Reading with willpower

First I will continue the quote from the GA 221, p. 37. Next week I will write about my own experiences of and thoughts about the metamorphosis of thinking.

Rudolf Steiner:
'People read anthroposophy in their habitual way, with passive thinking. One can understand the texts if ones understanding is healthy, one doesn't need any faith. If the intellect is healthy, one can understand the thoughts. But still one lives in a passive way in them, just as in the thoughts about outer nature. Then people come and say: “Oh well, I have these thoughts from anthroposophical research, I cannot be sure of them myself, for I have only read them” - this is what is said so easily: I have heard this from the spiritual side.[...]

What does that mean? It means that the speaker says that he is remaining in passive thinking, that he wants to adopt spiritual science in a passive way.

For in the moment that he decides himself to formulate the thoughts given to him by anthroposophical research, he will be in a position to represent the full truth with his whole personality, for in this way he experiences the first stage of their truth.

In other words: the human being has not yet come, when awake, to pour the reality that he experiences as an independent reality in sleep, into the thoughts of this waking life through the power of his will. When we want to become anthroposophers, in order to perceive anthroposophical thoughts, not surrendering in a passive way, but pouring with a forceful will what we are in our thoughts every night in dreamless sleep, in the pure thoughts of anthroposophy, then we have risen to the first level of what we can justifiably call clairvoyance in our time - then we live clairvoyantly in anthroposophical thoughts. We should read a book with the forceful will to bring not only our daily life into the anthroposophical book, so that we don't read some the day before yesterday, and then stop; more yesterday, and stop, and again today, and stop - and so on.

People read nowadays with only part of their day-consciousness. One can read Gustav Freytag, Dickens or Emerson in such a way, but not an anthroposophical book. When we read an anthroposophical book, we have to go into it with our full human being; and because we are unconscious in sleep, which means that we have no thoughts – while the will goes on - we have to go into it with our will. If you will what resides in the words of a real anthroposophical book, you will become directly clairvoyant in thinking through this willing.

You see, this will still has to penetrate those who represent our anthroposophy! If this will, like lightning, goes into those who represent our anthroposophy, then it will become possible for anthroposophy to stand in the world in a true way. So we don't need any miracles, we just need the energetic will that brings more than merely our day-consciousness into a book. However, people don't even read with this level of consciousness any more. Reading journals only takes a few minutes’ attention to receive what is there. We don't even need a whole day there. However, when we dive into a book that comes from anthroposophy with our full human being, it comes to life in us.

Reading with willpower by Mieke Mosmuller