Richard Shorman on Chess, Life, and Spirituality

They won’t remember you told them that when they were six. But they’ll feel strongly about their own personal revelation.

-Richard Shorman

Memorial

I just got back from Richard Shorman’s memorial. Speeches were given for hours. I may have missed a couple at the end as I had to catch a flight (the service went way over as so many people had stories to tell).

He was described as a yogi— a realized soul who never made a big deal about it.

Richard mentored one of the speakers in photography. He could tell things about a person by looking at a photo of them. Richard spent time in Russia on behalf of the US— part of his time was spent as an army interrogator, and he was fluent in Russian.

A speaker described how he’d walk by dozens of chess games, providing guidance. He only saw a portion of each game, but he was able to play the chess games backward, showing each previous move. You could feel his intellect.

The room was filled with people of diverse personalities, backgrounds, and religions. One of the speakers said, “Richard taught me things about my own religion.” Everyone in the room audibly agreed.

I learned much about Richard in the weeks since his passing, how his housekeeper taught him about spirituality when he was five. How old he was, where he grew up, how many people he taught, and how he impacted them. Stories like how Richard convinced a man with a gun in his mouth not to commit suicide. The same man now runs a suicide prevention center.

Richard said anytime before you were born is the olden days. Richard taught beginners games from 1867-1938. I realize now this is because Richard was born in 1938.

When a team he trained came out of nowhere and won the national chess championship, the coach of the formerly top school in the country asked to meet with Richard. In Richard fashion, he said, of course, and that he’d be happy to answer any questions.

The coach asked what openings he taught. Richard said he didn’t teach openings. The coach asked what middle game positions he taught. Richard didn’t teach middle-game positions. The coach asked what end games he taught. Richard didn’t teach end games.

Richard taught tactics and complete games on how winners win.

The blue knights memorized 43 games and did 20,000 chess puzzles in a year. Richard said any child can be a national chess champion. You just need to memorize the 43 games and do 20,000 chess puzzles per year.

His common sayings to children were “make the most aggressive move based on strong, strategic principles.” And “Do the work. Pay attention. Follow directions. Do the work.”

Even as adults, he always gave us homework— books to read and philosophical problems to solve. Then, he’d conclude the lesson. Richard never left a thing unfinished.

In that vein, I listened to every recording I have of Richard. I found value in his words below.

Chess

You win by them making errors. What you ultimately want is not to win but to have a good time. Chess is a pastime. It’s a terrific exercise to understand how the mind works. What you do is who you are.

Learning how to take real risks is one of the keystones of chess improvement. It’s not possible to play good chess until you’ve gotten great at playing bad chess.

You have to play the most aggressive move, and you get to enjoy the fruits. The position is going to dictate what you’re going to do, and you get the pleasure from that.

The player who took risks and played brilliant games is what’s valuable.

The simple, naive, direct approach will win against simple, naive opponents. Sophisticated opponents will be your teachers.

You can only get better from losing. You get better by things you don’t notice. You only notice when you lose. Opponents show you what you don’t notice.

If you lose, you get a lesson. If you win, you give a lesson.

After you become a master, you have to learn openings and play real chess. But between 2200 and 2300, you can still play sharp openings.

The only way to consistently make good moves is to become aware of the methods you use to make decisions. Consistency is the hallmark of a real master.

If you don’t see every contact among every piece and every position, you’re not looking. Your eyes are open, but the eyes are not connected to the organ of vision. Even if you see the position and recognize it, it’s still not connected to the part of the brain that registers and organizes the data. You have to compare.

Don’t play bad moves on purpose, but play a certain style that corresponds to your understanding of the game. You shouldn’t play Kasporav’s style because you’re incapable of it. You can pretend to by memorizing what he plays, but as soon as you’re on your own, your strength will plummet.

As time goes on, you’ll become less and less interested in chess and its intricacies and how strong you are compared to others. You’re gradually growing out of the “desire stage.” You’re interested in the game for its own sake, for the patterns involved. The competition to win is ego satisfaction, but the desire to see beauty on the chessboard is above. Even though the ego is still attached, it’s a higher form of satisfaction.

When you’re no longer interested in serious tournament chess, it’s a sign of progress.

Gradually, you’ll realize that all knowledge is within you. To realize it internally frees you to play the game of being different. Once you’ve come to terms with death, you can go on with life. Understand that life is precious, and it doesn’t matter at all. Free to die and pursue life vigorously by not being attached to either.

Teaching

If you want the game to be more interesting, train the youth. Give them standards and show them the secrets of the game. You know how kids are– they don’t pay attention. Plant these thoughts like seeds. As they get older and older, they will discover as if it were their very own treasure that they found out. They won’t remember you told them that when they were six. But they’ll feel strongly about their own personal revelation.

Each child’s gambit needs to be met so they learn right and wrong. They must pick up clues from their environment.

When you’re completely honest, you can lie freely because there’s no malicious motive involved. I lie to the kids I teach all the time. I do this to make them stronger. It gives them lessons. If you reach a certain level of spiritual accomplishment, you’re above the law, but you can’t let fools do that. The way you live your life is how you tell.

A career as a saint is a reprehensible goal.

Priests give propaganda spiels in the middle of sacred texts.

Priests take bribes and tend to do awful things. Even so, we don’t want to hold them in contempt— how pitiful is it to spend your life pursuing spiritual knowledge and to not get it? 

People talk about meditation, physics, the quantum mind, healing, new dimensions, radio and re-enchantment of everyday life, and the psychobiology of gene expression. These are bridging articles. Nothing wrong with that.

I learned a great deal from Alan Watts, who is a bridge between Zen Buddhism and Western thought. He broke down some of the rigid philosophical barriers I was brought up with. He made sense and was entertaining and kept saying the same thing over and over again until a dull mind could appreciate what he was saying.

His concern was not with spirituality but with the proper interpretation of nature as a unity and a human being as part of that unity and not as a separate creature fighting nature. It’s what I needed at the time as you start from total obtuseness. You go on from there.

Dalai Lama’s job in life is to serve as an example for the rest of you. That’s why I’m here. To let you know, and then you can do it.

The Self

If you don’t have a mind, love. If you do have a mind, you have a problem. What you think you know isn’t real. It’s all you have to hang onto until you’re free from it, so use it.

Who are you? Because that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to discover yourself in order to know how you make your decisions. The methods. And it turns out it’s not something you acquire, it’s something you discard. You give up your preconceived views. You surrender your ideas. Your attachment to patterns that you would like to see work out on the board. You see the traces and outlines of patterns, and you’d like to realize them and bring them into fruition. That’s not the way to do it.

You must take all of these patterns into account. Be aware of them and find your own path based on the features in the position. Without judgment. Without preconceptions. So you need to know how your mind works. You need to know who’s asking. That’s called maturity. Serenity. 

So you can work under pressure and not feel pressure. You can make decisions by knowing how you arrive at the decisions. 

Go to the source— death, nothingness.

Dalai Lama explains what happens to the mind after death. Prepare for death through meditation. Unless you reach the deepest subconsciousness, you can’t separate body and mind. The deepest level of meditation is the clear light. 

Go from solid reality to transcendental reality. If you have done something, it’s nice to know that someone else has done it, too. Focus on the inner sound to lead yourself to Nāda to lead yourself to liberation.

Cosmic consciousness doesn’t affect everyone the same

Thoughts that occur naturally are the ones that lead you to your next stage of development.

The meaning of life, the purpose of life is to serve the senses of the self. The self is the witness. It can feel what you feel.

The only way to know the self is to be the self. Since you are the self, all you need to do is remove the distractions. When you want to live, you want to feel weight. You want to hear sounds. You want to see sights. You want to have the thrill of contrast of going up and going down. All the things that are involved with duality. 

How beautiful and how simple it is. It either is or isn’t. But there’s a transition point. A little notch that’s neither plus nor minus. Neither is or is not. Neither here nor there. That’s the place called the middle way. That’s the place called the higher self.

Nothing is really useful vs. knowing the core of yourself.

Take the arrow out of your eye. Don’t inquire as to who shot the arrow and the quality of the tip, what type of feathers were used, and the shaft structure. Don’t worry about that. Get the arrow out! Treat the eye. Worry about the structure of the universe when you understand the self.

You can’t be a gangster or mobster and at the moment of death think Krishna Krishna Krishna and expect to get away with it. You are who you are.

You’re not going to cheat death. It’s all you. Separate yourself from yourself to find yourself.

Feeling life

Enjoy the sensations of being alive. If you’re going to enjoy it, enjoy it fully. When it’s time to meditate, meditate, if it’s really good and delicious, feel it fully. And when it’s done, it’s done. And don’t go back in your mind to how delicious the partridge was. And don’t have anticipations for the next partridge. When it’s time to partridge, partridge. When it’s time to meditate, meditate.

It’s all a big test to resist temptation. How can you resist temptation if you haven’t been exposed to temptation? How do you get strong if you’re not weak?  You have to understand pleasure before you can abandon pleasure by common sense.

It’s all knowledge. Some suffering can be avoided by making better choices.

A goat thinks a tiger is evil. A tiger can have an equal opinion of the goat. Without duality, you don’t have the essence of life.

Human beings have a consciousness that appears to be different from other kinds of animals. We can feel our thinking process. We can project to the past, to the future. But if we worry about the past or we’re anxious about the future, then it clogs us up in the present. We’re not really thinking. So goal-oriented thinking is a hard path to follow.

Even at the end, you play the most aggressive move.

Love

You can’t intellectualize love. There cannot be anything more important than love. All human love is selfish. Only divine love is pure.

Your parents' love affects your character today.

How do you handle a kid who is totally out of control? You protect him from self-injury, even by force; you protect him from society even if you have to remove him from society, but all the while, you do it with maximum love.

Next to love, the greatest power in the universe is the power to grow.

Controlling life

Be a person who has thoughts that occur naturally, which lead you to your next stage of development.

Thinking means you’re not paying attention. Choiceless awareness is far stronger than thinking.

You create the world through your perceptions.

Stand up to evil, or evil wins.

Whenever you find an intractable problem, it’s because you misstated the question. You haven’t given the right question. You assumed something in your question that was fundamentally wrong.

What is it really like to be your parents? Have you paid attention? What’s going on inside your dad’s head? Knowing this gives you the power to understand others. There is really no difference between you and other parts of the universe.

There is no space and time without human minds. We make it up by assigning words that equate to rough, broad paintbrush definitions. The universe is always there whether we close our eyes or not. Our mind determines what is real. We can change what is real.

If you look at an object of beauty too carefully, it’s flawed. It loses its awe. So you have to be careful about too much analysis. 

This chessboard is made up of thought. Thought produced actions that were made up of waves to produce a chessboard. 

It’s not just what you’re thinking that determines your next apparent living form. It’s all continuous, like a wave. 

If you want to be a real yogi— stay in the city with all the distractions. Learn all the distractions and how to defeat the distractions. Ok, now you’re safe to go to the woods.

When you get to the woods and think you’re free from distractions, just wait for the crickets and sounds of the trees. Don’t become a recluse too soon. 

Spirituality

There’s nothing on this earth that you can take with you. Your body will disappear. All things that were given to you will disappear. The more you live in comfort, the less hard work you do. Going to heaven is the worst fate— you’re surrounded by delights and pleasures of all kinds. No work is required. Your mere thought creates a world tailored to your every requirement. Everything you ever wanted. What incentive is there to dissolve the bonds of ego, then?

If you theoretically go to this heaven, but you’re not attached to the pleasures, then nothing wrong with that. Same on earth with karma. 

We aren’t separate from the universe. We’re leaves on a tree, thinking we aren’t part of a tree. We are the tree. 

Place yourself in smaller versions of yourself. The treeness is in you. When you feel you’re one with the universe, you no longer see yourself as separate, but you can act separately. I’m a tree leaf.

And then there’s the mystery within the mystery. There’s your body; there’s your soul. But your soul is only one manifestation of the great soul, the great spirit. Your first job, of course, is to know who you are as an individualized ego. Once you find that, then you’ll find the flood. The ocean of consciousness, and you are that. There’s no individual identity in that. There’s nothing you can hang onto. There’s not a place to stand. There’s not an intellectual concept. There’s not a thought. 

Because a thought is all in the past, there is no now in thoughts. All thoughts are gone. Even thinking about thinking is in the past. Thinking about the future is the past. All thoughts are unreal and unreliable guides to the truth. That’s why the intellect can’t do it. 

You fulfill your desires, and you realize how unsatisfactory the fulfillment of those desires really was. Like Solomon, vanity vanity; all is vanity. Nothing is worthwhile. Get to nothing. See clear light for encouragement to persist.

Our cells die every day; we’re still human. We’re breathing in dust, which is dead human cells. The Gita says the sameness of everything for God is pure.

Real religion is realization. That’s it. Everything else is making you receptive. You dissolve cell by cell. The boundaries disappear. You become what you always were.