An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 6)

[AshvinP]

“Whereas the tactician knows what to do when there is something to do, it requires the strategist to know what to do when there is nothing to do.” - Gerald Abrahams

The Temporal Depth of our Intuitive Navigation

Previously, we tried to get a better feel for our thinking (imaginative rehearsal) process and how it can be oriented ‘vertically’, so that our mental images are experienced as focused from within our intuitive navigation and as testifying to the latter’s characteristic dynamics. That is what we are practicing in these essays through our various symbolic concepts, illustrations, comparisons, and so forth. These rehearsals invite an awakening to a deeper level of intuitive navigation, which is the archetypal aim of occult education across all ages. At the same time, there is no sharp division between this vertical rehearsal process and the primary process we are rehearsing for, just as the rapid and classical games are both examples of navigating the same intuitive landscape within Chess. Gradually, this overlap becomes more evident and they begin to coincide in their high-stakes seriousness. What we take seriously is not only reaching narrow goal states with our rehearsal puzzles, but perfecting the art of the rehearsal process itself. In this way, we become more sensitive to the encompassing meaning that continually seeks to incarnate through our rehearsal process but remains unconscious when we allow that process to exhaust its momentum in an associative chain of mental images and outer deeds, as we move from one myopic goal to another.

If we take some time to reflect on our navigation throughout an ordinary day, it may soon dawn on us how much of what we do is forced upon us by external circumstances and ingrained habits that take shape in our temperament, sympathies, desires, and other flow aspects we feel thrown into. We feel generally comfortable and confident in our navigation, as if we ‘know what to do’, because we have experienced the ‘guardrails’ of these same compulsive pathways so many times before, driven by instinct, habit, and memorized knowledge. In our vertical rehearsal process, on the other hand, we are no longer operating within a given framework of natural or cultural conditioning and pursuing goal states imposed by that framework. We are instead left in a void of such goal states and must faithfully pursue a path of intuitive navigation when there is seemingly ‘nothing to do’. There are no ingrained habits or memorized facts to rely upon as a compass, and no myopic rewards waiting for us at the end of the mental-imaging tunnel. For that reason, we will experience great fear, mistrust, and hesitation about sustaining the vertical orientation. That is one way we know we are engaged in a truly free act, perhaps for the first time in our lives.

Full essay - https://open.substack.com/pub/spiritana ... id&r=rlafh

[Federica]

Great part, Ashvin, thanks!
Stated in this way, I believe this can make the novice reader dizzy:

Modern science also recognizes this polarity and conceives of the intuitive pushing pole as invisible ‘forces of nature’ or the ‘unconscious’. Modern philosophers likewise conceive of it as ‘things themselves’, the ‘Divine Consciousness’, ‘Mind at Large’, and so on.

But I guess there's no avoiding the shock of being confronted, in a way or another, with the willfulness of all reality, and with the realization that the impersonal natural laws of modern science can (and should) be seen as a striving to grasp the intuitive intents behind the perceivable outputs of world phenomena, where the striving falls short of keeping itself continuous with its own process. Consciousness of flow continuity is broken in the contextual intervals between the isolated mental pictures impressed in the memorable part of the flow, hence the mind continually forgets itself, to arrive at theorizing mindless "causes" of phenomena. As you say, it's not only science. Modern philosophy suffers from the same type of stroboscopic confusion, from Kant to Kastrup.

Let's imagine a simple puzzle where we move the knight through a six-by-six chessboard, where the knight begins on one of the corner squares, with the goal of reaching the central square.

Why "six-by-six"?

[AshvinP]

Great part, Ashvin, thanks!
Stated in this way, I believe this can make the novice reader dizzy:

Modern science also recognizes this polarity and conceives of the intuitive pushing pole as invisible ‘forces of nature’ or the ‘unconscious’. Modern philosophers likewise conceive of it as ‘things themselves’, the ‘Divine Consciousness’, ‘Mind at Large’, and so on.

But I guess there's no avoiding the shock of being confronted, in a way or another, with the willfulness of all reality, and with the realization that the impersonal natural laws of modern science can (and should) be seen as a striving to grasp the intuitive intents behind the perceivable outputs of world phenomena, where the striving falls short of keeping itself continuous with its own process. Consciousness of flow continuity is broken in the contextual intervals between the isolated mental pictures impressed in the memorable part of the flow, hence the mind continually forgets itself, to arrive at theorizing mindless "causes" of phenomena. As you say, it's not only science. Modern philosophy suffers from the same type of stroboscopic confusion, from Kant to Kastrup.

Let's imagine a simple puzzle where we move the knight through a six-by-six chessboard, where the knight begins on one of the corner squares, with the goal of reaching the central square.

Why "six-by-six"?

Thanks, Federica! And also for catching the typo. It's fixed now.

Yeah, in retrospect, it seems so obvious. What else could invisible 'things responsible for the output flow' be except the only invisible process we are intimately familiar with? Especially for an idealist thinker. Yet, as you say, the stroboscopic interruption continues to assert itself until the magic eye, intuitive vergence shift occurs, and our invisible process become a bit more self-similar to that which could plausibly be responsible for the sensory output flow.