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Michael's mission is to bring into the human etheric body the forces by which the thought-shadows gain life again; then souls and spirits of the supersensible worlds will incline to the animated thoughts; the liberated human being will be able to live with them as formerly the human being lived with them, who was only the physical image of their working.|26|76ff}}
Michael's mission is to bring into the human etheric body the forces by which the thought-shadows gain life again; then souls and spirits of the supersensible worlds will incline to the animated thoughts; the liberated human being will be able to live with them as formerly the human being lived with them, who was only the physical image of their working.|26|76ff}}
== The thought content of the world ==
Through our [[thinking]] we bring to appearance in our [[consciousness]] the thoughts which, according to their [[reality]], belong to the world of which we ourselves are also a part.
{{GZ|The materialist does not admit that the thoughts which we form in nature are previously contained in it. He believes that we put them into it.
The Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages placed a glass of water in front of the neophyte and said to him: 'In order for this water to be in the glass, someone must have put it in. It is the same with the ideas that we find in nature. They must have been put there by the divine spirits, the helpers of the Logos.
The thoughts we draw from the world are in truth found in it. Everything we create is necessarily included in it.|94|34}}
Thoughts are spread throughout the world, they are the forces at work in things. But they do not float about freely in the world, but are carried or streamed out by [[spiritual beings]].
{{GZ|It is a prejudice of the present so-called enlightened humanity that its thoughts are only in the mind. We would not know anything about things through thoughts if these thoughts were only in people's heads. The person who believes that thoughts are only in people's heads is subject to the same prejudice, paradoxical as it may sound, as the person who believes that the sip of water with which he quenches his thirst originated on his tongue and did not flow from the water jug into his mouth. Basically, it is just as ridiculous to claim that thoughts originate in the human head as it is to say - when I quench my thirst with a drink of water that I have in my jug - that the water originated in my mouth. Thoughts are indeed spread out in the world. Thoughts are the forces that are at work in things. And our organ of thought is only something that draws from the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, that takes the thoughts into itself. So we must not speak of thoughts as if they were something that belongs only to man. We must speak of thoughts in such a way that we are conscious of them: Thoughts are the world-dominating forces that are spread everywhere in the cosmos. But these thoughts do not therefore fly about freely, but are always carried, worked on by some beings. And, what is most important, they are not always carried by the same beings.|222|45f}}
Until about the 4th century A.D., the Exusiai, the spirits of form, called Elohim in Genesis, were the bearers of cosmic intelligence. Then this task passed to the Archai, the spirits of personality. This process of handing over began in pre-Christian times and was not completed until the 14th century. As a result, man's access to the world of thought also became different. Whereas in former times thoughts were received from the outside like sensory perceptions, they now appeared more and more within and thus increasingly came into the possession of the personality. {{GZ||222|46ff}}


== Literature ==
== Literature ==

Revision as of 15:00, 19 April 2021

Wassily Kandinsky: To the Unknown Voice (1916)

The thought initially appears as the more or less solidified, dead product of living thinking, whereby a clear distinction must be made between the subjective form of its appearance in consciousness, for example as an idea, and its objective content. Mentally, thoughts are mostly experienced through image and/or word conceptions. In terms of content, they consist of concepts or ordered conceptual connections. Complex thoughts that are not formed step by step through discursive thinking, but arise intuitively in our consciousness, are called ideas.

It is through thoughts that we become aware of thinking in the first place, because we do not normally observe the living thinking process, at least not in its full depth, but only the products it produces, namely thoughts. However, the observation of thinking is possible for every thinking person with the appropriate training of attention. If this succeeds, the act of thinking itself becomes a component of the experience of thought.

Mere having of thoughts, i.e. the presence of finished thoughts in consciousness, which are called up from memory as the result of earlier thinking without actively experienced insight, or which have been acquired more or less passively as knowledge without one's own deeper insight in reliance on an authority, or which consist only in factually largely unrelated associations of thoughts, is not yet thinking, but a mere perception of the thoughts passing through consciousness. Real thinking must be produced by one's own effort, i.e. by an activity of the will, and must progress self-actively to the immediate clear insight into the present ideal connections.

The thought formation process

Thoughts are reflections of a supersensible. Today, their carrier is the etheric body and their mirroring apparatus is the physical body, which, however, only pictures the living thoughts in a pale dead form shadow-like in our consciousness.

„The etheric body is the carrier of thoughts, which are also reflections. People could easily come to the conclusion that thoughts are reflections of a supersensible. Thoughts will never be able to be prepared under a microscope. Thoughts live in truth in the etheric body. They are formed by thought, and this is reflected in the physical body. From this we can see that cognition, knowledge, depends on the physical body and the etheric body. Only the impressions of the physical plan speak to the physical and etheric body. Other ideas, however, must find a place in the human soul. They must also take hold of the astral body, the whole feeling and willing and the thinking, which is not only exhausted on the physical plane. Otherwise the human being remains inwardly dead. All ideas that depict something only have meaning for the physical plane. The very question: Is an idea justified that does not represent something? - says this. But the ideas that live freely in the spirit, that live freely in the astral body and in the ego, with them one not only recognises, but lives with them. These are ideas that not only represent something, but are inwardly active, alive, that make something of themselves and of us.“ (Lit.:GA 154, p. 131f)

According to their true origin, thoughts are reflections of the spiritual, i.e. of the actual spiritual world, the devachan.

„Now, in the spirit as man has it today, thoughts live, the thoughts as I present them, for instance, in my "Philosophy of Freedom", where they are not saturated with sensory perceptions, but are freely created, pure thoughts in human consciousness. There the thoughts, according to their quality, are at first only an appearance, they are so little a full reality that they do not have an inner power. Because we do not have the mirror image, we can compare them, not entirely, but in a certain sense nevertheless, with mirror images. The image that appears in the mirror does not have force in the direction of its lines; it is entirely passive. Human thoughts have force in their unfolding, so that we can also catch this force, as I said yesterday in the esoteric lesson, and make it permeate the will. But in relation to the universe in its full being, these thoughts which man has in life actually behave like mirror images, so that we already carry the spirit in the human being, but the spirit in the mirror image.

Now, my dear friends, what we carry within us comes from the world which I have described in my "Theosophy" as spirit-land, and we actually, by thinking on earth, bring down to earth the ingredients of spirit-land in appearance, in reflection. We carry what Theosophy calls the Devachan down into the earth realm by thinking, even if it is a faint reflection. We carry these contents in us on earth, in a faint reflection the glow of heaven.“ (Lit.:GA 346, p. 199)

The experience of thoughts has changed greatly in the course of human development. Originally, thoughts were experienced directly in the I. Man felt himself carried by a world of spiritual beings. Later, their spiritual revelation was experienced in the astral body. In the heyday of Greco-Latin culture, it was still possible to experience living thoughts. Only with the dawn of the consciousness-soul age did they take on the shadowy form that we consider the only possible form today. Today it is Michael's mission to revive the shadows of thought, but in such a way that the full freedom of man is preserved.

„Today man feels that ideas are formed in him through the activity of his soul. He has the feeling that he is the formator of ideas, while only the perceptions from outside reach him. Man did not always have this feeling. In older times, he felt that the content of ideas was not something he had made himself, but something he had received through inspiration from the supersensible world.

This feeling went through stages. And the stages depended on the part of the human being's being with which he experienced what he now calls his ideas. Today, in the age of the development of the consciousness soul, what is written in the preceding guidelines applies unreservedly: "Thoughts have their actual seat in the etheric body of man. But there they are essentially living forces. They imprint themselves on the physical body. And as such 'imprinted thoughts' they have the shadowy nature in which ordinary consciousness knows them." We can now go back to times when thoughts were experienced directly in the "I". But then they were not shadowy as they are today; they were not merely living; they were animated and spiritualised. This means, however, that man did not think thoughts, but experienced the perception of concrete spiritual entities [...]

Man is spirit. And his world is that of spirits. The next stage is the one where thought is no longer experienced by the "I" but by the astral body. There the immediate spirituality is lost to the soul's sight. The mental appears as an animate living thing [...]

There the concrete spiritual beings conceal themselves; their reflection, as animate life, appears. One begins to bring the "life of nature" to this "life of the souls". One looks for the effective spiritual beings and their deeds in the natural beings and natural processes. In what later appeared as the alchemical search, the historical precipitation of this stage of consciousness can be seen [...]

A third epoch of the development of consciousness brings thoughts to consciousness, but as living thoughts, in the etheric body.

When Greek civilisation was great, it lived in this consciousness. When the Greek thought, he did not form a thought through which he looked at the world as with his own construction; but he felt life excited within him, which also pulsated outside in things and processes.

There arose for the first time the longing for freedom of one's own actions. Not yet real freedom, but the longing for it [...]

Only when the thoughts took on their imprint in the physical body and consciousness extended only to this imprint, did the possibility of freedom arise. This is the condition which is given with the fifteenth century after Christ [...]

When thoughts seized the physical body, spirit, soul, life had been eradicated from their immediate content; and the abstract shadow clinging to the physical body remained alone. Such thoughts can only make physical-material things the object of their cognition. For they are themselves only real in the physical-material body of man.

Materialism did not arise because only material beings and processes could be perceived in outer nature, but because man had to pass through a stage in his development which led him to a consciousness which at first was only capable of beholding material revelations. The one-sided shaping of this human need for development resulted in the view of nature of modern times.

Michael's mission is to bring into the human etheric body the forces by which the thought-shadows gain life again; then souls and spirits of the supersensible worlds will incline to the animated thoughts; the liberated human being will be able to live with them as formerly the human being lived with them, who was only the physical image of their working.“ (Lit.:GA 26, p. 76ff)

The thought content of the world

Through our thinking we bring to appearance in our consciousness the thoughts which, according to their reality, belong to the world of which we ourselves are also a part.

„The materialist does not admit that the thoughts which we form in nature are previously contained in it. He believes that we put them into it.

The Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages placed a glass of water in front of the neophyte and said to him: 'In order for this water to be in the glass, someone must have put it in. It is the same with the ideas that we find in nature. They must have been put there by the divine spirits, the helpers of the Logos.

The thoughts we draw from the world are in truth found in it. Everything we create is necessarily included in it.“ (Lit.:GA 94, p. 34)

Thoughts are spread throughout the world, they are the forces at work in things. But they do not float about freely in the world, but are carried or streamed out by spiritual beings.

„It is a prejudice of the present so-called enlightened humanity that its thoughts are only in the mind. We would not know anything about things through thoughts if these thoughts were only in people's heads. The person who believes that thoughts are only in people's heads is subject to the same prejudice, paradoxical as it may sound, as the person who believes that the sip of water with which he quenches his thirst originated on his tongue and did not flow from the water jug into his mouth. Basically, it is just as ridiculous to claim that thoughts originate in the human head as it is to say - when I quench my thirst with a drink of water that I have in my jug - that the water originated in my mouth. Thoughts are indeed spread out in the world. Thoughts are the forces that are at work in things. And our organ of thought is only something that draws from the cosmic reservoir of thought forces, that takes the thoughts into itself. So we must not speak of thoughts as if they were something that belongs only to man. We must speak of thoughts in such a way that we are conscious of them: Thoughts are the world-dominating forces that are spread everywhere in the cosmos. But these thoughts do not therefore fly about freely, but are always carried, worked on by some beings. And, what is most important, they are not always carried by the same beings.“ (Lit.:GA 222, p. 45f)

Until about the 4th century A.D., the Exusiai, the spirits of form, called Elohim in Genesis, were the bearers of cosmic intelligence. Then this task passed to the Archai, the spirits of personality. This process of handing over began in pre-Christian times and was not completed until the 14th century. As a result, man's access to the world of thought also became different. Whereas in former times thoughts were received from the outside like sensory perceptions, they now appeared more and more within and thus increasingly came into the possession of the personality. (Lit.:GA 222, p. 46ff)

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.
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