I think some of the confusion comes from the fact that not-observing-thinking is somehow equated with being unconscious of (living) thinking. But this is incorrect and Steiner made it explicit:
Steiner wrote:
The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.
So whether we realize it or not, we're always existing in Thinking Intuition, which is the
immediately known meaning of our present state of being. Whether we experience that this meaning manifests as the result of active becoming, is another question. So the blind (instinctive) will is truly concealed behind the metamorphosis of meaning that our states of being hold.
The exceptional state is entered when the Thinking will discovers its own reflection in thought-images. For example, when we think about the table, we're metamorphosing through meaningful states. This meaning is the immediate knowing essence of our spiritual being which we call Intuition. Yet the thought-images of the table do not reflect anything about the actual spiritual metamorphosis which brings them about. At the moment the Thinking will realizes that it not only moves instinctively through meaningful metamorphosis but also recognizes in the world content the reflections of what it is doing, we speak of observation of thinking.
Let's approach this through an analogy. Let's suppose we know ourselves only as inner metamorphosis of bodily will which is instinctive. It is meaningfully experienced but is not self-conscious. Then one day we stand before a mirror. Initially there's no connection whatsoever between the image and the will. We can imagine this similarly to the delay we see in live TV programs where the signal goes through satellite link. By the time the image is reflected, the will has already 'forgotten' what it was doing an instant ago and thus the image is not recognized to have any correlation with it. If we imagine the delay growing smaller and smaller, self-consciousness begins to take shape because the will now recognizes in the image, the
effects of its bodily gestures. This is true even if we take the mirror example literally - our reflection in the mirror is already a
past image. It is something that our will imprinted into the physical world, which was reflected by light, bounced in the mirror and arrived in our eyes. What we contemplate is the image of our bodily configuration as it was absurdly small but yet measurable time ago (it's measurable as it can be seen from any modern laser rangefinder which measures precisely the time of flight of light before it reflects back to the meter). So in this sense, the observation of thinking is really the perception of how our intuitive spiritual activity
has modified the world content. We experience the act in real time, in pure intuition, but the effect of this act is
perceived as if retrospectively, as it is already embedded in the world. It is tremendously important to grasp this correctly, otherwise things will always remain confusing. We
do not become conscious of the content of thinking only at the time when we perceive it. We're conscious of this content in pure intuition in the very act of thinking. When we perceive how this thinking act has modified the world content (with the thought-image) our
new intuition is already something
different - it consists of the meaning "I perceive how my intuitive act of thinking from an instant ago has impressed as a thought-image in the world content."
The real trouble is that the modern intellect lives continuously in this thinking intuition but wants to build picture of reality only as
arrangement of thought-images. In other words, it must be ensured that thought-images stand on their own, as if having nothing to do with the activity that imprints them in the world content. This is also the reason why any intellectual attempt to approach thinking, fails miserably. Thinking is confronted with great contradiction. It is very easy to trace this in our modern age when concepts as Turing machine are common understanding. Thinking which wants to understand itself as arrangement of thought-images of concepts related through abstract laws, tries to grasp itself as some mechanism which ultimately can be presented as a universal state machine. It doesn't matter if it's imagined that the 'substance' of this machine is physical, spiritual, energetic or whatever. It's the
mode of cognition that is the same in all cases. As thinking juggles with the concepts reflected in thought-images, it says "So this neuron activates this neuron" or "this is the soul, it excites these thoughts" or "This is MAL, it ripples through these alters" and so on. What is common in all these cases is that the above thoughts don't really say anything about the thinking spiritual activity which thinks these thoughts in real time. These thoughts look
away from their origin. They
represent an
imagined thinking organism and its laws of operation which however can exist in this way only as long as the comfortable distance between real thinking and the thought-images is maintained.
If we imagine that we have found the perfect Turing machine which explains our thinking, even if we try to test it against ourselves, we'll quickly see that we can't do it. If we try to simulate the thought "I think" in this machine, we immediately find out that the
real machine that we are, is already doing something else - it is thinking the
mental simulation of
another thinking machine which thinks the "I think" thought. This is well known but it presents a limitation only when we don't recognize that the dual intellect (strict separation between thinking subject and object) is not the only form of cognition available to man. When we realize that the thought-images are not supposed to build external (to thinking) mental model of reality but are the living feedback such that we can come to know ourselves as active spiritual beings in much greater depth, then the whole quest for knowledge assumes a different character. It is no longer building of toy models of the universe but continual unveiling of the spiritual essence of the Cosmos through the pinhole of our "I"-being, similarly to the way sand slowly sips through an hourglass. When we contemplate the "I think" thought, it is no longer the goal to simply cover this thought with even more intellectual thoughts that are supposed to 'explain' the first, but instead, the thought becomes the mirror image through which we begin to gain self-consciousness of the spiritual
thinking gestures that we perform in order to bring thoughts like these into existence.
What we must realize is that in the course of evolution we can't gain self-consciousness directly within the initially instinctive spiritual activity. This first comes about when spiritual activity begins to approach its reflection in thought-images. This is the exceptional state where spiritual activity encounters its own contribution to the world content. Once we begin to investigate these thought-images, we begin to become more and more conscious of the instinctive thinking gestures that we have always performed but were not yet
self-conscious. As we understand that in our "I"-being we're constantly performing spiritual gestures and as we learn to contemplate their reflection in thought-images (in the etheric body), we gradually attain to Imaginative consciousness. When through the help of these panoramic reflection of our spiritual activity we come to know ourselves better as a spiritual being, we learn to be self-conscious within the spiritual gestures themselves (which are really the degrees of freedom our spirit). This is the ascent to Inspirative consciousness. Here we no longer strictly need the support of Imaginative reflections in the ether but instead we live in the meaning-interference of living idea processes (beings). Now the world ether doesn't serve to give us self-consciousness - we already have self-consciousness in the spiritual gestures themselves. Instead, we contemplate how the activity of the beings in the spiritual world shape the World Process. Even further than this, we no longer live in the reverberation of spiritual activity of beings, which is like Cosmic speech resounding through the spiritual world, but we can live self-consciously directly in pure meaning. That is, we no longer spiritually perceive the meaning of Cosmic Thoughts of spiritual beings but we directly resonate with the pure meaning of their perspectives.
It is true that Steiner didn't talk about the higher forms of cognition in PoF but from every sentence in the book it's clear that all effort is to bring consciousness to this state where we recognize ourselves as a spiritual being that contemplates its thought-reflection. It is from this tiny island of self-reflection that the no longer instinctive but now more and more conscious evolution of the spirit proceeds.