Thoughts and thinking

Thoughts come and go, they fill up our consciousness all day. If we try to gain knowledge, a little bit of concentration, attention and willpower enters our thinking. But true thinking is something else. Gaining knowledge, studying, is made by intellectual thinking. In our western culture we seem to be born and educated to become intellectual thinkers. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that through this intellectual thinking by day, we live in a kind of nothing by night. That means that by day we have nothing in our thinking consciousness that bears signs of the spiritual worlds.

In earlier times (Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus) the human being took something of his etheric body into the night, and this was inspired with spiritual knowledge. By day this knowledge intermingled with the normal day-thoughts. Thanks to the fact that the modern human being sleeps into nothingness, he wakes up without anything spiritual and in his thinking consciousness he has nothing other than the contents of his own thinking. And in this thinking he only has images, no reality. My image in the mirror can't force me to anything, nor can a photograph. We could call that free-ness of the higher worlds and true independence.

Rudolf Steiner in the lecture in GA 221, p. 34.
'Because of all this the human being has become weak in his will. Modern people don't want to admit this, but so it is. If one only would try, one could understand this in a historical way. One should look at the mighty spiritual movements that have spread over the world and see with what huge impulses of the will the founders of religions have worked in the world. Such an inner impulse of the will has been lost for the modern human race. Therefore the modern human being is being educated in his thoughts by the outer world. He looks at nature, the forms, processes and the beings of nature with his mere intellectual thoughts, as if his inner being were only a mirror that reflects everything. Yes, the human being is in his inner life so weak that he gets frightened to death when somebody produces thoughts by himself, when he doesn't only read his thoughts from what outer nature offers. Thus has pure thought developed itself in a passive way in the modern human being. I don't say this in a critical way; for if humanity had moved to produce pure thoughts immediately, people would have brought all kinds of impure phantasies into thinking, through the old inheritance. It has been a good education for modern humanity that people have let themselves be seduced into developing their concepts, their ideas, only by reference to the outer world, have let themselves be dictated by the outer world. And so people have got used to it, not to live themselves in their concepts and ideas, in their thinking, but let these be given to them by the outer world. '

Our time for learning time has, however, now passed and the time has come to bring activity in thinking and to live ourselves in our thinking, in our concepts and ideas. A unification of the self and its concepts and ideas, in thinking, would be 'modern' in the true sense of the word.

Thoughts and thinking by Mieke Mosmuller