"Properly played, chess is a mirror of the soul." - Svetozar Gligorić
More Characteristic Results of Meditation
Loosening the Soul Flows
As previously explored, meditation expands our cognitive aperture into more integrated states of becoming, beginning with deeper soul states that shape and guide our ordinary thinking, feeling, and bodily will. In this way, we gradually gain more sensitivity to soul patterns that are otherwise merged into the intuitive background of experience. We start to feel that, concealed within our templated physical gestures, dry words, and ghostly mental pictures, exists an endless depth of intuitive navigation in which we somehow participate. Our imagination, by which we steer through mental pictures of our trivial daily tasks along with the deeper existential questions, is felt as proximately woven into deeper scales of soul existence, taking its shape and direction through a spectrum of living impulses and habits, sympathies and antipathies. The content of our imagination may be about the most encompassing ideas, but the way we perceive that content, the way we visually or verbally represent it, understand it, selectively attend to its elements, the meaningful depth we feel in it, and similar second-order factors are all modulated by our soul context. That context is most directly responsible for our intuitive perspective on what the phenomenal flow is, who ‘we’ are, and what we are steering toward within that flow.
For example, our imagination may be contemplating the ‘solar system’, yet we hold that meaning as a small plum-sized image in our convex perspective. We mentally associate this image with many other similarly scaled-down images of the sun, planets, comets, forces, energies, etc. The meaning is likely shaped by many concepts about how this system formed, what it is ‘made of’, what ‘makes it work’, its significance in the ‘Universe’, how we are situated in it, how it may develop, and so on. All of these perceptions and concepts are shaped by our proximate soul constraints. That doesn't imply this imaginative content lacks any objective meaning, but that this meaning is formatted through several levels of indirection which we are hardly conscious of. It is as if our soul context refracts the light of that intuitive meaning through a few media of different densities, finally producing an aliased image of it in our restricted conscious aperture. Into the ‘gaps’ of this temporally decohered image, we insert our feelings, preferences, assumptions, biases, inferences, etc. The ‘solar system’ then becomes a highly abstract and often misleading placeholder for a more temporally integrated, long-forgotten experience of intuitive navigation.
Through our meditative state, we aim to bring the soul lenses into greater alignment so that the meaningful light of our intuitions can transduce into our expanded aperture more directly and faithfully. In that way, we awaken within their flows and build temporally expansive intuition of their constraints on our navigation, as we attempt to maintain a concentrated cross-flow and resist their formatting. Then we experience their influences as slight nudges (instead of forceful shoves) on our concentrated flow that spark flashes of intuition about their characteristic dynamics. These are not felt as brand new aspects of our navigation through life, but as ones that were always there in the background, and as the only reasonable way to make sense of our ordinary state and its transformations. For example, the rhythmic transition from waking to dreaming/sleeping to waking, which is ordinarily paid little attention to, becomes a critical ‘landmark’ against which to reference many of our daily feelings and thoughts. All such rhythms are understood as scale-specific iterations of the ‘central polarity’ we discussed in Part 6, i.e., that between intuitive pushing toward unknown states and imaginative review/integration of the consequences from that pushing, which we first become intimately familiar with in our thinking process.
At the same time, as we grow our conscious aperture into more integrated states, we begin to attain some cognitive ‘distance’ on our soul flows. We then perceive how they were forced into a shallow harmony with one another by the rigid necessities of sensory and corresponding intellectual life. In fact, we realize that is why they feel so ‘localized’ in our perspective, as strictly personal aspects of our navigation in contrast to the wider ‘world out there’. We could say the neurosensory constraint acts analogously to the fixed rules of chess, which guarantee the pieces will always end up in certain predictable configurations with respect to other pieces regardless of how creatively we execute our strategic ideas. We may envision our pawns turning into queens, but they only move one or two squares at a time. Likewise, although there are many times in ordinary life when our bodily will unfolds on autopilot while our imagination wanders to various topics, the sensory spectrum often provides correctives that keep the flows moving together within narrow limits, like coupled oscillators.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-23f
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 10.3)
An Occult Education Through Chess (Part 10.3)
"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."