Chapter 51: Methods’ End

At the end of a long run, I was warming down, jogging slowly, my heart overflowing with such joy that I simply couldn’t refrain from singing aloud:

If you’re seeking freedom, seek it on the mountain,
God’s sunlight on your shoulder, the wind in your hair.
For there’s no one can hold you, boss about or mold you.
Once your heart is free, you’ll be king everywhere!¹

I glanced at my watch and saw that it was time to head back to the gym. Turning around, I discovered that a beautiful, athletic-looking young woman had been running behind me while I sang. She was beaming, her tanned and healthy face split by a lovely smile.

At home later, I was quietly singing an Elvis Presley song while I made dinner, Muss I Denn, from his time in Germany. It’s a German tune, simple and sweet, about a soldier who must leave his sweetheart behind. I was thinking of Elvis’s sweet nature – I remembered reading that he liked to visit the monastery of a great master of yoga, Paramhansa Yogananda, in Los Angeles, and that he would talk, very respectfully, with one of the monks there, a Brother Premamoy.

I then remembered a time when God had answered my call in a deeply loving way. I was driving down Alma Street in Palo Alto, singing a devotional song, and I was remembering what it was like to be seven years old, in the kitchen with my mother while she cooked and told me stories. I remembered the warm feeling of being with Mom, and I was singing to God like that, as a little boy to his Mother. It was the deepest I had ever gone in simple, childlike devotion. It was so open-hearted and real that it would have been embarrassing if anyone had known what I was feeling. But I felt heaven open and God smile Her blessing, in a very feminine, motherly way. For hours afterward, I was in an unusual state – it was a kind of complete naturalness, where I was effortlessly at one with every situation and person, as if we were all part of the same One Thing.

I have to think that God wants me to run that way – to find the deepest, simplest, most natural, guileless part of me. That place in the heart where I can talk to God like a little boy with his mother when he was seven. In some spiritual paths, the ancient words for the Heavenly Father and Divine Mother are the equivalent of our modern “mommy” and “daddy.” Hard to imagine, from our cynical modern perspective, but it seems to be a state that we must reach, if we want to enjoy inner spiritual communion.

I was thinking about this, and wondering if the sports science of the future will be as much about feeling and the heart, as about reason and the mind. I suspect that we’ve entered an age of energy. Nearly all of the major scientific discoveries of the last two centuries have been about energy; and the material achievements of the last century have been based on that new awareness of energy and its laws.

We’ve also, I suspect, entered an age of feeling, where the rigid forms of the materialistic age are gradually dissolving, to be replaced by a spirit of flowing inner energies, in sports and religion. In our daily lives, and as athletes, I think we’re beginning to discover new ways to balance the logical thinking processes of the intellect with the more flowing intelligence of the heart. Even so, in religion, rigid forms are being replaced by practical methods for direct, inner communion with God in the heart.