#182. On Thoughts, Truth, and the Claret Jug

 "He was in such a good mood, and that's important because when he's happy, he's unconscious.  When he gets serious, he starts thinking.  All we really just tried to do was to get him to not think all week, and he managed it really really well."
--Bob Rotella on Darren Clarke's run for the Open Championship's Claret Jug

Those pesky thoughts.  Most of the world thinks we're just stuck with our thoughts.  Nothing to be done.  They're who we are. Sports psychologists like Bob Rotella dig deeper, though.  They tend to go at thoughts in one of two ways: either they want you to think positive thoughts (including images and emotions) or they want you not to think at all.  It's hard to argue with Rotella if Darren Clarke really was so happy he wasn't thinking at Royal St. George's this past week.  I know Clarke made me happy just by continually flashing his infectious grin. Check out the photos in this video.  He was even smiling during his swing!



My favorite spiritual teachers take a different tack on thoughts, though.  They're not much hyped on positive thoughts (better than negative ones but still stuck in the dualistic world of positive-negative, good-bad, etc.) and they're not too keen on directly trying to squelch thoughts. What we resist persists and all that. The consensus among mystics seems to be that we don't really have control over thoughts dropping by, but we do get to choose whether we attach to them or not.  Thoughts come, thoughts go.  If we don't identify with them, they don't really matter.

The Enlightened crowd has another suggestion for dealing with thoughts: Just don't believe them. Adyashanti says that if you want to awaken, "Be silent and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts."  Hmmmm. 

Byron Katie has a program she calls "The Work" to help you give up believing your thoughts.  Take a stressful thought (e.g., I'm a lousy putter.) and apply these four questions and a turn-around to the thought.  By the time you finish, you'll be totally confused how about what kind of a putter you are, and the thought will likely have lost its hold on you.  Here are the questions:
     "1. Is it true?
      2. Do you absolutely know it's true?
      3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
      4. Who would you be without the thought?"

Then once you've subjected the thought to the four questions, Katie says you should "turn around the concept you are questioning, and be sure to find at least three genuine, specific examples of each turnaround."  For example, the obvious turnaround to "I'm a lousy putter" would be "I'm not a lousy putter." Then you'd find three examples of not being a lousy putter.  The idea is not to reject the thought but to shake its veracity at the roots and make you aware of how the thought affects you.

I don't know any golf performance gurus who focus on getting folks to disbelieve their thoughts, but I figure it's worth a try.  Of course, this flies in the face of all the power-of-positive-thinking and affirmation gurus, but not because positive thinking can't have an effect on golf (or anything else). It can; it just doesn't necessarily help you get any closer to Truth with a capital T.  At least according to folks like Katie, Adyashanti, and Eckhart Tolle.

It seems silly to spend all this time working on our golf games just to get better at golf.  We might as well kill two birds with one ball and pursue Truth as well. Unless, of course, you're chasing the Claret Jug.  Then you might want to take the fame and fortune and work on Truth later . . . once the hangover subsides.  Hey, Clarke's another Ulsterman. Comes with the territory. 

Then again, if all we want is to be better golfers, maybe we should just move to Northern Ireland.

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