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).

Pure thinking is pure will

„When I speak of pure thinking in my "Philosophy of Freedom", this designation was already out of place for the cultural conditions of the time; for Eduard von Hartmann once said to me: "There is no such thing; one can only think on the basis of external perception!" I could only answer him: "You have to try it; then you will learn it and in the end you will really be able to do it. - Suppose, then, that you could have thoughts in the pure flow of thought. Then the moment begins for you when you have led thinking to a point at which it no longer needs to be called thinking. In the twinkling of an eye - let us say in the twinkling of a thought - it has become something else. For this thinking, rightly called "pure thinking", has become pure will; it is willing through and through. If you have come so far in the soul that you have freed thinking from external perception, then it has at the same time become pure will. You float, if I may say so, with your soul in the pure course of thought. This pure course of thought is a course of will. With this, however, pure thinking, and even the effort after its exercise, begins to be not only an exercise of thought, but an exercise of will, and one that reaches into the centre of the human being. For you will make the strange observation: Only now can you speak of thinking, as one has it in ordinary life, as a head activity. Before, you had no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you only know this externally from physiology, anatomy and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you no longer think so high up, but that you begin to think with your chest. You are actually interweaving your thinking with the breathing process. In this way you are stimulating what the yoga exercises have artificially sought to do. You notice, as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will, that it first wrings itself out of the human breast and then out of the whole human body. It is as if you were drawing this thinking out of the last cell fibre of your big toe. And if you study something like this with an inner sympathy, something that has entered the world with all its imperfections - I do not want to defend my "philosophy of freedom" - if you let something like this have its effect on you and feel what this pure thinking is, then you feel that a new inner human being has been born in you, who can bring about the development of will out of the spirit.“ (Lit.:GA 217, p. 148f)

Bodiless thinking

„There are people who do not believe in the existence of such thoughts at all. They think that man cannot think anything that he does not draw from perception or from the bodily conditioned inner life. And all thoughts are only, so to speak, shadow images of perceptions or of inner experiences. He who asserts this only does so because he has never brought himself to the ability to experience with his soul the pure life of thought based in itself. But he who has experienced this has come to know that wherever thought is active in the life of the soul, to the extent that this thought permeates other processes of the soul, the human being is engaged in an activity in the creation of which his body is uninvolved. In the ordinary soul-life, thinking is almost always connected with other soul-activities: Perceiving, feeling, willing, etc., are almost always intermingled. These other processes come about through the body. But thinking plays a part in them. And to the extent that it plays a part, something goes on in the human being and through the human being in which the body is not involved. People who deny this cannot get beyond the deception which arises from the fact that they always observe the activity of thinking united with other activities. But in inner experience it is possible to rouse oneself mentally to experience the mental part of the inner life as separate from everything else. One can detach something from the scope of the soul's life that exists only in pure thoughts. In thoughts that exist in themselves, from which everything is eliminated that gives perception or bodily conditioned inner life. Such thoughts reveal themselves through themselves, through what they are, as a spiritual, a supersensible beingness. And the soul, which unites with such thoughts by excluding all perceiving, all remembering, all other inner life during this union, knows itself with thinking in a supersensible realm and experiences itself outside the body. For the one who sees through all this, the question can no longer come into consideration: is there an experience of the soul in a supersensible element outside the body? For him it would mean denying what he knows from experience. For him there is only the question: what prevents people from recognising such a certain fact? And to this question he finds the answer that the fact in question is one which does not reveal itself unless man first puts himself in such a state of soul that he can receive the revelation. At first people are suspicious when they themselves have to do something purely in their souls, so that something independent of them can be revealed to them. They believe because they have to prepare themselves to receive the revelation, they make the content of the revelation. They want experiences to which man does nothing, towards which he remains completely passive. If, moreover, such people are still unacquainted with the simplest requirements of scientific comprehension of a fact, then they see in soul-contents or soul-productions, in which the soul is depressed below the degree of conscious self-activation that is present in sense-perception and in arbitrary action, an objective revelation of a non-sensuous beingness. Such soul-contents are the visionary experiences, the mediumnistic revelations. - But what comes to light through such revelations is not supersensuous, it is a sub-sensuous world. The conscious waking life of the human being does not take place entirely in the body; above all, the most conscious part of this life takes place on the border between the body and the physical outer world; thus the life of perception, in which what takes place in the sense organs is just as much the carrying into the body of a process outside the body as a penetration of this process from the body; And so the life of the will, which is based on a placing of the human being into the world-being, so that what happens in the human being through his will is at the same time a member of the world-action. In this spiritual experience, which runs along the bodily border, the human being is to a great extent dependent on his bodily organisation; but mental activity plays a part in this experience, and to the extent that this is the case, the human being makes himself independent of the body in sense perception and volition. In visionary experience and in mediumistic production, man enters completely into dependence on the body. He switches off from his soul life that which makes him independent of the body in perception and volition. And thus soul contents and soul productions become mere revelations of the life of the body. Visionary experience and mediumistic production are the results of the fact that in this experience and production man is less independent of the body with his soul than in the ordinary life of perception and will. In the experience of the supersensible, which is meant in this writing, the development of the soul's experience goes in precisely the opposite direction to that of the visionary or mediumistic experience. The soul becomes progressively more independent of the body than it is in the life of perception and will. It attains that independence which can be grasped in the experience of pure thoughts, for a much broader soul activity.

For the supersensible activity of the soul meant here, it is extremely important to see through the experience of pure thinking with complete clarity. For basically this experience itself is already a supersensible activity of the soul. Only one through which one does not yet see anything supersensible. One lives with pure thought in the supersensible; but one experiences only this in a supersensible way; one does not yet experience anything else supersensible. And the supersensible experience must be a continuation of that soul-experience which can already be attained by uniting with pure thinking. That is why it is so important to be able to experience this union correctly. For from the understanding of this union shines the light which can also bring right insight into the nature of supersensible knowledge. As soon as the soul's experience would sink below the clarity of consciousness, which is expressed in thinking, it would be on an erroneous path for the true knowledge of the supersensible world. It would be grasped by the bodily processes; what it experiences and produces is then not revelation of the supersensible through it, but bodily revelation in the realm of the sub-sensible world.“ (Lit.:GA 10, p. 215ff)

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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