Pure thinking

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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 body-free 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)

Body-free 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)

Mathematics and pure thinking

Thinking in purely mathematical terms is already pure thinking:

„You will find numerous philosophers saying that there is no such thing as pure thinking, that all thinking must always be filled at least with remnants, however diluted, of sensual perception. One would have to believe, however, that such philosophers have never really studied mathematics, have never got involved in the difference between analytical mechanics and empirical mechanics, who assert such a thing. But our specialism has already brought us to the point where today we often philosophise without even a trace of knowledge of mathematical thinking. Basically, one cannot philosophise without at least having grasped the spirit of mathematical thinking.“ (Lit.:GA 322, p. 111f)

Ways to sensuality-free thinking

Meditation: The thought thinks the thought

„The most sensuality-free thoughts in the world are still the mathematical ones; but even when today's man thinks of a triangle, he thinks of it in terms of colour and a certain thickness, not abstract enough. But one comes nearer to supersensible thoughts when one pays attention to relations. To remember a tone is still the memory of something sensual; to remember a melody is already something that consists in a relationship of tones to one another, which as such does not belong to the sensual world. Or imagine a villain and next to him another - or even two good people - and one [villain] is an even greater villain than the other, or the one good is greater in good than the other: then in this relationship lies something that is not of the physical-sensuous world, something that leads us up into the spiritual world. If man thinks of a villain or sees one, it will touch him unpleasantly; but if he sees two villains side by side in a play, he will always like the worst villain better than the less bad one, because the great always attracts. The effect of various Shakespearean dramas, for example, is based on this. - That is why it is so important that we observe and study conditions in the outside world, because that leads us away from the sensual.

Another means of becoming free of sensuality [in thinking] is to make processes run in reverse, for example, reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards or the reverse review of our meditation.[2] Only in this way can man improve his memory. In the last four or five centuries memory has declined enormously, and it will do so much more in the future if people do not seize the opportunities now offered to improve it. The time is particularly favourable for these opportunities now, and later they will simply no longer be there. Memory will then become something other than just waiting to see if things want to come up for some dark reason. It will be like groping for the past, like sending out feelers, so to speak, that will reach for the past as if for something real. The time is particularly favourable now for this development and for esoteric development in general.

Thus it becomes apparent how our body is a Maja, thoughts of beings which are themselves again thoughts. The thought thinks the thought, that is a meditation sentence of the highest importance. Not our brain thinks, not our etheric or astral body, but thought itself thinks thoughts.“ (Lit.:GA 266b, p. 134ff)

Reason as the germinal beginning of a new clairvoyance

„No human being could actually come to real clairvoyance if he did not first have a tiny bit of clairvoyance in his soul. If it were true, which is a common belief, that men, as they are, are not clairvoyant, then they could not become clairvoyant at all. For just as the alchemist thinks that one must have a little gold in order to conjure up many quantities of gold, so one must necessarily be already somewhat clairvoyant, so that one can develop this clairvoyance further and further into the infinite.

Now you could put up the alternative and say: So do you believe that we are all already clairvoyant, even if only a tiny bit, or that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so? - You see, this is what matters, that one understands that the first case of the alternative is correct: there is really no one among you who does not have - even if he is not aware of it - this starting point. You all have it. None of you is in distress because you all have a certain quantum of clairvoyance. And what is this quantum? It is that which is not usually appreciated as clairvoyance.

Forgive a somewhat crude comparison: if a pearl lies by the road and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not particularly appreciate the pearl. Modern people are mostly such chickens. They do not value the pearl that is lying there quite openly, they value something quite different, namely they value their ideas. No one could think abstractly, have real thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant, for in ordinary thoughts and ideas the pearl of clairvoyance is there from the very beginning. These thoughts and ideas arise precisely through the same process of the soul through which the highest powers arise. And it is immensely important that one should first learn to understand that the beginning of clairvoyance is actually something quite commonplace: one has only to grasp the supersensible nature of the concepts and ideas. One must be clear that the concepts and ideas come to us from the supersensible worlds, only then does one see correctly. When I tell you of spirits of the higher Hierarchies, of the Seraphim, Cherubim, from the Thrones down to the Archangeloi and Angeloi, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from spiritual, higher worlds. It is from these very worlds that the ideas and concepts come to the soul, they come into the soul from higher worlds and not from the world of the senses.

It was considered a great word of a great Enlightenment philosopher, said by him in the eighteenth century: Man, dare to use your reason. - Today a greater word must ring in the souls, that is: Man, dare to address your concepts and ideas as the beginnings of your clairvoyance. - What I have said now I said many years ago, publicly, in my books "Truth and Science" and "Philosophy of Freedom", where I showed that human ideas come from supersensible, spiritual cognition....

For today's man one thing is necessary if he wants to come to an inwardly experienced truth. If he really wants to experience truth inwardly, then he must have experienced the feeling of the transitoriness of all outer transformations, he must have experienced the mood of infinite sorrow, infinite tragedy and the rejoicing of bliss at the same time, he must have experienced the breath that transitoriness exudes from things. He must have been able to captivate his interest in this breath of becoming, of coming into being and of the transitoriness of the world of the senses. Then man, when he has been able to feel the highest pain and the highest bliss in the outer world, must once have been quite alone, alone only with his concepts and ideas; then he must once have felt: Yes, in these concepts and ideas, there you grasp the world's mystery, the world's events at a corner - the same expression I once used in my "Philosophy of Freedom". But you have to experience this, not just understand it intellectually, and if you want to experience it, you experience it in complete solitude.

And then one has a secondary feeling. On the one hand, one experiences the grandiosity of the world of ideas that stretches out over the universe; on the other hand, one experiences with the deepest bitterness that one must separate from space and time if one wants to be together with one's concepts and ideas. Loneliness! One experiences the frosty cold. And further it reveals itself to one that the world of ideas has now contracted as in one point, as in one point of this loneliness. One experiences: now you are alone with it. - One must be able to experience this. Then one experiences the misguidedness of this world of ideas, an experience that stirs one up deeply in the soul. Then one experiences that one says to oneself: Perhaps you are all this only yourself, perhaps it is only true of these laws that it lives in the point of your own loneliness. - Then one experiences, magnified to infinity, all doubt about being.

When one has this experience in one's world of ideas, when all doubt about being has been painfully and bitterly unloaded on the soul, only then is one basically mature enough to understand how it is not the infinite spaces and the infinite times of the physical world that have given one the ideas. Only now, after the bitter doubt, does one open oneself to the regions of the spiritual and know that the doubt was justified, and how it was justified. For it had to be justified because one believed that the ideas had come from the times and spaces into the soul. But what does one feel now? What does one feel the world of ideas to be, after having experienced it out of the spiritual worlds? Now one feels inspired for the first time, now one begins to feel, whereas before one felt the infinite wasteland stretching out around one like an abyss, now one begins to feel as if one were standing on a rock growing up out of the abyss, and one feels in such a way that one knows: now you are in connection with the spiritual worlds, these and not the sense world have endowed you with the world of ideas.“ (Lit.:GA 146, p. 34ff)

On the essence of pure thinking

In his writing "On the Division of Nature", Johannes Scotus Eriugena compared pure thought with the incomprehensible, because all-embracing, inconceivable, because completely superconceptual essence of God, which can only be approached by seemingly contradictory statements.

„For although our thinking is in itself invisible and incomprehensible, it gives itself to be recognised and grasped by certain signs, in that it condenses itself to a certain extent by sounds or letters or other indications and becomes outwardly visible, but always remains invisible, and in that it emerges in various sensually comprehensible forms without leaving the incomprehensible state of its nature, it moves in its own inner sphere before it reveals itself outwardly. Accordingly, it is silent and calls at the same time, and in silence it calls and in calling it is silent. Yet it shows itself invisibly, and in showing itself it remains invisible; yet it is bounded without limitation, and in being bounded it persists without limitation. It embodies itself at will in sounds and letters, and yet in this embodiment it remains incorporeal in itself. While, in order to move to the senses of others, it forms certain means of movement out of the airy material or out of sensuous forms, it also in turn, in order to reach the outer senses, leaves these very aids and penetrates freely through itself alone into the innermost part of the heart, in order to mingle here with foreign thought and to become one with the object of its union. In performing this, it nevertheless always remains with itself; in its movement it nevertheless stands firm and moves in standing firm, for it is mobile standing and constant movement, and while it unites with others, it does not leave its simplicity.“

– Johannes Scotus Eriugena: On the Classification of Nature, p. 264fTranslated from: Johannes Scotus Erigena, Ludwig Noack (transl.): Über die Eintheilung der Natur, Verlag von L. Heimann, Berlin 1870, Erste Abtheilung, p. 264f

Heart thinking

→ Main article: Heart thinking

Heart thinking is an ability that people in ancient times possessed in an unconscious way. It was connected with a certain sense of truth which, although it could not yet be grasped in clear, conscious contours, nevertheless enabled certain insights into the higher, spiritual worlds. Even Aristotle still regarded the heart as the central organ of thought. But at the same time, with his logic, he laid the reliable foundation for intellectual thinking, which is no longer centred in the heart but in the head.

In the future, a new kind of heart thinking will develop that is compatible with the fully awake I-consciousness, and thus allows insight into purely spiritual connections in a very conscious and level-headed way. It will differ essentially from our present mind in that it is not a discursive, deductive thinking, but overlooks the truth with a glance. This new thinking of the heart does not unfold in a chain of logically joined concepts, but in inwardly experienced mental images that reveal the spiritual connections at a stroke. At the same time, it is a sensuality-free, i.e. pure thinking.

Pure thinking and etheric body

In pure thinking, our thinking activity, which arises in the astral body from the source of the I, is not reflected in the physical body but in the etheric body.

„In our cerebral thinking it happens in such a way that the thought activity develops in the etheric brain, bounces back against the physical nervous system, and that through this the thoughts come to our consciousness. In clairvoyance we push back the brain, as it were. We think with the astral body, and thinking is already thrown back to us by the etheric body.“ (Lit.:GA 161, p. 246)

„Anyone who reads my "Philosophy of Freedom" will find how these ways of understanding the nature of human thinking have been sought. And for me it turned out that only he who sees in the highest expressions of this thinking something that takes place independently of our corporeality, of our bodily organisation, can understand human thinking correctly. And I believe I have succeeded in proving that the processes of pure thinking in man take place independently of bodily processes. In the bodily processes, natural necessities prevail. What emerges from these bodily processes in the form of dull instincts, impulses of will and so on, is in a certain sense determined by natural necessity. What man carries out in his thinking ultimately turns out to be a process which runs independently of the physical organisation of man. And I believe that nothing less than the supersensible nature of human thinking has been revealed to me through this " Philosophy of Freedom". And once this supersensible nature of human thinking had been recognised, then the proof was given that in the most ordinary everyday life, when man only rises to real thinking, through which he is determined by nothing other than the motives of thinking itself, he then has a supersensible element before him in this thinking. If he then directs himself in life according to this thinking, if he develops in this way, if he is educated in such a way that he bases his actions on motives of pure thinking over and above the motives of his physical organisation, over and above drives, emotions, instincts, then he may be called a free being. At that time I set myself the task of explaining the connection between supersensible pure thinking and freedom.

One can now stop at pursuing such a train of thought merely theoretically. But if one does not pursue such a train of thought merely theoretically, but if it becomes a fulfilment of one's whole life, if one sees in it a revelation of human nature itself, then one does not pursue it merely theoretically, then one pursues it practically. What is this practical pursuit? Well, one learns to recognise - once one has grasped the supersensible nature of thought - that man is capable of making himself independent of his bodily organisation in a certain activity. One can now try to see whether man, apart from pure thinking, is still capable of developing such an activity, which is according to the pattern of this pure thinking. Whoever calls that on which I base my anthroposophical spiritual science as a method of research clairvoyance must also call ordinary pure thinking, which certainly flows up from everyday life into human consciousness, which flows into human action, clairvoyance. I myself see no qualitative difference between pure thinking and what I call clairvoyance. I see the matter in such a way that man can first develop a practice in the process of pure thinking, how one becomes independent of one's bodily organisation in one's inner processes, how one accomplishes something in pure thinking in which the body has no part. At the philosophers' congress in Bologna in 1911, I explained in a quite philosophical way that pure thinking is already something that is carried out in the human being without the body's organisation having any part in it.“ (Lit.:GA 255b, p. 299ff)

Living thinking

When our thinking is reflected in the etheric body, we first experience the living forms that it imprints on the warmth ether. Pure thinking thus becomes living thinking, which does not take place in rigid concepts and definitions, but in evolving, living metamorphosing thought forms. Without sufficient warmth of heart, these cannot survive as body-free thoughts; otherwise they grow cold and stiff and then necessarily unite with the physical body. The pure thoughts are therefore in a certain sense etheric warmth beings and thus related to the elementary beings that live in the fire - the salamanders that ripen the fruits and seeds. These living pure thoughts are experienced as a fiery enthusiasm of thought. And this fire immediately proves to be their inherent irrepressible willpower, which can be felt so strongly that it is experienced as more real than the outer sense world. Here is the point where one becomes aware of the independent reality of the spiritual for the first time from one's own experience with absolute certainty. Thought beings make their self-will very strongly apparent, so that we now know: It thinks in me. By confronting them objectively, they nevertheless leave us completely free. They do not force us any more than we are able to force them. As intense and great as this experience of pure thinking is - it is not overwhelming in this sense!

„In the same way that man can penetrate the sleeping dream, so to speak, he can also penetrate the waking life of the day. Here, however, the human being uses his physical body in a very robust way. I have also described this in essays in the Goetheanum. Man does not at all come to see how he could actually see the fire-beings during day-life, for the fire-beings stand in an inner relationship with the thoughts of man, with all that emerges from the organisation of the head. And if man can bring himself to be completely in the waking consciousness of the day and yet in a certain sense be out of himself, that is to say, to be quite rational, to stand firmly with both feet on the earth, and then again to be out of himself at the same time - that is to say, to be himself and to be his opposite, that is to say, to be able to regard himself as a thought-being: then man perceives how the fire-beings in the world form that element which, when we perceive it, makes our thoughts perceptible towards the other side.

Thus the perception of the fire beings can lead man to see himself as a thinker, not merely to be the thinker and to boil out the thoughts there, but to look at how the thoughts run. Only then the thoughts cease to be bound to man; they then prove to be world thoughts; they work and weave as impulses in the world. One then notices that the human head only creates the illusion as if the thoughts were enclosed in this skull. They are only mirrored there; their mirror images are there. That which underlies the thoughts belongs to the sphere of the fire beings. If one enters this sphere of the fire beings, then one sees not only oneself in the thoughts, but one sees the thought content of the world, which is actually at the same time an imaginative content. So it is the power to come out of oneself that presents one's thoughts as thoughts of the world. Yes, perhaps I may say that if one does not look at what is to be seen on earth from the human body, but from the sphere of the fire beings, that is to say, as it were, from the Saturnian being projecting into the earth, then one gets exactly the picture I have described of earth evolution in the „Occult Science in Outline". This outline of an occult science is drawn in such a way that the thoughts appear as the thought-content of the world, seen from the perspective of the fire beings.“ (Lit.:GA 230, p. 135f)

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.
  2. ↑ What is meant is the evening review of the day's life in reverse order, from back to front.
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