Pure thinking

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843)

Pure thinking (Latin: intellectus purus) is creative, active, living thinking and thus at the same time pure will, i.e. pure spiritual activity. It is the beginning of direct spiritual experience. Its content are at first pure concepts without direct reference to sensual perceptions and the reciprocal lawful relationships to each other resulting from the concepts themselves, which reveal themselves holistically in pure forms and structures free of sensuality. Pure thinking thus differs from the usual discursive activity of understanding, through which we try to penetrate sensual experiences by thinking and combine ready-made concepts with one another according to logical criteria or formally derive them from one another through logical conclusions. We use the physical brain as a tool in the activity of understanding. Although it is not the brain that thinks, the brain reflects our own mental activity back to us in the form of intellectual thoughts and only thereby brings them to our consciousness. Through the unprejudiced mind we can, as Rudolf Steiner has repeatedly emphasised, grasp spiritual content in principle, but we cannot experience it directly. This only becomes possible through pure, sensuality-free thinking, which presupposes bodiless experience and is thus at the same time bodiless thinking[1], through which the spirit self is already formed as the higher spiritual element of the human being (Lit.:GA 53, p. 214f).

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.

References

  1. ↑ Pure thinking does not gain its content through abstraction from the sense world, but directly from the purely spiritual, essential world of ideas; in order to be able to hold and communicate this content in the form of factual thoughts, however, the tool of the brain is most certainly necessary. In this sense, "free of the body" means that nothing of the activity of the body flows into the content of pure thinking.
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