WE FIRST HEARD about Ken Wilber through Michael Murphy. He was a young philosopher and scholar who had hung out at Esalen for a while before moving to Colorado. Wilber ran a website that was kind of an underground hangout. You wouldn’t have known about it unless someone told you. He conducted interviews called “Ken Wilber Dialogues” with artists, writers, and thinkers. We downloaded them, listened to some of them, and were totally inspired.
Wilber had been a pre-med student at Duke University in the late 1960s before he became interested in Eastern thought and history. He also took deep dives into psychology, history, culture, physics, you name it. After two years of college, he dropped out, as he said, “to sit in a room by myself and stare at a wall for five years.”
I read Wilber’s book called The Theory of Everything. He’s an amazing synthesizer of the world’s most important ideas, histories, and philosophies. He’s fluent in science, art, and ethics, as well as physics, biology, aesthetics, and sociology. He reflects on politics, medicine, business, and even sports. Reading Wilber’s book helped me look at the bigger picture. If Ken Wilber could connect the dots between just about everything that’s ever happened in the history of the world, and help point us in a positive direction, how might we try to do the same in our world of golf?
Wilber says it doesn’t make sense to point fingers at who is right and who is wrong. Instead, he suggests we look at the great things that people have done through history, look at the common denominators of good, and see how we can integrate all the best ideas to create something functional that helps people.
Wilber came up with a concept he calls Integral Theory, in which all human knowledge and experience are placed in a four-quadrant grid. The quadrants are: Individual-Interior (our thoughts, feelings, values, motivations, and state of consciousness); Individual-Exterior (our physical bodies, biology, neurology, and biomechanics); Collective-Interior (the “we” perspective, including values, language, mutual understanding, and relationships); and Collective-Exterior (the “it” perspective—social rules, environment, and people). The quadrants are part of a bigger, more holistic system with the acronym AQAL: All quadrants, all states, all lines, all levels, and all types of human experience.
Everything human beings do, including golf, can be seen through the frame of these quadrants. It was especially interesting to us because golf is such a first-person experience. No one can swing the club for you. No one can commit to decisions for you. No one can quell the nerves you feel standing over an important shot. That’s why awareness is so critical. Unless you have a good understanding of yourself and your physical, mental, and emotional states, you’re not going to be able to fully manage or access your capabilities. What intrigued us was how Wilber’s framework could be relevant for golfers.
When Lynn and I get interested in something, we apply it first to our own lives and golf games to see how it works. We read another of Wilber’s books, Integral Life Practice, which made his system more applicable. Wilber’s model includes what he calls “Lines and Levels of Development.” Everyone has core capabilities, including cognitive, physical, and emotional, which we can choose to develop over our lifetimes. How much we choose to develop is up to us.
As human beings, we have an exterior world and an interior world. If you’re going to be great at something, you need to have good access to both. When you apply this filter to golf, you see that a great deal of effort has been expended on developing the exterior of the individual and the game: fitness, technique, and equipment. Golfers’ technical skills are fairly advanced, relatively speaking, because that’s where they’ve put most of their energy. At VISION54, we’re trying to add the interior piece for those who are interested. We believe that people can become better, more well-rounded golfers if they have a baseline of both exterior and interior skills.
I wanted to see how I could beef up my own integral life practices. Basically, if we agree that life is multidimensional, and that golf is multidimensional, I can choose to focus on a number of things: developing my physical body, developing aspects of my mind, working on how I react emotionally, and how I interact with others, even improving my willpower, ethics, and spiritual life. All of these will help me become a better golfer (and person). The trick is to not get stuck thinking that if I devote myself to one or two things—fitness and technique, for example—I will reach my full potential. Each of us needs to figure out which particular human skills will most strengthen our games. Then we need to practice them.
I made a multidimensional plan. I worked out daily on my fitness; then I read a book for 30 minutes in an area that would broaden my thinking. I meditated twice a day, and did a few extra minutes of “feeling” gratitude. If I had the time, I’d take a hike and experience being in nature. The point is to develop integral habits in life that keep your body, mind, emotions, and spirit awake. If you apply the system to golf, it might mean that I would check my posture or ball position regularly, but also practice meditation and focus exercises to improve my ability to stay in the present in my Play Box. If I had time, I would do the practices for longer durations. If I was busy, I’d do some of them for 10 minutes, or five minutes—even one minute, if necessary.
I practice these things today. It’s important to keep them up. The mistake some of our golfers make is when they start to work on inner skills and find themselves playing better, but after some time, they think they’ve done enough—and so they fall back to working only on their technique. Or they think because they’ve learned a few inner skills, their work stops there. We need to be both flexible and disciplined in creating and sustaining new habits. The point is that these skills are foundational—keep practicing them!
Wilber (and Michael Murphy) believe that only an integral approach to the body, mind, emotions, heart, and spirit can truly create access to your full capacities, and thus the “flow” or “zone” or peak-performance state. Wilber says these performance states are the equivalent of altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness and have parallels in the world’s great meditative and contemplative systems. In short, spiritual experiences can occur in sports.
Most of our VISION54 skills are human skills aimed at drawing out the interior capacities of the individual. Wilber’s ideas helped us come up with our own VISION54 acronym for the elements we feel are important to how we play golf: PTMESS stands for Physical, Technical, Mental, Emotional, Social, and Spirit of the Game.
One particular Wilber quote continues to resonate with us on and off the course, because it’s truly what we believe: “Every area of life is a place to practice and to develop as human beings.”