Get a Free Golden Swing Thing

I have decided to give away 12 Golden Swing Things.

The product featured below is called The Golden Swing Thing TM. There are only 50 to 60 models of the product as depicted below. The original lot of Swing Things had insufficient Centre connections. So I had some of these custom modified at great expense in order to achieve the level of quality I expected out of myself. Each of the 12 will come with solid brass center pieces, a stainless steel laser engraved center ring, a leather tether, a hitting ball, laser engraved wood turnings, and a carrying case. Each custom Swing Thing balances on Centre. Every component of the product was made in the USA. I have a strong commitment to quality.

When I first produced this quality product, my intent was to peg the price of this product to the price of gold. It is after all "The Golden Swing Thing." I thought it was easily worth one fifth the price of gold. My original target price for this product was around 80 bucks. That was when gold was trading at $400 ... With the price of gold around $1350, the question begs. Is this product worth $270 now? Who knows. All I know is that these units are rare ... maybe they will be a collectible item long after I'm dead and gone. Hell! ... I even torched a bunch of these. I cut up and burned up many of the ones that didn't meet my standard of quality.

So I'm giving away twelve of these things. What's the catch? All I ask is that you become a wholesale distributor in my card network. As an added bonus, I will also include the Swingpointer TM in the free package for the first 12 people. Why did I join this network? Click Here for my answer.

The Final Obama Rally Before The November Election

I infiltrated this rally with another Tea Party favorable acquaintance. I didn't make an ass out of myself ... I'm above that. Here is a link to the full post on fishypeech.

On the way to the rally I was walking by Carl Monday of Action19 news. His mike was down and he was kind of perusing the crowd. I walked by with my "enough" sign and was showing a good bit of vigor. He came up to me, with the camera rolling, and started to interview me. He asked, "What do you think of the fact that when Obama came to Cleveland during his campaign, he racked up $40,000.00 in extra security costs to the city of Cleveland and has yet to reimburse the city." I said something like "that's very typical" .... "what about flying his entourage all over the world, renting out every room in the Taj Mahal hotel ... vacation after vacation ... constantly golfing! ... and what about golf? ... I've never seen the guy swing ... what is he? Kim Jong Il? ... shows us your scorecard Obama!" OK I'll admit, I went a bit off the rails.there. There is video out there of Obama swinging the club. But my point was this: He is exhibiting every telltale sign of an elitist authoritarian. At least Clinton admitted that he was a perpetual stroke shaver. Obama protects his personal image like a thin skinned dictator. The golf point is an example of just one of many manifestations of the elitist attitude. With the city of Cleveland, it is the same thing. It's as if Obama is saying, "The city of Cleveland should be honored that I am gracing it with my presence. Someone else will pick up the tab."

I see Obama as a mini Chavez. I was a bit fired up when I read that Chavez wants to confiscate golf courses in Venezuela and turn them into (so-called) better use. Sure Chavez, just destroy the game of golf like the Taliban destroys ancient Buddhist statues in Afganistan. What a tool! Hey folks ... Chavez is the model! Do we want to be Venezuela? Do we want to be France right now? I don't think so.

Fishyspeech link

How stupid do you think I Am?

The Golf Thread

Below is an expanded response to a thread in the Advanced Ball Striking forum. The thread starts by referring to this article.

Here is a link to the original thread.

We can all agree that the game as it is set up presupposes the man vs, nature battle. This is the nature of the game.

When you slip into that nascent freedom which emerges from ease and trust, formless beyond intention, the pure shot expresses itself. Then you look at this tree and see a it in a unique way. You assess the fractal beauty. The tree takes on the essence of a beautiful form before the mind can assign a title or a name to the object. In fact, it could be called an altered state. This is the state of mind that is known as the Uncarved Block. Normally when I see a tree, it's just a tree. But in the altered state of pure swinging, I see a different thing. For example: Observe the tree pictured above. It's just a tree, on a street, in a yard. When in a zone state, I see a giant neural brain with tentacles of wooden neurons. My point: It is impossible to ignore the aesthetic aspects of the game because the game of golf is itself embedded within the natural world. So I don't see the golf swing so much as battling nature. The battle is already established when one commences to cut out from groves of trees and rolling landscapes a course of play. Instead of hitting a stone into a rabbit hole with a Shepard's crooked staff, we hit a manufactured ball into a standardized hole with a manufactured club. The course is thus a manufactured landscape drawn from a natural canvas. Man vs. Nature is therefore defined. I believe we must become part of nature if we are to master the game ... and ourselves. After all, we already are part of it. Why should we resist?

We learn from nature when we become it ... when we absorb it. However, in the everyday state of mind, our consciousness causes us to analyze and come up with concepts and explanations. We come up with things like the Golf Machine and all manner of method to take us to the Holy Grail. I believe that the original intent of this thread was to explain the appearance of the golden spiral in strobe photography of pure golf swings. My contention is that when the endpoint of the sensuous sphere has a perfect reciprocal relationship with the True Centre, the spiral expresses itself. If you peruse the goldengolf website you will find that I call this final point the "final metacenter." We cannot cause this relationship be correct. We can only allow it to be correct. The nature of the motion creates the form. We can only allow it to work through us. A pure motion will then work through a variety of methods. Nearly any method will work (at least temporarily) so long as there is trust and one can pump through a pure trustful motion. There are people that use the "Natural Golf" method (a Moe Norman inspiration), the "Stack and Tilt," and the "Peak Performance" method. You have "Gravity Golf" and a million others. I like to tout goldengolf.com as the method of no method.

When speaking of a good player, Sir Walter Simpson says, "... he plays well, because his style is a natural product of a single-minded concentration on hitting clean. The duffer got his swing in another way, namely, by mimicry. The copy is fairly good, but not quite exact. The hands are Esau's, but not the club, which, being flat, compels him to add some movements not indulged in by his master." He then goes on to say, "The one thinks of hitting, the other about his manner of threatening to do so." In an earlier passage Simpson says, "Style, in other words, is not nearly of so much importance as accurate hitting." His point is that the development of a style can never eclipse the entrance of the individual into a zone state, whereupon the ball is seen pristine and the action of smiting commences. Seamus Macduff, the visionary golfer in Golf In The Kingdom, references the same action as occurring when the seven veils of consciousness have been removed. This is the mystical, and dare I say, spiritual side of the game.

If you recall, Seamus Macduff had a fascination with the concept of "True Gravity." I firmly believe that the golden mean and true gravity are connected. At goldengolf.com I lay out how the golden spiral bounces back and forth (at 90 degree intervals) on either side of the true value of phi by obeying Newton's second law of motion. ... the inverse square law. This layout of the Fibonacci sequence and the manner of its deviation is not meant to show some practical way to apply this perception to the golf swing. This is only done to show that the golden spiral has a connection to "True Gravity" and that the spiral is a significant force in the self correcting action of nature. It refines itself more and more as it grows and grows. This explains why the spiral is so prevalent in nature over grand scales ... from the spiral arm of a galaxy all the way down to the spiral action of our own DNA.

There are many pearls of wisdom in The Art of Golf. "Imitating one's own style is only less bad than copying a neighbor's." My favorite, of course, is this one, "Either may go astray, or either may discover the golden mean (emphasis mine) before becoming set in the tricks they have excogitated." I believe Simpson is expressing the opinion that says, "when we enter into a true state of leisure, encompassed by a truly playful state of mind, all of our intent can be directed at smiting the ball. We have then discovered the golden mean. We don't create the motion ... we tap into a motion that already exists. We don't create the motion ... the motion creates us!

Further, I believe the whole discussion of swinging vs. hitting is just a semantic distraction. So long as there is "slogging" and "smiting" all is well. Sir Walter Simpson put it this way, "...and if the beginner must have advice, let him consult a really first-class player, who will probably tell him he knows nothing about grips, or elbows, or following, and that all he has to do is to stand firm and smite hard." So these words, beyond reminding me that I am far from a first-class player, points to the inconsequential nature of specific forms. The pure motion, working through any form, will edify it and correct it through a real time intuitive process. This is the meaning of Simpson's words.

When we are swinging from a pure initial condition, there is harmony and ease. When we tweak our initial state with the zygote of a formless thought, there is disharmony and struggle. When I speak of initial conditions, I am specifically referencing chaos theory and the propensity of golfers to press through the entropy barrier. This is why mastery in golf is so fleeting. Slight changes in our emotional or mental substrates can result in wildness and big numbers ... the dreaded "disaster hole." This is why the bell curve in golf scores remains. Despite all the advances in technology, breaking 100, breaking 90, and breaking 80, still remain significant barriers for most players.

I believe one of these zygotes of thought revolve around the insistence on validity of the Vardon grip. Part of the answer to dismantling the tension of thought requires a dismantling of the Vardon grip. This has to do with the telephone game advice I indirectly gave to Michael Allen the week before he won at Canterbury. He has been a pretty hot player on both the Senior and PGA Tours ever since. I believe he has two runner ups in Majors this year on the senior circuit.

I see Michael Allen is on top of his game today out in San Fransisco. He just shot a 61 out there today for a tournament record. I noticed that he has switched to the split grip putter. I am not aware of when he made the switch. But based on what I passed on to Mr. Allen through Stephanie (his caddy's girlfriend), this putter change completely makes sense.I myself may move in that direction.

I refer to my advice to him, back in 2009, as The Jelly Doughnut Insight. He went on to win the Senior PGA that weekend. Stephanie and Michael introduced me to Mr. Allen, and I got to shake his hand at the practice round and plug the goldengolf site to him. I like to keep alive the idea that I somehow influenced his play. I don't know. What I do know is ... that he bought his caddy Michael a brand new Harley after he won the Senior PGA ... Me? ... I got nothing! ... It's OK ... I'm not bitter. ;~)

The Jelly Doughnut Insight deconstructs Vardon and puts it back together in a reasonable manner. Only upon reconstruction is there hope for a revelation in the game.

I know that I subject myself to criticism for bringing up Vardon. To do so enters into a field of speculation that Sir Walter Simpson himself derided. I could criticize myself for falling into the belief that the Stack and Tilt was the answer ... or that any particular aspect of form was important. It just so happened that by attending to this Stack and Tilt form on a particular day, one of the veils of consciousness was lifted for me. I was able to see the ball pure for a window of time. The eureka moment was soon replaced by the disappointment I encountered upon the attempt to replicate that form. Hence the veil was immediately replaced. Simpson addresses these issues in chapter 4 when he says,  "Even minor sensations, too earnestly attended to, may, however, do a great deal of harm. When, by patiently keeping his attention fixed on hitting, the golfer has got into his best driving form, he is tempted to luxuriate in the sweet balls; to note how he gets his shoulders into the work; or how he feels like a whipcord, from the point of his toe to the head of his club; and to determine that in the future these joys shall be repeated every shot. Fool!"

So long as we golfers luxuriate on the physical effects of pure motion, we are doomed to struggle. We are prone to invent opinions on the nature of mechanics and delusional ideas as to what is considered good form. We can never forget that golf remains as: Einstein space in a Van Gogh sky.

Now I'm Really Ticked

Chavez wants to seize golf courses in Venezuela

Time Wave

I think of it as accessing a time wave ... upon accessing it the mind loses perception of time. Suddenly you find yourself swept up in it. You become time itself ... inseparable from the object. This is sort of what I mean when I say that the club handle glues itself to the hands. There is no time for manipulation of form through time. The form, for the fact that the time wave has been accessed, becomes self correcting. The intuition of intent becomes the only mechanic.

The Real Answer in Golf

Sometimes (I should really say always) the answer is just to hold the club so lightly, that if you held it any more lightly, it would fall from your hands ... and keep it that way throughout the swing ... There has to be trust that we are not so much holding the club as we are allowing the club to become glued to our hands through the nature of the waning motion ... ahhh! magic!

The struggle of method entices the hands to inject themselves. The thumb on the cymbal represents the hands in the swing. Can we dance the hands so lightly on the cymbal that the Centre does not become deadened. This kind of thought is the culmination of a long struggle for me personally in my own game. Attempting to let the hands go and really letting the hands go are two different things. One is a contemplation that innervates the hands, the other is a sense of trust that develops as you attempt to hold the club more lightly, and more lightly, and more lightly. Suddenly the pure view of the ball ... commence movement. swish!

Now putting ... that's been a true thorn lately. But I think the same line of reasoning applies.

My Post to an Instruction Blog

Go here to see context of this reply.

I first noticed the chambered nautilus in the golf swing way back in the 1980's. A strobe photo appeared on a golf instruction book that I was perusing. I cannot recall the title of the book right now. If anyone out there remembers, that would be great. It wasn't until reading Robert Prechter's book, The Elliot Wave Theory that I came to piece together a golf theory based on this aesthetic constant.

I believe that when the mind is completely clear, absent of any thought (be it a thought in a larval state or a thought as a full blown conceptual butterfly) ... free of all this ... then and only then can trust persist throughout the movement ... then and only then can the ball be seen in a pristine primordial state ... then and only then will the nautilus appear in the swing. All physical manipulations are worthwhile only in the context of the trust in which the tinkering occurs. Pure shots can be had in the stack and tilt context. Pure shots can be had in the conventional swing context. Pure shots can be had in the Moe Norman context. Nearly any manner of configuration can be successful if there is absolute trust in the motion as it is expressed.

A while back I had an extraordinary experience playing a round (or should I say "playing around") with the stack and tilt method. BTW I have never read The Golfing Machine, but I believe that the idea of the Stack and Tilt is derived from this material. Subsequently, I deluded my sentient self into believing that there was something to it. But here's the thing. It was not that the method was preferable to any other. It was simply that (for some reason) I fell into a spell of trust which, in that instance, allowed a pure expression of the motion to be borne out. Application of the method itself is not the answer. Finding a sense of trust that is not dependent on method is the answer. This is a high order primary key. Method and it's distractions is like putting your thumb somewhere on the flat plane of a ringing cymbal. The cymbal continues to vibrate outside of the place where you touch it ... but everything goes dead inside of it. The tension of consciousness is just like the thumb ... deadening the possibility of the pure strike. The key is to ring the cymbal without touching it ... the question is how we become the ringing cymbal from the Centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the Centre ... thus, facilitating a reciprocation and harmonization of interacting waves ... like the seeds of a sunflower. So I believe that the golden spiral is more than just observable ... it is experiential. In other words, when you know inside that you have "pured" it and the ball is sailing straight to the pin, a strobe photo of that particular swing would reveal a nautilus property.

I shudder to see what a strobe photo would look like if it were taken during the commencement of a shank or a topped shot. If the strobe picture were taken of an inexperienced golfer, twisted into knots, attempting to strike the ball, I don't believe the nautilus strobe effect would manifest itself. I believe you would still see a spiral ... but it would be truncated or distended ...evidence of an impure expression.

The bottom line is that we as golfers cannot create the golden swing we can only surrender to it and trust that it will create itself ... if we just allow it to happen! Therein lies the paradox of the game.

Taylor Spalding

www.goldengolf.com

About Tiger

Although I have been writing about Tiger for nearly twenty years, I have refrained from commenting in writing on the whole Tiger situation.  Much of the Tiger commentary on goldengolf.com was made between 1990 and 2004. This was a time when the world experienced an paradigm shift in the nature of the game. Tiger took golf to level that even experienced tour veterans rarely enjoyed. During the years of Tiger's coming up, I was fascinated that he seemed to embody the militaristic discipline of his Vietnam veteran father, and the humble influence of his Buddhist mother. He seemed to me to be the perfect example of sentient detachment. At the time, I believed that the more we can detach from sentient entanglement the better we could step into the moment and hit pure golf shots. I still believe this. However, now I have a different perspective. It is not the state of your moral condition that determines the level of your play; it is your ability to detach from the implications of your off course actions, the conflicting thoughts that accompany those actions, and the hints of doubt that such thoughts might evoke. In a way, it's a disappointment. For once upon a time I thought that by reducing moral conflicts, one would reduce the need for such detachment. Such is not the case.

In respect to moral turpitude, golf may in fact may be a safe harbor ... a place where one can escape from the pernicious thoughts of personal shortcomings and failings. This may explain why Tiger is on his best start ever in the Masters.

I think the conflict for Tiger is not the fact of his infidelity, but his attempt to have a foot in both worlds.




Obviously he wanted to have children in world where a wealthy man can be afforded a stable of quality concubines. I know this sounds sexist ... too bad. Here is a guy in the prime of his life, boyishly handsome, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. Finding girls that want to shag you won't be a problem.

If he wanted to have both worlds, he should have just payed someone to bear his children and put all the cards on the table. He should have said to the future mother of his children, "Look, here's one hundred million dollars to have my children. I'll be the dad, but don't try to control my behavior. I am not a monogamous man. I have a mountain of cash and there are hundreds of supermodel women that want to sleep with me. Don't expect me to ever be faithful."

He may have received criticism from the press and social rejection. But he wouldn't have to be trying to work payoff deals with his paramours through a staff of attorneys.

John Daly: The Five Stages of Grief

You can't help but root for John Daly. I have been catching "Being John Daley" on The Golf Channel lately. The narrator speaks of the five stages of grief.

The Five Stages of Grief:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Right now America is in the anger stage. If we move to bargaining .... were toast. If America bargains with the atrocity unfolding before us, we truly begin to accept that we are sheep.

I apologize for injecting politics into all facets of this blog project ... but right now this is more important than golf. I need to find fellow patriot golfers.