Golf’s Three Noble Truths by James Ragonnet

The Accidental Golfer

The subtitle of my book – The Fine Art of Playing Awake – could have easily read The Fine Art of Waking Up. Essentially, golf is accidental. If I were an avid and experienced gardener, quilter, chef, auto mechanic, stamp collector, skier or bowler, I would have expressed and applied the same universal truths to a different target audience.

There are core truths and peripheral truths. Core truths, which lie deeply within you, allow you to be more. Peripheral truths, which lie superficially within you, allow you to do more. Admittedly, my book attends to both being and doing. However, remember that the dictionary primarily refers to you as a “human being” – not a “human doing.”

Accordingly, my book teaches golfers and non-golfers alike how to transcend the ordinary – whether it’s ordinary golfing, ordinary gardening, ordinary quilting, or ordinary living. But the extraordinary doesn’t happen all by itself. Nothing happens all by itself. The extraordinary happens when you open the doors of your heart. This may sound sappy, but it’s true: It’s what you bring into your heart – not your head – that makes an ordinary game, garden, quilt or life – an extraordinary one.

What most directly shapes your destiny – is what’s in your heart, not what’s in your head. Medical researchers (Pearsall, THE HEART CODE, 1999) claim that humans are essentially “heart-centered” quantum systems. Your heart’s electro-magnetic volume is 5000 times that of your brain. It may sound strange and silly, but your consciousness isn’t confined to your head. Your central nervous system, autonomic nervous system and electro-magnetic heart center all shape your consciousness, growth and awareness. Do you really feel that your consciousness is localized only in your head? It’s a foolish notion that gurus, mystics and medical researchers dismiss. Whether you golf or garden, you must learn to do so from your three-fold nature – from your head, heart and hands.

All activities — golfing, gardening, quilting, etc. — are essentially a game within a game within a game. An activity isn’t an end in itself. Rather it’s your opportunity to bring joy and meaning to your life. Nor is your life an end in itself. Rather, your life is your opportunity to attain the requisite wisdom and compassion to transcend the earthly.

To understand golf as a game within a game within a game, imagine three Chinese boxes that fit inside one another. Your golfing, gardening or quilting activity is the small box. Your life is the medium box. Your transcendence is the large box. The trick is to fill each box mindfully. How you fill your small and medium box ultimately determines the value of your large box. Everything depends on everything else.

Buddhist Masters teach their students, among other things, how to focus. Pointing his finger at the moon, the Master tells his students to focus on the moon – not on his finger. In this book, my finger points at the moon. Focus on the moon, namely, the core truths – not on my finger, namely golf. Golf is only an accidental and convenient prism that refracts my core truths. I could have chosen other prisms. However, my golf prism was handy.

Let’s suppose that for several decades you avidly golf, garden or quilt. You’d logically expect that your golfing, gardening or quilting skills would keep improving. Right? Well, the fact is that golfers – unlike gardeners and quilters – don’t steadily improve. And that’s exactly what happened to me. The golf seeds I planted three decades ago – despite considerable time and effort spent nurturing them – didn’t grow properly. Nor did my other seeds – the other parts of my life – grow properly.

Human beings are like farmers who plant a variety of seeds. If a farmer plants pumpkin seeds, among many other seeds, what’s the point of his worrying about only his pumpkins and ignoring everything else? That’s what I did. I worried mostly about my golf growth and ignored my human growth.

When I finally woke up, I formulated my three core truths, namely awareness, balance and unity. My book recounts the lessons I used to actualize my total growth – my golf and human growth. If you actualize only partial growth, you’re like a lopsided, asymmetrical and puny weight-lifter or body-builder who develops only his left bicep – and nothing else. My core truths helped me actualize total growth — as a golfer, teacher, writer, consultant, citizen, tax payer, friend, Navy vet, home owner, brother, student, weight lifter, neighbor, literacy volunteer, etc.

The three core truths (i.e. awareness, balance and unity) are the iron strings that resonate throughout the book. The life-lessons, expressed in brief stories and comments, transcend golf. The book’s abiding and universal themes aim to inform and connect people of all cultures, religions, backgrounds, etc.

The book includes the following key themes: attaining peace of mind, seeing life’s big picture, cherishing what you have, paying attention to what’s going on, laughing at yourself, connecting with people and things, learning how to learn and grow, quelling your anger, managing your ego, accessing your joy, walking your own path, reducing your stress, recognizing your flaws to move ahead, finding your mentor, staying in the moment, looking within, learning to excel, settling your mind, operating from your center, employing effortless-effort, asking penetrating questions, dropping your pretensions, etc.

Here’s a brief excerpt, entitled “Navajo Sun, Golf Sun.” If it speaks to your nature – then we’re both standing in the same place.

NAVAJO SUN, GOLF SUN - Excerpt

The Navajo teach their children that a new sun is born each day. It lives for only twenty-four hours. At sunset, when it dies, it will never return again. When Navajo children are old enough to understand this notion, their parents sit with them at dawn and wait for the sun to rise.

At first light, the parents tell their children that the sun has only today to live. To not waste the sun’s precious and sacred rays, the children are told to live this day in a special way. On only this particular day will this particular sun shine down on them. To waste a single precious moment of their day is to dishonor the sun by letting it die before it was ever fully used.

If you view the sun as Navajos do, you won’t waste a single moment when you play golf. Your golf game will become a succession of precious moments. If you become miserable and depressed, you’ll waste the sun shining down on you. Your resentment and disappointment over your score will prevent you from appreciating the hot smell of pines at noon or the fresh green of spring. Remind yourself that you’re never going to have this golf moment again. Give thanks. Nothing is worth more than this moment. Rumi, the thirteenth-century poet, wrote, “There are one hundred ways to kneel and kiss the earth.” Remind yourself that you’re never going to have this golf moment again. Eternity will never give it back.

How can you possibly be upset knowing that these beautiful things all around you are so steady, so simple? The fairways ever growing. The wind ever stirring the branches. The trees ever shading the course. The wildflowers ever sprouting in the rough. The birds ever singing. The water ever sparkling in the sun.

Magnify the obvious. “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “how men would believe and adore!” Your thoughts shape your personality. What you cherish ultimately defines who you are.

You’re totally present with golf when you ask yourself, “Have I ever been this happy before?” When you feel enraptured — fully absorbed in time and place without a hint of ego or judgment — you are in what the ancient Greeks called “kairos.” That’s when time stops. Rumi called that same rapture “the secret sky within our hearts.”

“The Seventh Direction” is a legend passed on by native American storytellers. They describe how the Great Spirit quickly established the six directions of north, south, east, west, above, and below. Then the Great Spirit had to decide where to establish the most important direction, the Seventh Direction, containing power and wisdom. The Great Spirit selected a secret place where humans would never think to look — inside their own hearts! This story illustrates the point that wisdom is not something that you need to create from scratch: it’s something already inside you that you need to discover.

Remember to open your heart. Use each golf day to connect your life passion with your golf passion. The sun — born to shine on only this particular day — will die this evening. Every day is special just as it is. Don’t waste it.