Abstract thinking

So it is time to wake up in our thoughts. Of course we 'see' them; we know what we are thinking. But we see them as images that have much to do with us, but that also seem to be outside of our will. And when we really start to think, when we conceive thoughts, concepts, coherences, then we still are outside of the thoughts. That is why Rudolf Steiner calls them corpses, dead bodies, ingenuous structures without a living soul in them. They are there, but no one is at home there. Everybody lives outside them.

These thoughts cannot be taken into sleep, they vanish. There are no thoughts in sleep, and therefore sleep is unconscious. This is the sleeping in nothingness. Feeling and will are not in nothingness while asleep, they live in a full spiritual world. But there are no thoughts - there is no consciousness.

When woken up in everyday life, there are only vague feelings and impulses which it could be said come out of the sleeping life. But there is no clear conscious effect that can be formed as thoughts in our mind. That makes our thinking even more abstract. And so, on and on, intellectual thinking has become pure thinking, without rests of sleep or clairvoyance. Without feeling, without will.

As I have already said, the time has come to wake up, stand up, bring heart and will into our thoughts. It is not enough to think pure thoughts, not enough to get used to a sense-free thinking, not enough to do our meditation every morning, every evening. Thinking itself must be engaged in metamorphosis. And there is no one who can do that for us, not even a spiritual assistant; we have to do that all by ourselves. I don't mean that we wouldn't receive forces from the spiritual world, to perfect our efforts. But the first step ... we have to put in free will.

But how can we bring heart, soul, will - our whole human being - into thoughts? So that we don't stay outside anymore, but can live in our thoughts, wholeheartedly? So that the thoughts become spirit and soul again?

In the quoted lecture of last week we could read that this would mean that we become clairvoyant in our thoughts. It is the first level of modern clairvoyance. We could also call it a spiritualised thinking, the process a spiritualising of thinking. In 'Rudolf Steiner enters my life' Friedrich Rittelmeyer wrote:
'Once, later on, something made me ask: “Where are the ‘Initiates’ now, when a life-work like yours is at stake?” He replied: “Spiritual truths have now to be grasped by human thought. If you were to meet these Initiates to-day you might not find in them anything of what you are seeking. They had their tasks more in earlier incarnations. To-day the thinking of man must be spiritualised.”

But how can dead thinking be resurrected and become alive?


Thoughts are outsideAbstract thinking by Mieke Mosmuller