Yes, after some time I once again gathered the courage to sit down here and put a thing or two into words. When you follow politics—and by that I do not mean only in the Netherlands, but in the world—then your courage can very easily sink into your shoes. What you see is that, in essence, it always remains the same.
Whether you see a cabinet functioning from the left or from the right—we still have yet to see this new cabinet in the Netherlands, of course. Whether you hear one thing or another, it is actually not very different. The only thing that really differs is the content, but the manner in which the content is proclaimed is, to the point of weariness, always the same.
This is something that you can really only grasp when you come to know human thinking. Now, that is a task that I have seen before me my entire life and that I have also tried to fulfill: to develop an observation of what human thinking is. Where do you begin, then? Naturally, you must begin with yourself, with yourself as a thinker.
And over the course of my life it has become very clear to me that one actually suffers from the nature of thinking. You all surely remember that as a child you had a very different experience of the world than the one that develops when you enter puberty, and then further still when you subsequently enter student life or professional life.
In my life, at any rate, it was so that as I grew older—and by that I do not mean truly old, but rather moving toward adulthood—I experienced a loss of reality. You get a feeling that—you are not yet so consciously aware that you are beginning to compare how you experienced things as a child with later on—but you suffer from the fact that everything flattens out and that you gradually lose the sheen and the rapture of reality. And how can it be that people—for surely everyone must have this—that people then grow older and older and actually have a certain satisfaction with that? I truly do not understand that.
In my experience it was so that you feel that that which you seek in life as a human being, you gradually lose more and more. And it really cannot be otherwise than that at some point in your life there comes a moment in which you discover: yes, there is after all a possibility of emerging from this flattening and this shadow existence into which you increasingly fall. When I follow politics, then I see only people and I hear only the arguments of people who have remained in that shadow existence.
When will someone finally stand up who gives a speech that proceeds from a kind of thinking that does not come from that shadow existence? Yes, what kind of thinking would that have to be? Look, in your own thinking you actually always see that you either trail along behind thinking as it runs entirely by itself, or else you, as it were, group it somewhat with your will into a body of knowledge with which you have a certain satisfaction. That is really what you discover when you observe thinking.
That is something entirely different from what, for example, moves an artist who makes an attempt to render visible or audible that which lives in experience. Such a person will not be satisfied with a shadow existence if he or she is a true artist. Then something of a reality must appear, and that is what one so longs for in thinking.
That it does not remain this always-the-same talking whole, but that it takes on a form that has some affinity with the artistic nature. That you enter into thinking with your being, and that from the inner side of the concepts you give form to thinking. I do not see that happening with politicians, and the result is that it truly makes little difference whether you listen to someone from the left, someone from the center, or someone from the right.
Of course the contents are completely different, but the way in which the content is expressed in writing, in messages, and in spoken word—the difference is perhaps that one has a little more fire than the other, one a little more conviction than the other. The whole personality is of course behind it, but in essence it is the same with everyone. One must surely long for it that, as a human being, one does not remain outside of things, but that one can unite with them in such a way that one brings about a movement from within.
Now I know, of course, that I am sitting here and I am also speaking words and I also have a certain personality and I also have my limitations, but I do know that in what I speak, I am fully present. And that is what should arise in thinking: that thinking is permeated with the will of the thinker.
Then something would truly change in politics, but now that cannot happen, because what Mr. or Mrs. A has said has been thought and spoken from shadow thinking. And what Mr. B or Mrs. B says, from shadow thinking, essentially comes down to the same thing. That is something that may not be so immediately transparent, but it was Rudolf Steiner who drew attention to this, and he already made it very clear at the beginning—or rather, in the course of his activity in the twentieth century—that you cannot change anything in the world if you do so with exactly the same instrument with which you first made the mistakes.
When something goes completely wrong and you recognize that and you say, well then, we will now take a completely different course and we will solve it—and you do so with the same means with which the mistakes were made or through which the mistakes were made—does not everyone see that this is a senseless path? We see here in the Netherlands that the previous cabinet, which was a right-wing cabinet, received a great deal of criticism because it, so it is said, achieved nothing. Now a cabinet comes and it is said: we will now truly achieve something.
Why? How so? Because other laws are being introduced? The experiential world and the shadow thinking are exactly the same, and therefore nothing fundamental will truly be able to change. There will have to come a metamorphosis from shadow thinking to genuine, fiery, will-permeated, individually carried thinking.
Then there is a chance that real progress will be achieved in politics.
Een reactie
I resonate with your reflection on how our understanding of reality shifts as we grow older. It’s fascinating to think about how childhood innocence contrasts with the complexities we face as adults, and how this shapes our worldview.