How do we find freedom?

The question is: how can we find this inner mighty stream of freedom? Is there a kind of path to reach this field of freedom? The first step in this answer can be shown by the following quote from Rudolf Steiner (GA 78). Because there is no full translation of this text in English available - as far as I can see - I will give my own translation here.

'In observing nature we rely on outer sense perception. The human world of thought, the content of thinking, is being developed at the other side of this sense perception and as true reality we find what is composed of one-sided contents of experience of the outer world and one-sided content of thinking. We complete what, as I said yesterday, as half a reality meets with us through our physical organisation. When we want to grasp this freedom that is an experience which is directly identical to the human being itself, we can not lean on outer things. We have to ally thinking itself with what we are - as I would say - in the process of our I. We have to view what stands before us in freedom, but meanwhile, while viewing, we have simultaneously to develop thinking, in the same way as we develop thinking when we think about outer aspects. What Goethe appreciated so much, as Heinroth called his thinking a 'gegenständliches' thinking (an object thinking), must reveal itself at a still higher level, if we want to grasp the revelation of freedom, for Goethe connected his thinking with the outer-sensual world of the plants. Here he succeeded in letting his thinking dive into the object, with active thinking living in the object itself; but the object remained passive. If we want to –if I may say it in this way –develop object-thinking in the concept of freedom, we will have to permeate a super sensual-spiritual that is in a continuous activity in the weaving of the human soul, in a still more intimate way with the activity of thinking. We must not permeate something outer but permeate something that develops in us with the activity of thinking. Through this now, this new object of our thinking is being wrenched from being linked to whatever object in a normal sense. What thinking performs here becomes a deed of freeing itself. Thinking, without becoming empty, without losing content, but rather filled with the most intimate flowing of the human being itself, raises itself to a free flow that makes flow one thought from the other. The soul content is being filled with content that it creates itself and that is, in its creation, at the same time objective.'

In this description it becomes very clear to us that we have the possibility not only to think about outer objects, but that we also are able to permeate the activity of our thinking with thinking, as if our thinking-activity were an object - although it is a subjective activity. At the moment that the thinking-activity becomes an object to permeate with thinking, we can feel how we are lifted to another level of being, how the physical body is being 'forgotten', and a thinking is unfolding that is free from the body. This flow is a mighty stream of freed thinking; it provides the field at which 'intuition' is living.

But we need to develop our thinking powerfully to become able to permeate it with thinking itself. So we need to have contents for thinking, before thinking itself can become content. I hope to describe this in a forthcoming text.


From Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the green snake and the beautiful Lily, painted by Daniël van Bemmelen.How do we find freedom? by Mieke Mosmuller