Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute and author of Golf in the Kingdom (1972) and its sequel The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (1997). In this fascinating interview with Michael Toms, he discusses sport as a vehicle for transcendence. Golf, for instance, with its mixture of solitude and intense focus, creates in some people a sensory deprivation that is conducive to mystical epiphanies. Or as Murphy puts it, "The more I study it, the more I come to deeply love and admire athletic excellence and beauty. It is one of the great manifestations of the divine."

This lifelong student of what he calls "metanormality" also discusses the phantom figures that Charles Lindbergh claimed accompanied him on his historical 1927 flight, Sri Aurobindo's ideas on the evolutionary unfolding of the universe, and Esalen's upcoming emphasis on examining the research on survival beyond the body. Murphy is a consistently interesting explorer of the mystical side of life.