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, also 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 at 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, 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?"

[AshvinP]

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, also 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, 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?"

This is an important point you raise, Federica. Before this palette of prayerful-shrinking gestures even becomes apparent, we must actively experiment with resisting the ordinary flow. In that sense, the whole thing is a non-starter prior to that inner experimentation. That is where I would say our unique human responsibility comes in, i.e., to do that which no other being can do for us. We should at least sense a depth structure to our inner inputs so that we can conceive the possibility of modulating the inner flow at a deeper scale than our normal intellectual thoughts and our familiar gestures, by which we try to 'resist' a desire after it has already crystallized in our flow to a large extent. In a certain sense, we have zero hope of resisting desires once they reach that stage, just as many illnesses cannot be 'cured' once they manifest as symptoms. We need to at least suspect that we can ray our personal will out into the Cosmic depths and find some concrete support there, such as in the lofty and pious spiritual realities testified to by the Psalms, beyond our mere mental pictures of God, Christ, and so on. And this is a huge danger of our default technological orientation, insofar as it deprives us of the opportunities to sustain our long-term intentions and remain focused over their duration, as expressed in the recent essay.

Even before attempting to resist the most tempting desires, we could begin by thinking the course of events in some activity (like a movie, play, chess game, etc.) in reverse, as Steiner often suggested. Then we gradually accustom our inner organism to resisting the customary, well-trodden flow of our imagination that gets dragged from thought to thought in a linear sequence. Only through this inner experimentation do we expand our sensitivity to what impulses/desires are shaping our flow, what aspects of those desires are within our immediate control, and what aspects need to be prayerfully entrusted to the Divine periphery. In my experience, we gradually discover how much we overestimate the former and how much we underestimate the latter. Again, the act of orchestrating this prayerful-meditative stance within the physical plane is only gradually cultivated through our experimental efforts and something we are uniquely responsible for. It's perhaps better to think about it not as resisting any particular desire, but the whole superposition of lower desires that periodically come to particular expression. At our ordinary intellectual scale, in contrast, we will often resist one desire only to impart the displaced momentum to another desire.

Once we form the long-term and concrete intent to actively experiment with resisting the ordinary flow of tempting desires, then the situation becomes much more similar to what we experience in meditation. It is like there is a general desire-ideal, that now continually hovers in our daily intuitive context, to anticipate and resist the lower impulses. We can think of the familiar Tetris metaphor. It is like we can sense the condensing blocks of our lower impulses before they fully materialize as finished facts of existence in our conscious apertures. We begin to get a feeling for the elastic soul tensions, how they are gradually building up and seeking to release the tension through impulsive acts. That is when our prayerful-meditative stance becomes critical, so that we are only gently nudged by these inner tensions, instead of completely diverted from our generally intended flow. This stance does not negate any of the strategic considerations you are mentioning, such as simulating the consequences or 'buying time'. It is not either we employ such strategies, or we entrust aspects of our navigation to the Divine, but both/and. At the same time, however, we realize that these personal strategies will never be sufficient, by themselves, to navigate the native soul landscape in which these archetypally tempting desires take shape and weave.

I can share a relevant Chess metaphor that I have been working on for the next part:

"Consider how, unlike solving a simple Chess puzzle, a standard Chess game involves another player whose intents modulate our intuitive process as we navigate the flow. For that reason, our desired movements of the pieces cannot always be carried forward in a straight line within this transpersonal flow, as if we were the only ones playing the game. We may have memorized some openings and theoretical lines, for example, which is often what we feel forced to do as beginners, but then our Chess partner makes an unexpected series of moves, like launching a king-side attack with their pawns, and prompts us to adapt our process accordingly; to improvise based on our compounded intuition of the unfolding game flow. Our intended plan needs to remain plastic and supple in that scenario. That would be an example of an intent that interferes destructively with ours. We could also imagine our partner making moves that play right into our opening strategy, making it even more optimal to unfold our originally intended moves, thus interfering constructively with it. Generally, there will be an interplay between the two, and our optimal play results from harmoniously navigating the mesh of interference.

A very weak player often tries to squeeze their plan through this mesh of interference by brute force, leading to inner rigidity. This strategy is like that of an artist who attempts to chisel a sculpture from marble, making a beeline to his intended vision, without paying any attention to the properties of the material he is working with. Then he may fail to notice hidden flaws in the marble, remove too much material too quickly, use improper tools for the particular task at hand, and so on. Chess players who transfer this default stance into their games, which is rooted in years of consumptive conditioning by navigating the modern sensory environment, will likewise quickly ruin the position they are sculpting, leaving them with only inartistic chunks of the pieces they began with. Stronger players, on the other hand, realize it is optimal to become highly receptive to the interference patterns by maintaining a concentrated state within the flow, as if not to miss a beat in the rhythm of the game. Then we are more like the clay artist who lightly and smoothly fashions the material as it spins on the wheel, remaining as receptive as possible to how our fine touches interact with the clay.

Thus, as the flow becomes increasingly transpersonal, our inner movements need to be orchestrated in a correspondingly more receptive way to stay ‘in tune’ with its dynamic feedback on our gestures. We can no longer shape our ‘imaginative clay’ with brute force to attain an understanding of the flow and pursue our intended goal in a linear path, by following a chain of premises and facts to conclusions. Indeed, as we progress higher up the ratings in Chess, we are engaging with an increasingly expansive sphere of collective experience and knowledge accumulated by Chess players throughout history, which is implicit in our partner’s moves. Our navigation at these levels is like the art of continually dialoguing and negotiating with this human chess-playing collective. If we are not keenly attuned to the various positions and creative lines refined by the best players over many years, we will often find ourselves thoroughly confused or practically paralyzed in the flow.

The fissiparous parts of our psyche are also such a transpersonal collective, only they belong to a more subtle strata of our intuitive context and often feel merged together into what we simply experience as our “inner life” or “personality”. We normally experience these soul aspects in a dreamy way, as local entities that are more or less our personal possessions - referring to them as “my desires”, “my feelings”, “my outlook”, and so forth. Even in our ordinary state, however, we can notice times when we argue with ourselves because we feel two or more competing desires, ideas, or perceptions attempting to become the main attractors of our imaginative and physical flows. Thus, it is like the wayward parts of our psychic flow are normally held together by thin strands of duct tape that often snap free. Those who practice concentration first and foremost realize how unstable this duct-taped personality is."


And here is where the quote from Cleric comes in, as we attempt to shrink our inner authority, trust certain encompassing streams of 'our personality' to the Divine periphery, and smoothly navigate through the mesh of interfering soul forces. It is not about satisfying the desires (although that will inevitably happen and then, yes, we should at least have the periscope in place to learn from the experience), but finding a more fruitful way of encountering and engaging them. The ideal is to reach a dynamic flow-state where we learn the best ways to lean our prayerful-meditative state to compensate for the nudges, such as described here:

"This balance is a dynamic flow-state, just like bicycle riding. It is not a point in space that we settle in, as if in a static equilibrium. We need to gain sensitivity for the ways in which we are nudged in one direction or another and gently ‘lean’ our concentrated flow to compensate. When we fail to resist the nudges or we overcompensate, our inner flow metamorphoses through oscillatory patterns."

This balance is a state we primarily pursue in meditation, but it should also gradually come to expression in our navigation of the daily flow as well. I also came across this relevant passage from GA 215. Through the events of the first century, Christ made it possible for the soul to consciously and freely seek the intercession of the Sun guide even during the trials of Earthly life. I think that we can attain inklings of this deeper-scale experience, which we normally experience in its purity after death, by adopting the prayerful-shrinking mood suggested. Our prayers do not need to be verbal, of course, but could be completely wordless, such as would be the case after we leave behind the physical body.

Before man enters the actual spiritual world where he engages in a life in common with other human souls who are not incarnated and are in a condition similar to his own—as it happens, he lives together with these souls even earlier—that is to say, before he can enter into a common life with those spiritual beings of the highest rank, whose physical replica is expressed in the starry constellations, he must leave behind in the moon sphere the being that constitutes his moral evaluation. Without it, he must enter the region of the stars where the moon forces no longer prevail. There, through the companionship with spiritual beings of the highest kind, the forces are born in his soul that enable him now really to prepare and work at the spirit germ of the future human physical organization.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, when the old initiates wished to characterize the manner in which this transition into spirit land took place for the humanity of that time, they had to say to those who were willing to listen: “When, after death, you are to pass out of the soul world into the spirit land, you must leave behind you in the moon sphere the destiny-forming part of your good and bad deeds. But the forces of your own human organization are not enough to give you the power to bring about the transition from the moon sphere to that of the stars. Therefore, the Sun Being intercedes for you; He, Whose physical reflection is the physical sun. Just as your outer life proceeds under the influence of the physical sun's light and warmth, so, after death, the lofty Sun Being claims you, sets you free from your burden of destiny and bears you into the sphere of the stars. There, with the help of your Sun Guide, you can work out the spirit germ of your future physical organization. Then, after having worked sufficiently under the guidance of your Sun Leader on the formation of your physical organism in the spiritual realm, you can return again to life on earth. On this return to earth, you are again received by the moon sphere. In it you find the destiny being which you carried out of your earlier life on earth through the gate of death. You unite with it again and now, after having prepared the spirit germ of your future physical organism together with the great Sun Being, you can control it quite differently. You can unite this destiny being with the forces in you that are drawn toward your physical organism. You stride again through the moon sphere. “ Then follows the entrance into earth life as I have described it already earlier.

[Federica]

This is an important point you raise, Federica. Before this palette of prayerful-shrinking gestures even becomes apparent, we must actively experiment with resisting the ordinary flow. In that sense, the whole thing is a non-starter prior to that inner experimentation. That is where I would say our unique human responsibility comes in, i.e., to do that which no other being can do for us. We should at least sense a depth structure to our inner inputs so that we can conceive the possibility of modulating the inner flow at a deeper scale than our normal intellectual thoughts and our familiar gestures, by which we try to 'resist' a desire after it has already crystallized in our flow to a large extent. In a certain sense, we have zero hope of resisting desires once they reach that stage, just as many illnesses cannot be 'cured' once they manifest as symptoms. We need to at least suspect that we can ray our personal will out into the Cosmic depths and find some concrete support there, such as in the lofty and pious spiritual realities testified to by the Psalms, beyond our mere mental pictures of God, Christ, and so on. And this is a huge danger of our default technological orientation, insofar as it deprives us of the opportunities to sustain our long-term intentions and remain focused over their duration, as expressed in the recent essay.

Even before attempting to resist the most tempting desires, we could begin by thinking the course of events in some activity (like a movie, play, chess game, etc.) in reverse, as Steiner often suggested. Then we gradually accustom our inner organism to resisting the customary, well-trodden flow of our imagination that gets dragged from thought to thought in a linear sequence. Only through this inner experimentation do we expand our sensitivity to what impulses/desires are shaping our flow, what aspects of those desires are within our immediate control, and what aspects need to be prayerfully entrusted to the Divine periphery. In my experience, we gradually discover how much we overestimate the former and how much we underestimate the latter. Again, the act of orchestrating this prayerful-meditative stance within the physical plane is only gradually cultivated through our experimental efforts and something we are uniquely responsible for. It's perhaps better to think about it not as resisting any particular desire, but the whole superposition of lower desires that periodically come to particular expression. At our ordinary intellectual scale, in contrast, we will often resist one desire only to impart the displaced momentum to another desire.

Once we form the long-term and concrete intent to actively experiment with resisting the ordinary flow of tempting desires, then the situation becomes much more similar to what we experience in meditation. It is like there is a general desire-ideal, that now continually hovers in our daily intuitive context, to anticipate and resist the lower impulses. We can think of the familiar Tetris metaphor. It is like we can sense the condensing blocks of our lower impulses before they fully materialize as finished facts of existence in our conscious apertures. We begin to get a feeling for the elastic soul tensions, how they are gradually building up and seeking to release the tension through impulsive acts. That is when our prayerful-meditative stance becomes critical, so that we are only gently nudged by these inner tensions, instead of completely diverted from our generally intended flow. This stance does not negate any of the strategic considerations you are mentioning, such as simulating the consequences or 'buying time'. It is not either we employ such strategies, or we entrust aspects of our navigation to the Divine, but both/and. At the same time, however, we realize that these personal strategies will never be sufficient, by themselves, to navigate the native soul landscape in which these archetypally tempting desires take shape and weave.

I can share a relevant Chess metaphor that I have been working on for the next part:

"Consider how, unlike solving a simple Chess puzzle, a standard Chess game involves another player whose intents modulate our intuitive process as we navigate the flow. For that reason, our desired movements of the pieces cannot always be carried forward in a straight line within this transpersonal flow, as if we were the only ones playing the game. We may have memorized some openings and theoretical lines, for example, which is often what we feel forced to do as beginners, but then our Chess partner makes an unexpected series of moves, like launching a king-side attack with their pawns, and prompts us to adapt our process accordingly; to improvise based on our compounded intuition of the unfolding game flow. Our intended plan needs to remain plastic and supple in that scenario. That would be an example of an intent that interferes destructively with ours. We could also imagine our partner making moves that play right into our opening strategy, making it even more optimal to unfold our originally intended moves, thus interfering constructively with it. Generally, there will be an interplay between the two, and our optimal play results from harmoniously navigating the mesh of interference.

A very weak player often tries to squeeze their plan through this mesh of interference by brute force, leading to inner rigidity. This strategy is like that of an artist who attempts to chisel a sculpture from marble, making a beeline to his intended vision, without paying any attention to the properties of the material he is working with. Then he may fail to notice hidden flaws in the marble, remove too much material too quickly, use improper tools for the particular task at hand, and so on. Chess players who transfer this default stance into their games, which is rooted in years of consumptive conditioning by navigating the modern sensory environment, will likewise quickly ruin the position they are sculpting, leaving them with only inartistic chunks of the pieces they began with. Stronger players, on the other hand, realize it is optimal to become highly receptive to the interference patterns by maintaining a concentrated state within the flow, as if not to miss a beat in the rhythm of the game. Then we are more like the clay artist who lightly and smoothly fashions the material as it spins on the wheel, remaining as receptive as possible to how our fine touches interact with the clay.

Thus, as the flow becomes increasingly transpersonal, our inner movements need to be orchestrated in a correspondingly more receptive way to stay ‘in tune’ with its dynamic feedback on our gestures. We can no longer shape our ‘imaginative clay’ with brute force to attain an understanding of the flow and pursue our intended goal in a linear path, by following a chain of premises and facts to conclusions. Indeed, as we progress higher up the ratings in Chess, we are engaging with an increasingly expansive sphere of collective experience and knowledge accumulated by Chess players throughout history, which is implicit in our partner’s moves. Our navigation at these levels is like the art of continually dialoguing and negotiating with this human chess-playing collective. If we are not keenly attuned to the various positions and creative lines refined by the best players over many years, we will often find ourselves thoroughly confused or practically paralyzed in the flow.

The fissiparous parts of our psyche are also such a transpersonal collective, only they belong to a more subtle strata of our intuitive context and often feel merged together into what we simply experience as our “inner life” or “personality”. We normally experience these soul aspects in a dreamy way, as local entities that are more or less our personal possessions - referring to them as “my desires”, “my feelings”, “my outlook”, and so forth. Even in our ordinary state, however, we can notice times when we argue with ourselves because we feel two or more competing desires, ideas, or perceptions attempting to become the main attractors of our imaginative and physical flows. Thus, it is like the wayward parts of our psychic flow are normally held together by thin strands of duct tape that often snap free. Those who practice concentration first and foremost realize how unstable this duct-taped personality is."


And here is where the quote from Cleric comes in, as we attempt to shrink our inner authority, trust certain encompassing streams of 'our personality' to the Divine periphery, and smoothly navigate through the mesh of interfering soul forces. It is not about satisfying the desires (although that will inevitably happen and then, yes, we should at least have the periscope in place to learn from the experience), but finding a more fruitful way of encountering and engaging them. The ideal is to reach a dynamic flow-state where we learn the best ways to lean our prayerful-meditative state to compensate for the nudges, such as described here:

"This balance is a dynamic flow-state, just like bicycle riding. It is not a point in space that we settle in, as if in a static equilibrium. We need to gain sensitivity for the ways in which we are nudged in one direction or another and gently ‘lean’ our concentrated flow to compensate. When we fail to resist the nudges or we overcompensate, our inner flow metamorphoses through oscillatory patterns."

This balance is a state we primarily pursue in meditation, but it should also gradually come to expression in our navigation of the daily flow as well. I also came across this relevant passage from GA 215. Through the events of the first century, Christ made it possible for the soul to consciously and freely seek the intercession of the Sun guide even during the trials of Earthly life. I think that we can attain inklings of this deeper-scale experience, which we normally experience in its purity after death, by adopting the prayerful-shrinking mood suggested. Our prayers do not need to be verbal, of course, but could be completely wordless, such as would be the case after we leave behind the physical body.

Before man enters the actual spiritual world where he engages in a life in common with other human souls who are not incarnated and are in a condition similar to his own—as it happens, he lives together with these souls even earlier—that is to say, before he can enter into a common life with those spiritual beings of the highest rank, whose physical replica is expressed in the starry constellations, he must leave behind in the moon sphere the being that constitutes his moral evaluation. Without it, he must enter the region of the stars where the moon forces no longer prevail. There, through the companionship with spiritual beings of the highest kind, the forces are born in his soul that enable him now really to prepare and work at the spirit germ of the future human physical organization.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, when the old initiates wished to characterize the manner in which this transition into spirit land took place for the humanity of that time, they had to say to those who were willing to listen: “When, after death, you are to pass out of the soul world into the spirit land, you must leave behind you in the moon sphere the destiny-forming part of your good and bad deeds. But the forces of your own human organization are not enough to give you the power to bring about the transition from the moon sphere to that of the stars. Therefore, the Sun Being intercedes for you; He, Whose physical reflection is the physical sun. Just as your outer life proceeds under the influence of the physical sun's light and warmth, so, after death, the lofty Sun Being claims you, sets you free from your burden of destiny and bears you into the sphere of the stars. There, with the help of your Sun Guide, you can work out the spirit germ of your future physical organization. Then, after having worked sufficiently under the guidance of your Sun Leader on the formation of your physical organism in the spiritual realm, you can return again to life on earth. On this return to earth, you are again received by the moon sphere. In it you find the destiny being which you carried out of your earlier life on earth through the gate of death. You unite with it again and now, after having prepared the spirit germ of your future physical organism together with the great Sun Being, you can control it quite differently. You can unite this destiny being with the forces in you that are drawn toward your physical organism. You stride again through the moon sphere. “ Then follows the entrance into earth life as I have described it already earlier.

Thanks for developing and anticipating from the next Chess episode. I feel I'm losing you a bit at this juncture, as if the perspective is becoming more somber with each post. Perhaps it's just because I'm not following as intended the inversion of the ordinary flow of life you speak of. While I recognize the cyclical aspect of the flow, I don't see that curbing one temptation necessarily leads to succumbing to an adjacent one, with precluded overall improvement, if the temptation has already become manifest. As I said before, it seems to me that a virtuous effect is also possible, by which resisting adjacent temptations becomes more doable, once a virtuous resistance has been first achieved. The Chess metaphor is also not yet clear to me. If your partner makes moves that play right into your opening strategy, making it more optimal to unfold your originally intended moves, the interference is constructive only for you, while from their viewpoint, it is secretly building up to a disruption point, to a harsh awakening. They are not realizing how you are getting closer to a local optimum undisturbed by any counter-strategy from their side. Even if your endgame and their endgame is to optimize the entire series to infinity, their navigation is somewhat myopic and will backfire on them . So at the moment I don't understand the metaphor well, how it points to transpersonal navigation. Perhaps I will get it better in the context of the entire part. I may need to let it sit for a little.

[AshvinP]

Thanks for developing and anticipating from the next Chess episode. I feel I'm losing you a bit at this juncture, as if the perspective is becoming more somber with each post. Perhaps it's just because I'm not following as intended the inversion of the ordinary flow of life you speak of. While I recognize the cyclical aspect of the flow, I don't see that curbing one temptation necessarily leads to succumbing to an adjacent one, with precluded overall improvement, if the temptation has already become manifest. As I said before, it seems to me that a virtuous effect is also possible, by which resisting adjacent temptations becomes more doable, once a virtuous resistance has been first achieved. The Chess metaphor is also not yet clear to me. If your partner makes moves that play right into your opening strategy, making it more optimal to unfold your originally intended moves, the interference is constructive only for you, while from their viewpoint, it is secretly building up to a disruption point, to a harsh awakening. They are not realizing how you are getting closer to a local optimum undisturbed by any counter-strategy from their side. Even if your endgame and their endgame is to optimize the entire series to infinity, their navigation is somewhat myopic and will backfire on them . So at the moment I don't understand the metaphor well, how it points to transpersonal navigation. Perhaps I will get it better in the context of the entire part. I may need to let it sit for a little.

The metaphor is intended to point toward how our inner perspective-stance needs to shift when it encounters the transpersonal flow and seeks to navigate it smoothly. Our chess partner's intent symbolises the psychic and bodily factors that interfere with our intuitive intents in constructive and destructive ways, which, of course, can be traced to autonomous beings. As a really simple example, if we intend to go running in the park, the atmospheric conditions for good weather will interfere constructively with our intent, and those for bad weather will interfere destructively. Our intact motor nerves may amplify our intent, while a severed nerve may dampen it

In the context of what we are discussing, the weak player represents the times when we confront the interfering forces of our soul flow head-on and push through with our plans to "purify the soul and attain higher knowledge" in a linear, naive, and unreceptive way. We don’t patiently expand our sensitivity to these soul constraints (which is a quality you demonstrated in the above post - "sit for a little"), prayerfully seeking 'clues' from the deeper strata of our intuitive life, but instead try to brutally resist them through trial-and-error gestures as we rush toward our conclusive judgments and myopic deeds. Of course, that is the default approach when we have no basis to even suspect we are navigating through transpersonal soul constraints. It reminds me of another characteristic observation that Steiner made:

"Such things are called ‘axioms’ because they are self-evident truths and, as it is said, cannot and need not be proved. The same applies to the formula: the straight way is the shortest distance between any two points. But neither formula holds good in the spiritual world. What actually holds good in the spiritual world is the formula: the whole is always smaller than any one of its parts. And we find confirmation of this in the very being of man. Observed in the spiritual world, the spiritual counterpart of your physical being is about the size—a trifle larger but approximately the same size as it is in the physical world. When, however, you see your lungs or your liver in the spiritual world, they are of gigantic magnitude, and yet they are parts of something small. We have to learn to change our thinking entirely. In the spiritual world the straight way is by no means the shortest but on the contrary the very longest, because in that world to move from one point to another is a different matter altogether. In the physical world it is pedantically correct to say: that way is long, this longer, this—the straight—the shortest. But in the spiritual world the straight way presents such enormous difficulties that any of the winding ways is the shorter. Hence there is no sense in saying: the straight way is the shortest between any two points—because in actual fact it is the longest of all.

We have to recognise that in the spiritual world nothing is the same as in the physical world. The reason why people find it so difficult to reach the spiritual world with the exercises they practise quite faithfully is that they cling to preconceptions such as: the whole is greater than any of its parts, or, the straight way is the shortest between two points. So much for the axioms."

And we can indeed verify the above ourselves as we actively experiment and grow more sensitive to the prayerful flow-stance needed to lean this way and that way when encountering the deflecting forces that drag against our intended flow. As Cleric described with the mountain climbing metaphor:

"Every crack in the glaciers is a logistical challenge. Special effort is needed to bridge the chasms. Yet, this all happens within the overarching intent that the altitude should be maximized. This is not always trivial. If we climb in dense fog, there’s no guarantee that just because we are gaining altitude, we are approaching the peak. It could be that we are only approaching a local hill. Our meditative flow can be seen as increasing the intuitive sense for the contextually nested flow-bending nudges in the here and now and the direction of the gradient. This rarely happens through a monotonic increase. It is an iterative process. Especially while we still cannot clearly differentiate what makes sense and expands our intuitive perimeter, from what merely feels good."

This is also a key component of what the Chess metaphor intends to convey. Taking the easiest and most convenient path between our current state and our ideal state, making a beeline to our intended vision of ourselves as spiritually pure and knowledgeable beings (maximizing meaning), will often lead us further from, not closer to, that goal state. The deeper reason is that we are engaged in dialogue and coordination with a mesh of autonomous spiritual beings and their intentions. Just as we need to approach and orient our inner process to an engineering project differently when working in a team than when working alone, we need to pursue higher knowledge differently in our meditative context. There is a subtle art of negotiating the transpersonal flow at play, which requires a high degree of concentrated sensitivity/receptivity to the dynamic feedback. I hope more of the wider implications will be clearer in the full essay.

I can certainly appreciate the somber feeling in connection with these posts. I often have this feeling when contemplating how feeble my attempts are to resist temptations and remain fully concentrated within the flow. And I think the paradigmatic shift in our time invites us to honestly confront this situation as individuals and collectives approaching the threshold of deeper spiritual existence. We need to seriously contemplate what truly separates our form of intuitive navigation, which repeatedly falls into the same traps, from that of the Divine. Not only our own lives but also modern history reveal how the same lower impulses are deflected from nation to nation, decade to decade, appearing in different, sometimes more vicious, forms. We could say the same for many chronic illnesses that originally take shape in the soul world. One cannot help but feel that humanity is simply spending its time and effort trying to plug holes on a sinking ship.

Yet these feelings and intuitions of our situation can also become a blessing when rightly perceived from the inverted perspective. By actively experimenting and intimately confronting our inadequacy in resisting tempting desires, we begin to perceive the depth of the soul landscape, which was otherwise completely unsuspected, and to understand how we could potentially become more active within that depth through new 'inner buttons'. We begin to intimate and envision a concrete, non-linear path from our current state to the ideal state. We will surely recognize many desires that carry too much momentum to be adequately resisted in our current incarnation. Yet we know that our efforts to expand sensitivity and orientation to these flows will provide the seed for new possibilities after death and in our next incarnation. We will be given the opportunity to creatively participate in the creation of new bodies, more pliable to our higher intents, and thus the creation of new worlds.

[Federica]

...

Yes, following. I see that much will have to remain unaccomplished in this life, but feelingwise, I think equanimity is an attainable goal. Christ made it possible in the first place, and we also have the initiates' detailed guides. Looking forward to the next installment.