Get Out of Your Own Way – Chapter 3, Part 2.
Chapter 3 – Belief, Or Experience?
We All Work the Same Way
When you understand more clearly how your own mind works, it gives you an insight into the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of others.
The cult of the individual has been encouraged and promoted in society in recent years. We are encouraged to believe that each one of us is unique, different, separate, and that our differences are to be celebrated, but at the same time are responsible for the problems we appear to be facing.
But is this true?
Or is this another belief that isn’t borne out by our experience of life?
Perhaps these differences are more superficial, less deep-rooted than we think.
Spiritually and psychologically, every human being on the planet, and all those who have come before us, have had access to the same fundamental experience.
The content of that experience is unique and different for everyone. But the way it is created, the nature of that experience is universal.
Every human being experiences the world as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations within awareness.
As I describe in detail in my previous books, our perception and experience of reality is created from the inside out.
It is very important to state again here that this is a constant. There are no exceptions. There is no wiggle room. Our thoughts are made real to us via consciousness, and we experience those thoughts and feel the emotions associated with them.
In general, this is simple to understand, at least intellectually, but maybe not so coming down the last couple of holes when everything seems to speed up and spiral out of control.
Even if we realise that our feelings are coming from thought, events seem to give rise to those thoughts. And therefore those events must really be what is causing us to feel the way we feel.
But this isn’t true. Thought is creative, not reactive. Rather than our thinking coming to us from something happening outside, it is here – within consciousness! – creating our perception of the event from moment to moment.
Whatever is happening around us, our perception of that experience is being created and projected via thought. This was a big step forward in my understanding, and it seems to be the same for many of the people I talk to about this.
Let’s quickly recap some of the implications of this fact. What can we stop worrying about now that we know that our thoughts and feelings are generated by thought and consciousness, and not coming from our situation or circumstances?
1. We can stop blaming events and people for how we feel.
If this is the only thing you realise from reading this book, I will consider it a success. To realise deeply that nothing outside of you has the capacity or ability to make you feel something, is hugely empowering. Any feeling or emotion you have arises from a thought in the moment.
This implication immediately and completely takes a whole world of thinking off our minds in terms of why we might be feeling this or that. We can stop exhausting our mental and physical energies trying to fix or manage our circumstances and the environment in order to make ourselves feel better.
Realising this was one of the most liberating moments of my life.
2. We realise that other people have different perceptions of reality created by their thinking.
Golf is an individual sport. But relationships can appear to be a source of stress and pressure if we don’t understand the nature of thought and where our feelings, and those of other people, are coming from.
Any situation is neutral. Our thinking about it is what creates any feelings we have. For example, if I’m watching the Ryder Cup with an American friend, and a European player holes a long putt, my feelings and mood are going to be very different from his.
We have both just watched a neutral event. A small white ball has rolled across some finely mown turf into a hole. My friend and I both have a story running in our heads as to what this event means. For me it’s good, for him, not so good. Our feelings come from our thinking based on our beliefs about who we are, not from the situation being experienced.
And if your experience of the game is influenced by concerns about what other people think about you and your game, a better understanding of the nature of thought might provide some relief from those concerns.
3. We realise that our feelings about something can change in an instant.
When we see that our experience is created from the inside out, we realise that our situation doesn’t need to change in order for our feelings to change. When our thinking flows on, our feelings will too.
Most of us golfers have had the experience of our golf swing feeling great one minute and awful the next, and vice versa. In truth, our golf swings don’t change very much once we have been playing a while, but the feeling of the swing can change dramatically in a short space of time. This is down to our thinking.
For a good player, what they think about their swing is more important than the swing itself. We all know good players with somewhat unconventional swings who couldn’t care less what they look like or what other people think of them.
We probably also know golfers who swing the club superbly, but who are always complaining and finding fault with what they do. Many great players have finally broken through, however, not from of a swing change but because of a subsiding of their insecure thinking leading to a change in how they felt.
As should become evident from many ideas in this book, there are far wider and more significant implications of understanding more clearly how your mind works.
When you realise that you are sharing a single paradigm of awareness with every human being on the planet, you immediately fall out of insecure personal thinking and feel that connection to the rest of humanity and the universal whole.
We have all experienced this at some point but almost certainly mistook the feeling as coming from the person or people you were with.
What you are actually feeling is the dissolution of the ego, the separate, thought-created idea of who you are, and with it goes any feelings of insecurity.
You feel connected, as one.
Because you are.
If Something Is True, It’s Always True
Many golfers I talk to have a belief that feelings of stress or pressure can be caused by an outside circumstance, such as playing from the first tee, having a scorecard in your pocket, or coming down the last few holes of a tournament in contention or with a good score going.
When asked to challenge this belief with their own direct experience, they realise that they don’t feel that way every time they are in that situation. Therefore, there cannot be a causal relationship between the situation and how they are feeling
It might happen some of the time, or even most of the time, but correlation does not imply causation.
If something is true – if it’s a fundamental law – it must be true all the time. And it must be true for everyone.
If a golfer sometimes feels nervous on the first tee and other times feels OK, the feeling cannot be coming from the situation of hitting the first shot of the round.
Therefore, the cause of the feeling of anxiety must be something else.
When you see the truth in this, experience overrules belief. That belief can be let go. This allows us to move forward. It moves us closer to truth.
When we expose our beliefs to the bright light of our direct experience, we uncover the truth – about ourselves, about the nature of our own experience, and about the reality of the universe we are part of – undeniably so.
The True Nature of Our Experience
All that we know, all that we could ever really know, is experience.
Our direct experience is the only field of research available for our enquiries into the truth about the game of golf, and about ourselves.
If something exists outside awareness, outside of consciousness, we can have no knowledge of it.
Therefore, we cannot say for sure it exists.
It isn’t an experience.
We can have a belief about it, but we can’t know it as truth.
Have you ever experienced anything outside your experience, outside of awareness?
In order to know something you weren’t aware of, something would need to be aware of the fact you weren’t aware of it.
So, you can’t even be unaware without being aware of it.
Awareness is the primary element of our experience, and as such, understanding the nature of awareness, or consciousness, is the most important knowledge we can ever have.
It is the knowledge that underpins our knowledge of everything else.
It is the window through which everything else in our lives is viewed
It is the only thing a human being can know for certain. It is the only thing we know to be true.
This is the constant theme running through the chapters that follow.
You would be right to say that the nature of awareness is the starting point if we really want to understand golf, life, relationships, and everything else.
On every page of the book, the following question will be implicit in the words you read:
What do you trust – your beliefs, or your experience brought to you via awareness?
Or put another way:
Who are you? Is it who you think you are?
By examining these questions in the contexts of creativity, confidence, consistency, concentration, and composure, you will move closer to the truth about how your experience of golf and life really works.
The closer we get to understanding the true nature of awareness, of consciousness, the better we understand our experience, and the better we understand our reasons for playing the game, and our feelings associated with it.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore a question I doubt many golfers have pondered:
What do you believe about the fundamental nature of the world in which we live and in which the game we love takes place?