An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 7)

[AshvinP]

Thanks for the example. For me it’s very interesting because it would not occur to me to pray at the exact moment when a temptation arises. I do pray in the morning for my will to become stronger, but I feel that the task of managing any specific occurrence is mine alone, and that when the temptation is tempting it’s too late to invoke the higher worlds, and perhaps not the right scale. I don’t know how these differences may be understood, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Are there times when praying in direct response to a particular occurrence has helped you?

Right, and it often doesn't occur to me either, and I feel that is a stark symptom of the inner tendency that I am pointing to. When we think about it, it is precisely when we are engulfed by the waves of a tempting desire, like the disciples on the stormy sea of Galilee, that we should seek a prayerful mood and look beyond our limited personal will for the strength we need to resist it. But to do so is experienced as highly inconvenient and disquieting, as if we were interrupting the anticipated pleasurable thoughts, feelings, and sensations that will proceed from allowing the desire to overtake our flow. I think we will often rationalize the failure to pray at the critical juncture in all kinds of ways. And for that reason and the one mentioned before, it's hard for me to even assess whether praying in direct response to a particular occurrence has helped me because I simply haven't done it enough, with enough regularity, focus, and intensity. Most of the time, I reserve prayers for the morning and evening as you do. On the other hand, at a more intellectual level, but also based on my general inner experience with the prayerful-meditative stance, I am extremely confident that it would help me in the moment, if carried out without too much inner reservation.

I would like to look further into this, because at this point of my life I don't feel the same.

i feel that we pray for our overall alignment efforts to find their harmonious and virtuous ways. But is it appropriate to pray for God to micromanage our flow just when things get tough? It's precisely in those tough moments, that the forces we have been working for and praying for have a chance to be tested and to play out. That's when we should do something, put into practice what we have been praying for, and it's our direct responsibility. We cannot invest so much intent and resource to develop our virtue in God's image, only to resort to appealing to divine intervention when the moment comes when we are called to really apply our emerging qualities. Otherwise it's like saying: “Well, I thought I was getting stronger and more virtuous, but actually it looks like it's not working, as You can see. Please, please, do the job for me this time, as it seems like I can't do it by myself”.

The deep reason for what I'm saying is that when I pray “empower my will with your strength" in reality I'm praying for God's grace to maintain the possibilities open, so that I can be able to work my way toward God's strength and begin to join it. I'm not paying to be magically bestowed strength. In Steiner's Pater Noster it is said: "May we perform Your will", not: "May God's will be done", and: "You do not let the tempter work in us beyond the capacity of our strength". So we have that capacity. Therefore I think that when temptation presents itself, we should gather our forces and leverage our own capacity, rather than pray for a divine intervention.

Otherwise, where's the freedom? (This entire post is meant in this question form)

I certainly understand the feeling and idea underlying this question. The way I would think about it is somewhat as follows.

When we take time to concentrate and meditate, we come into intimate contact with the tempting desires that continually seek to hijack our imaginative, emotional, and physical flows. These are, of course, the same desires that steer our ordinary life flow. For example, if we are ordinarily steered by a tempting desire to go shopping, during our meditation, we may unwittingly be carried into tunnels of images about the mall, the stores we want to visit, the things we want to buy, and so on. In that sense, our intent to concentrate-meditate creates the inner conditions for these tempting desires to arise with great force, as they resist our intent and try to drag it in the most varied directions. Thus, it provides the archetypal example of when 'things get tough'. Maintaining the concentrated state is the archetypal test of our inner qualities and capacities. What is the optimal inner stance in this concentrated state to navigate the flow?

As we are also discussing in the other thread, it becomes a question of striking a harmonious balance between activity (input gestures) and receptivity (output feedback), which could also be characterized as a balance between our personal will and the Divine will. In an interesting way, the test of our personal will is to what extent it can voluntarily make itself attuned with and receptive to the Divine will. If by "prayer" (or becoming "attuned and receptive"), we mean something like what you expressed in the quote, i.e., a mere expression of a thought that we can't do it by ourselves and need help, then clearly this is not much of a test. It doesn't take much strength of will to simply express such a thought, but rather such thoughts can be generated on demand with our familiar intellectual gestures. Prayer and attunement, in a deeper sense, are much more demanding on our inner life. It requires a whole orchestration of our inner conditions, for example, as Cleric described here:

"In this way, we see that our approach to meditation is somewhat different compared to many popular views. Most people see meditation as intractable because they cannot stop their thinking. Here, however, we see that we do not try to stop our thinking in the trivial sense. This thinking is like a heavy train with great inertia. If we try to stop it head-on, we’re simply run over. So, we do not fight the inertia but start by playing along with it. We gradually modulate it. For example, instead of fighting our inner flow, we can start by speaking to ourselves, “Alright, I won’t fight my inner stream, but I’ll flow along with it. I want to clearly behold the galleries that the inner process, which I barely have control over, leads me through. I’ll attend to my inner voice as it describes the intuitive and feeling galleries that I traverse.” Then, after flowing along with our usual stream for a while, we can say, “I won’t stop thinking of what I feel compelled to think about, but I’ll modulate the thoughts into a melody, I’ll sing them. Or I’ll turn the volume down and still flow along the same riverbed but by only feeling the barely audible mental hum, while trying to be more aware of the stratum of inner life that the words would ordinarily depict.” Thus, we do not try to control the inner process right away, but gradually loosen it from the rigid riverbed constraints. Our skills to consciously direct the stream will also come, but we start with small steps."

So, in this similar sense, I am speaking of prayer in the moment of temptation. It is this inner orchestration toward a stance of attunement-receptivity, entrusting that which we cannot immediately control (such as tempting desires) to the Divine periphery, which certainly demands a strong personal will, that I am saying is frequently missing when we pray in such moments (because we purposefully withhold it). And if we imagine that this kind of superficial prayer is all that we can do, then it certainly makes sense to also say that it's a cop-out in the midst of inner testing, and we shouldn't rely on such gestures but on our own capacities. I hope the conundrum is clear here. If we adopt that stance, we will never manage to consciously direct the stream, and we will always end up witnessing ourselves flowing along with the tempting desires. Instead, I think we need to realize that all we work so hard to cultivate as inner qualities and capacities find their proper place precisely when they are recruited to make our soul life more attuned and receptive to the Divine will, which alone carries the strength to imbue us with conscious control within the flow.

This Divine will, of course, shouldn't be understood as a remote, external agency separate from our personal soul life. It is an intimate aspect of our higher organization that has already overcome the tempting desires and learned to consciously control the flow. Our personal soul life and will is what this higher organization feels like when constrained and conditioned within a narrow, aliased, past-facing aperture. Thus, through prayer and attunement, we are simply seeking to resonate with that intimate aspect of our deeper nature that perceives and understands the flow within a much wider and holistic context. Seeking that resonance, however, requires great inner orchestration and is the freest thing we can possibly do in life, because it is not stimulated by any past natural or cultural conditioning (whereas trying to encompass and control the flow on our own is often the expression of modern cultural conditioning).

[Federica]

So, in this similar sense, I am speaking of prayer in the moment of temptation. It is this inner orchestration toward a stance of attunement-receptivity, entrusting that which we cannot immediately control (such as tempting desires) to the Divine periphery, which certainly demands a strong personal will, that I am saying is frequently missing when we pray in such moments (because we purposefully withhold it). And if we imagine that this kind of superficial prayer is all that we can do, then it certainly makes sense to also say that it's a cop-out in the midst of inner testing, and we shouldn't rely on such gestures but on our own capacities. I hope the conundrum is clear here. If we adopt that stance, we will never manage to consciously direct the stream, and we will always end up witnessing ourselves flowing along with the tempting desires. Instead, I think we need to realize that all we work so hard to cultivate as inner qualities and capacities find their proper place precisely when they are recruited to make our soul life more attuned and receptive to the Divine will, which alone carries the strength to imbue us with conscious control within the flow.

This Divine will, of course, shouldn't be understood as a remote, external agency separate from our personal soul life. It is an intimate aspect of our higher organization that has already overcome the tempting desires and learned to consciously control the flow. Our personal soul life and will is what this higher organization feels like when constrained and conditioned within a narrow, aliased, past-facing aperture. Thus, through prayer and attunement, we are simply seeking to resonate with that intimate aspect of our deeper nature that perceives and understands the flow within a much wider and holistic context. Seeking that resonance, however, requires great inner orchestration and is the freest thing we can possibly do in life, because it is not stimulated by any past natural or cultural conditioning (whereas trying to encompass and control the flow on our own is often the expression of modern cultural conditioning).

Thanks, Ashvin. Do you mean that ideally the prayer should be for the power to shrink and become smaller than the temptations, to slip through their mesh, in the future? I am not sure, because "entrusting that which we cannot immediately control (such as tempting desires) to the Divine periphery", in the light of Cleric's quote, sounds like satisfying the tempting desire, while also using the experience (by beholding it) to make it into a sort of periscope in the depth of the unconscious soul life. Is this the ideal attitude you speak of?

I am not sure, because there is an important difference between the archetypal temptation of distracting thoughts in meditation and the temptations we are considering here. In meditation, we cannot think before we think the distraction, and we are actually unconscious of the exact moment of distraction. When we eventually awaken in the distraction, it is definitely too late to escape it. However, the temptations we were discussing here - those where there is a moment of hesitation when we can even decide to pray - are necessarily deeds, like, say, eat an additional piece of cake. When the temptation arises, we actually don't know whether or not we will be successful in resisting it. We are considering the possibility of doing/not doing something. Therefore the situation is different compared to meditation. I would even say, the temptation of distracting thoughts in meditation is technically not even a temptation, since we are not conscious of its inception. We are not tempted, we are hit by it, until we aren't. Conversely, when it comes to tempting deeds, perhaps we do have the strength to withstand the desire, for example by extending the sense of now, which allows us to ponder differently the consequences of our action/non action. Or by buying some time to train the will (I will eat the cake, but only in half an hour hour, if I still want it).

But you speak of "temptations we cannot immediately control". How do you know you cannot control them? We first have to at least try to control them, not to mention that in principle we are given the strength to withstand all tempting deeds we are presented with.
So let's imagine we have tried, and there's a clear feeling that there's no chance we will resist it this time. Then I am not sure I understand correctly the prayerful attitude of entrusting what we can't yet control to the Divine periphery. Is it something like, "This time I won't have the strength, and I pray for the Divine will to make me more attuned to it so I will grow stronger?" Is it: "Now I will give in to the temptation. May I navigate the experience in a way that teaches me how to create more alignment next time?"