Becoming free - part 2

Thinking is a purely human faculty. Our consciousness is filled with thoughts, they go on and on, they make us happy, they bring stress, they make us sad. In the night they still persist, although our awareness of them vanishes. Only in dreams can we perceive that they are still there, showing themselves in more or less fantastic images. At the moment of waking up, the dreaming of thoughts continues, but they become attached to our sense-perceptions - they are held together by the senses.

There are moments when we wake up from this dreaming of our thoughts. Then, we bring more willpower in the course of our thoughts; we determine more what we are thinking. Such moments occur when we want to make decisions, when we have to do work that needs thinking, when we start studying, trying to understand what we have to learn.

There is a faculty in us to wake up from our willful thinking, an awakening that exceeds the normal waking thinking. It is an unbinding from our normal thinking that proceeds along the well-trodden paths of education, family, nation, science etc. Rudolf Steiner said once that this is what people fear most of all, this 'free-ness' in thinking. It is not only feared that a race of self-thinking people will arise, it is also that becoming a self-thinking individual is feared by everyone. It is much easier, and seems to be much safer, simply to follow the stream and never stand up in this stream.

The old Greek philosophy of Heraklitos is based on this concept of stream:
'Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.'

In his dialogue 'Cratylus' Plato quotes this idea:
'Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream.'

But in our modern times we can change this image: The stream goes on, but the thinker can stand up and form thoughts that he himself wants to form, without being entrained by the stream. From this point on we can even think against the stream, Of course, we will not want to think irrationally or illogically, or with concepts that don't exist. We will want to think in a moral and rational way, but we will want to form these thoughts in an independent way. Fear of this prevents us from starting with this free thinking.

Last week I proposed exercising this free thinking in a harmless way: to 'sing' a simple song inwardly in a reverse way.

There are other exercises for standing up in the stream, for waking up from normal wakefulness in a way of thinking that is not determined, that looses itself from the personal way, the routine, of thinking.

Remember an important decision that you made, many years ago. You know how your life has developed after that decision. Now try to focus on this decision and transform it with another decision that you could have made, but did not. Now you try to live your life in the imagination, how it could have formed itself from this other decision. It is a kind of fantasy: life has not been this way, but it could have been so. While thinking the life you could have had, you free yourself for a moment from the groove you are in, you take another direction.

A second biographic possibility to find a certain free-ness, is to go back to the time you were twelve years old and try to identify with a memory of that time. Try to remember as vividly as possible, so that you see the surroundings, sense the atmosphere, smell or taste what there was to smell and to taste, feel the emotions and so on. If you can detect at the same time how your consciousness is, while remembering, you will feel a liberation from all those phrases, conventions, and routines that glue themselves onto your everyday self.


Heraclitos in Raphael's School of Athens.Becoming free - part 2 by Mieke Mosmuller