The Psychic Side of Sports

by Michael Murphy, Rhea A. White

Psychic Side of Sports [Paperback]

Genres: Sports, Psychology

227 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1978

About the author

Bestselling author Michael Murphy has been called the father of the human potential movement, one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century American culture. His bestselling book Golf in the Kingdom (1972) inspired the creation of the Shivas Irons Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to finding beauty and discovery through the game of golf, and has recently been adapted into a movie starring Malcolm McDowell (2010). His other books include Jacob Atabet (1977), An End to Ordinary History (1982), In the Zone (1995), and The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (1997). He lives in California.

Reviews

[Scott Gray]

I had never given much thought to athletics as a source of anomalous experience, which is exactly why The Psychic Side of Sports surprised me. Michael Murphy and Rhea A. White collected reports from athletes describing altered perceptions of time and space, unusual communication between teammates, out-of-body experiences, extraordinary bursts of strength or endurance, profound states of unity, and experiences that resemble descriptions found in mystical literature. The familiar idea of being “in the zone” becomes much more interesting when some athletes describe states that seem to extend beyond heightened concentration and flow. Intense physical activity combines absorption, repetitive movement, narrowed attention, physiological arousal, and enormous emotional investment, making sport a fascinating natural laboratory for altered states of consciousness.

The breadth of the material is both the book's strength and the reason I wouldn't give every example equal evidential weight. Many accounts are retrospective, and extraordinary performance can involve time distortion, analgesia, automaticity, altered body awareness, and other effects that psychology and neuroscience can investigate without invoking psi. Yet Murphy and White are interested in cases that seem to push beyond those explanations as well. Telepathic coordination, apparent precognition, anomalous perception, and other psychic experiences raise a different set of questions. I especially appreciated seeing these reports placed alongside mystical traditions and mind-body disciplines. An athlete practicing the same movement thousands of times may enter states of effortless action that have intriguing parallels with meditation and contemplative practice, even if the cultural interpretation is completely different.

What makes this book memorable for me is the suggestion that extraordinary experiences may emerge from conditions people enter for reasons having nothing to do with spirituality. Someone can spend years training concentration, bodily awareness, responsiveness, and the ability to act without conscious deliberation simply because they want to become a better athlete, then unexpectedly encounter something that feels mystical or psychic. The book dates from 1978, so I would love to see many of these observations revisited using contemporary neuroscience, flow research, anomalistic psychology, and modern parapsychological methods. Still, Murphy and White assembled an impressive amount of material and recognized an area of consciousness research that deserves considerably more attention. After reading this, “the zone” seems less like a convenient sports metaphor and more like one point on a much larger spectrum of human experience.

[Dr Goon Taco Supreme]

The word I would use to describe, “The Psychic Side of Sports,” is sloppy.

From start to finish this whole book is a mess. The book has so many glaring typos even I noticed them. I’m no one's editor, so if I notice typos then there has got to be a lot of them and they are major.

I can forgive an occasional typo if the content of what I’m reading is good quality, but this book didn’t know if it was coming or going. It was just a mishmash of crap that came at me from every direction.

First of all, the athletes used as examples in this book were all over the place. There were football players and basketball players just as frequently mentioned as there were yacht racers and ballet dancers.

On page 144, it's stated that firewalking and sword swallowing might be classified as sports. Firewalking and sword swallowing are not sports. I looked it up on Google. Firewalking and sword swallowing are skills.

It seems that any activity that proved the point of the guy who wrote this dross, Michael Murphy, was somehow classified as a sport--and the reporter of the experience was the athlete.

While all these random activities were being proclaimed sports, it’s also true that Murphy couldn't always even stick to claims made by athletes.

There’s a whole unnecessary page of writing devoted to the singer Barbra Streisand and how she has been tormented by a high-pitched sound in her ears all her life. She also sees a lot of colors and textures projected onto white walls.

So what? Who cares? Barbra Streisand is a singer, not an athlete. Streisand never should have even been mentioned in this book. I’m sure Murphy would argue that singing is a sport since it requires a lot of stamina, and you have to breathe deeply and rhythmically while doing it, but that is actual horse sh*t.

He also just quotes some nobody doctor who had a hallucination while driving a boat.

That’s another thing that really chapped my a** about this book, basically, this book is just a string of reports that have been made by "athletes" about experiences they have had that may have been spiritual.

The book jumps all around the spiritual spectrum too–just being sloppy. It goes from Eastern mysticism to Shamanism to Christian saints to New Age hooey. Most of the time the book is just chirping a bunch of nonsense.

Because this book was published in 1978, it’s very unfortunate that it included reference to the bogus psychic Uri Geller.
Uri Geller was a spoon bending psychic who was debunked by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. It is just so embarrassing they made reference to Geller as he is a known fraud, and it makes the book lose credibility.

This book is just a sloppy mess. It compares athletes who play sports that have no common denominator with each other. This guy talks about how mystical golf is because golfers practice a lot of swings after explaining football players can enter mystical spaces because they run a lot.
Golfers don’t run, and football players don't swing.

The book is filled with self-reports of various individuals who were involved in "activity" of some kind, and cherry picks those reports to fit the hypothesis that sports can induce mystical states.

The book then goes on to talk of how actual mystics devote a lot of time to meditation and other spiritual practice, and that’s why they are so much better and more evolved than your average athlete.

So basically, by the time you get through reading this sloppy drivel you find out that athletes would accomplish a lot more mystically if they devoted themselves to spiritual practice, like Lamas and Yogis and such.

As of now, athletes only have random spiritual experiences because they are not training themselves properly to regularly induce mystical states.

This book is so sloppy that I bet you could get 6 monkeys to bang on 6 keyboards and they will produce a work just as disjointed and random.

The final thing about this book that really chapped my a** was just that the self-reports of mystical experiences were not fact checked in any way. We are just supposed to take the reports made at face value and call them evidence of mysticism.

There was even a report made by a football player who had obviously suffered a concussion due to a head injury and it was decided by the writer that the colors he saw after he received a blow to the head were indicative of an enlightened state.

That guy was hit in the head, and he probably had a traumatic brain injury.

This book was just the worst. I don’t recommend anyone read it for any reason.

[RA]

An amazing book, written in '79, about the psychic & psychological connections between the body/brain and movement/"sports."

So many interesting topics are covered by Murphy & White, pioneers in the psychic investigation of sports-related activities:
Mystical Sensations
Altered Perceptions
Extraordinary Feats
Sports & Mysticism
Mind/Body Training
Evolutionary Possibilities.

There are many puzzling & rational explanations of altered reality in movement/sports activities.

As someone who experienced a truly spiritual alteration of time during a basketball game, this made sense.

While this time-frame (for the book) was clearly in an era of mystical exploration, the bibliography is stunning. Many of the concepts are familiar - biofeedback, the placebo effect, martial arts coordination of mind & body, the mental techniques pioneered in East Germany & Russia in areas of sports training. Many of these concepts are commonplace in sports now.

[Daniel]

An exploration of the spiritual and mystical dimensions of athletics. Quite a sincere, beautiful and even romantic book that gives you a clear idea that more--much more--is possible in life and sport than you think. A reader will need a certain level of credulousness to get maximum value out of this book, while a cynical or highly skeptical reader shouldn't bother reading it at all.

This book also offers a *tremendo..[see the rest on my book review site.]