Chess Board

Redelinghuys Chess Club, which gathers from time to time like a ceremony of Medieval druids, is a group of dynamic chess players who, living as they do out in the backveld where time is not money but life, may surprise you with their wizardry. Come and challenge them, O knight…

When Grandmaster Gary Kasparov defeated and drew with the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in the 1990s, he demonstrated, philosophically, what the wise grasp about consciousness: that all life is conscious, aware, awake – although not all of that which lives – people included – are aware of this awareness. But when you look very deeply, such as into the swirling clouds, you may suddenly become aware…of awareness.

The tragic-comedy of the search for the spark of consciousness, is that mankind, deluded by intellectual inattention (the ego) seeks this consciousness externally, rather than within – which amounts to not taking responsibility for being born with a divine essence, a miraculous stand in the Here and Now. So, because we are so scattered and divided, we try to dress up consciousness in all sorts of external forms, be it in linear computing (so-called ”artificial intelligence”, which is exactly what the name suggests – a mere database), or in the particle physicist’s mad search for the so-called ”God particle”, never to be conclusively found – for all particles are of God, of course – being of one vibrational Source.

I am a better philosopher than I am a chess player, but even then, I only know that I do not know. The language I understand intimately as an art – English – and so much so that the very idea of spell or grammar checker is wholly absurd to my mind, an insult really, and more especially because errors are part of the journey – has 26 to the power of 26 permutations (does it though? – I am only a theoretical mathematician), which is far more than the possibilities of an 8×8 chess board of squares (is it, though?). Yet revelatory thought, which is beyond the confines of words, coming from the silent Source, is infinite, the Absolute of Consciousness to which the greatest database can never attain.