“A chess game in progress is a cosmos unto itself, fully insulated from an infant’s cry, an erotic invitation, or war.” – David Shenk
Characteristic Insights Attained from Meditation
Meditation awakens the soul from dreaming through fragmented mental pipelines into more integrated states of lucid navigation, from which those pipelines derive their content and relations. As we have seen, we always rely upon symbolic mental pictures to navigate the ordinary flow - to recall past experiences, perform simple daily tasks, simulate and rehearse various scenarios for speech and action, and abstractly contemplate the lawful dynamics of sensory experience or metaphysical objects via philosophy, science, theology, etc. Most people never pause to investigate what they are doing and experiencing within this mental picturing process, despite it being the most critical one for the quality and direction of their lives. Such an investigation is felt to be excessively inconvenient, because what we are doing in this intimate process cannot be neatly extrapolated from what we have already done, i.e., from accumulated memories, habits, or knowledge. In other words, we always encounter our present intuitive activity as a brand-new element within the experiential flow. Meditation is the technique by which we establish the conditions for maintaining an intense coupling with, and presence within, this novel unfolding. We then gradually begin to discern how this real-time steering relates to states already familiar from sensory life.
To attain a better feel for that, let’s explore some characteristic ways in which the unfamiliar states reached through meditation overlap with our familiar flow of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and impulses. Occult education is by no means an escape from the latter into the former, but rather a way of gradually becoming conscious and active along the entire gradient of cognitive modalities accessible to the modern soul. It is not about sidelining our ordinary sensory-intellectual mode of navigation, but finding its proper positioning and role within the temporal depth of our ever-present, metamorphosing state. Our sense of “I” then no longer takes its rigid shape from a single spectrum of physical experience but coalesces a new, malleable identity by ‘dipping into and out of’ many overlapping spectra, thus becoming increasingly well-rounded. We previously described it as a musical resonance between the operational, tactical, and strategic flows of our navigation along the curvatures of overarching intents. Gradually, we become more sensitive to how our present navigation fits within encompassing rhythms shaped by our previous navigation of the flow and the interfering intents of our partners in the ‘chess game’ of existence.
As we have noted, the state of concentration is not fundamentally different from what we do in ordinary thinking, but simply stabilizes and aligns the ‘orbits’ of our inner flows, so that our experience of thinking becomes purer, more intense, and more expansive.1 As such, we begin to acquire a better sense of what we are always subtly living through when we navigate the flow intelligently. We are no longer interested in forming thoughts about a hypothetical reality, but rather in feeling how the reality we directly experience thinks within and through us. Instead of contemplating ghostly mental pictures from our homunculus perspective, we begin to live in their temporally extended curvatures. If we imagine counting from 1 to 10, it would be as if our perspective gradually closed the gap between its vantage point and the numerical pictures, becoming woven into the richly meaningful fabric of “counting” as an archetypal activity. It wouldn't sequentially behold numerical pictures 1, 2, 3, and so on, but would experience itself becoming those pictures and their relations. Importantly, this lived experience would be imbued with meaning only through the affinities between counting and other vectors of personal and collective experience, such as encounters with multiple similar physical objects, school teachers and lessons, calculation devices we have used, the history of mathematical knowledge, and many other experiences that make our counting state possible and meaningful.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-be1
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 10.2)
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 10.2)
"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."