An Occult Education through Chess (Part 1)

"Even in the allurements of playing, the adepts have known how to introduce the great cosmic laws, so that, even in play, people have at least a smack of wisdom." -Rudolf Steiner

Life as a Metaphor for Intuitive Navigation

In this essay, we are using Chess to stand in for any life activity in which we intelligently navigate toward specific goal states based on our intuition, which is shaped by past experiences and their lawful patterns. In modern times, this intuitive navigation applies to virtually all aspects of life except our period of sleep. Even if we are immersed in passive entertainment, as soon as we begin thinking about its meaning, like what may happen to our favorite character in a movie, we are once again intuitively navigating toward an imaginative goal state. This navigatory experience is something we rarely reflect upon in our time, and instead, we often take it for granted as an unquestioned capacity. Yet that is a recipe for disaster. It is no exaggeration to say that all of our modern confusions and predicaments, all our pathological states of thinking and being, are born out of our lack of conscious orientation to the intuitive navigation we continuously use to pursue our goals, as individuals and collectives.

For animal consciousness, the navigation unfolds automatically from inborn instinct. Shortly after birth, the animal seamlessly develops an orientation to what is edible and inedible, what is safe and unsafe, how to build a shelter, what to do in a storm, where to migrate as the seasons change, how to sacrifice itself for the benefit of its young, and so on. The wasp soul, for example, ‘invented’ paper to construct its nest long before humans.¹ Modern human souls, on the other hand, must effortfully cultivate their navigation skills across many domains of life, from maintaining physical health to pursuing philosophical and scientific inquiries to carrying out philanthropic deeds. What human can draw the knowledge of how to make paper directly out of their physical organism shortly after birth, without any learning curve? The human soul, in this way, begins its life as a much more helpless and dependent creature, and can sometimes remain that way if not imbued with proper socialization and a healthy thinking capacity.

The palette of potential experience that can be navigated by the animal, for that same reason, is fundamentally constrained by its instincts. The latter leads the animal soul into the same experiential pathways centered around myopic interests, again and again. Since many of the skills that the animal draws directly out of its physical organism must be intuitively cultivated by the human, a certain leeway is opened up for the human imagination. The latter becomes more plastic and pliable, capable of adapting itself to novel circumstances and developing corresponding novel intuitions of its place within the experiential flow. The human imagination is no longer so tightly bound to what the senses, urges, and passions dictate for its flow. Thus, there is no instinctual ceiling on what experiential pathways can be navigated. In that sense, we have been given the unique responsibility of navigating our individualized experiential flow with a modicum of intention, conscious awareness, and corresponding intuition that can open into limitless possibilities for engaging with experience.

An occult education is the process of unveiling the deeper dynamics that make this navigation of the experiential flow possible, becoming more sensitive to those dynamics, and gradually participating in their unfoldment, creatively and ethically. This path of education is quite orthogonal to what we normally experience as ‘acquiring knowledge’, i.e., the accumulation and clever arrangement of mental pictures that point to a reality ‘out there’ or ‘back then’. The reality we investigate is certainly beyond our personal consciousness at any given time, and it is understood as a shared experiential space that can be objectively observed and experimented with, but this investigation doesn’t leave our personal navigating perspective out of its purview, in the blind spot. In fact, we become more and more intimately familiar with that perspective, the way that it takes shape and is steered by various influences through vectors of experience. Our flow of philosophizing mental pictures is experienced as one such vector, an inseparable ‘frequency band’ of the wider flow, which we aim to investigate more and more consciously.

Let’s begin that investigation by clarifying what is meant by the term “intuition”. It is simply the fact that, when we live through various experiences with conscious awareness, we gradually develop a feeling for their lawful patterns such that we can recall those patterns in our present state and anticipate which possible states they are ‘biasing’ to become our next one. This recall-anticipation process is rarely explicit as we navigate ordinary life, but rather unfolds in the ‘background’ of experience. Let’s say someone is a master-level rapid Chess player, and we ask them, “What do you do inside your mind to produce the thoughts that allow such optimal moves in every position with so little time to calculate?” They will probably answer, “I don’t know. I still rely on calculation when I have the time, but most of it happens intuitively. I’m sure it has something to do with the effort I have put into my Chess education, exercises, and competitive games over many years. Maybe it’s also a good gene that I was born with; who knows!”

Thus, when we speak of intuition, we are only pointing to the experiential fact that most of what we think and do feels meaningful, that it follows some logical patterns, yet we cannot encompass this meaningful process in our intellect as a clear-cut mechanism that can be broken down into sequential steps. It rather feels like the mysterious background context in which all such steps unfold, and which continuously compounds upon itself as we live through more experiences. Every moment we live through contributes new, meaningful qualities to our intuitive context, even if that is generally difficult to notice. This growing intuitive context then guides how we further navigate the experiential flow and informs us of what pathways of experience are possible to pursue. The latter aspect will be important to keep in mind as we proceed, since an occult education is all about expanding our palette of experiential pathways, our intuitive degrees of freedom.

In science, for example, we pursue the state of understanding some facts of phenomenal experience more deeply, which is represented by the hypothesis. This hypothesis is like a crystallized intuition that has been shaped by many observations of the phenomena in question and corresponding patterns of transformation that were discerned. It is also shaped by our general understanding of ‘what reality is’, ‘how reality works’, ‘what is worth pursuing’, and so on, based on much broader life experiences. We then move our imagination in ways that we feel are consonant with that intuition, more likely to make the ideal state coincide with our present state, i.e., we navigate toward the state that will confirm the hypothesis. That is called ‘experimentation’. Our data analysis is a means of refining the underlying intuition of the lawfulness that is coming to expression in the phenomena. That intuition, however, is never fully captured or exhausted by such calculations (we never reach a ‘theory of everything’).

Even when we reach a state that fully or partially rejects the hypothesis, assuming we are scientists who are only interested in acquiring truthful knowledge, we experience it as a movement toward our ideal state, since our ‘failure’ provides feedback on how we may have conducted our imagination in ways that are dissonant with a deeper understanding of the phenomena in question. It may suggest that we were focusing too much on unimportant variables, for example, and need to pay more attention to other variables. We integrate this feedback into our compounded intuition, sensing where our proposed hypothesis went astray, and morph our imaginative movements accordingly to develop an updated hypothesis. Then we continue our intuitive navigation through further experimentation, analysis, etc. In this way, our scientific knowledge of the phenomenal spectrum continues to become more refined, and corresponding technologies come into existence.

All such life activities are metaphors for the intuitive dynamics that we experience inwardly while engaging in them. Thus, we are also using the concept of “metaphor” in a somewhat different way than common usage. It’s not only that these life activities utilize our mental processes and qualities, as we have come to know them. Nor is it only that we can create correspondences between those activities and occult concepts. There are plenty of esoteric treatments which draw correspondences between the white/black opposition in Chess and the Cosmic forces of light and darkness, for example, or between the Chess pieces and the occult elements of earth, water, air, and fire. This is similar to the natural scientist who draws correspondences between her mental models and the hypothetical reality ‘out there’. Yet such correspondences are not what we are interested in here. At best, they are only secondary considerations that may naturally arise from our independent inner process, as we are reminded of the occult concepts by the characteristic inner experiences that we have lived through.

Our ordinary life activities are metaphors in the sense that they are self-similar projections of a deeper navigatory experience that we can consciously explore, and which is quite distinct from familiar experience. This deeper navigation may initially sound like an abstract metaphysical postulate, of which we can have no direct experience. That is not quite the case, however. Even with our ordinary consciousness, we can sometimes, in retrospect, sense how our current life situation was made possible by prior events that helped us cultivate certain qualities and skills. How did we become interested in pursuing an ‘occult education’, for example? Perhaps we formed certain relationships, dispositions, skills, and interests which, at the time, didn’t seem to be leading anywhere in particular. Now, however, we can sense how they fortuitously coalesced in just the ‘proper proportions’ to bring us into the vicinity of this educational path, as if belonging to a hidden plan that we never would have suspected before.

We can notice similar threads when contemplating the collective flow of history. For example, we often hear about landmark discoveries that entered the historical flow when certain individuals were ‘at the right place at the right time’. In other words, these epoch-making discoveries didn’t seem to be the result of a linear build-up of prior events that were rationally planned out by the individuals in question. Instead, all the factors of their life and their environment fortuitously aligned such that the relevant insights could be stimulated when the time was ripe, perhaps by a seemingly ‘random’ event (think Archimedes in the bathtub). We only need to develop some trust that these intuitions point to a deeper scale of intentional navigation that can be permeated with greater consciousness over time. Hopefully, what follows will help us cultivate our faith in the expansive possibilities of the intuitive process and permeate them with consciousness.

Zooming Into the Primary Flow

Our ordinary life flow can be characterized as what the deeper navigatory process feels like when it reflects itself into complicated transformations and the soul micromanages its partial transitions from state to state, as if these states connect the Alpha and Omega of an overarching intent. The latter is ‘teased apart,’ and its meaningful elements are explored sequentially through our intuitive navigation. We could analogize this process with a video game where clicking on an actionable element can lead to a whole series of changes in the output flow. For example, in a real-time strategy game, we may drag to select certain units and then click to issue a command. A similar principle could be illustrated with a series of pre-moves in a Chess game, when we designate moves that we intend by clicking the pieces and destination squares before the opponent has had a chance to move.²

From our overarching perspective, we intend a single sweeping gesture of highlighting the units and clicking on their destination, and the game flow transforms seamlessly. If we imagine inhabiting the perspective of the grunts on the ground, on the other hand, we can sense how they would experience a whole series of varied states that transform their flow through the rocky terrain, micromanaging the navigation of that flow step by step. Instead of imagining that two separate entities are experiencing these widely different perspectives, however, we can imagine that the unitary soul life is stretched along both of these perspectives simultaneously. It performs the sweeping gesture and also experiences the process of micromanaging the states of the gesture’s unfolding. Whenever we maintain a persistent desire or intent in our daily flow, we consciously experience something of this dynamic. In that sense, the soul ‘zooms into’ the detailed partial transformations of its sweeping gesture and experiences its flow of becoming there, developing a correspondingly novel intuitive perspective.

To get a more intimate feeling for that, we can focus on various objects in our space - the keyboard, the monitor, the desk lamp, and so on. But we can also ‘zoom out’ and try to encompass the totality of our visual field as a panorama, without trying to focus on anything in particular. We should resist any movement of the eyes and our gaze snapping into this or that partial sensation. Our gaze is relaxed and unmoving, and we try to encompass as much of our peripheral vision as possible. This feels like our ray of attention expands into a spotlight, striving to illuminate and feel the whole field of visual sensations. Our visual field may now feel a little defocused, as if we look through the color sensations. Now we can gradually contract (zoom in) toward the visual sensation of a particular object, like the keyboard, and feel how the most varied mental and memory images arise that are intuitively compatible with the object. For example, we begin experiencing thoughts about the shape and color of the keyboard, what it is used for, how it got to be on our desk, and so on. We can also notice how, from our zoomed-out perspective, there was simply no need or desire to form any such thoughts.

This visual ‘zooming out and in’ experience only provides us with a very limited aperture on what also unfolds in our intuitive life in a more expanded form. Within the latter, the intents navigated encompass entire evolutionary arcs of development which, from our zoomed-in perspective, unfold over many stages of life and ages of collective history, just as the grunts on the ground may feel like it takes dozens of steps to fulfill the sweeping command. These evolutionary arcs feel like the historical context through which the natural kingdoms and human civilizations have developed and been attracted toward certain encompassing goals. At the same time as it navigates the overarching intents, the soul forms intents that are more specifically related to its experience of the partial transitions. These form the basis for our ordinary life activities, such as the various vocations of humanity - hunting, fishing, farming, trading, soldiering, and so on. They also form the basis for our attempts to cognitively orient to the more encompassing arcs through art, science, and religion.

In this sense, we can imagine that the navigation within the overarching evolutionary intent has been ‘chopped up’ and distributed across time and space, taking shape as our various life activities experienced from unique intuitive perspectives. These partial flows are like the decompositions of this primally unified experience, which bring about qualities and capacities in our developmental flow that wouldn’t be possible otherwise (what these are will naturally become evident through our further exploration). Through our intuitive navigation, we gradually seek to harmonize the flows with one another and restore the unified navigatory experience. This harmonization can no longer run its course instinctively, however, as it has for millennia prior, but requires souls who are consciously aware that they are involved in the harmonization process. As we will see, becoming consciously aware of our participation in the process is no simple matter, but at the same time, we are already taking important steps in that direction.

Once the soul zooms into the decomposed flows of the deeper navigatory experience, its understanding of what reality is, how reality works, what it is, how it fits within this reality, how it can influence this reality, what its ‘thinking’ is, and so on, is all gradually shaped and formatted by this unique perspective on its flow. Its mode of consciousness and corresponding perceptual contents metamorphose, leading to the experience of discrete elements that can only be followed in consciousness ‘frame by frame’. An entirely new ‘intuitive vocabulary’ develops for this narrowed and linear experience of the flow, which helps the soul navigate the restricted elements more consciously and precisely. In our age, this vocabulary consists mostly of things like “find food”, “groom”, “seek pleasurable sensations”, “attract a mate”, “reproduce”, “complete societal tasks and earn money”, “get the children out of the house”, “accumulate devices that shrink my responsibility for navigation”, “investigate the forces and particles of reality”, and so on.

The partial transformations also form the basis for conflicting intents between intuitive perspectives, which further decompose the primary flow, since additional partial flows must be shaped and maintained to manage the resulting friction. The soul's interests feel increasingly consumed by the decomposed flows. For example, it feels the need to devote more and more time and inner effort to negotiating stable relationships with other perspectives that are perceived as competing for its goal states (e.g., politics, economics, etc.), or to mitigate the disharmonious effects of the friction (medicine). The holistic navigatory experience recedes further and further into the background of awareness as the new intuitive vocabulary accumulates, the friction ensues, and these all condition the soul’s perspective in a positive feedback spiral. In our time, the soul finally becomes absorbed in this narrowed perspective and intuitive vocabulary, completely enchanted, losing sight of the ‘zooming in’ process. The latter then becomes occluded or “occult”.

Imagine you are playing a Chess game on a standard 8x8 board, and then at some point, your focus is restricted to a 4x4 section of the board in the middle with a few pieces. Eventually, after zooming in and beholding this restricted flow over millions of iterations, you feel immersed in a game with an entirely different ‘intuitive signature’. You see pawns making their limited unidirectional moves, knights arbitrarily hopping around, bishops cutting across the world, and all the pieces mysteriously disappearing from that world and eventually reappearing from another direction and even in different forms (if the pawns promote to queens). Many aspects of this sub-flow begin to feel unintuitive because you can no longer trace where certain pieces come from and why they are on their respective squares. The logic that updates the board state you are witnessing is no longer transparent to your consciousness. This sub-game never seems to be leading in any particular direction, toward any particular goal, or to find a conclusion.

You become so absorbed in this ‘picture in picture’ sub-game that the primary game flow now feels like a rapidly fading dream. The version of ‘you’ with an interest in forever beholding the restricted dynamics cannot find any points of overlap with the version that is still interested in the full spectrum of Chess navigation. The dream of the latter then sinks into the abyss of unconsciousness, becoming only the object of theoretical speculation about ‘things themselves’ or outright ridicule as invisible spectres that were invented to comfort the soul in the midst of the painfully restricted dynamics. People who continue talking about the primary game flow as if it is a concrete reality are deemed naive, superstitious, or insane. For others, the primary flow is acknowledged, but the seemingly arbitrary sub-flow is seen as an obstacle to be dissolved so that they can mystically unite with the former, which is now shrouded in the blurriness of dream life and the darkness of unconscious sleep.

Yet the primary game is still unfolding, even if our gaze has been temporarily restricted. The pieces in the sub-game, if traced widely and far back enough, still testify to that native game flow, of which their current positions and movements are like a narrow aperture. A metaphor, in this deeper sense, acts as a cognitive instrument by which the soul can ‘zoom out’ its aperture back into the wider flow and regain intuitive sensitivity to the full spectrum of navigatory experience by leveraging and retracing (rather than dissolving) the restricted projections in its decomposed imaginative flow. The ‘positions and movements’ of the phenomenal content in the imaginative sub-flow - sensations, thoughts, memories, feelings, impulses - can once again testify to our native experience of the primary game flow, by reminding us of what the latter feels like. It can help bring back into focus some lucid sense of the Alpha and Omega points along which the micromanaged partial transformations have been stretched.

Notice how the metaphorical retracing only works if the sub-flow dynamics aren't considered a literal representation of the primary game flow, such that we can simply derive the latter by extrapolating the former to a larger scale. That would be like observing how pawns seem to disappear from the board in one direction and queens enter from another direction, and concluding the primary game flow must follow similar rules of disappearing, materializing, and teleporting pieces, only at a larger scale. This implies that the leveraging and retracing we are speaking of cannot involve a linear extrapolation of sensible dynamics within our narrow aperture into macro- and micro-scales; a thinking tendency which has become the hallmark of modern science. Such extrapolation can only seem like a reasonable thing to do while the aperture remains restricted. Instead, our retracing expands the aperture and leads us to new and unsuspected intuitions of ‘how reality works’ and how our navigatory perspective fits within the unfamiliar workings of that reality.

Chess playing is only one metaphor amongst the whole spectrum of metaphors that comprise the landscape of cultural activities. There is nothing particularly special about it, but it provides one of the infinite ways to leverage such ordinary activities and their phenomenal content to rekindle consciousness of the deeper navigatory experience. Since it relies primarily on intuitive and intellectual skills and involves simple rules and goals that most people are familiar with, it is somewhat well-suited to distilling the inner dynamics that we are trying to bring into focus. The more we can contemplate and feel our way into what we are instinctively doing in such an activity, the more we open up new experiential pathways for our imagination and advance our occult education. It can provide a basis for ‘figural and far learning transfer’, stimulating insights and cultivating skills that not only transfer to other familiar life activities but also along the unfamiliar vertical axis of intuitive navigation.

The ‘hypothesis’ of Chess is the ideal strategy that we propose will win the game by capturing the opponent’s king, which is rooted in our intuition shaped by our past observations of chess games. We experiment by making various moves that are consonant with our overall strategy and which feel like they bring this ideal state into closer coincidence with our present state. Our data analysis is the calculations we make when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of any given move within the intuitive context of that strategy (during or after the game). Depending on how the game flow feeds back to us after such moves, we adjust our imaginative movements to stay as aligned with the ideal trajectory as possible. Thus, Chess playing gives us a typified image of the intuitive dynamics that make our navigation of life experience possible. The simplicity of the Chess rules that constrain these dynamics helps bring the latter into clearer focus, since it becomes easier to feel what we are doing in the process of playing.

We should also be clear that becoming conscious of the inner flow isn’t solely a mental effort. It requires that we inquire into this primary intuitive flow with patience, precision, and persistent effort, but also with a deep feeling of humility, wonder, and gratitude for all that it makes possible in our lives. We can begin looking at this process that we always use as if we have never experienced it before (in most cases, we haven’t), and with the feeling that its dynamics are beyond anything already familiar to us. This inner stance could be compared to the feeling we may have experienced when we were invited to some gathering but had no idea what to expect when we arrived there, perhaps the first time we attended a wedding or a funeral. We probably entered this unfamiliar space without many expectations or presumptions, and with a certain solemn sense of responsibility for participating in the sacred ritual.

We instinctively possessed this stance as infants learning how to walk, speak, and think, but now it should be readopted voluntarily. Just as we cannot teach a baby to speak or think by explaining to it what to do (which would presuppose that verbal thinking is already mastered), so we can only gradually awaken to the unsuspected inner flow through active experimentation in unfamiliar directions. With a mood of humility and grateful receptivity to the sacred flow, we indeed experience a domain of experience for the very first time in our lives, because we now undergo the experience of observing it consciously. It is unmistakable that this experience cannot be compared with any other previous experiences we have lived through. It is like awakening from a lifelong dream into deeper spectrums of cognitive experience that we never previously suspected to exist.

In the next part, we will further our awakening through the metaphorical portal of Chess. The following summary may help orient the reader to what was explored so far. It should be evident, however, that we cannot rely on such a summary for our intuitive orientation, because the latter comes from actively and consistently experimenting with the symbolic concepts of the essay, as they have been fleshed out. Everything pursued in the domain of occult education is like a living process - our hunger today cannot be satisfied by the memory of what we ate yesterday, but only by eating fresh food, again and again. Likewise, the summary should only be felt as a condensed image of all the imaginative experiences we have lived through in the process of intuitively navigating the essay, and as an anchor point for consistently living through such experiences anew.

SUMMARY:

• Chess as Metaphor for Intuitive Navigation

  • Chess is used as an example of any life activity where we navigate toward goals using intuition shaped by past experience.

  • Most of life (except sleep) involves this intuitive navigation, though we rarely reflect on it.

  • Modern predicaments of all varieties stem from our lack of conscious awareness of this navigatory process.

• Nature of Intuition

  • Intuition is the background recall-anticipation of lawful experiential patterns rooted in lived bodily or imaginative experiences.

  • It guides thinking and action without being reducible to explicit step-by-step reasoning.

  • Every experience enriches our intuitive context, shaping future navigation and its possibilities.

• Animal vs. Human Navigation

  • Animals navigate the life flow automatically through inborn instincts, which imply fundamentally limited experiential pathways.

  • Humans must consciously cultivate their intuitive navigatory skills across diverse domains.

  • This lack of total reliance on instinct gives humans greater imaginative freedom and no fixed ceiling on the experiential pathways that can be pursued.

• Occult Education

  • An occult education uncovers and refines awareness of the deeper dynamics behind intuitive navigation.

  • It differs from mere fact accumulation about some theoretical reality; it intimately investigates reality while including our own real-time (or nearly real-time) navigating perspective and how the latter is modulated by the former.

  • The general aim is to expand our intuitive orientation and degrees of freedom within the experiential flow, such that we can more creatively and ethically pursue our ideal states.

• Metaphor Reconceived

  • Life activities are metaphors in that they are self-similar projections of deeper navigatory dynamics.

  • The goal is not symbolic correspondence (e.g., chess pieces as cosmic elements), but retracing the now occluded process of zooming in from those deeper dynamics.

• Zooming In and Out

  • The soul “zooms in” to micromanage partial transformations and corresponding states within overarching intents.

  • We can experientially sense zooming in/out through attention exercises (e.g., focusing on objects vs. the whole visual field).

• Decomposition of the Primary Flow

  • The unified navigatory intent becomes fragmented among perspectives distributed across time, space, and corresponding life activities.

  • This creates friction (politics, economics, medicine) and increasingly narrows consciousness.

  • The primary holistic flow becomes “occult” (hidden) as attention is absorbed into the zoomed-in aperture and its restricted dynamics.

• Inner Stance Required

  • Awakening to the deeper flow requires humility, patience, gratitude, and wonder.

  • It is not achieved by explanation alone but through consistent and active inner experimentation.

1. https://www.thebugman.com/about/our-blog/how-do-wasps-make-nests

2. For example: