The Phoenix from the ashes

Achieving enlightenment towards an understanding of the purely human, I tried to formulate in the book 'Seek the light that rises in the west'. Here is a quote at the heart of this enlightenment.

'Now comes the point where we engage the forces at our disposal and move ourselves into the transition from not-thinking to thinking. When we are able to enter into this transition energetically, we sense through thinking itself, through thinking-as-seeing, and understanding without the help of concepts, that if I want to think, then I, and no-one else, am the one who has to set thinking in train. Here is absolute freedom: I can start thinking or even not start. There is no other single cause for this engagement in thinking than my own will to engage in it. That this fact remains unnoticed in daily life is because the transition from not-thinking to thinking always escapes our attention because it is never simply present by itself. To be able to research this transition we have to bring it about ourselves and it requires much effort to do this, because we have continually to differentiate our thought associations, which are not penetrated by our will, from our true, free thinking. But for everyone who wants to do this, there is the possibility of finding this point, the wellspring of free thinking. Then he will find himself as thinker.

And one realises: here I have found the point in the world where I myself am the creator. It is no more than a point, but it is the point where I am conscious for the first time, that: here I have found my actual human being. I recognise my very own thinking capacity, and from this moment on, nothing is the same as before.

Before I had found this point, I lived in insecurity about the world and about myself and the relation between them both. At this point I find myself as a free creating being. And precisely because I am the creator myself, there is no single inexplicable point in regard to what I create. After it has been thought, I do not have to think it over and understand it again as if it were something that had been created beyond my will and my being. That is the case with everything else, but not with thinking. No, while thinking is going on, it is wanted and known at the same time. What I think is not a creation which has to be understood subsequent to my creating it; rather, it is not at all possible for me to think something that I do not already understand while thinking.

I can certainly observe something that I do not understand; I can also repeat something that I do not understand; I can speak of something that I do not understand. Even a thought association which I do not understand can occur to me. But I can never think something myself that I have not already understood.

To realize this means to overcome forever the phenomenon of doubt. I am, as thinker, not only fully present in creating, but I also know exactly what I create and I know that this creation, my thinking, moves in accordance with a lawfulness that is fully comprehended by me. The seemingly unbridgeable gap between creation and concept, between world and I, between object and subject, is here reliably bridged.

The contradiction between Platonist and Aristotelian thinking is also resolved here: when we find our thinking as a reality that is at the same time both subjective – I construct it, and objective – it conforms to a lawfulness that lies outside of myself – then we become ‘universal-realists’. We experience an objective general being – thinking – as a being which is different from everything else, because we produce it subjectively, while at the same time it obeys a general lawfulness.

Plato experienced universals as ‘ante res’: there is not only the reality of everything else, there is a second region of being, the world of Ideas, which precedes the creation of everything else. First, there was the Idea and out of this Idea was created the whole world of ‘everything else’.

We experience this world of Ideas in our thinking as ‘I myself, existent before the onset of thinking’, thus as ‘Ego, ante rem’. By contrast, Aristotle found the universalia in rebus (universals in things): there is indeed a world of Ideas; however, it is not independent of and beyond everything else but is incorporated within the things of our world. We experience ourselves creating within thinking. We find our creative I incorporated in thinking. The I, my creative I, was there before I started thinking. It was there in not-thinking, it even brought the not-thinking about. The I was there as universale ante rem. Subsequently, the I bestirs itself to work. Thinking, as a revelation of the universals of everything else, becomes a creation of the I. The I is universalis in re. It metamorphoses itself in full consciousness in the universals. During this process the self and its metamorphoses in the universals are understood in full consciousness, because thinking and understanding are indissolubly interconnected here. The I is universalis post rem. The I is the creator of thinking; thinking is itself ‘I’. The Categories (of Aristotle) are the I, they are the letters with which the human being may write his own name and at the same time they are the name of the world. They are the letters of the ‘cosmic word’, the letters of the Logos. They are the letters of logic.
The self can release itself from its own creating activity and look upon what it has created. This observation is then at the same time an observation and a thinking understanding.

The human being who has actually found this point – thus not only as an imagination but really as a deed – brings to light that which normally lights up everything else but which always remains in the dark itself. When the light of thinking shines upon itself, it is released from the dark, where it is always experienced as surface appearance, and becomes a new observable substance, which is immaterial, and thus intangible to the bodily senses, but very ‘tangible’ to the sense of thought, the sense which is the self. Thinking as metamorphosis of the I becomes Being.'

The Phoenix from the ashes by Mieke Mosmuller