered his game and vision. Shivas's insights about competition, life, and "true gravity," all instilled in him by his elusive mentor Seamus MacDuff, captured the imaginations and the devoted following of students of the inner game of golf. The Kingdom of Shivas Irons is the enchanting story of Murphy's return to Scotland to investigate reports of further visitations by Shivas Irons and to answer questions about him and MacDuff that have haunted Murphy since his original trip to Burningbush some thirty-one years before. Murphy and his companion, Buck Hannigan, a skeptical physicist fascinated by Shivas's connections to metanormal events, embark on a magical quest for Irons and MacDuff - and their wisdom about golf and human potential.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

One of the pioneers of the human potential movement, Murphy co-founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 and, 10 years later, expressed his beliefs in the bestseller Golf in the Kingdom, which told readers about golf pro and mystic Shivas Irons, with whom Murphy had played a transformative round of golf in 1956. Here, Murphy details his recent (beginning in 1987) search for Irons. The golf pro had introduced Murphy to supernatural practices resulting in amazing golf shots, but Murphy seems to have forgotten most of what he learnedor perhaps he never really understood it. Now he haunts golf courses in Scotland and travels to Moscow to spend a little time with a Sufi shaman, all in hopes of finding Irons. Eventually, he realizes that he must turn his attention inward to learn that the truth, the answer, the possibilities are all there, within him and everyone else. Murphy spins a good yarn and has the ability to inspire readers to want to change their lives, inner and outer. But his brand of self-transformation here, as in his major nonfiction work, The Future of the Body, relies heavily on the potentialities of the body and on whether humans can transcend their ordinary limitations in order to enjoy such powers as traveling instantaneously, appearing and disappearing at will, or becoming a "luminous embodiment" with only the vaguest cloud-like form. His emphasis on superhuman physical powers undermines his talk of heart, soul and spirit; after all, there's no substantial reason to assume that Moses, Jesus, Muhammad or Buddha could have shot par. $200,000 ad/promo; simultaneous BDD audio; author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

In this sequel to Murphy's mystical Golf in the Kingdom (1972), the author returns to Scotland to find out more about his mentor, golfer Shivas Irons, who spouts philosophy in between swings.

AudioFile - Yuri Rasovsky

This book, fiction disguised as memoir, has something for everybody mind fodder for the credulous, high satire for the skeptical, palliative for golfers, Scots travelogue for armchair travelers. Echoing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the bestselling hoaxes of Carlos Castaneda, Michael Murphy seeks nirvana on the golf courses of Scotland. His quest involves a hodgepodge of Eastern mysticism, ersatz Platonic philosophy, spiritualism, white magic, hauntings and ESP. Oh, yes! Golf, too! Murphy admits poking a little fun at duffers, but his mind-expanding passages seem to send-up the whole Esalen human growth potential movement, which he helped found. Is he trying to be funny? Narrator John Hannah takes him at face value. He plays it straight and adeptly in authentic Scottish tones, giving us all the drama and epiphany of Murphy's striving while letting the humor, intentional or otherwise, fall where it may. Y.R. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Ghosts on the golf course! Phantom visitations on the ninth green! Platonism, the paranormal, and psychedelic whiskey at Scotland's most famed but fictional golf course!

Yes, Murphy, golf's greatest mystic, humorist, and founder-director of the Esalen Institute, has at last spawned a sequel to his otherworldly Golf in the Kingdom, which has sold 750,000 copies since 1972. In volume one, Murphy went to the fictitious Burningbush course in Scotland's County Fife ("The Kingdom"), where he had a metaphysical encounter with Shivas Irons, a guru/pro of supernatural perfection whose line of mystical palaver would leave Madame Blavatsky drooling enviously. Since that encounter, many parts of which, Murphy explains, he could not put into volume one because they'd not fully matured and developed (such as Murphy's sighting of Irons's own guru, Seamus McDuff, three years after McDuff's death), Murphy and his buddies have been hyperaware of luminous bodies on the green—paranormals guiding balls through shots only a witch could make. He returns to Scotland once more to seek out Shivas Irons. There, he finds himself well-known, his book read to tatters by the locals, all of whom try to wheedle from him how much of his account is true. Meantime, Murphy falls in with Buck Hannigan, a James Joyce look-alike and theoretical physicist hooked on the paranormal, and together they visit the late Seamus's glowing house and his preposterously difficult seven-hole personal golf course, designed to help raise otherworldly spirits. A visit to Hannigan's mistress, a Russian mystic and channeler, shows the ties between angels and eros, while all comes to a head at the '93 National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. Do they find Shivas? Well, spiritually.

A big hit? Doubt it not. These are the occult dimensions of golf, straight from the Easter bunny.