findingblanks wrote: ↑Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:10 am
Do you have any experience in which 'thinking exists' would not apply?
As long as we understand thinking as the
ever-present essential being of Thinking - no. As Santeri noted, there are moments when there's no verbal thinking but from all that Ashvin and I have written in so many places, it should be perfectly clear by now that Thinking, in the sense of cognitive spiritual activity, is not limited to verbal/symbolic intellectual thinking. In the most general sense, even simply being aware of the World Content is already
thinking contemplation.
Steiner wrote:The reason why we do not observe thinking in our everyday spiritual life is none other than that it depends upon our own activity. What I do not myself bring forth comes as something objective into my field of observation. I see myself before it as before something that has occurred without me; it comes to me; I have to receive it as the prerequisite for my thinking process. While I am reflecting on the object, I am occupied with it; my gaze is turned to it. This occupation is in fact thinking contemplation. My attention is directed not upon my activity, but rather upon the object of this activity. In other words: while I am thinking, I do not look at my thinking, which I myself bring forth, but rather at the object of my thinking, which I do not bring forth.
In that sense, Thinking is
always present. There's always a Thinking intuition at the core of the essential being, which
is the actual awareness of what is being experienced (awareness=intuitive knowing that something is being experienced). This Thinking contemplation is present even in deep sleep. When we wake up in the morning we can enter the exceptional state by trying to remember what we were engaged with during sleep (not speaking of dreaming). For contemporary man without any spiritual training, the most one can tell is that
passage of time has been experienced. If this was not the case, then sleeping would resemble blinking of the eyes. As soon as we fall asleep, we would wake up without any experience that time has passed, no matter if we slept for six hours or six days (again, putting aside dreaming). When I'm thinking about the table, I'm engaged with all my being in this activity and 'forget' that I'm thinking. Nevertheless, I continuously experience the intuitive meaning of this thinking activity in the most intimate way. When I snap out of it into the exceptional state, I now experience
new invisible intuition which tells me that an instant ago I was engaged in the thinking about the table. This new state can be further projected as the verbal thought "I am/was thinking about the table". Similarly, when we wake up in the morning we can enter the exceptional state and try to encompass what our intuitively experienced Thinking has been. As said, the most that normally developed man of today can say, is that he has been completely absorbed in the Thinking contemplation of the passage of time. This is the only thing we retain from deep sleep - the knowledge that we've
spent time in deep sleep.
It is possible to enter the exceptional state even in deep sleep. Eugene has reported this from his own experience. If we do that while in deep sleep, a new intuition is experienced which has the non-verbally experienced meaning "I'm experiencing the passage of time within nothingness" (this is only the approximate meaning of the intuition, we don't verbalize it). As you know, through spiritual development, this intuition becomes much more rich and meaningful, ultimately leading to what is called Intuitive cognition.
Let's approach it thus. The normally evolving human is at a stage where he
continuously lives within Thinking intuition - that is, we're always aware of something. In the course of evolution, what Thinking contemplation is aware of, and the actual recognition that the essential being of Thinking is engaged in this contemplation, are slowly approaching each other, closing the gap, so to speak. Today, for every normally developed human being, through minimal application of effort, is possible to bridge the gap quite sufficiently. How do we do this? By engaging in Thinking contemplation of Thinking itself.
In evolutionary terms, so far (the same 'so far' you speak of) Thinking has been completely absorbed in what it has been doing, providing us with intuitive understanding of what is being experienced. In the age of the sentient soul, Thinking has been completely absorbed in the Perceptual element (the full spectrum, not only sensory, including atavistic clairvoyant pictures). In the age of the intellectual soul, Thinking gradually is lifted from the perceptual and is now absorbed into the
thoughts about the perceptual world. As we enter the age of the consciousness soul, Thinking is lifted even further and is absorbed in a new kind of intuition - the one that when contemplating the thoughts, the essential being of Thinking actually
contemplates its own activity. This is an important distinction. The Greeks were
fully absorbed in thoughts about Nature, the Soul, the Gods, etc. They were completely aware of this thinking through the intuitions contained in it. But at that stage, the gap between the actual thinking activity and the experience of thoughts was too wide and in fact unbridgeable. They were so mesmerized in the experience of thoughts, that even if we were to travel back in time and tell them "Hey, you're thinking your thoughts!", they simply wouldn't know what we're trying to say. The funny thing is that they wouldn't even be able to tell that we're trying to point their attention to something. For them, what we say would sound as something obvious, they'll say "Of course, I'm thinking the thoughts". Yet what they call "thinking" actually from
our perspective would equate to "Of course, I'm experiencing thoughts bubbling up in my soul". We would never be able to bring attention to the fact that there's a spiritual activity which weaves these thoughts out of itself. If the Greeks were to reflect on the inner lawfulness that caused the thoughts to bubble in the way they do, they would attribute that to the power of the Logos. They couldn't experience themselves being involved in the very lawfulness itself, and as such could never understand us if we speak to them about this.
In our everyday life, the degrees of absorption are rhythmically mixed. We continuously oscillate between being absorbed into Thinking contemplation of the perceptual spectrum, and normal intellectual thinking, where're we completely absorbed in the meaning of what we think. In all cases the essential being of Thinking is absorbed with something outside of itself. It experiences itself through intuition all the time, but this experience is guided by the perceptual elements, as if Thinking is mesmerized by them. In the exceptional state we have the chance for Thinking to lift from the mesmerized state and become engaged with perceptual element which is entirely of its own nature/making.
Here we should clear one common misconception - that there's self-consciousness only as long as Thinking
thinks intellectually about itself. As it should be clear from the above, there's
always a living intuition at the core of the essential being. There's always something that Thinking is aware of. In our time we're at a very peculiar stage, where the intuition at the core of Thinking can make us aware that in the contemplation of thoughts we (the thinking essential being) are contemplating our own activity. This can easily be misunderstood that we can know that we're active, only if we try to grasp as perceptions our thoughts (which are already in the past). But this is not so. We do begin with the observation of our past thoughts but the more we close the gap, as if trying to contemplate our thinking in real time as it precipitates from our intuitively experienced activity, the more our intuition is developed. This already belongs to spiritual development. We begin to be more and more aware, not only of the object of thinking but of the actual activity we perform. This is not achieved through constant commentary on our thinking's past states but by the always experienced intuition at the core of the essential being that becomes more and more encompassing and self-aware. Self-consciousness gradually becomes a constant quality within the core intuition. If that was not the case, Intuition, the highest form of cognition, wouldn't be possible. As you know, in that state of consciousness we remove all kinds of activity towards perceptions - including thought perceptions. We then live in the pure element of intuition, the inner reality of the essential being. What we experience there depends on how developed this intuition is. When developed, we're fully self-aware in that stage, even though we don't need to reflect thoughts and recognize them as our own. Our intuition contains inseparably united within itself the above mentioned quality of self-awareness. So to speak, the gap has become so tight that we don't need to reflect on our thoughts in order to experience the intuition of self-awareness. The very intuition at the core of the essential being, already contains its self-comprehension. When I say "our", "own", "self-", etc. there's no presupposition of artificially constructed entity. It's only the intuitive comprehension within the essential being, that its (the essential being's) activity is an intrinsic contributing factor the World Flow.
These are already more advanced topics, that require experience with meditation (of the spiritual-scientific kind) but I mention them just to make the bridge and bring to attention that we always live in intuition. In the course of evolution this intuition at the core of the essential being, becomes less and less absorbed into the World Flow, it lifts itself from the mesmerized state and begins to intuit its own contribution to that Flow. This is initially achieved only gradually, by recognizing that past thoughts are related with the currently (invisibly and intuitively) experienced thinking, but in the course of evolution (or with spiritual development, for those who undertake it), this fully conscious contribution to the World Flow becomes
inseparable knowing within the always experienced intuition at the core of the essential being.
