Learn to Think! and how to begin

Because we have thoughts and because we can learn we think that we can think. We can absorb a great deal and put it into our memory and perhaps reproduce it, so we think: Yes, I can think! And in the course of life, we have formed opinions and judgements and we think that we have formed them ourselves, so we have the feeling that we live in a wealth of thoughts that are really ours. We humans, and I include myself here, do indeed build up a whole system of thoughts, of opinions and judgements through environment, through upbringing, through disposition, through everything we experience in our lives, but one cannot really say that these are really our own. If one starts on a path towards self-knowledge in this area, one has to examine: where do my opinions and judgements come from? Watch video on YouTube

It was absolutely not my intention not to make any video recordings for such a long time. It has been personal circumstances that have forced me to remain silent for a long time and now things are better again and there is time and also opportunity to make a video again.

In those months - I think the last time was in April - a lot has happened in outer life as well, and in the spring I had actually already come to a kind of weariness with regard to repeatedly pointing out how absurd the statements connected with this Corona crisis are; at a certain point you get tired of it, and of course at a certain point you also have to think, yes, the people will gradually begin to see for themselves how little is true of what is being served up in the media today, tomorrow and the day after that. When I was unable to record videos, I was asked: Can't you write down what you find most important in this crisis? What actually comes up most in this crisis and how would you see that you could prevent such, such a misunderstanding that is there all the time. I then did that. Or tried to at least, to do that. And that has to do with my inner strong belief that there's little point in having influencers, there's little point in having people telling you how you should think, what you should feel and how you should act, that makes little sense because human beings are created to want to do that in freedom and to be able to do that. And that is what finally drove me to write a book entitled Learn Thinking, with an exclamation point behind it. As if to say: Will something be done? This crisis, of course, is such that it actually assumes that people don't think. And they don't. You do think you think, and you do have a lot of thoughts, but that is something different from actually performing thinking as an inner activity. We think we think because we have thoughts and because we can learn. At least, sometimes you wonder about that too. But at least you can go to school, you can go to high school, you can go to college, you can go to university, you can do all kinds of continuing education, so you can learn. You can absorb a lot and you can put that into your memory and you can perhaps reproduce that, so you think: Yes, I can think! And in the course of your life you have formed opinions and judgments and you think that you have formed them yourself, so you have the feeling that you live in a rich body of thoughts that are really yours. I want to oppose that with all my heart. I don't believe in that. I think that we humans, and I include myself here, by environment, by upbringing, by disposition, by everything you experience in your life, do indeed build up a whole system of thoughts, of opinions and judgments, but that they are really yours you really can't say. If you start on a path to self-knowledge in that area and you start looking at: what about the opinions and judgments that I have? then you quickly discover that they are much more formed in you, formed, that is passivity and that is also lack of freedom, that goes more or less automatically, you have them at a certain moment, these thoughts, you have them, but you really haven't formed and embraced them all with your full free will. It's really not like that. And so it is at a certain moment when you are an adult that you go around with more or less pride about your thoughts and perhaps, it depends on your temperament and on your nature, perhaps you like to express them, but I want to emphasize that we humans have not yet come far enough to form our own thoughts freely, from free will. You get served them and you take them on or you don't take them on and you should ask yourself: Why do I accept such thoughts and another person accepts completely different thoughts? Where does that come from? And is that really a deliberate choice? No, it's not. That's what I'm saying. And I actually want to argue that although we are all in some respects right-thinking people, that we actually have yet to start thinking. You have to learn that. That's something other than having a thought life. And that has become very clear in this time of crisis, which is now going to a second anniversary, that people take in thoughts, absorb thoughts, but they don't think with their own free thinking ability that thinking. I once published in a blog text a quote from the work of Rudolf Steiner, that is early 20th century, and that is of course a totally different time than ours, but in that quote it is already stated that the newspaper reader is not at all aware of what he reads but does absorb it. He absorbs it, reproduces it, but somewhere he has forgotten it again, because if tomorrow something completely different appears in the newspaper, it is not connected to what was there yesterday and then he absorbs it and starts working on it anew. So this is an activity that happens more or less automatically and in which you, as a human being, have not yet taken control. I'm not saying that it's the same for everyone, there may be people who naturally have the disposition to be strong in this, but I don't mean the people who have a very strong opinion in the world. I want to say that even those people are in fact like slaves following the facts and from certain preferences they have they accept or reject one thing or another but it's not about their own thinking at all. I have tried to present that in this new booklet in the form of exercises, let me say, to the reader in a certain structure as well. And it is then, when you start to write about that - and I do that of course from experience, because I have done that 'learning to think' myself first of all for decades - and when you then start to write that down then it is clear that you have to realize it first of all that you have to school the awareness. That's where all the passivity begins. That people are in life and not at all active in taking in the sense impressions. When you read, you read certain parts, what appeals to you you absorb and what doesn't appeal to you you leave behind and maybe you forget again. That is actually the first thing you should transform, that you should develop the perception, that is the comprehensive perception, that is not only looking, not only listening, that is the total of taking in the impressions that you receive through the senses. When you don't have that, then you can't expect to find your point of view in current events in a reasonable way. Because then you've heard a little bit here, looked a little bit there, you found this interesting, you found that less interesting, this attracts you enormously, that offends you, and so your point of view is formed in you. And that's really not how it should be, if we want to go to a, let's say better world. A world in which it is not possible for what is happening now to happen again. Namely, that our great human capabilities of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and doing, those capabilities that lead to high scientific achievements, to deep artistic expressions and experiences, and to loving moral actions, that is avhuman being after all - when you realize that and you see how that is suppressed by the fact that you are constantly preoccupied with pondering whether or not you want a vaccination, whether or not you will take a booster, whether that other person might have done that, whether this coronapassport, whether you should have it, whether you can still go out and so on and so forth. A world of thoughts and feelings and also a world of actions has crept into us that does not take into account the high human possibilities in such a way that you really would wish that we as human beings would now, today, begin to develop in such a way that this is no longer possible. That as a human world, as a society of human beings, that you learn to use your qualities to the utmost. And that begins with attentiveness. The booklet I wrote contains, I believe, twelve exercises, and I have tried not to lapse into explanations of how it is, but to do it in such a way that the person doing the exercises finds out for himself how it is. Because after all, that's what I would love to see, that there are people awakening who know how it is all by themselves. Then we no longer need influencers to speak to us to tell us what it's like, and we don't need the authorities for that either. It would then again be the way it was originally intended, that the authorities do their utmost to create and maintain a living environment in which people are most capable of expressing those high qualities of science, art and morality, instead of suppressing them. That on the one hand, the government ensures that the world is such that this can be developed and on the other hand, there are the citizens who do their best to experience in all reasonableness and inner activity whether what the governments do is actually good. That was democracy, that the people, the citizens, have the opportunity to use their participation to determine whether they want things the way they are. Now we only have one topic, and you sometimes ask yourself, why is this topic so big and in the foreground? What else is going on in the world, shouldn't we also think and speak about other things? Then you might say: "Yes, the climate, isn't that what we are doing as well?" But of course I don't mean that, I don't mean the agenda of the big governments, I mean the small, high-minded, human thing, which we were born to do after all. We are on earth, after all, not to have our physical integrity compromised, but we are there to develop love with that physical integrity. And love begins with awareness. That was the first thing I wanted to bring up and I have much more to say about that. But for today I will leave it at that.