Becoming a chess master helped Danny Rensch escape a northern Arizona cult
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As a young boy, Danny Rensch dreamed of being a chess prodigy. It wasn’t just that he was obsessed with the game; chess seemed like an escape from the extreme circumstances of his childhood.
Rensch was born into the Church of Immortal Consciousness, a spiritual community based in Tonto Village, not far from Payson. Rensch said the group was a cult, and in his new memoir, “Dark Squares,” he told the story of how chess became a pathway out of the group’s clutches.
Rensch would go on to become one of the most celebrated chess players in the world — but not without some heartbreaking sacrifices along the way.
He joined The Show and spoke about the game’s unique appeal, and how, as a kid, he spent hours reading every single chess book he could get his hands on.
Full conversation
DANNY RENSCH: Every single page had some sort of hidden gem or some sort of knowledge that I was just about to get. I felt like there were secret lessons just waiting to be passed down if you only would just keep reading.
And I think chess really was one of the first games that we started documenting. And when you start documenting and tracking not just every single game result, but the moves, I just understood right away that there was kind of something magical to this idea that there was an evolution within the board and that your own understanding could improve just by learning the secrets and/or learning from the mistakes of sort of the master of the past, if you will.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes, yes, there’s this fixed reality, which is a board with a set number of squares, set number of pieces, each of which has prescribed movements. But within those limitations, there’s all these infinite variations that can unfold.
RENSCH: And even as we sit here today with AI and machine learning, and as I’ve joked many times on different shows, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t solve chess, which is a game of complete and limited information.
It’s not even a game with luck, where you’re calculating the odds of the possibilities you actually are not in control of. Chess is a game where you are in full control and yet you in many ways are sort of surrendering the fact that you inherently can’t control it because you can never see all the way to the end and you can’t fully solve the unsolvable.
DINGMAN: There is a resonance there between that idea and the environment that you were raised in, which was this cult called the Church of Immortal Consciousness, where the central teaching was that there was this 15th century doctor who one of the founders of this cult was able to channel and speak to you directly as, kind of passing down this ancient wisdom. Do you see an alignment there?
RENSCH: I was born into and then literally raised under the premise of honoring those who’ve come before you and having an appreciation that there is wisdom that if you’re open to it, you can benefit from.
Chess is interesting because chess also — I can say, having been raised in a cult — has a very religious following where people, for lack of a better term or lack of a better comparison, they tend to worship the game, and they tend to fall almost at times victim to their own sort of obsession with the unsolvable nature.
DINGMAN: Yes. Well, I’m glad you brought this up because this is something I wanted to ask you about. You do this really lovely thing in the book where, between the chapters of your story, there are these little interludes where you’re kind of tracing the history of chess and its evolution.
And in those interludes, it feels to me at least as a reader, you’re nodding towards what you were just describing: This idea that chess as a kind of beautiful ideology with a mystery at the center has all of these imperfect systems grow up around it. Which is also a way of describing a cult maybe?
RENSCH: Well, I think one of the things about chess that is to your point, chess is fascinating precisely because every single moment there is a right decision. And yet throughout the entire maze, you are almost guaranteed to go wrong at one point.
And I believe that spirituality itself, even religious storytelling can be very healthy if used to help people ask life’s biggest questions like, “Why am I here?” and “How can I have a meaning? How can I make meaning and have an impact?”
The moment anyone tells you they have the answers to those questions, and certainly all of those questions, is where any religion has the potential to become a cult. Because the moment you pretend that anything is infallible or somehow above the right to your own skepticism, I believe that is the slippery slope where — I saw for myself and experienced it — where you can you can give away your own agency in the process and ultimately not be served by those who are pretending to have the answers. And so there’s a very interesting kind of human predicament within the game itself.
DINGMAN: It seems like in addition to you having an intuitive sense that chess was maybe your lowercase p purpose, it ends up being decided for you within the church that chess is in fact your capital P purpose. So talk a little bit about the tension between those two things, because it is very significant.
RENSCH: At some point, as I was progressing as a young player and became an All-American under the auspices of another part of the spiritual frameworks, which is that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience and our spirit is here to achieve a purpose. And if we know what that purpose is, everything else should be secondary. And not only secondary, if it’s in any way evaluated or deemed to be impeding on your purpose being the most successful possible, that it should be removed.
And this includes not just intimate relationships but biological relationships. And this dynamic had kind of existed, but never in the way that it came down explosively for me, which was that at the age of 12, I was told that my purpose was chess. Which was kind of a big deal in terms of it meaning that nothing else mattered. No schooling mattered, no relationships would matter if they weren’t supporting me becoming the best chess player in the world, essentially, and becoming a world champion.
And at one point, not having the best chess tournaments here and there, I was separated and taken away from my mom. And my mom, for her part, was complicit in the idea that she was also under the same sort of brainwashing that If she was standing in the way of my purpose, she wouldn’t want to do that either. And I wouldn’t speak to her for 10 years.
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