An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 1)

[AshvinP]

I am sharing an essay here that I just posted on Substack. Due to ongoing issues with my sprained wrist, I felt it was too cumbersome to transfer the whole thing here with all the necessary formatting and so on. Therefore, I will simply provide the link for anyone interested in checking it out, along with a brief quote. It is a much more rudimentary version of what Cleric has been illustrating through his essays, and hopefully will be experienced as complementary to those for anyone following both.

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"Even in the allurements of playing, the adepts have known how to introduce the great cosmic laws, so that, even in play, people have at least a smack of wisdom." -Rudolf Steiner


Life as a Metaphor for Intuitive Navigation

In this essay, we are using Chess to stand in for any life activity in which we intelligently navigate toward specific goal states based on our intuition, which is shaped by past experiences and their lawful patterns. In modern times, this intuitive navigation applies to virtually all aspects of life except our period of sleep. Even if we are immersed in passive entertainment, as soon as we begin thinking about its meaning, like what may happen to our favorite character in a movie, we are once again intuitively navigating toward an imaginative goal state. This navigatory experience is something we rarely reflect upon in our time, and instead, we often take it for granted as an unquestioned capacity. Yet that is a recipe for disaster. It is no exaggeration to say that all of our modern confusions and predicaments, all our pathological states of thinking and being, are born out of our lack of conscious orientation to the intuitive navigation we continuously use to pursue our goals, as individuals and collectives.

For animal consciousness, the navigation unfolds automatically from inborn instinct. Shortly after birth, the animal seamlessly develops an orientation to what is edible and inedible, what is safe and unsafe, how to build a shelter, what to do in a storm, where to migrate as the seasons change, how to sacrifice itself for the benefit of its young, and so on. The wasp soul, for example, ‘invented’ paper to construct its nest long before humans.1 Modern human souls, on the other hand, must effortfully cultivate their navigation skills across many domains of life, from maintaining physical health to pursuing philosophical and scientific inquiries to carrying out philanthropic deeds. What human can draw the knowledge of how to make paper directly out of their physical organism shortly after birth, without any learning curve? The human soul, in this way, begins its life as a much more helpless and dependent creature, and can sometimes remain that way if not imbued with proper socialization and a healthy thinking capacity.

The palette of potential experience that can be navigated by the animal, for that same reason, is fundamentally constrained by its instincts. The latter leads the animal soul into the same experiential pathways centered around myopic interests, again and again. Since many of the skills that the animal draws directly out of its physical organism must be intuitively cultivated by the human, a certain leeway is opened up for the human imagination. The latter becomes more plastic and pliable, capable of adapting itself to novel circumstances and developing corresponding novel intuitions of its place within the experiential flow. The human imagination is no longer so tightly bound to what the senses, urges, and passions dictate for its flow. Thus, there is no instinctual ceiling on what experiential pathways can be navigated. In that sense, we have been given the unique responsibility of navigating our individualized experiential flow with a modicum of intention, conscious awareness, and corresponding intuition that can open into limitless possibilities for engaging with experience.

An occult education is the process of unveiling the deeper dynamics that make this navigation of the experiential flow possible, becoming more sensitive to those dynamics, and gradually participating in their unfoldment, creatively and ethically. This path of education is quite orthogonal to what we normally experience as ‘acquiring knowledge’, i.e., the accumulation and clever arrangement of mental pictures that point to a reality ‘out there’ or ‘back then’. The reality we investigate is certainly beyond our personal consciousness at any given time, and it is understood as a shared experiential space that can be objectively observed and experimented with, but this investigation doesn’t leave our personal navigating perspective out of its purview, in the blind spot. In fact, we become more and more intimately familiar with that perspective, the way that it takes shape and is steered by various influences through vectors of experience. Our flow of philosophizing mental pictures is experienced as one such vector, an inseparable ‘frequency band’ of the wider flow, which we aim to investigate more and more consciously.

[Federica]

Thank you for sharing this essay, Ashvin. It feels indeed complementary to the Game Loop angle, with its thought-provoking yet approachable idea of continuity between flows through the workings of intuition.

Yet the primary game is still unfolding, even if our gaze has been temporarily restricted. The pieces in the sub-game, if traced widely and far back enough, still testify to that native game flow, of which their current positions and movements are like a narrow aperture. A metaphor, in this deeper sense, acts as a cognitive instrument by which the soul can ‘zoom out’ its aperture back into the wider flow and regain intuitive sensitivity to the full spectrum of navigatory experience by leveraging and retracing (rather than dissolving) the restricted projections in its decomposed imaginative flow. The ‘positions and movements’ of the phenomenal content in the imaginative sub-flow - sensations, thoughts, memories, feelings, impulses - can once again testify to our native experience of the primary game flow, by reminding us of what the latter feels like. It can help bring back into focus some lucid sense of the Alpha and Omega points along which the micromanaged partial transformations have been stretched.

Notice how the metaphorical retracing only works if the sub-flow dynamics aren't considered a literal representation of the primary game flow, such that we can simply derive the latter by extrapolating the former to a larger scale. That would be like observing how pawns seem to disappear from the board in one direction and queens enter from another direction, and concluding the primary game flow must follow similar rules of disappearing, materializing, and teleporting pieces, only at a larger scale.

The chessboard-section nested metaphor works very effectively as an image of the fragmented flow. It’s a literal picture within the picture, and at the same time it escapes its spatial character, by elucidating the link between flow fragmentation and myopic misunderstanding of its lawfulness. I also find that presenting “occult” as the deeper lawfulness that accommodates human open-ended navigation of the experiential flow, sets a healthy precedent for the long-due demystification of “occult”. In general, the ‘vibe’ of this series seems to be one of surprisingly viable simplification of the approach to the complexity of the inner dynamics, like reducing equations down to their cleanest form that still preserves all the meaningful relations. Looking forward to the next part!

PS: Hope your wrist will heal soon, it’s been a long time since you mentioned that!