“There must have been a time when men were demigods, or they could not have invented Chess.” - Gustav Schenk
Chess Incepts as a Sacred Rite
We previously explored how our seemingly ‘private’ imaginative rehearsal space took shape through perforations in the encompassing instinctive orientation of our ancestors. An ‘ontogenetic’ echo of this collective ‘phylogenetic’ process also unfolds in our individual development from conception to childhood as our instinctive orientation is perforated and our living imagination is turned to intellectual stones by which we rehearse for the primary flow. In this context of perforated orientation, the ancient iterations of games like Chess emerged. They were fashioned to help ‘caulk the gaps’ of the perforated flow, so to speak, by acting as symbolic reminders of the intuition that had been blotted out. These rites helped the soul, through the exercise of its blossoming human intelligence, once again feel how it navigates the primary flow and seeks to expand its intuitive orientation; a navigatory experience which had now been veiled in confused dream imagery and the unconsciousness of sleep. Like the Sphinx, and many other religious symbols and practices, such games posed to man the riddle of what he is in his deeper nature and invited him to begin participating in its unriddling.
Just as the adult environment provides the human infant with emotional and linguistic patterns to imitate, the wise ancient initiates provided their various communities with archetypal spiritual patterns to imitate. The aim of this occult education was to mitigate the ‘anterograde amnesia’ that was setting in. This collective amnesia unfolded gradually over centuries and millennia. Ancient cultural manifestations across all domains of life can only be understood by becoming more sensitive to this developmental arc and its implications. Many of the seminal images that have made a lasting impression on humanity reflect a period of transition between intuitive perspectives within the primary flow, most notably the transition to our 4x4 narrowed and delayed aperture of spatial consciousness. For example, the image of the Medusa turning anyone who looked upon her to stone, as referenced above. Or the image of Osiris being dismembered by his brother Set, who scattered the resulting pieces across Egypt. Both reflect the decoherence of holistic, intuitive consciousness into our fragmented imaginative replicas. It is now the task of the human soul, archetypally represented by Isis, to locate and reassemble these pieces through individual intelligence as fully conscious (moral) intuitions.
We have now lost sight of this task due to our highly aliased perspective on the primary flow. One simple way to sense this trajectory is to consider the colloquial meaning of words, for example, “imagination”. In modern times, the meaning of such a word has been stripped of all concreteness. Most people feel like the gestures of their imagination comprise a ‘subjective’ process of fantasizing and combining mental pictures in a mostly arbitrary way, based on personal likes and dislikes. Yet, at the core of this word is “mage” or “magic”, which evokes a deeper act of focusing lawful aspects of encompassing intuitive reality into the manifest environment through symbols that can influence the course of destinies. What we now dryly feel as ‘my thinking’ and ‘my thoughts’ was felt by the ancients, even into the early Middle Ages, as a truly magical act that embodied the supersensible relations of the primary flow in images of mythic proportions. Similarly, the word “evolution” can evoke a pictorial sense of unrolling or unfolding the convolutions that presently constrain the inner flow, as we experimented with in the previous part, rather than merely a process of ‘random mutations and selection’ that shaped physical forms in the distant past and cannot be experienced.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-456
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
"They only can acquire the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol... those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in the involucrum for antennae yet to come."
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Thanks, Ashvin, for this precise treatment of what it concretely means to rotate the perspective to face the event horizon and watch how our intuitive perspective condenses. The simplified (compared to life at large) framework of Chess definitely helps make the necessary cognitive rewiring apprehendable. On the opposite side of this valuable leverage of Chess, however, some points of tension can be discerned, I believe.
One limitation of Chess practice beyond the metaphor appearing here is that, if I fully do the above, in the context of Chess playing - instead of trying to win the game, be it by seeking the game ‘explanations’ that allow to make effective predictions and move consequently, or by playing more intuitively - I am silently disengaging from the Chess ‘behavioral agreement’, and in all likelihood I will awkwardly lose the game. Isn’t there a certain ambiguity, or double game, in this approach? Because the optimization which has become the new goal state (once the puzzle arrangements are experienced only as anchors for our independent process of harmonizing various aspects of our intuitive navigation) is not an optimization towards the game moves that can make me play in keeping with the framework of the ‘Chess game agreement’, but rather an optimization towards the inner moves that can make me discover my soul tendencies and sins, to resist the most prominent attractors pulling my flow towards the expression of those tendencies. On the other hand, doing the vertical rehearsal afterwards, as an analysis, kind of defeats the purpose of developing real-time sensitivity within the primary flow for how our intuitive orientation condenses in certain mental pictures.
This also connects to a certain tension between chess as a useful metaphor for crucial aspects of our life of mind, and chess as prominent life practice. As a comparison, like Chess, the Dasher is also a very useful metaphor. Necessarily, the most fitting metaphors are processes - things we can see ourselves experimenting with, rather than static images or associations. Indeed, one may want to experiment with the Dasher software. However, its usefulness does not require that I begin to integrate it in my life and begin to type my texts in Dasher, for example. Not only is it not required, but it would probably become counterproductive, since the tool only does its proper job for us once its main limitations are clearly understood -within the metaphor - and corrected for. With Dasher, if I nevertheless become hooked on it and integrate it in my daily life - as a means to increase my intuitive orientation - I would transform a very insightful tool into precisely one of those most prominent attractors which I attempt to uncover and resist with the help of that same tool. With Chess practice, this risk seems even more prominent to me, because Chess is not framed as an intimate tool but as a social activity (which is why you are forced to do your psychic observations by analyzing your games after they are finished).
Moreover, Chess as a modern game beyond its metaphoric value, is a practice in which the symbolic activity has been extended out of the function of intimate sacred rite, into a social practice where the discernment of winners and losers constitutes entertainment. This leads to an additional, high-stake element: the direct involvement of an adversary. As it seems to me, this may also create some tension. When you describe how, within the context of playing for occult educational purposes, the aim is to develop sensitive foresight:
These were some of the caveats coming to mind, in parallel with the benefits of the metaphor, now that we dive deeper into the ins and outs of Chess playing on top of its metaphoric value. At the same time I can imagine that you have already reserved a dedicated space for some of these aspects in the upcoming installments.
Ashvin wrote:In Chess, that psychic observation is mostly accomplished by analyzing our games after they are finished. We can review the particular moves we made for inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders. Instead of only noting that these move ‘pixels’ exist and what the better pixels would have been, we try to sense how they coalesce into patterns that reflect our underlying tendencies and habits. We try to feel how the latter are consistently conditioning our intuitive process during the game flow.
(...) We try to feel how the perceptual facts harmonize with other perceptual facts and thoughts through our intuitive process rather than using the latter to ‘explain’ those facts. The puzzle arrangements are experienced and understood only as anchors for our independent process of harmonizing various aspects of our intuitive navigation.
One limitation of Chess practice beyond the metaphor appearing here is that, if I fully do the above, in the context of Chess playing - instead of trying to win the game, be it by seeking the game ‘explanations’ that allow to make effective predictions and move consequently, or by playing more intuitively - I am silently disengaging from the Chess ‘behavioral agreement’, and in all likelihood I will awkwardly lose the game. Isn’t there a certain ambiguity, or double game, in this approach? Because the optimization which has become the new goal state (once the puzzle arrangements are experienced only as anchors for our independent process of harmonizing various aspects of our intuitive navigation) is not an optimization towards the game moves that can make me play in keeping with the framework of the ‘Chess game agreement’, but rather an optimization towards the inner moves that can make me discover my soul tendencies and sins, to resist the most prominent attractors pulling my flow towards the expression of those tendencies. On the other hand, doing the vertical rehearsal afterwards, as an analysis, kind of defeats the purpose of developing real-time sensitivity within the primary flow for how our intuitive orientation condenses in certain mental pictures.
This also connects to a certain tension between chess as a useful metaphor for crucial aspects of our life of mind, and chess as prominent life practice. As a comparison, like Chess, the Dasher is also a very useful metaphor. Necessarily, the most fitting metaphors are processes - things we can see ourselves experimenting with, rather than static images or associations. Indeed, one may want to experiment with the Dasher software. However, its usefulness does not require that I begin to integrate it in my life and begin to type my texts in Dasher, for example. Not only is it not required, but it would probably become counterproductive, since the tool only does its proper job for us once its main limitations are clearly understood -within the metaphor - and corrected for. With Dasher, if I nevertheless become hooked on it and integrate it in my daily life - as a means to increase my intuitive orientation - I would transform a very insightful tool into precisely one of those most prominent attractors which I attempt to uncover and resist with the help of that same tool. With Chess practice, this risk seems even more prominent to me, because Chess is not framed as an intimate tool but as a social activity (which is why you are forced to do your psychic observations by analyzing your games after they are finished).
Moreover, Chess as a modern game beyond its metaphoric value, is a practice in which the symbolic activity has been extended out of the function of intimate sacred rite, into a social practice where the discernment of winners and losers constitutes entertainment. This leads to an additional, high-stake element: the direct involvement of an adversary. As it seems to me, this may also create some tension. When you describe how, within the context of playing for occult educational purposes, the aim is to develop sensitive foresight:
when you describe how this new focus is the only way to improve game navigation (do you mean improve win rates here?) I have wondered if you would also speak of the possibilities to cognitively interact with the other player, and especially of the fact that the Chess framework, by design, moves towards an end-state picture where a tie is broken between a winner and a loser.Ashvin wrote:Eventually, that sensitivity not only reveals how the pattern attracted our past moves, but also alerts us to the attractive pull before we lift or click our pieces and make suboptimal moves. After all, that sensitive foresight is the only way our game navigation would improve.
These were some of the caveats coming to mind, in parallel with the benefits of the metaphor, now that we dive deeper into the ins and outs of Chess playing on top of its metaphoric value. At the same time I can imagine that you have already reserved a dedicated space for some of these aspects in the upcoming installments.
"In the sense world, every time you have a sensation, it’s a recapitulation of the Fall." Dennis Klocek
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Thanks for these observations, Federica. It stimulates many ideas about the nature of occult development for me. There is definitely a real concern with getting 'hooked' on any occult exercises, which I don't take lightly. The concern arises when we subtly adapt such exercises to our already formatted lower nature. That can even come to expression in meditation. I think we have seen quite a few examples of how one can get hooked on a meditative practice that has been adapted in such a way. In that case, we may even be better off without the meditative practice. So, we should remain clear that this concern exists, but we should also remember how broadly it applies. It is not particularly unique to Chess playing (or contemplation of Chess playing) as an occult exercise.
I see this somewhat differently. I think that the psychic observation described above is one of the key elements that allow mid-level to advanced players to continually improve. In other words, they instinctively seek "an optimization towards the inner moves that can make me discover my soul tendencies and sins, to resist the most prominent attractors pulling my flow towards the expression of those tendencies".
Without that observation, players remain stuck in the same attractors and cannot distinguish their imaginative flow from them, resulting in the same patterns of suboptimal moves recurring over and over. So the 'disengagement from the behavioral agreement' is quite necessary for improvement. I think that is evident when we look at the most advanced players who also create content on various streaming platforms. Their whole perspective and attitude toward the game seem quite disengaged from the default behavioral interaction. Of course, they are still quite competitive in their games with players at their own level, but in their teaching capacity, they are more interested in helping others hone in on the underlying thinking process that results in improvement over time. They will often play their subscribers in that pedagogical spirit, for example.
The soul tendencies that we discover through this psychic observation, in the context of improving our Chess game, will naturally be those that are relevant to that improvement, like the impatient tendency. It turns out, however, that this actually covers a wide range of soul tendencies that are critical to become conscious of and modulate in our occult development as well. Many of these are related to our modern intellectual habits in the pursuit of knowledge. The same tendencies that steer our Chess play are the ones that are steering our intuitive navigation toward an 'understanding of reality' through philosophy and science. Thus, there is a 'far learning' transfer whenever we engage in such psychic observation of those tendencies, as Kaje would say.
In our occult development, we also naturally begin by reflecting on our intuitive process and its dynamics (vertical rehearsal) after the fact. We will rely on various phenomenological treatments to anchor that process, for example, and direct attention to inner experiences we have already gone through. I don't see that as 'defeating the purpose', but as necessary preparation for gradually closing the gap. Without that preparation, we would remain in a naive state of flowing along with whatever imaginative gestures feel comfortable or pleasing. Only after consistent meditative experience do we begin to close the gap or 'split the moment' between real-time inputs and outputs so that we can more easily focus on the contextual aspects shaping and steering our imaginative process as it unfolds. That is how I also experience it in Chess playing, because after all, it is the same real-time intuitive process in all cases. If we become more proficient at closing the gap through our meditative exercises, that will naturally translate into our experience of other life activities, whether we are driving, doing chores, working on a project, playing Chess, etc. We can more readily sense the musical resonance of the interfering IO flows while we are engaged in the activity, instead of only contemplating the intersection at a later time.
Whether any particular occult exercise can helpfully become a 'prominent life practice', I think, depends on many individual factors. Generally speaking, what Chess playing (or any life activity) is, how it is framed, what it can be, and so on, all depend on our cognitive perspective and interests within the flow as we navigate toward our goal states. Improving our consciousness of that navigation will naturally improve our 'win rates' in such activities. It's a very interesting dynamic to contemplate. We have heard the sayings, "The best leaders are those who do not wish to lead" or "happiness only comes to those who don't seek happiness", etc. These are all rooted in the Gospel principle: "Those who cling to their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake shall find it." In that sense, we simply become better at whatever we are doing in life when we sacrifice the desire to reach myopic goal states and focus on perfecting the intuitive process for its own sake. And that also naturally entails that we will develop at the expense of others in the short-term. If we become proficient biodynamic farmers or Waldorf teachers, for example, we are probably contributing, however marginally, to putting some industrial farms or private schools out of business. Such are the dynamics of the evolutionary process we are entangled with. Sometimes there is no way to avoid generating these (karmic) tensions. Yet that process also tends toward a long-term resolution of the tensions through our inner development.
Indeed, I have already written a section related to this topic, but it kept getting pushed back to later installments. I will go ahead and share a portion of that section, since it seems quite relevant to what we are discussing and may be helpful to contemplate in that respect:
"Before continuing, we should take a moment to contemplate how, without such an inner orientation to the game of Chess (or any life activity) as we have been pursuing here, the game flow wouldn’t remind us of anything except the game’s internal dynamics and our myopic aims of learning positions and tactics, beating our opponent, gaining rating points, becoming ‘better’ than others, gaining reputation in the Chess world, and so on. In other words, it is in these ignorant conditions that our lower egoistic impulses find fertile breeding ground within the game flow and hijack our cognitive process. All modern games, as life activities in general, become decadent when we can no longer keenly sense how they point toward the inner dynamics that make them possible. Without that sensitivity, we begin to imagine that we are involved in an entirely different pursuit, involving different aims, from the one we are actually engaged in within the depths of our intuitive life. An occult education, on the other hand, redeems this decadent trajectory through deeper knowledge of what we are always instinctively pursuing, but are usually too distracted, ungrateful, and prideful to register.
It is like shifting from the aim of winning any particular game to mastering and ‘winning’ the iterated set of all possible games that could unfold, asymptotically approaching infinity. Once we focus on this long-term intuition of what makes it possible to succeed within the game flow, our interest shifts toward patiently cultivating the novel inner qualities and skills needed to intuitively navigate the set of all possible games. Our intuitive navigation then reaches a deeper point of balance, where it no longer haphazardly oscillates attention between possible moves in any particular game, or swings wildly from optimal moves to blunders. Instead, we navigate the landscape of inner qualities and capacities that comprise the optimal pathways across all games. The best Chess players in the world instinctively do that as well, but we aim to pursue it with full awareness of what we are doing and why. That explicit awareness is what transmutes any given life activity into a path for occult development.
If everyone were to explore Chess in this way, it would no longer be experienced as a zero-sum game where one player’s victory comes at the expense of another’s defeat, and where players are all competing to get a larger stake of limited financial, intellectual, and emotional resources. Instead, all players would feel as if they were growing together ‘in stature and wisdom’ through the shared, inexhaustible value of an occult education. Every mistake, inaccuracy, blunder, loss, or losing streak would become a lesson for inner development, just as every winning position, tactic, and game would. No player would feel joy in ‘dominating’ their Chess partner, just as no player would feel like they are being ‘dominated’ when losing a game. Competition for prize money would feel unnecessary because we would not feel that any monetary prize is worth more than the inner developmental value we all attain from competing, and we would know how the former tends to dilute and poison the well of the latter. The occultist learns quickly that he cannot ‘serve two masters’, for then he will end up loving one and hating the other.
Such a radical shift in cognitive perspective applies not only to redeeming the experience of the game flow in Chess, of course, but to redeeming the experience of intelligently pursued life activities in general. Clearly, such a shift cannot be expected to take root without much more inner effort and persistence, much deeper humility and gratitude, on the part of humanity. The shift we are speaking of here is what drives the evolutionary process itself, in culture as in nature, and thus cannot be expected to take hold ‘at scale’ easily or immediately. The old perspective and methods of navigation carry great momentum and have built up the entire infrastructure of modern society, which further reinforces that momentum. Yet the longer we delay this shift, the more difficult it becomes for us to even imagine what it means, and then the more decadent our experience of various life activities becomes.
There is a reason why cheating in a competitive activity such as Chess is experienced as so disturbing. Obviously, financial reasons are at play when monetary benefits flow, directly or indirectly, from winning games, but we are even disturbed by cheating in games that involve no such benefits, for example, when playing recreationally with a family member or friend. In the phenomenon of cheating, people navigate the game flow in ways that preclude long-term improvement. It is, by its very nature, diametrically opposed to the goal of perfecting intuitive navigation."
Federica wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2026 12:27 pm One limitation of Chess practice beyond the metaphor appearing here is that, if I fully do the above, in the context of Chess playing - instead of trying to win the game, be it by seeking the game ‘explanations’ that allow to make effective predictions and move consequently, or by playing more intuitively - I am silently disengaging from the Chess ‘behavioral agreement’, and in all likelihood I will awkwardly lose the game. Isn’t there a certain ambiguity, or double game, in this approach? Because the “optimization” which has become the new goal state (once the puzzle arrangements are experienced only as anchors for our independent process of harmonizing various aspects of our intuitive navigation) is not an optimization towards the game moves that can make me play in keeping with the framework of the ‘Chess game agreement’, but rather an optimization towards the inner moves that can make me discover my soul tendencies and sins, to resist the most prominent attractors pulling my flow towards the expression of those tendencies. On the other hand, doing the vertical rehearsal afterwards, as an analysis, kind of defeats the purpose of developing real-time sensitivity within the primary flow for how our intuitive orientation condenses in certain mental pictures.
I see this somewhat differently. I think that the psychic observation described above is one of the key elements that allow mid-level to advanced players to continually improve. In other words, they instinctively seek "an optimization towards the inner moves that can make me discover my soul tendencies and sins, to resist the most prominent attractors pulling my flow towards the expression of those tendencies".
Without that observation, players remain stuck in the same attractors and cannot distinguish their imaginative flow from them, resulting in the same patterns of suboptimal moves recurring over and over. So the 'disengagement from the behavioral agreement' is quite necessary for improvement. I think that is evident when we look at the most advanced players who also create content on various streaming platforms. Their whole perspective and attitude toward the game seem quite disengaged from the default behavioral interaction. Of course, they are still quite competitive in their games with players at their own level, but in their teaching capacity, they are more interested in helping others hone in on the underlying thinking process that results in improvement over time. They will often play their subscribers in that pedagogical spirit, for example.
The soul tendencies that we discover through this psychic observation, in the context of improving our Chess game, will naturally be those that are relevant to that improvement, like the impatient tendency. It turns out, however, that this actually covers a wide range of soul tendencies that are critical to become conscious of and modulate in our occult development as well. Many of these are related to our modern intellectual habits in the pursuit of knowledge. The same tendencies that steer our Chess play are the ones that are steering our intuitive navigation toward an 'understanding of reality' through philosophy and science. Thus, there is a 'far learning' transfer whenever we engage in such psychic observation of those tendencies, as Kaje would say.
In our occult development, we also naturally begin by reflecting on our intuitive process and its dynamics (vertical rehearsal) after the fact. We will rely on various phenomenological treatments to anchor that process, for example, and direct attention to inner experiences we have already gone through. I don't see that as 'defeating the purpose', but as necessary preparation for gradually closing the gap. Without that preparation, we would remain in a naive state of flowing along with whatever imaginative gestures feel comfortable or pleasing. Only after consistent meditative experience do we begin to close the gap or 'split the moment' between real-time inputs and outputs so that we can more easily focus on the contextual aspects shaping and steering our imaginative process as it unfolds. That is how I also experience it in Chess playing, because after all, it is the same real-time intuitive process in all cases. If we become more proficient at closing the gap through our meditative exercises, that will naturally translate into our experience of other life activities, whether we are driving, doing chores, working on a project, playing Chess, etc. We can more readily sense the musical resonance of the interfering IO flows while we are engaged in the activity, instead of only contemplating the intersection at a later time.
This also connects to a certain tension between chess as a useful metaphor for crucial aspects of our life of mind, and chess as prominent life practice. As a comparison, like Chess, the Dasher is also a very useful metaphor. Necessarily, the most fitting metaphors are processes - things we can see ourselves experimenting with, rather than static images or associations. Indeed, one may want to experiment with the Dasher software. However, its usefulness does not require that I begin to integrate it in my life and begin to type my texts in Dasher, for example. Not only is it not required, but it would probably become counterproductive, since the tool only does its proper job for us once its main limitations are clearly understood -within the metaphor - and corrected for. With Dasher, if I nevertheless become hooked on it and integrate it in my daily life - as a means to increase my intuitive orientation - I would transform a very insightful tool into precisely one of those most prominent attractors which I attempt to uncover and resist with the help of that same tool. With Chess practice, this risk seems even more prominent to me, because Chess is not framed as an intimate tool but as a social activity (which is why you are forced to do your psychic observations by analyzing your games after they are finished).
Moreover, Chess as a modern game beyond its metaphoric value, is a practice in which the symbolic activity has been extended out of the function of intimate sacred rite, into a social practice where the discernment of winners and losers constitutes entertainment. This leads to an additional, high-stake element: the direct involvement of an adversary. As it seems to me, this may also create some tension. When you describe how, within the context of playing for occult educational purposes, the aim is to develop sensitive foresight:
when you describe how this new focus is the only way to improve game navigation (do you mean improve win rates here?) I have wondered if you would also speak of the possibilities to cognitively interact with the other player, and especially of the fact that the Chess framework, by design, moves towards an end-state picture where a tie is broken between a winner and a loser.Ashvin wrote:Eventually, that sensitivity not only reveals how the pattern attracted our past moves, but also alerts us to the attractive pull before we lift or click our pieces and make suboptimal moves. After all, that sensitive foresight is the only way our game navigation would improve.
These were some of the caveats coming to mind, in parallel with the benefits of the metaphor, now that we dive deeper into the ins and outs of Chess playing on top of its metaphoric value. At the same time I can imagine that you have already reserved a dedicated space for some of these aspects in the upcoming installments.
Whether any particular occult exercise can helpfully become a 'prominent life practice', I think, depends on many individual factors. Generally speaking, what Chess playing (or any life activity) is, how it is framed, what it can be, and so on, all depend on our cognitive perspective and interests within the flow as we navigate toward our goal states. Improving our consciousness of that navigation will naturally improve our 'win rates' in such activities. It's a very interesting dynamic to contemplate. We have heard the sayings, "The best leaders are those who do not wish to lead" or "happiness only comes to those who don't seek happiness", etc. These are all rooted in the Gospel principle: "Those who cling to their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake shall find it." In that sense, we simply become better at whatever we are doing in life when we sacrifice the desire to reach myopic goal states and focus on perfecting the intuitive process for its own sake. And that also naturally entails that we will develop at the expense of others in the short-term. If we become proficient biodynamic farmers or Waldorf teachers, for example, we are probably contributing, however marginally, to putting some industrial farms or private schools out of business. Such are the dynamics of the evolutionary process we are entangled with. Sometimes there is no way to avoid generating these (karmic) tensions. Yet that process also tends toward a long-term resolution of the tensions through our inner development.
Indeed, I have already written a section related to this topic, but it kept getting pushed back to later installments. I will go ahead and share a portion of that section, since it seems quite relevant to what we are discussing and may be helpful to contemplate in that respect:
"Before continuing, we should take a moment to contemplate how, without such an inner orientation to the game of Chess (or any life activity) as we have been pursuing here, the game flow wouldn’t remind us of anything except the game’s internal dynamics and our myopic aims of learning positions and tactics, beating our opponent, gaining rating points, becoming ‘better’ than others, gaining reputation in the Chess world, and so on. In other words, it is in these ignorant conditions that our lower egoistic impulses find fertile breeding ground within the game flow and hijack our cognitive process. All modern games, as life activities in general, become decadent when we can no longer keenly sense how they point toward the inner dynamics that make them possible. Without that sensitivity, we begin to imagine that we are involved in an entirely different pursuit, involving different aims, from the one we are actually engaged in within the depths of our intuitive life. An occult education, on the other hand, redeems this decadent trajectory through deeper knowledge of what we are always instinctively pursuing, but are usually too distracted, ungrateful, and prideful to register.
It is like shifting from the aim of winning any particular game to mastering and ‘winning’ the iterated set of all possible games that could unfold, asymptotically approaching infinity. Once we focus on this long-term intuition of what makes it possible to succeed within the game flow, our interest shifts toward patiently cultivating the novel inner qualities and skills needed to intuitively navigate the set of all possible games. Our intuitive navigation then reaches a deeper point of balance, where it no longer haphazardly oscillates attention between possible moves in any particular game, or swings wildly from optimal moves to blunders. Instead, we navigate the landscape of inner qualities and capacities that comprise the optimal pathways across all games. The best Chess players in the world instinctively do that as well, but we aim to pursue it with full awareness of what we are doing and why. That explicit awareness is what transmutes any given life activity into a path for occult development.
If everyone were to explore Chess in this way, it would no longer be experienced as a zero-sum game where one player’s victory comes at the expense of another’s defeat, and where players are all competing to get a larger stake of limited financial, intellectual, and emotional resources. Instead, all players would feel as if they were growing together ‘in stature and wisdom’ through the shared, inexhaustible value of an occult education. Every mistake, inaccuracy, blunder, loss, or losing streak would become a lesson for inner development, just as every winning position, tactic, and game would. No player would feel joy in ‘dominating’ their Chess partner, just as no player would feel like they are being ‘dominated’ when losing a game. Competition for prize money would feel unnecessary because we would not feel that any monetary prize is worth more than the inner developmental value we all attain from competing, and we would know how the former tends to dilute and poison the well of the latter. The occultist learns quickly that he cannot ‘serve two masters’, for then he will end up loving one and hating the other.
Such a radical shift in cognitive perspective applies not only to redeeming the experience of the game flow in Chess, of course, but to redeeming the experience of intelligently pursued life activities in general. Clearly, such a shift cannot be expected to take root without much more inner effort and persistence, much deeper humility and gratitude, on the part of humanity. The shift we are speaking of here is what drives the evolutionary process itself, in culture as in nature, and thus cannot be expected to take hold ‘at scale’ easily or immediately. The old perspective and methods of navigation carry great momentum and have built up the entire infrastructure of modern society, which further reinforces that momentum. Yet the longer we delay this shift, the more difficult it becomes for us to even imagine what it means, and then the more decadent our experience of various life activities becomes.
There is a reason why cheating in a competitive activity such as Chess is experienced as so disturbing. Obviously, financial reasons are at play when monetary benefits flow, directly or indirectly, from winning games, but we are even disturbed by cheating in games that involve no such benefits, for example, when playing recreationally with a family member or friend. In the phenomenon of cheating, people navigate the game flow in ways that preclude long-term improvement. It is, by its very nature, diametrically opposed to the goal of perfecting intuitive navigation."
"They only can acquire the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol... those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in the involucrum for antennae yet to come."
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Thanks for the sneak peek of a future post! It’s an uplifting vista that you share, of the redemption of all decadent human activities, of which Chess is one example. In the meantime, yes, one can get hooked on anything (as I exemplified above).
Interesting that there are these top players who coach and teach at the same time. Indeed I have no idea of this world. Here comes a question. In their competitive capacity, these players do instinctively what the occult student figures out in full awareness (improve one’s game by identifying and working on soul weaknesses). But how are they able to bring that into their teaching capacity then? If their improvement journey is instinctive, what do they teach exactly? And if it’s not completely instinctive, is it that the work can be intellectualized, taught to others in explanatory form, and it still works?
Another question/exercise :
I can somewhat see how this can be the case, but to be specific, how would you say that a materialist tends to play, for example?
Is it possible to sketch how their mindset bleeds onto their tactics?
Interesting that there are these top players who coach and teach at the same time. Indeed I have no idea of this world. Here comes a question. In their competitive capacity, these players do instinctively what the occult student figures out in full awareness (improve one’s game by identifying and working on soul weaknesses). But how are they able to bring that into their teaching capacity then? If their improvement journey is instinctive, what do they teach exactly? And if it’s not completely instinctive, is it that the work can be intellectualized, taught to others in explanatory form, and it still works?
Another question/exercise :
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2026 5:12 pm The same tendencies that steer our Chess play are the ones that are steering our intuitive navigation toward an 'understanding of reality' through philosophy and science. Thus, there is a 'far learning' transfer whenever we engage in such psychic observation of those tendencies, as Kaje would say.
I can somewhat see how this can be the case, but to be specific, how would you say that a materialist tends to play, for example?
Is it possible to sketch how their mindset bleeds onto their tactics?"In the sense world, every time you have a sensation, it’s a recapitulation of the Fall." Dennis Klocek
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2026 12:56 pm Thanks for the sneak peek of a future post! It’s an uplifting vista that you share, of the redemption of all decadent human activities, of which Chess is one example. In the meantime, yes, one can get hooked on anything (as I exemplified above).
Interesting that there are these top players who coach and teach at the same time. Indeed I have no idea of this world. Here comes a question. In their competitive capacity, these players do instinctively what the occult student figures out in full awareness (improve one’s game by identifying and working on soul weaknesses). But how are they able to bring that into their teaching capacity then? If their improvement journey is instinctive, what do they teach exactly? And if it’s not completely instinctive, is it that the work can be intellectualized, taught to others in explanatory form, and it still works?
In this context, I use "instinctively" to mean that they probe the soul landscape through standard mental puzzle-making, just as natural scientists, psychologists, etc. In other words, they are not very interested in whether there actually is a 'soul landscape' or whether the tendencies are an emergent property of their genes, brain wiring, and so on. Unlike our occult education, they are not actively trying to trace the implications of this soul landscape, how it relates to their intimate experience of spiritual activity, how it fits into the wider evolutionary process, how they can intuitively steer within this landscape, and so forth. It reminds me of the movies where characters begin to time-travel, access other dimensions, speak with the dead, and so on, but never pause to contemplate what these experiences actually imply for the structure of reality and whether their interests and goals in life should be modified in light of that knowledge. But yes, without that vertical perspective on their mental puzzles, they can still identify various 'soul patterns' (whatever they are or they imply) that guide their navigation of the game flow, and they can still intuit, based on observation and inference, that these patterns are shared among other players whom they can potentially help by calling attention to them.
Another question/exercise :
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2026 5:12 pm The same tendencies that steer our Chess play are the ones that are steering our intuitive navigation toward an 'understanding of reality' through philosophy and science. Thus, there is a 'far learning' transfer whenever we engage in such psychic observation of those tendencies, as Kaje would say.
I can somewhat see how this can be the case, but to be specific, how would you say that a materialist tends to play, for example?
I think it's always helpful to remember what Cleric pointed out previously, that practically every physical movement we make currently utilizes bioelectric black magic. Of course, that still applies to those of us who have shifted our cognitive perspective on the experiential flow. If anything, we first become much more sensitive to how every gesture of our imagination, feeling, and volition is somewhat an expression of greed, envy, pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, and wrath. Every time we move our eyes to look at something, for example, something of these tendencies are at work.
I used the example of the impatient tendency in the essay because I think that overlaps quite closely with what we do in our intellectual pursuits and our ordinary navigation of the life flow, whether we are 'materialists', 'idealists', 'spiritualists', or something else. A huge obstacle in our meditations, for example, will probably be the subtle rushing to attain some deeper knowledge and experiences, to 'score points' and 'win the game' of our meditation. These tendencies are heavily masked by our subflow of mental images, so it is usually very difficult to sense them, and we often convince ourselves that they don't exist, or perhaps that we are even exemplars of patient striving. Chess, when navigated in this self-conscious way, is just one of many ways our concentrated activity within the flow can help unmask aspects of these tendencies that are always there.
Novices in Chess always make the same types of mistakes, falling into the same characteristic soul attractors as everyone else. There's impatience to win the game, overconfidence in one's navigation skills, continual distraction within the flow, a myopic vision of the board state, failure to think through the implications of a move (a thought or idea), and so on. In that sense, all of the same tendencies that shape our modern intellectual pursuit of knowledge are also naturally shaping how we navigate other 'game spaces'. The task of the occultist would be to trace how the tendencies they observe in their Chess play are also bleeding into their operational, tactical, and strategic flows as they navigate other life pursuits, particularly the pursuit of higher knowledge.
"They only can acquire the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol... those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in the involucrum for antennae yet to come."
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2026 1:48 pm I think it's always helpful to remember what Cleric pointed out previously, that practically every physical movement we make currently utilizes bioelectric black magic. Of course, that still applies to those of us who have shifted our cognitive perspective on the experiential flow. If anything, we first become much more sensitive to how every gesture of our imagination, feeling, and volition is somewhat an expression of greed, envy, pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, and wrath. Every time we move our eyes to look at something, for example, something of these tendencies are at work.
Yes I've been thinking about that during Easter preparation. This is the same as saying that every time we have a sensation (or a perception) it's a recapitulation of the Fall.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2026 1:48 pm I used the example of the impatient tendency in the essay because I think that overlaps quite closely with what we do in our intellectual pursuits and our ordinary navigation of the life flow, whether we are 'materialists', 'idealists', 'spiritualists', or something else. A huge obstacle in our meditations, for example, will probably be the subtle rushing to attain some deeper knowledge and experiences, to 'score points' and 'win the game' of our meditation. These tendencies are heavily masked by our subflow of mental images, so it is usually very difficult to sense them, and we often convince ourselves that they don't exist, or perhaps that we are even exemplars of patient striving. Chess, when navigated in this self-conscious way, is just one of many ways our concentrated activity within the flow can help unmask aspects of these tendencies that are always there.
Novices in Chess always make the same types of mistakes, falling into the same characteristic soul attractors as everyone else. There's impatience to win the game, overconfidence in one's navigation skills, continual distraction within the flow, a myopic vision of the board state, failure to think through the implications of a move (a thought or idea), and so on. In that sense, all of the same tendencies that shape our modern intellectual pursuit of knowledge are also naturally shaping how we navigate other 'game spaces'. The task of the occultist would be to trace how the tendencies they observe in their Chess play are also bleeding into their operational, tactical, and strategic flows as they navigate other life pursuits, particularly the pursuit of higher knowledge.
Indeed, for my part I can surely recognize impatience in playing games (“this move will be good enough and let’s see what happens”) or in doing chores or cooking (“let’s go faster than fast”), but not really in meditation
I think the way to detect impatience in meditation is to recognize it in its direct consequence which is a gesture of giving up. That’s basically the same sin. When the feeling is “Ok I give up” it’s because there’s been impatience first, and I am certainly familiar with giving up in meditation. Impatience is an impossible bet on going faster than the music, when one already knows it will be disharmonious, not viable, because the means are not there. This might be difficult to detect, but what’s easier to detect are the next frames: starting over with a disadvantage (in the best case) and eventually giving up. This has a characteristic feeling of ‘asynchronicity’ to it, and that’s the marker of impatience, I believe.
"In the sense world, every time you have a sensation, it’s a recapitulation of the Fall." Dennis Klocek
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2026 3:46 pm
I think the way to detect impatience in meditation is to recognize it in its direct consequence which is a gesture of giving up. That’s basically the same sin. When the feeling is “Ok I give up” it’s because there’s been impatience first, and I am certainly familiar with giving up in meditation. Impatience is an impossible bet on going faster than the music, when one already knows it will be disharmonious, not viable, because the means are not there. This might be difficult to detect, but what’s easier to detect are the next frames: starting over with a disadvantage (in the best case) and eventually giving up. This has a characteristic feeling of ‘asynchronicity’ to it, and that’s the marker of impatience, I believe.
Good point, which reminds me of a way to adapt the 'volume knob' exercise in the context of giving up. When we feel like our inner efforts are exhausted, and are getting ready to activate our limbs and return to 'normal life', we can allow ourselves to really live in that feeling of 'giving up' (similar to the "I can't concentrate" exercise), of impatience and frustration with what we are doing, allowing the impulse to start moving to condense and come right to the brink of physical expression. Then we resist and make this into a new exercise, feeling how the impulse and associated feelings buzz and bubble in our imaginative volume. We may suddenly find that we are concentrated again and replenished with an enthusiasm to maintain our laminar inner flow for at least a few more moments, which could even turn into minutes.
"They only can acquire the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol... those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in the involucrum for antennae yet to come."
Re: An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 5)
Thanks!AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2026 5:04 pm Good point, which reminds me of a way to adapt the 'volume knob' exercise in the context of giving up. When we feel like our inner efforts are exhausted, and are getting ready to activate our limbs and return to 'normal life', we can allow ourselves to really live in that feeling of 'giving up' (similar to the "I can't concentrate" exercise), of impatience and frustration with what we are doing, allowing the impulse to start moving to condense and come right to the brink of physical expression. Then we resist and make this into a new exercise, feeling how the impulse and associated feelings buzz and bubble in our imaginative volume. We may suddenly find that we are concentrated again and replenished with an enthusiasm to maintain our laminar inner flow for at least a few more moments, which could even turn into minutes.
"In the sense world, every time you have a sensation, it’s a recapitulation of the Fall." Dennis Klocek