Performance of thinking

Thoughts are reflections, they 'fall into consciousness', they are not performed. When an actor learns his role by heart, he has a great deal of thoughts in his mind. But then the rehearsals start and what were thoughts before have to be performed now. We have to become actors in the world of thinking itself, and a meditation like this one from the past week is a kind of rehearsal, to become a true performance. This is the 'role', I repeat the quote:

- I am thinking things and facts.
Keep this imagination in mind for about a minute, with exclusion of all other thoughts.
Then concentration of the imagination:
- My thinking flows in time.
Again for about one minute.

This was preparation. Then the following imaginations one after the other, in about 3 - 4 minutes:

- I follow the flowing thinking
- I want to recognise my will in my thinking
- I want to find my I in my thinking-will
- I want to live as I in my thinking-will
- I await the resolving of the I by (from) the I.

Then a quiet inner mood of the soul.'

How can we perform thoughts like this?
The preparation is a making conscious of thinking as a phenomenon that can be perceived and observed. But in the second part, in the five sentences, something should happen.

In the preparation we have learned to see how thinking takes time, how it floats in the medium of time. Now our own role starts: I follow the flowing thinking. Of course it is not enough to just say this and repeat it. It would be the same as saying that I should imagine a blue circular area with red surroundings and not imagine it. So I follow the flowing thinking that I have learned to perceive. But now that I follow, I feel that I really follow, and so I discover my will in my thinking. For the 'following' is also a thinking and I have become active, I do not only think, I also act: I follow.

Now I have recognised my will in thinking and from now on I have or I am a thinking-will. I only have to realise that it is I that is one with this thinking-will, and I can start to imagine or observe how it is I that lives in my thinking-will. Not just by saying it, but by realising it.

Then a great change comes. Up to this moment the sentences called for an activity of the I, a growing self-knowledge in action.

Now I find the word 'await'. I can do nothing myself anymore, something has to come now that I can't bring about. It seems as if the other side of the I has to be awaited. There seems to be an I that will still be there when my 'normal' I will be resolved. And it is this I that brings the resolving about. Through this, the actual I that was already there, but unconscious, emerges. This state could not be reached without the strengthening of the I as we followed in this meditation-sequence. There cannot be a conquering of egoism, as long as the ego is obscure. Through this procedure it becomes as strong as it can be, it comes to light and it shows its affinity with the true I.

The end of this meditation is an awaiting and an abiding of the soul in a quiet mood....


From the 'School of Athens', RaphaelPerformance of thinking by Mieke Mosmuller