transforming thinking - a study course in rudolf steiner's intuitive thinking as a spiritual...

Great Lakes Waldorf Institute

Spring 2013

Transformational Thinking: A New Look at Looking

with your hosts

Nancy Kresin-Price and Seth Miller

Main Text: Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

(The Philosophy of Freedom) by Rudolf Steiner

TABLE OF CONTENTS: CH 1-2 Reading Discussion: Introduction, Conscious Human Action &

The Fundamental Urge for Knowledge .................................................. 1 CH 1-2 Exercise: The Fresh Impression (EARTH) ............................................. 3

CH 3 Reading Discussion: Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World ......... 6 CH 3 Exercise: Exact Sensorial Imagination (WATER) ....................................... 7

CH 4 Reading Discussion: The World as Percept ............................................. 9 CH 4 Exercise: Non-Objective Rendering: The Activity Behind Manifestation (AIR) .. 10

CH 5 Reading Discussion: The Act of Knowing .............................................. 12 CH 5 Exercise: Distilling the “holographic principle” in the other – ESSENCE

(FIRE/WARMTH) ........................................................................... 13

CH 1-6 Reading Discussion Review/Summary: Percept & Concept & Thinking ........ 15 CH 6 Exercise: Perceiving Perception ........................................................ 27

CH 7 Reading Discussion: Monism and the Limitlessness of Knowing ................... 29 CH 7 Exercise: Awakening to the difference between PERCEPT, CONCEPT, and

MENTAL IMAGE ............................................................................ 31

CH 8 Reading Discussion: The Factors of Life .............................................. 34 CH 8 Exercise: Thinking, Feeling, and Willing .............................................. 37

CH 9 Reading Discussion: The Idea of Freedom ............................................ 40 CH 9 Exercise: Distinguishing Driving Forces: Instinct, Feeling, Practical Experience, Pure

Thinking, or: Getting to Know Your Particular Characterological Disposition 101 ........ 43

CH 10-11 Reading Discussion: Freedom-Philosophy and Monism & World Purpose and Life Purpose ........................................................................... 44

CH 10-11 Exercise: Performing a Free Act .................................................. 50

CH 12 Reading Discussion: Moral Intuition, Imagination, and Technique .............. 52 CH 12 Exercise: Poetry and Moral Imagination ............................................. 53

CH 13 Reading Discussion: The Value of Life ............................................... 54 CH 13 Exercise: Values ......................................................................... 58

CH 14 Reading Discussion: Individuality and Genus ....................................... 59 CH 14 Exercise: From Genus to Individual .................................................. 62

Closing Reading Discussion: Preface/Appendices .......................................... 64

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CHAPTERS 1-2 READING DISCUSSION: (NANCY)

Introduction, Conscious Human Action & The Fundamental Urge for Knowledge

THE INTRODUCTION

I hope that you found the introduction written by Gertrude a helpful overview of what is to come. I return to it time and again to gain a sense for the whole of this book when I am not actively engaged in reading it. This is a suggestion for a way to work with that content. CHAPTER ONE

We will work further with ideas from chapter one in the Transformative Exercise section. CHAPTER TWO

In our week's reading discussion, we will focus on creating artistic impressions of different and varying perspectives on human and earthly life as described in chapter 2. This week we will consider a chosen phenomenon through four lenses using an artistic depiction to enter into each perspective.

Your first task is to consider a human/earthly process - maybe something really juicy like the conception or gestation of a baby, or the process of human growth and development anywhere along the cycle, or it could be something you do every day like sleeping, digestion, or breathing or anything else you can think of. Imagine one of these processes, focus in on it from the differing perspectives explored by Steiner in this chapter - for your convenience, some of the ideas are reiterated below.

As you consider each point of view, draw, paint, sketch, sculpt or otherwise depict through a visually artistic medium how each of these lenses might envision your process. When you have created your artistic piece, photograph it and post the pictures in the threaded discussion area below by clicking "REPLY".

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THE FOUR LENSES

A monistic view - Monism directs its gaze exclusively to unity, and seeks to deny or erase the opposites, present though these are. Steiner mentions 3 "solutions" attempted by monisim,

1) "...either it denies spirit and becomes materialism;

2) or it denies matter, seeking salvation through spiritualism;

3) or else it claims that matter and spirit are inseparably united even in the simplest entity, so that it should come as no surprise if these two forms of existence, which after all are never apart, appear together in human beings."

4) A dualistic view - Dualism directs its gaze solely to the separation that human consciousness effects between the "I" and the world. Steiner says, "Dualism sees spirit (I) and matter (world) as two fundamentally different entities, and therefore it cannot understand how the two can affect one another. How could spirit know what is going on in matter, if matter's specific nature is altogether foreign to spirit? Or, given these conditions, how could spirit affect matter so that intentions translate into deeds?"

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CHAPTERS 1-2 EXERCISE DISCUSSION: (NANCY)

The Fresh Impression (EARTH)

In chapter 1, Steiner, in that brilliant way he has, sets up the argument using several philosophical sources, showing how each one is flawed when considering the subject of human freedom. One of the most important concepts for me in the chapter 1, comes near the end as he begins to discuss the heart coming into its own as motives are permeated by thought. In this process, he says, "The way to the heart goes through the head" and we develop a "sensitivity" for things. It is this sensitivity that I wish to discuss in our first week. The Geman word for this sensitivity is Gemüt and it has no satisfactory English equivalent. It points more to the totality of man's inner being than "heart" does. It refers to a blending of thinking, willing, and feeling that one can feel with one's whole being, but is centered in the region of one's heart. Elsewhere Steiner provides a more poetic translation, "the mind warmed by a loving heart and stimulated by the soul's imaginative power" and a more intellectual one, "the soul in a state of unconscious intuition arising from the working together of heart and mind." The following verse may come to mind:

IN THE HEAD THE POWER OF FAITH IN THE HEART THE MIGHT OF LOVE

IN THE FULL HUMAN BEING ALL-SUSTAINING HOPE

As you move into the Transformative Exercise for the week, you will work more deeply with this concept in a very personal way. Introduction When we are familiar with someone or something, we often take its many complexities and characteristics for granted. This week, we will work to refresh our ability to notice anew even if we see someone every day. One scientist describes this act of seeing anew in the following way: “The aim is to make conscious the moment of first contact with a phenomenon—a moment when one’s sensibilities are most alive and open. Everyone has a first impression when experiencing something new, but this encounter is usually quickly

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forgotten as the thing becomes familiar and ordinary. Goethe’s approach suggests that we can consciously carry this impression throughout the course of the research process and allow it to develop and become more clear." -Nigel Hoffman, 1998

PART ONE:

Observation Exercise: If you are a teacher, it will be easy for you to try this with one of your students. If you are not currently working with children, try it with a colleague, friend, or family member. If the person is new to you, this will be very easy. The rest of us must think back to our first meeting with this person. Choose one or two people on which to focus for this week's exercise. Take a few minutes to jot down your first impressions of the person.

REMEMBER TO USE SOME CODE NAME OR PSEUDONYM AND NOT THE PERSON'S REAL NAME

Give yourself 3-5 minutes per person and try to capture the essence of what you noticed in that first meeting. It will be best to jot down a few notes when you are present in the room with that person. Try to avoid making judgments or drawing conclusions, but instead employ the use of discernment. (This is tricky but here is an example: JUDGMENT-"She has beautiful hair"; DISCERNMENT-"She has long, silky, sandy-blonde hair that falls in loose ringlets around her shoulders." See the difference? Exact descriptions without value provide a clearer and more accurate picture.) Only record the easily observable characteristics that are as free from judgment as possible. This description might include such things as hair color, eye color, facial features, height, gender, the sound of that person's voice, what they were wearing, their frequency of attendance or engagement, time of engagement, and other things you notice. These are the "earth" elements present in your encounter. Provide as many details as you can but in a very short amount of time. Your goal is not to be exhaustive, but exacting! In other words, describe in as much detail as possible the "cover of the book", but don't judge it! Share your observations in an initial posting below by clicking "Reply".

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PART TWO Introduction We sometimes make quick judgments about people that we meet as soon as we begin our work with them. We begin trying to "figure them out" right away. Often, once we have come to some initial conclusions, we think of a person in that same light each time we consider them, their work, or their capacity for growth. Unless we bring to consciousness that we are actually doing this, we will continue to have superficial relationships. By considering some of the types of relationships we create, we can begin to change the way we relate and allow room for transformation. THREE SIMPLE THINGS:

1. Maybe we really like a person and find them very easy to get along with. 2. Maybe we find it hard to get to know someone, they are quiet or don't reveal much

about themselves, and then we don't feel we know them at all. 3. And then there are the "difficult" people. These are the ones that get to you,

frustrate you, and always seem to be stirring up trouble in some way.

Transformative Exercise:

• Take some time to consider an example person. Find one that fits each of the 3 categories above.

• Visualize them one at a time. First, the "easy" person, then the "puzzling" person, then the "difficult" person .

• Say aloud and send towards each person in turn the following thoughts:

"I wish you peace. May you experience true joy. May you flourish in your life."

Share your experiences in a second posting below. Comment on the posts of others if you feel called to do so, or simply let this week's postings stand without comment - an earthy thing to do.

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CHAPTER 3 READING DISCUSSION: (NANCY)

Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World

Steiner's third chapter explores what he calls the "exceptional state" of the observation of thinking. He has much to say about the elements that are required in this process as well as the chronology of how the elements unfold to create the process. This week you will work in groups to accomplish three tasks with regard to the reading:

1. You will work through the text to decide upon what you think the elements of the process actually are. 2. You will decide upon the chronological order in which you believe the elements of the process proceed as they allow the process of the observation of thinking to unfold. 3. You will note any other important aspects or elements that your group feels must be mentioned in regard to this "exceptional state".

Group assignments are listed below. You will find your group discussion rooms by clicking in the left hand menu or by clicking the “Groups” tab in the blue menu bar at the top of the screen. When you get there, make sure that you are in the correct group by looking at the "About" section for your group where all the members are listed. Be careful when you go into the Groups area, because this will take you outside of the classroom space. To reenter, choose "Classes" from the blue menu bar at the top of your screen and come back to class. You can discuss together online in your group specific "Forums" discussion (you'll find that tab in the left hand menu of each group section once you move into your group area). You can post your thoughts and questions for the rest of your group members, or you can arrange to call or skype each other. I'll check in with each group to see if there are any needs. When you have decided on what to post for all 3 tasks above, you should choose a member of your group to make the post for your whole group in the assignment/discussion space below by clicking on the first "Reply" button beneath these instructions. This post should be made no later than Thursday to allow for full class discussion of the

group postings through the end of the week.

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CHAPTER 3 EXERCISE DISCUSSION: (NANCY)

Exact Sensorial Imagination (WATER)

Introduction This week, your observations will help you to re-create the image of a person inside of your picturing consciousness. Goethe called this activity, exact sensorial imagination. This observational mode asks you to focus on the relationships between the empirical characteristics noted last week and on the time sequence in which they unfold. When seeing a plant through such a technique for example, one comes to realize that the growth process is the relationship or connection between the contiguous plant organs we have been observing. The particulars dissolve inside the fluidity and flow of one movement that is the metamorphosis of the whole seen in our imagination. We cannot usually see the growth process itself with the organ of our eyes. Likewise, the flower or fruit is not present during the first stages of growth and so is initially invisible to our view. In order to “view” the relationships between each successive phase of development, we must bring the previously detailed observations of phenomenon into our imagination to re-create the image there. From a process of imaginative thinking, the concept of the plant, including its growth processes and relational aspects, is brought forth from within us through our own inner activity. During this phase, our own inner world of thought has penetrated the outer world; that which is perceived by the senses in the way that water can penetrate the earth. PART 1:

Observation Exercise:

This week's work asks that you recreate the outer vision of a person within your picturing consciousness. Stay with one of the people from last week's observations. Go deeper with the phenomena. Now, begin to imagine a process of metamorphosis taking place. Imagine the person back in time. Imagine how this person got to the current phase of development. What came before? Imagine a much younger version of him or herself, as a young child, as a baby. Then, imagine them forward in time again, to where you see them today. Continuing on, imagine them into the future as far as you can. What will that sly smile turn into at middle age? How will the hair change? How will the voice be different? How will the spark in the eye manifest as an older person?

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If, in your imagination of the person, you find parts are missing, place something there. If you don't know how tall they are, you get to decide. You have this power, and many others, as the creator of the imagination. Simply the intention you carry in performing the exercise as well as the detail with which you can achieve it, holds transformative elements for your relationship. PART 2:

Transformation Exercise:

This week's exercise will assist you in strengthening your inner organs of perception. The exercise is analogous to the work you are doing with other people during the observation exercise. This exercise can be done over and over again. It can be done while you are waiting for a bus, driving in traffic, or sitting in the doctor's office. It will help you to develop new organs for perceiving deeper qualities and needs in others and perhaps even in yourself. Here are the steps:

• Imagine that you are holding a seed in your hand. You should decide what type of seed it is, and be as specific as you are able.

• Imagine planting it. • Think about all the elements that it needs in order to begin to grow into a healthy

plant. • Provide these elements in your imagination. • See the plant sprouting, growing, and finally flourishing. • Imagine the plant moving backwards from the flourishing seed-bearing blossom

gradually back to the seed itself. • The seed is again in your hand.

Post reflections about how this worked for you and any revelations you may have had as a result of working with this image. Click "Reply" below to make your post and to read and respond to the posts of others.

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The World as Percept After reading chapter 4:

1. Describe briefly, the problem with Critical Idealism relative to the processes we are studying.

2. Describe even more briefly, the problem with Naïve Realism in this same regard.

3. Look at the work your group produced last week: Review the elements and order of steps in the process as your group described it last week to see if there are any elements you would like to add, subtract, or change in light of any new understanding you now have, and in order to account for the new element of PERCEPT.

(You may do number 3 as an individual or you can go back in your group discussion space to discuss and decide together – whichever you find easier.)

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Non-Objective Rendering: The Activity Behind Manifestation (AIR)


Introduction What was originally objective, clearly separate and outside of the observer, now begins to take up residence on the inside of the observer’s consciousness.

Observation Exercise

1. Bring one of the people you have been observing into your mind's eye. This person has many outer characteristics that you have been noticing. Review some of those now. 2. Review the person's quality of movement - is it choppy, fluid, or determined? Review the personal energy they exude. Review the way they speak. Using a few adjectives, how would you describe the quality, which seems to inspire this person's way of being? These should be based strongly on your observations of outer phenomena, not your judgments, but your observations of actual movements, spoken interactions, and the way you have experienced the energetic presence of this person. 3. Work only with one or two of these adjectives and let go of the outer characteristics. Write down the words you choose. Are they exactly what you mean? If not, adjust them. Now you have distilled one or two simple words as a description of certain energetic qualities of the person you have observed. 4. Take these words into the transformative exercise for the week.

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Introduction As the observer moves more deeply into the specific phenomenon of the organism, he finds that both the outer physical object and its hidden inner workings arise very clearly inside his thoughts, feelings, and imaginative life.

Transformative Exercise • First, prepare yourself and your space with your favorite art materials - pen,

paper, pencil, paints, colored leads, crayons, clay, whatever you like. • Begin with the word(s) you have decided upon as a result of your observations of

a particular person in this week's observation. • Consider only the words you have chosen. Go deeply into these words. Repeat

them inwardly to yourself. Allow color, shape, form, movement, depth, space, feeling, and emotion to arise before your mind's eye.

• When you have immersed yourself in this experience for a time, use your art materials to express some of what you have visualized. These images should be non-objective - they are not of specific people or objects but show only qualities.

• Allow your creative inspiration to lead you. Do not judge what you are doing. Let yourself go with these qualities and do not impose too much thinking or cognition on your results

• Photograph and post the images you create. Post the words you chose along with the images.

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The Act of Knowing Now, let's boil it down. Let's try to find the essence of this very complex chapter of interwoven ideas. Write only ONE SENTENCE on one of the topics listed below. Let's try, as a group, to create an essential picture of what Steiner is telling us in this chapter. Choose only one of the ideas listed below. Try to choose one that has not been done yet, but if you have to duplicate, explain the same idea differently than the original person has done. Make sure you indicate which of the items you are working with early in the week (I've included this in blue) and then again as you post your sentence.

Remember - ONLY ONE SENTENCE ALLOWED for each!!!

• CRITICAL THINKING • MENTAL PICTURE DREAM • RELATIONSHIP OF THINKING TO PERCEPTION • WORLD PRODUCES THINKING • PROCESS OF BECOMING • INDIVISIBLE EXISTENCE OF CONCEPT WITH PERCEPTION • ISOLATING SECTIONS OF THE WORLD TO UNDERSTAND IT • SELF-PERCEPTION VS. SELF-DEFINITION • UNIVERSAL THINKING • PRINCIPLE OF WORLD UNITY • TWO SIDES OF "TOTAL REALITY" • UNIFIED WORLD OF INTUITION • CONCEPTUAL CONNECTIONS OF PERCEPTS • OBJECTIVE PERCEPTI

AND THE LAST WORD FROM STEINER AS HE CLOSES THE LESSON

“Only one thing can prevent our mental pictures from interposing themselves between us and the world – and that is thinking. When “thinkers” confront an external thing the “conceptual intuition” that corresponds to the observation appears.”

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Distilling the “holographic principle” in the other – ESSENCE (FIRE/WARMTH)


Introduction Scientist Henri Bortoft describes the phenomenon behind the holographic

principle: When a holograph is shattered, the entire image is contained within each individual piece. When looking at a fragment, we do not see only that portion of the holograph that has broken away from the whole, but the entirety of the image contained in each part.

Similarly, as we carefully observe other individuals, our observations reveal

patterns and truths about the entirety of the whole and contain a microcosmic window into the inner and outer structures of the observed.

Outwardly, we experience warmth through heat, but inwardly we sense “the

warmth of identification that one feels when he or she has made contact with another living being’s ‘inner impulse’. Such investigation requires several pre-requisites, such as respect, gentleness, and humility on the part of the observer.

Observation Exercise This week, we move deeper into the phenomenological characteristics of the other to find something of the "essence" of this person. Below are a few guidelines to hold in mind during your observations:

• As we look for the "being(ness)" of the other, we strive not to generalize or build an abstraction, but to notice that which is living at once in the whole, as well as in each and every one of the parts, themselves reflecting also the whole.

• What makes this person uniquely himself and unlike anyone else?

• When observing that which is "characteristic" of this person, also notice

the essential quality or inner gesture that permeates his or her entire "being(ness)"?

• Record and discuss your impressions in the space below.

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Introduction As the observer moves more deeply into the specific phenomenon of the organism, he finds that both the outer physical object and its hidden inner workings arise very clearly inside his thoughts, feelings, and imaginative life.

Transformative Exercise

Looking again at the world of nature, consider a blue spruce tree and an apple tree.

You know that there are many aspects that make each tree distinct, recognizable

as itself and not the other, and different from any other sort of tree. You don’t have to know very much about trees to realize this truth.

Think of all the distinctions you can. Many are apparent by just looking or

remembering trees you’ve seen. Consider the characteristics that you can observe outwardly, but also imagine others that reside on the inside of the tree. Now you must enter into the being of each tree. You must imagine the experience of being inside each of them. Below are a few questions you can contemplate on this journey - but there are an infinite number of others.

• What do you imagine about the sap? • When and why do the leaves fall or not from the tree? • What is the gesture of the each of the leaf forms as related to the gesture of

the entire tree? • Consider the fruit of each tree, its shape, size, texture and relationship to

the rest of the tree. • How long do you think it takes a blue spruce to grow to maturity? • What about an apple? • Describe each tree’s relationship to the earth, to water, to the air. • What is the relationship of each tree to the element of warmth?

Don’t look anything up. Just contemplate these questions and then post your

thoughts about each tree. Your thoughts can include drawings, pictures, poetry, music, video or anything else that helps you to convey what you have learned about the essence of these two beings.

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CHAPTERS 1-6 READING DISCUSSION REVIEW/SUMMARY: (SETH)

PERCEPT & CONCEPT & THINKING

• There outside stands a tree “What I add to things by this awakening is not a new idea, is not an enrichment of the content of my knowledge; it is a raising of knowledge, of cognition, to a higher level, on which everything is endowed with a new brilliance. As long as I do not raise my cognition to this level, all knowledge remains worthless to me in the higher sense. Things exist without me too. They have their being in themselves. What does it mean if with their existence, which they have outside without me, I connect another spiritual existence, which repeats things within me? If it were a matter of a mere repetition of things, it would be senseless to do this. But it is a matter of a mere repetition only so long as I do not awaken to a higher existence within my own self the spiritual content of things received into myself. When this happens, then I have not repeated the nature of things within me, but have given it a rebirth on a higher level. With the awakening of my self there takes place a spiritual rebirth of the things of the world. What things show in this rebirth they did not possess previously. There outside stands a tree. I take it into my mind. I throw my inner light upon what I have apprehended. Within me the tree becomes more than it is outside. That part of it which enters through the portal of the senses is received into a spiritual content. An ideal counterpart to the tree is in me. This says infinitely much about the tree, which the tree outside cannot tell me. What the tree is only shines upon it out of me. Now the tree is no longer the isolated being which it is in external space. It becomes a part of the whole spiritual world living within me. It combines its content with other ideas which exist in me. It becomes a part of the whole world of ideas, which embraces the vegetable kingdom; it is further integrated into the evolutionary scale of every living thing.” -Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Introduction

• Creative Thinking

“Truth is not, as is usually assumed, an ideal reflection of something real, but is a product of the human spirit, created by an activity which is free; this product would exist nowhere if we did not create it ourselves. The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new

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sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus the human being's highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.” -Rudolf Steiner, Truth And Knowledge, Preface

I'd like to give some context and discuss a little bit about where we are at and where we are headed. We are at a very juicy point. We are all a bit confused with Steiner. THIS IS GOOD. If you are not confused you are almost certainly not reading beyond a superficial level. This is hard stuff. Despite it explicitly being a work of philosophy, you CAN'T read The Philosophy of Freedom only as a work of philosophy. We have to engage with the ideas experientially, we have to expand our thinking, and expand the ways our soul moves when we think, so that we think in NEW WAYS, not just with new content. Nancy has laid out the basic idea of this book: to be free means to fully and consciously penetrate the motives of our deeds; the extent to which the sources of our deeds is opaque to us is the extent to which we are not free. How can I be free if the source of my action is obscured to me? I could be acting out of some unrevealed necessity or unconscious compulsion that drives my action without my conscious agreement or acceptance. The Philosophy of Freedom (intuitive thinking as a spiritual path) gives Steiner's picture of the background for why this is the case and how we can address it. His solution is an attempt at showing how human beings can become free. He presents his solution in the context of the philosophy of his day, which was dominated by Immanuel Kant and his idea that all human experience already comes in a structured way, leading him to propose that whatever the "real" world is, it is not fully accessible to the human mind. It is NOUMENOUS, lying somehow outside of our possible experience. This is the whole thing that Steiner is referring to in the book when he talks about the "thing-in-itself" -- the thing in its complete reality as it exists beyond the human being's limited modes of apprehension, which always diminish or distort the thing-in-itself because we are required to have our experience through the filters of time and space. Our experience is local and dependent upon the specifics of our organism, so whenever we encounter the world we are "really" encountering ourselves, our own organization. This is the critical idealism we have been discussing, the idea

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that the world is somehow my mental picture of it, because I can never get beyond or through the way the specificity and locality of my organization constructs the world for me. This Kantian philosophy is one of the most prominent and influential philosophies in history; it presents real challenges to our picture of ourselves, how and what we can know, and our place in the universe. Steiner tries to show that the whole idea that we can't know the "real" world is based on a naively realistic point of view with respect to the human organism. That is, in order to accept the critical idealist position, we have to take AS A GIVEN two things: 1: that there is an independently existing reality that lies forever beyond our reach (the numinous thing-in-itself) and 2: in every attempt to grasp this thing-in-itself our organism distorts it so that we never really have it completely. Steiner shows that the first point is simply a false postulation, not a necessary one, and that it is a result of naively accepting point #2. He then shows that critical idealism rests on the naively realistic assumption of the human organism, which (if CI were to be consistent with itself) would ALSO be "merely" another set of mental pictures. But this would be to make a category error: if CI wants to show that the world is really only my mental pictures, it can't rely upon a presumed "real" body that distorts reality. Steiner shows us how point #2 is (only) partly true; it is true for the vast majority of experience, but not for all of it, because there is a place within experience that has the characteristic of NOT being merely a mental image (which is always distorted somehow by our organism), but which is rather SELF-REVEALING. THIS IS THINKING. Thinking is the ONE place in experience where we have the possibility of NOT being fooled by our organism, because thinking can become transparent to itself. That is to say, while in every other realm of experience we can be fooled about the sources of the experience, we can be completely awake to the source of thinking. Once you can (really, not superficially) think through 2+2=4, or why every triangle has angles that add up to 180 degrees, you see exactly why it must be the case. The content of the thought is transparent to you; nothing is interposing itself in between 2+2 and 4 that may mislead you into believing that 2+2=5 today, or for this part of the country, or because I am sick and my senses are distorted. Nope. You know that a line that crosses two parallel lines in a plane makes opposing internal angles that add to 180 degrees because you can think all the necessary thoughts that together make that conclusion self-transparent; nothing is "hidden" away somewhere beyond your thinking that could change that conclusion. Yes, you can change the situation (put the parallel lines on a non-planar surface, for example), but again thinking can penetrate the new situation with equal clarity. The point is not that thinking yields certain THOUGHTS that are correct, but rather that THE PROCESS OF THINKING ITSELF (and ONLY thinking) carries this potential for self-transparency, because of its nature. In other words, it is

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the ONE place in our experience where we can grab hold of the "one world process" in its deepest sense, un-modified by the limitations of our local, embedded, always-partial organism. This doesn't mean that "truth" independently exists "out there" somewhere, just waiting to be found by thinking; the situation is more complex. Truth is the result of what thinking does, not the container in which thinking operates more or less skillfully. This is important because it bears on the whole thrust of the book: that it is through our thinking that we can experience free-ness. A brief aside: I have used examples from math and geometry because those are areas in which it is the most easy for thinking to find its way towards that experience of self-transparent clarity. We have to work for this experience, it is not a given. Trying to penetrate with thinking all that is necessary to have a self-luminous understanding of what happens to my lunch when I eat it is far beyond us at this time; we are not free with respect to our digestion. Here we are almost totally asleep with our consciousness. We are more free with respect to our feeling life, but because half of our feeling life is embedded in parts of our organism that our thinking cannot yet penetrate with full clarity and completeness, it carries a dream quality, and we are never sure about the sources of the arising feelings that come over us. But when thinking directs itself to the ideal realm, such as that of mathematics, logic, and geometry, we don't have to worry (so much) about our organism. The extent to which we can fully penetrate in our thinking a geometric idea is the extent to which we are perceiving the spiritual world. This is the quality that Steiner refers to as "sense-free thinking" -- thinking that is not conditioned by our organism and thus is capable of being self-revealing in its entirety, i.e. thinking that is free. This is why he can say something like: "That one can work out forms which are seen purely inwardly, independent of the outer senses, gave me a feeling of deep contentment. I found consolation for the loneliness caused by the many unanswered questions. To be able to grasp something purely spiritual brought me an inner joy. I know that through geometry I first experienced happiness." Or more to the point: "When a man reaches the stage of being able to think of other properties of the world independently of sense-perception in the same way as he is able to think mathematically of geometrical forms and arithmetical relations of numbers, then he is fairly on the path to spiritual knowledge." (If this aside piques your interest, read this amazing and very short letter to the Anthroposophical Society on mathematics, which is very easy to read and takes this further, having some real gems of ideas.) So: human beings are unique on the planet, because we have the potential to become free in our thinking, and this is all wrapped up in learning to perceive through the phenomena of our daily lives into the sources of their becoming, i.e. into the spiritual world. And here we run into these tricky ideas that take up the bulk of the first half of the book: percept, concept, and their relationship. I'd like to look more deeply into these two terms because much hinges on how we understand them.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19040621p01.html

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So: take a look at this image, a sort of schematic of the last few chapters -- but first, not that BOTH of these images are "wrong" in the sense that they are only suggestions, crutches for your thinking, rungs on the ladder, but not the destination... they are excuses for further thinking of your own, and are only meant to stimulate that thinking, not simply reproduce my thoughts in you, which are only presented here for you to take hold of and then work forward from in your own way. IMAGE 1:

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This image represents one way of working with the book, specifically with respect to percept and concept. Let's call this way the "PC" version, for highlighting the "Percept/Concept" division, but also maybe for "partly correct" and "potentially confusing". The way that Steiner speaks about percepts and concepts can make it seem that they are quite divided and different from each other. We can get the impression that "Reality" has two aspects that the human being has access to: its perceptual side and its conceptual side: for example Steiner states that: "It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking." (p. 67 in the Wilson translation, p. 81 paragraph 15 in the Lipson translation). We can feel the split here between the perceptual and conceptual sides of the world. "The percept is thus not something finished and self-contained, but only one side of the total reality." This sets us up for his idea about how it is the recombination of the percept and concept that makes for a complete reality; that reality is what happens when percepts meet with the "right" concepts through our activity of thinking. Steiner calls this the "task of knowledge" -- to unite the outer world, given to us as percepts, with the inner world, the world of ideas. So still looking at the first image, observation is the faculty by which percepts come to us, while intuition is the faculty by which ideas and concepts come to us (Steiner mentions that an idea is richer and more complete than a concept). And in addition to percepts OF the outer world (for example percepts of trees and people and the sky), we also have percepts of ourselves. Steiner does something cool here. He shows how objectivity, and the sense of the world as filled with objects of perception, arises only because we have the direct perception of ourselves as a subject. What becomes "objects" and "objective" for us does so because we ourselves appear as percepts to ourselves: we perceive ourselves as a subject. Thus, if a further perception appears to be external "to the percept of myself as subject", we call it an object. Why is this important? Because the whole thing is that Steiner is trying to point not to the division between subject and object, but rather to the fact that THINKING is what is "doing" all of this work. Percepts appear to observation, both percepts of ourselves (subjective percepts) and of "the world" (objective precepts). These percepts are simply "given" in Steiner's view, and the only question is what are these percepts for THINKING? It is thinking that makes of these percepts a world of objects and subjects; they are not "already" that way somehow, before thinking does its thing, as if we only "discover" them. No, we are part of the innermost way in which reality becomes, because of THINKING. So we have the "mental image" which arises as the modification of the perceptual subject just discussed (ourselves). The mental image is what is left to us when what thinking has just identified as an object is no longer present for us. Look at a table: we

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have the objective percept (the faculty of observation yields the percept of a table; the percept of myself as subject is separated by thinking from the percept of the table as object; I perceive the table as an object; THESE ARE SIMULTANEOUS, it is ONE process, not a sequence). Now take the table away and close all your senses but call up the sensation of looking at the table, inwardly: now we have the subjective precept (the faculty of observation yields the percept of myself as subject, now modified inwardly by the past presence of the table; that is, in calling up my mental image of the table I am observing the change in myself as a subject -- this "myself" is a percept, just like that of the table, and is available for thinking to make something of it). But I'd like to point out that this bit about having the mental image doesn't stop when we open our eyes and look at the actual table. Not at all -- this process by which I observe the changes in myself as subject continues even when I am actively looking at the table -- mental images are continually being formed, and I can perceive them as changes in the percept of myself as subject, even while I am viewing the table in front of me with my eyes. It is only because we can will our attention towards just those ("subjective") percepts which are not being directly triggered by our major senses (i.e. we can quiet down or ignore our "objective" percepts) that we can notice how the "subjective" percepts stand out from the great wall of sensation as modifications of our own self without the benefit of external sensation. The process of mental image formation is occurring all the time simultaneous to the process of observing these other ("objective") percepts. This week you will see more about just what this mental picture is, specifically with respect to what "feeling" is in the larger context. But I'll let that stand for now. The thing I really want to point out at this moment is that all this talk about reality that presents itself to us on the one side as percepts and the other as concepts, so that the task of the human being is to unite them back together to get the full reality is... well, misleading. This is one of Steiner's earliest works, and he was trying his best, in the context of his time, to bring forward these ideas which were radical enough in his day, and are radical today still. He was searching for how to make his experiences clear, and in so doing used the idiom of his time, and language structures which all-too-easily leads to the impression that perceiving is over there and thinking is over there and we get to bring them together to make reality; yay! But this is too simple. This is one way to read Philosophy of Freedom, but if we take it in this way we may be missing a more subtle and much more interesting line of thought, which he gets at in his 1918 additions to the text. The fact that he felt the need to include these later additions is significant; and they show how he continued to struggle with these ideas himself and how to express them. More importantly, there is a bit of a shift in the additions that starts to reveal a different way of thinking about the main text, and which puts a different 'spin' on the thrust of the whole thing. It is to this second way of reading, which for the moment we can call the "OT" view for "ongoing thinking" or "out of thinking" or

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"omnipresent thinking" or maybe "other totality" that I want to turn to now, with the second image: IMAGE 2:

Now, this is a bit more complicated and subtle, but let's see if we can tease out the relevant differences.

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So in this view "reality" (in black) is a subset of the one world process. It is not exactly the same as the entire rainbow background, but is potentially there anywhere within it. In other words, unlike in the first drawing, where reality was somehow still "out there" and thus carried with it (perhaps) a sense of "needing to find our way back there" by uniting percepts and concepts, in this second view it is implicit through the whole diagram. However, in this case, reality is what WE make out of the one-world process through the activity of thinking (hence the word is embedded within the large orange "thinking" arrow). This is why this version is harder -- the goal in this reading is to never lose the "ongoingness" by falling into the trap of thinking of reality as somehow "already there" independently of our activity. "Reality" requires US, in the sense of that part of us which connects to and IS this ongoingness of thinking. The old view of reality (such as that championed in most of physics at least until some versions of quantum theory) as precisely that which does NOT require us is the naive realism we have already encountered. Steiner is good about saying we can't be naive realists about OBJECTS but really we can't be naive realists about the IDEA of REALITY either. Just like critical idealism is not the answer for objects (the perceptual side of our activity), it is ALSO not the answer for our THINKING (our conceptual activity). In other words, we can't just say "no" to a naively realistic view of the existence of IDEAS but then turn around and say "yes" to critical idealism with respect to them. And here is the main difference: percepts and concepts don't ALREADY exist, "out there" to be perceived or thought separately and then brought together by thinking. Rather, both percepts and concepts arise through the activity of thinking; thinking is what "makes" (allows us to "have") both percepts and concepts. Both these terms involve a root meaning of "to take in or have": perceiving is a having THROUGH (per-) and conceiving is a having TOGETHER (con-), and this having of percepts and concepts is only possible because of the nature of thinking -- not the nature of its products (such as the division of the one world process into concepts and percepts), but the nature of its ongoingness, it's producing. Ideas don't exist out there in the "conceptual world" completely independently of the activity of thinking; it's not like there is a static world of ideas that thinking then searches through like a database, pulling out one idea after the next like a piece of clothing to try on the percept to see if it fits. A person holding such a view would be a naive realist about ideas. On the other hand, if we take the view that ideas are "only ideas" that have no basis in the one world process (which is not really a good term because it still traps thinking into projecting something of itself outside itself in order to move forward) then we have become critical idealists with respect to ideas and find ourselves back in the same dilemma Steiner just pointed out with this view. So the point is not to fall into either of these views but to develop a middle-ground, where we don't naively believe in a "reality" out there, nor do we completely discount the whole idea of reality, but rather find -- by turning phenomenologically toward our experiencing -- how it is specifically in thinking that we can experience the way that reality shows up for us, for example as percepts and concepts. But even more importantly, it is not

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THAT we have some idea of percepts and concepts and their relation, but rather that thinking turns itself to its own activity. The one world process (the colored rainbow background in the second drawing) is the un-separated multiplicity which "THINKING" takes a hold of and makes into percepts and concepts, which it can then fiddle with and unite or whatever, in order to have the kind of experiences we have. Just as "there is no" subject and object without thinking, so too there is no concept of thinking vs. perception without thinking. This term we use, thinking, to describe what is happening that takes the unity of the one world process and makes of it our experience, is the real "meat" (and "meta") of the issue. Observation, in this sense, then, is something (almost) like the inverse of thinking; it is the reflection of the thinking activity; it is what reveals for experience the results of the thinking activity; but again this is only possible because of thinking (hence the "observation bubble" in the second image is penetrated by the gray "thinking" arrow from the right). Thinking (the orange arrow) takes a hold of the one world process and makes of it a dis-unity, a particularity, which can be a concept, a subjective or objective percept, or whatever. These then are available for observation, which reveals the END of what thinking did. We don't observe the process of thinking as it happens but only after the fact; our observation reflects the activity of thinking as it has become, making it available for consciousness. HERE is where, within our experience, we find that we are directed beyond what we are observing (the results of the thinking activity) to whatever process was at work to allow those particular observations to arise. That is, our observation points us towards THINKING, as the activity that directly grasps the one world process and makes of it all those things that we can then experience. So then we can say that thinking = (can be confused with) experiencing, and observing = experience. This is the difference between first and second-order levels, that between process and product. But additionally, because percepts are never found "alone" and are always permeated by thinking, our thinkING, we have the additional confusion of thinking = experience. In other words, the second-order activity of thinkING is in recursive relationship with itself; it is the process that yields the product that allows it to turn back on itself. Thus in the drawing we have thinking coming out of the "one world process", both as a creating/distinguishing of percept and concept (orange arrow), but also as what grasps the results of that process and pushes through what observation yields (gray/white thinking arrow moving through the observation bubble), so as to meet the reality from which it came and is, but now newly for having gone through the transitioning from process to product to process again. So Nancy says that "Steiner points out that it is futile to seek the basis for manifestation from outside of our own experiential senses and powers of reasoning unless an observation of something within our experience directs us to look beyond experience to the activity or influence which lives behind it."

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YES -- and it is only by thinking that we move from the observation to what "lives behind it". But this doesn't mean we should parcel up the world into observations on one side and the processes on the other: they are ONE happening, and it is thinking that is always present throughout this whole. Experience itself leads to the quest for experiencING, it's a move from first to second order. But we don't get OUT of the process; we can't posit a world beyond experience that is more real than experience, as if the happening NOW is "only" derivative (this would be another form of naive realism). We can't be naive realists about the spiritual world either. The happening NOW is itself a part of the one world process, and we can see in that happening (anywhere we care to look) the signature of the activity of thinking doing its thing; making of the unity of the one world process a multiplicity, particularity, specificity... including all this about ego's and "I beings" and spiritual beings and kidneys and dogs and helicopters and sensations of red. This is sort of the "big" mystery; which Steiner gets at in the main exercise (if you are familiar with that) with the "IT THINKS" portion in relation to the Holy Spirit; this IT THINKS (or rather, IT IS THINKING/THINKING IS IT) is the SAME thinking that we "have" -- there is only ONE triangle; there is only ONE thinking. We are literally a part of that on both the microcosmic and macrocosmic scale; human beings now (and not all hierarchies in their respective past "human" stages) are the ones that are at the edge of this process by which thinking (in its cosmic, all-one sense) is starting to turn around and see where it came from, to look at its own origin through the lens of the particular human being. We are, in this sense, in our thinking (the kind that Steiner wants for us), the very eyes of the Holy Spirit, gazing on the source of all the manifestation without simply being the manifestation. That is, we have the capacity for freedom in a higher sense, BECAUSE we engage with the ongoingness of thinking AS thinking, that is, at a second-order level of its coming-into-being rather than its having-been. It is as this level that we can see "through" the thoughts to the thinking that produces them, and then become awake to all the ways that the thinking gets conditioned into its products. Hence Steiner's famous "pen exercise" meditation -- asking "how does this pen get here?" and thinking through all the possible thoughts related to the origin and use of the pen is a training that has the benefit of using the physical world as a crutch; it is a training for thinking to pattern itself after the activity of attending to how an object comes into being, because that same process applies to every THOUGHT. So then thinking can start to make of itself new forms (percepts and concepts) whose observation is designed to point towards the ongoingness of the thinking activity. It fashions a mirror so that it can view itself, and in order to do that it makes US of us; we are that fashioning. SO: The point of all this is to try to re-orient how we deal with The Philosophy of Freedom so that we don't make of it simply a set of ideas that we either agree or disagree with. Steiner indicates in the 1918 addition to chapter 5 with respect to naive realism and critical idealism that we must live through these thoughts inwardly so that we can arrive at the insights that allow us to move beyond them. This applies to

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Steiner's work as w ell. We must not make a dogma of the division of percepts and concepts, but must actively live through the thoughts to the thinking at work in them, the same thinking that makes subjects and objects makes percepts and concepts. Thus Steiner himself ends the 1918 addition to chapter 5 with the idea that "inside everything we can experience by means of perceiving, be it within ourselves or outside in the world, there is something which cannot suffer the fate of having a mental picture interpose itself between the process and the person observing it. This something is thinking."

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CHAPTER 6 EXERCISE: (SETH)

PERCEIVING PERCPTION:

The Setup:

For this exercise you will need a piece of fruit. Place it in front of you where you can comfortably observe it in a space and time free from distractions.

The goal of this exercise is to go as deeply as possible into the process of perceiving as possible and to explore the nature of HOW you perceive. Let me be clear: the goal is not to go deeply into the PERCEPTION, but into the process of perceiving. This requires noticing your perception, but only so that you can notice through your perception to its arising.

Part 1: Objective Percept

Observe the fruit. Use all your senses. While you are observing the fruit, observe your observing. Move your attention into, around, through, and over your observing. Get a feeling for your observing process. Try to use your attention like a magnifying glass that can focus in on changes in your observing. Pay particular attention to one such shift that you identify. Try to magnify that one shift; try to recreate it again, and penetrate it more fully with your awareness. Sink yourself into that one shift in your observING of the fruit.

Part 2: Subjective Percept

Now, place the fruit in front of you again. Close your eyes and remove all your senses from the fruit, so that you are moving towards a quiet, calm, empty state. Relax into yourself. Now call up inwardly the sensation of the fruit. Make it vivid. While you are calling up the image of the fruit, observe your observing. Move your attention so that it follows the changes in the subjective percept of yourself as you remember sensing the fruit inwardly. Try to track how your perceiving changes now that the fruit itself is not present to your sensory organism directly.

Part 3: Resisting Objective Perception

Open your eyes and come back to your space. Now, while your senses are open, actively try to suppress any perceptual process whatsoever. WHAT? Yes. With your senses active, try NOT TO PERCEIVE. You may want to focus first on just vision; or perhaps touch. While looking at the fruit, try to NOT SEE what is available for your vision. Withdraw your attention from your vision completely, but keep your eyes open. By changing your attending, can you resist the process by which your physical sense organs press into your awareness?

Part 4: Resisting Subjective Perception

Now close your eyes and senses. Now try to resist the arising of any subjective perception. Don't let any mental images arise. Try working with your attention in different ways to see if you can find a way of extending the time between the arising of inner sensations. Don't fall asleep with your attention; keep it awake; just don't let it grasp any percepts. Keep it self-enclosed.

Sharing:

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In the discussion space below, share any insights you may have about these exercises. What did you notice? Do you have a new sense of what "a percept" is? Where was thinking in all of this? What stood out the most about the differences between these four parts?

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CHAPTER 7 READING DISCUSSION: (SETH)

Monism and the Limitlessness of Knowing

A preface: I just want to draw your attention to the difference between the main text of this chapter and (again) the 1918 additions. The language which Steiner uses to talk about the percept/concept split in the main text tends towards its own <ahem> naive reification. You may sense this in the hilarious statement that "Monism never finds it necessary to ask for any principles of explanation for reality OTHER THAN PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS." Fine fine fine. But in the 1918 addition he starts to speak differently: "Whatever senses man might possibly have, not one would give him reality if his thinking did not permeate with concepts whatever he perceived by means of it. And every sense, however constructed, would, if thus permeated, enable him to live within reality." "Added to this is the further realization that thinking leads us into that part of the reality WHICH THE PERCEPT CONCEALS WITHIN ITSELF." Let us take this statement now in conjunction with the one from the addition to chapter 5, shortened for effect: "INSIDE everything we can experience by means of perceiving ... is THINKING." This shifting of how he speaks about percepts and concepts is (I think) vastly important for keeping the underpinnings of Steiner's philosophy from decaying into some old German B.S. If we take the "old" reading, we can end up thinking about reality as the "sum" of percepts and concepts, like it's a simple math equation: Reality = Percepts + Concepts. Whee! Umm, not really. Remember how "=" can be read "is confused with"? Well we are seeing here a little movement towards a confusion of percept and concept, not in the sense that they are completely interchangeable, but that they are not nicely divisible from each other in a simple way. Much modern philosophical work is actually aiming at just the ways in which percepts and concepts arise together out of the total experiencing, in ways that are compatible with the "newer" reading of Steiner but not so much the "old", which would posit a "world of percepts" and a "world of concepts" in a more naive way. Okay, with that caveat now sufficiently dealt with:

PART 1: This chapter may be a bit annoying to some of you. We have to remember that Steiner is working in a philosophical environment that is dominated by Kantians. Steiner therefore takes his time in showing why the Kantian assumptions are not tenable, and why both naive realism and the more sophisticated metaphysical

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realism are not appropriate positions one we understand the whole bit about thinking and perceiving that he has laid out for us. However, amidst the detailed refutation of these positions, Steiner drops some little nuggets, often simply by just re-phrasing what has come before or summing it up newly. So for this week's discussion I'd like you to find your OWN "little nugget" from the chapter and display it all to us (quote it) with the addition of your comment. Some suggestions for guiding your comments (if you need any):

• What is striking or unique about this passage? • How does it allow you to experience something newly about Steiner's meaning? • Does it throw a new or different light on any of your previous questions or ideas

about or in this book? • Does it give you a sense of where he is going with all of this or why? • Does it connect to some part of your life or experience?

PART 2: The main question for this week is "WHY ARE THERE NO LIMITS TO KNOWING?" Try to compose an answer to this question that touches on the roles of thinking, perceiving, and mental imaging. Bonus points if you can succinctly tie in how the answer to this question also gives the grounds for a refutation of naive realism and metaphysical realism.

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Awakening to the difference between PERCEPT, CONCEPT, and MENTAL IMAGE

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: "... to work one's way into the world of concepts through one's own activity, is an entirely different thing from experiencing something perceptible through the senses." (RS from the 1918 addition to this chapter) Now, all of this talk about percepts and concepts and mental images and reality and naive realism and dualism and monism and so forth won't amount to much of anything if we don't actually DO something that brings about a shift -- or at least the possibility of a shift -- in our actual lives. I will be the first to grant that just really seriously actively reading Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path IS a transformative exercise, but this is very hard (particularly only on a first, second or third reading...), so we can benefit from alternate modes of dealing with the content. So the goal of this week's exercise is to -- within the context of your daily life -- try to become aware of the differences IN YOU, PHENOMENOLOGICALLY, between the processes of perceiving, thinking, and forming mental images. Everyone has a different flavor for how they think, perceive, and make mental images. We could say that each person has a fairly well-established set of gestures to their thinking, perceiving, and mental imaging. These are patterns that we have come to rely upon in our daily life, and which -- if we are unconscious of them -- will almost certainly limit the flexibility of these processes, and it is flexibility of these processes that this book is about. Steiner wants us to become free, creative human beings, and this means we can't simply continue to unconsciously rely upon the default modes of interaction that we are used to (because they have served us well--something we shouldn't forget). We don't need to give up our default patterns, we simply have to make them optional. And in order to do that we have to become aware of these patterns.

WHY ALCHEMY IS YOUR FRIEND: The alchemical tradition has long understood that a substance can't be transformed unless it goes through a process that allows the untransformed aspects to come into a new relation. This requires the separation of the various parts of the substance so that they can be purified and brought into a state that allows them to "marry" again in a newly reconstituted -- and transformed -- whole. This is called a "spagyric process" -- and we need to do it with our (initially naive) experience: we can separate out in our total experience the PERCEPTUAL PROCESS, the CONCEPTUAL PROCESS, and the MENTAL IMAGING PROCESS. By making these distinctions (with thinking! remember thinking is always active), we can then learn to change how these

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processes relate to each other to form our total experience. We can purify -- a better metaphor is actually from electronics: to rectify -- these processes so that they operate in phase with each other, and so that one or the other doesn't act like it owns the place all by itself. When we train our attention to be sensitive to the differences in our total experiencing with respect to the role that perceiving, thinking, and mental imaging play, we begin to free ourselves of the default patterns by which these are already linked (tangled) in us through our body, soul, and spirit. In other words, THIS IS YOUR BODY, SOUL, AND SPIRIT ON ALCHEMY.

OK FINE THE ACTUAL INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Choose a person that will be the "object" of this week's exercise. It needs to be someone you will have direct contact with sometime during the week (preferably the first part of the week). Ideally you would be able to use one of the people that was part of the first four week's of exercises; choose the "difficult person" if you really want to bring the point of this exercise home. <<If you have the opportunity to do this exercise more than once with the same person, it may be much more fruitful. Ultimately rhythm makes this work, not power, so this is mostly to introduce the exercise, not to expect you to be able to do it "completely" or "successfully".>>

2. When you encounter this person, hold a portion of your attention in a warm, open, "witnessing" space. This part of your attention will not judge the person, it will not make any conceptualizations, it will simply actively be present to what is occurring in the situation. There is a bit of a sense of reverence for the "IS-ness" that goes with this; whatever it is, it is! Try to be as awake in particular to what is going on in you during the encounter, because this is the "substance" that is under consideration for transformation...

3. If you can, immediately after the encounter, take a few minutes to reflect on the following; or if you have time you can really try to go into it, otherwise maybe just take some brief notes so you can try to go more deeply later in the day when you have a protected time and space.

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4. Mentally run through the encounter (drawing on your witnessing space) and identify a moment of the encounter that seem "juicy" or "rich" or "hard" or somehow calls to you. Now try to extract the three components of your perceiving, thinking, and mental image forming for this part of the encounter. That is, try to use your attention like a surgeon's scalpel to tease apart this specific moment in your encounter so that you can really get a sense of JUST THE PERCEIVING process, JUST THE CONCEPTUALIZING, and JUST THE MENTAL IMAGING, separately from each other. Work your consciousness forwards and backwards through this moment, trying your best to allow each of these processes in you to stand out from the others.

5. Once you feel you have done what you can with this, relax your attention and simply replay the encounter like a movie in your mind, not focusing on anything in particular, but letting the whole play out as a whole. At the end of this inwardly thank your "partner" for their cooperation and give yourself a few moments of silence. Record any insights, questions, or images that come to you.

Some potential tips/questions that may help once you have done the exercise: How are you telling the difference between mental imaging and thinking? Can you imaginatively place in your body the activity of the three processes -- can you feel WHERE you are "having" your perceiving, thinking, and mental imaging? What is the hardest of the three processes to distinguish? Which of the three processes was easiest to separate? HOW did your attention shift between the different processes? Did you notice any tendencies? (For example, "I seemed to get the perceiving bit pretty easily and could just concentrate on that, and then I would try to move to just experiencing the thinking component, but would immediately get caught in mental imaging..." or some such.)

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The Factors of Life So this week we have a very short chapter, a mere 8 pages and that includes the 1918 addition. Steiner thinks he has sufficiently put forward the central elements of his philosophical "grounding," and now he is going to sum it all up for us in this chapter so that he can move on to his larger task which he introduces in next week's seminal chapter 9. Now you may be a bit sick and tired of talk about percepts and concepts, naive and metaphysical realism, and the nature of thinking... but it is only if we really dive deeply into what Steiner is getting at that we can begin to really grasp how it is the case that he can say something like

the essence of thinking is the power of love in its spiritual form

Let that soak in for a minute. ... ... We really have to take Steiner seriously when he says that "no other activity of the human soul is so easily misunderstood as thinking," and you can see that by "thinking" Steiner is not referring to what we might call thinking in a more colloquial manner, but to something that literally has a COSMIC significance and origin. The whole point of this book is to try to get us not just to have a new set of ideas about thinking, but to THINK DIFFERENTLY. The "closer" we read, the more we must open ourselves to the possibility of a new experience of thinking -- a thinking that is "warm, luminous, and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world." In this chapter, Steiner wraps up the whole first half of the book with the first clear distinction of thinking from feeling and willing. He has mentioned them before but now he can say something about their relationship to each other and to the kinds of (one-sided) worldviews that result when we take either the position that feeling or willing is what gets us most directly into contact with reality. As many of you already know, the division of the human soul into willing, feeling, and thinking components goes back at least to Plato, who clearly distinguished them from each other:

• The rational soul (mind or intellect) is the thinking portion within each of us, which discerns what is real and not merely apparent, judges what is true and what is false, and wisely makes the rational decisions in accordance with which human life is most properly lived.

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• The spirited soul (will or volition), on the other hand, is the active portion; its function is to carry out the dictates of reason in practical life, courageously doing whatever the intellect has determined to be best.

• Finally, the appetitive soul (emotion or desire) is the portion of each of us that wants and feels many things, most of which must be deferred in the face of rational pursuits if we are to achieve a salutary degree of self-control.

Notice that for Plato, both feeling and willing are--or should be--subordinate to the role of thinking; they are meant to operate in service of thinking. In his Phaedrus, Plato uses a stark metaphor: thinking is a charioteer, being driven by two unruly horses, feeling and thinking, which want to go their own ways but must be literally reined in by the directing activity of thinking. Steiner takes Plato further by showing the cosmic role of thinking, both on the grandest scale and down to the individual scale in our own daily experience. He wants us to see how in thinking is something precious, something special, something that can do what feeling and willing cannot do either alone or even together, and that is to AWAKEN TO REALITY in its fullest sense.

For Steiner, there is a kind of directionality to feeling, from object --> subject. Feeling is "what the world is for ME."

There is also a kind of directionality to willing, from subject --> object. Willing is "what I am for the world."

Thinking is not bound in this way; or we could say that it is bi-directional, or maybe omni-directional. Thinking connects our individuality to the reality of the wider cosmos; it leads the individual to the universal, and allows us to be a part of the reality of the cosmos that transcends our individuality. But it also connects the wider cosmos with our individuality, and leads the universal into the individual, allowing the universality of thinking to awaken to itself as "MY" thinking. The I-being is kind of the result of the confluence between the universal and particular. I want to point out that Steiner slips something amazing into the first part of this chapter that may not be too obvious. He says that "What is obtained by perception of self is ideally determined by this something in the same way as are all other percepts, and is placed as subject, or "I", over against the objects. This something is thinking." What Steiner is intimating here is that thinking is an ontologically and epistemologically primary part of the cosmos, and it is this universal aspect of thinking that then makes of certain percepts a "SELF" or "I" that can then be a locus of its continued activity, but now in a way that allows for the subject-object division to be realized. Remember how the orange arrow in the second drawing went straight in from the one-world-process to the individual? That's because thinking is more primary, both ontologically (in terms of its existence) and epistemologically (in terms of the process of knowing) than "self", which is a result of what thinking does (considered in the "larger" way that Steiner is indicating). We only need to look at how experience of self actually buds and grows and flowers in the course of child development.

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This point is important: it is through the percept of our self (when thinking directs itself to the observation of the self) that thinking reveals itself to us in a phenomenological way -- at first. But because it is the universal thinking that is at work in this very activity of seeing itself as SELF, something much more than "mere subjectivity" as occurring. This comes back much later in the course of esoteric development as the foundation for seeing myself IN THE OTHER, and the other IN MYSELF. This is only possible because of the universal cosmic nature of THINKING, as Steiner describes it. In other words, one of the highest of all human capacities can be seen as a natural outgrowth of the subtle and amazing picture that Steiner is painting of thinking, when taken up as a part of esoteric development. This is why Steiner is writing this "foundational" book, and why he continually throughout his life referred back to it in this way. It isn't dry philosophy, it is an invitation to begin working with the most high mysteries of potential human development in the context of the spiritual world! So, the task for this chapter's discussion, then, is to grasp what makes thinking so special vs. feeling and thinking, and why Steiner pins everything on it.

** Why does he implicitly admonish us not to become mystics (the philosophy of feeling)? ** Why does he likewise want to steer us clear of thelism (the philosophy of willing)? ** And why is he steering us toward what he is calling his "monism"? How does Steiner's view avoid the pitfalls he identifies in the other two views, and what does this have to do with "reality"?

Please use these questions as spurs for discussion, but also feel free to bring forward what you think is most important or fascinating about this chapter or the whole work up to this point. We are really at the turning point here, so let's see if we can all get to a place of feeling like we could individually summarize the essence of what has been presented up to and through this chapter. If you can post that summary, awesome!!, but at least try to take a moment or three and give it a go, so that you know where you will need to pay extra attention the next time you read through the book. ;-)

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Thinking, Feeling, and Willing Okay, this week we are going to try to further our alchemical surgery skills, this time with the operative distinction being thinking, feeling, and willing. Last week you did a similar exercise trying to tease out thinking from perceiving and mental imaging, and you did that with yourself as the subject. This week you are going to observe someone ELSE, and try to tease out the thinking, feeling, and willing components of their experience. For those of you who are teachers, this can be a very useful meditative activity that you can do about ("with" is better, but you doing this on your own) a student. A. This week, LET YOUR SUBJECT IDENTIFY YOU. This simply means don't try to actively choose a specific person. Rather, reserve a tiny fraction of your awareness this week for paying attention to your daily encounters with people. At night, just before falling asleep, hold a warm, questioning intention in your mind about the potential subject of the exercise, and release it to the cosmos. Let all expectations about receiving any answer go. Upon waking, take a moment to check in to any images or thoughts or feelings that come to you, and allow them to work on you during the day. It may take a few days of doing this for you to have the feeling that one particular subject is "right". If nothing seems to happen by the time you get too stressed out to continue the process, make up a random rule that will result in the selection of an individual. For example, "the third person I see after walking through this door" or "the first person that says hello to me today" or some such. Form a strong intention to follow the rule, and then see what happens. You may end up using the person chosen for you in this way, you may not; but it gives you a way to do so if needed, and which still allows the world's own processes to play a part. B. Now that you have your person identified, allow a specific encounter with this person to be the event you will consider. You may go into the event ahead of time knowing you have identified the encounter to come as the one to be used for the exercise, or you may identify the encounter after the fact. Thus for some of you instructions 1 and 2 will be simultaneous; you'll know the person by virtue of the encounter itself. C. Now, when you have a few moments to yourself, consider the encounter. Remember that this is an imaginative exercise; you are going to have to fill in with your imagination aspects that you don't have direct access to. Accept this and recognize the limitation. Now, bring up the encounter before your mind's eye and pay close attention to the other person. Try as much as you can to LIVE INTO the other person's experience. Imagine you are taking on their bodily positioning and movements, their facial expressions and gestures, their tone of voice and words. Imaginatively run through the encounter looking out from their eyes, feeling their feelings, doing their doings. Give this about 5 minutes, then come back to yourself and consider:

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1. WILLING. How is their body positioned? How are they moving? What is the scale and sequencing of their motions, gestures, and facial expressions? How are their words imbued with their will? What is the character of this will? What does this will feel like? What is its aim? How is it directed? 2. FEELING. What is the quality or qualities living through their movements? Move your soul inwardly in such a way that you try to match what you imagine the other person is feeling. What is this person feeling? How is their feeling expressed in their words, in the way they move their eyes, in the time they take between words, in the silences between motions? What are the possible mental images that this person is having? How do these mental images express their individuality? 3. THINKING. You will have a tendency to go towards imagining their mental images... but resist this temptation and try to work towards the purely conceptual content present in the experience. What are the thoughts that this person is thinking? What are the principles, the ideas and ideals that are at work in their being in this encounter? X. Once you have tried to live into the differences in this one person and one encounter between thinking, feeling, and willing, imagine approaching the exact same encounter, but now newly, and this time from the perspective of the other person. Imagine what is living in this person as they meet you... and allow the encounter to unfold with you playing the role of the other; what would you-as-the-other say, do, or otherwise express in order to feel completely understood by you-as-you? How might the encounter have gone differently if you-as-you were aware of what was happening with you-as-other? Y. Okay, don't go too far out there. Come back to yourself and simply run through the encounter again as a whole, briefly, this time as yourself. Be open to seeing something new, to feeling differently about the encounter, or to an impulse to be differently. Z. Thank your partner for their participation, and send them some free gratitude.

Write in the dialogue space below your reflections on this exercise (you don't have to explicitly write up each point). What needs to be said?

I'd like to leave you with a short set of verses that deal with the various relations between the human and the world (for world, you can also read: "other') from the perspective of this triune division:

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The innermost being of the world awakens in my thinking. My thinking sleeps into the outer being of the world.

The World Soul dreams in my feelings.

My feelings dream into the Soul of the World.

The outermost being of the world sleeps in my willing. My will awakens in the innermost being of the world.

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The Idea of Freedom OKAY, I just wanted to take a second to tell you all that I am very impressed with the amount of engagement that you are having with this class. It's really fantastic to see how everyone's various posts all contribute to the larger whole, making something that is really quite amazing and precious. This is a picture of how technology can serve a higher good, when the kind of attention and intention that we have with its use is borne not out of duty or the impulses of our lower organism, but by love for the deed! (You like that tie-in with this week's reading?) All right! This chapter is a seminal chapter in the book, because it is here that Steiner can first illustrate the PRACTICAL consequences of his philosophical insights that he spent the first half of the book building up. This is the first chapter where we can really start to experience the consequences of the nature of thinking for the rest of LIFE. It is also the first place where Steiner is really clear that the nature of thinking is SPIRITUAL; so that he can say that intuition (a capacity of thinking) is the conscious experience -- in pure spirit -- of purely spiritual content. He is actually laying out the groundwork here for some really radical ideas in the realm of "consciousness studies" that are pretty amazing; indicating in no uncertain terms that the organism is NOT responsible for the essential nature of thinking. This is COMPLETELY opposite to almost all current views on the subject, which say that WHATEVER thinking is, it is a CONSEQUENCE of the organism; i.e. thinking IS biology in action. There is some serious, detailed, experimental, and phenomenological evidence for this biological view; it is not seriously doubted except perhaps by a few rogue philosophers. STEINER UNDERSTANDS THIS, because our current view on the matter is really just a technical modification of ideas that were already current 100+ years ago. We have simply found much more detailed ways of evaluating and testing them. So when Steiner, who was extremely well-read and kept up with the current science of the day, is so adamant that the essence of thinking is independent of the organism, he isn't saying this as some kind of woo-woo proto-new-age wannabe, because he wants to somehow be "spiritual"; he is saying this with full force directly in the face of the best modern science of the day. If you want to read more about the place from which Steiner is making this statement, you can look into the unfinished book, Anthroposophy: A Fragment, which is one of the most potent and amazing and difficult and important of his works. But I just want to point out here that Steiner really is a RADICAL, he is thinking about thinking in ways that require us to really suspend our normal habits of thought if we are to follow him through and to see how "the organism recedes whenever the activity of thinking makes its appearance; it suspends its own activity, it yields ground; and on the ground thus left empty, the

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thinking appears." (Notice how the whole beginning of this chapter, up to page 139 in your edition, was revised/added in 1918... again you can get the sense of his different focus and style...) When you understand that by THINKING Steiner is talking about THE SPIRITUAL WORLD, you can start to get a sense of the relationship between the spiritual world and the physical world as he describes it; we are not talking about ethereal beings floating around somewhere that is just like here but less substantial, contained in well-defined spaces like our own bodies, and full of individual desires and agendas. This is projecting the results of what our physical organism provides for perception into realms that are beyond that perception. And part of Steiner's point is that this projecting is just a normal part of the situation right now -- and that if we want to avoid the mistakes made in the projecting we have to get in touch with the actual activity of thinking itself, we have to develop our own intuitive thinking capacity, because it is only in that way that we will actually BECOME able to experience FREEDOM. So this whole chapter is in a way a delving into the consequences of taking the nature of thinking seriously. He showed us how thinking is not feeling or willing in the last chapter, and he spent many chapters working out how thinking relates to observation and how it acts to connect percepts with each other, something that the percepts alone could never do. But if thinking is independent of the organism, how the heck does it relate to US individually???

THIS IS THE CENTRAL QUESTION OF THE CHAPTER.

And it is a big question! And in order to answer it Steiner has to make a distinction between "the REAL 'I'" and "ego-consciousness" ("I-consciousness" in your version), pointing out how the ego-consciousness is a consequence of the organism and our acts of will (and feelings too). This ego-consciousness is what we NORMALLY think of as "ME", the consciousness of self that is filled with everything I do, my feelings, my mental images, and the specific intuitions that I have. So the question about how thinking relates to ME individually ends up being a question of how thinking relates to my "ego-consciousness." We have THINKING on one side, with its luminous self-transparency and universality, and on the other we have the human organism, with its particularity and specificity and non-universality on the other. The "darkest" part of the human organism -- with respect to what is available to conscious reflection -- is OUR WILL. We are totally asleep with respect to HOW our will works (while we dream in our feelings and are awake in our thinking). Right in the middle between thinking and willing, considered in this way (along the polarity of universality to individuality), is the "ego-consciousness" -- and the task of this chapter is to illuminate this middle ground, where all the action takes place. So this is the setup. We have thinking's universality on one hand, and willing's non-universality on the other, with the "ego-consciousness" in between, having been BUILT out of the organism from which the will came, arising like the froth on the waves of

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the will's activity, but also being capable of becoming independent of that very organization through its being "taken up into thinking" in order to share in "thinking's spiritual being". That is our inheritance, our drama, and our promise, all in one. OKAY, the task for this week's reading is to discuss and try to understand:

1. what Steiner means by the word "freedom"

2. how this concept of freedom relates to the individual

3. what all this means with respect to how we actually act in the world

There are SO MANY amazing "nuggets" in this chapter that I can't help but ask that if one or two struck you in a profound way, to post them here as well.

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Distinguishing Driving Forces: Instinct, Feeling, Practical Experience, Pure Thinking, or:

GETTING TO KNOW YOUR PARTICULAR CHARACTEROLOGICAL DISPOSITION 101

The exercise for this week is to pay attention to your driving -- I mean, to pay attention to the various ways in which WE ARE DRIVEN and the various ways that we DRIVE; not your car, obviously, but your whole being. That is to say, the question for this week is "WHERE DOES MY WILL COME FROM?" in the context of your actual daily life. Steiner distinguishes as driving forces in the human INSTINCT, FEELING, PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE, and PURE THINKING. Here we can see the elemental patterning at work: Instinct is Earth; where our will is triggered automatically by a DIFFERENCE in our perceptual world. Feeling is Water; where our will is triggered by the WAY WE CONNECT with our percepts. Practical Experience is Air; where our will is triggered now on the basis of the habitual way in which our mental imaging has resolved PAST POLARITIES. and Pure Thinking is Fire: where our will is triggered not on the basis of ANYTHING BUT ITSELF in its own self-contained wholeness. So while you are about your week, pay attention to the driving forces of your actions. What actions are instinctual? Which are driven by feeling? Which are carried out because of practical experience? And are any of your actions driven solely by pure thinking?

Try to really LIVE INTO THE PHENOMENOLOGY of the various driving forces behind the will. Sink into the driving forces of an actual specific behavior that exemplifies each type. What is it like? How is it different than actions carried out with a different driving force? What do you notice about the relative abundance of actions that are triggered through one means or another? What patterns do you discern? Do you notice if the driving forces behind your will change depending upon what time of day it is? How hungry you are? How awake you are in your thinking? What is your particular characterological disposition with respect to the triggers for your will?

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CHAPTERS 10-11 READING DISCUSSION: (SETH)

Freedom-Philosophy and Monism & World Purpose and Life Purpose

Okay; chapter 9 is behind us, but it won't disappear -- rather, we are going to flesh out the context for it more deeply. In chapter 10, Steiner plays his usual game of setting up alternate views in order to show how they don't work, and why his does. (You can make a decent case that he is actually using a straw-man argument, but even if that is true it doesn't change a think about what he himself is trying to put forward; it merely changes the context in which he is attempting to present his ideas and how they connect to the intellectual milieu of his time).

So again he argues against naive realism and metaphysical idealism, and is trying to show that his view (which he is calling monism, although that word is really too general for his view, as there are multiple types of monism) gives a different way to think about morality. Basically Steiner is trying to straighten out the conversation about morality so it isn't confused. He wants to CUT THROUGH THE CRAP and go right to the heart of the matter.

And he set up that "heart" in the last chapter (9), and now will build on that. Now we have to be really clear here, that underneath all this seemingly philosophical talk Steiner is being VERY RADICAL in his thinking, and we need to pull out the major points so this becomes apparent.

He again works with the polarity between the extremes of materialism and spiritualism, placing his view, monism, right in the middle, straddling the line, as it were. It is important that we recognize Steiner's extremely serious committment to doing justice to the material world -- he's not off in some new-age faerie land looking with disdain upon the world of matter. Okay, he may at times be off with the faeries, but he always comes back, and integrates what he finds with the rest of what he knows about the physical world. In more formal terms, Steiner is less of a gnostic and more of an alchemist. He is firmly aware that transformation doesn't happen piece-meal, but rather is about the WHOLE shebang; all the way into the deepest parts of the material world... and all the way out to the highest heights of the spiritual world. That's what anthroposophy is; the middle space of "that work".

Okay, back to the text. So Steiner's view of monism places it in such a position that it looks for the source of morality not in the outer world given to us through our percpts (naive realism and particularly its materialistic form); nor does he find the source of morality in the ABSTRACTED view of the transcendent principle(s) that are assumed by metaphysical realism. In other words, the source of morality is NOT in some transcendent realm of GOD or THE GODS, which we access and then try to follow. No burning bush, no 10 commandments, no coalition of the wise, no circle of elders, no

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personal revelation, no chats with god, no intellectually agreed upon principles, no "because my parents raised me this way", no "because of tradition", no "because I WANT to", no no no no no. None of that will count for the highest source of moral action, although they ALL count on the spectrum of sources of moral action; we don't have to abandon all these sources of morality, but we do have to be really clear that there is ONE spot that gives us an ACTUAL freedom in our moral action, and this is in the intuitive thinking of the human being.

Do you see the radicality of this view? THE HIGHEST SOURCE FOR MORAL ACTION IS ONLY THE FREE INTUITIVE THINKING OF HUMAN BEINGS.

Period. End of story.

This means that ANY sort of guideline or commandment given from "on high" or even in a mystical revelation from above is NOT the highest source of morality, and in fact CAN'T be. The highest source for moral action can only be found when the INDIVIDUAL human being -- when that human being is FREE.

This is a HUGE caveat. The WHOLE POINT of the previous 9 chapters was to be able to give us the right footing so that we can understand this. In chapter 10 Steiner makes it very clear: for the most part human beings are NOT free. Indeed, we are rarely free, because the vast majority of the time our actions and feelings and mental images are not imbued with the warm, luminous, self-revealing element of free thinking, but are rather derived from other mental images, other actions and feelings that DRIVE us in some way or another. This is why it is so important to understand what Steiner means by freedom being a state in which one acts without any kind of compulsion but simply through the love of the deed itself, in the context of that deed being illuminated by the light of living thinking. We are not talking about loving donuts and so eating tons of donuts because we love the deed of eating donuts. We must not fool ourselves about our own motives (and this is REALLY HARD, and is why we have been doing all these exercises that are geared towards separating and becoming individually aware of the different levels of our being). We have to be fierce, courageous, and clear thinking. The operative question in this case is: "HOW DO I KNOW ... (the sources of my actions, feelings, and thoughts)?" This is the 'practical' aspect that we all have to grapple with, and it is the GRAPPLING that is important. As Steiner indicates, monism doesn't consider the human being as ALREADY free, but as POTENTIALLY free; freedom isn't something we ever "have" -- it is only something that is made real in the act of its accomplishment; it is a CAPACITY, and like any capacity it is only latent until an act makes it real.

THIS IS DIFFERENT than EVERY OTHER CAPACITY. You can build the capacity to play the piano, and you can then play the piano without having to really be present anymore -- you can just kind of let your brain do the work without your conscious awareness interceeding at each moment. But for FREEDOM, it is reversed; it ALWAYS requires the

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most direct and immediate and potent consciousness in our thinking; we are ONLY free when we ACTUALLY are performing an action in this way, on the basis of the freely realized intuition for its own sake -- at all other times we can't rightfully say we are free.

So you see this is also very radical from that perspective, because we have to earn our freedom through our own individual development, and there is no guarantee whatsoever that we will accomplish this. So much for chapter 10, except the 1918 addendum, which brings out two very subtle and interesting points. The first hints at some characteristics of experience that will help you realize when you are "getting it", with respect to how to live with the seeming contradiction between the universality of thinking on the one hand and the individuality of morality on the other. It is ONE and the SAME process which occurs which has this unity on the one side and particularity on the other. This point is subtle but philosophically deep, and it shows Steiner's committment to the actual phenomenology of the experience of freedom, and that this experience is a "complex unity", not a "simple unity" -- a point that is visually and philosophically made by the famous Yin-Yang symbol.

The second point is even more subtle, and is even MORE applicable to our present time. Here Steiner indicates that lip service to something beyong the purely materiality of existence isn't enough; there are plenty of people who would say "well, I admit that there is more than JUST the physical world, so I have room for spirituality and such!" But Steiner goes deeper; he says to such a person: "You are actually unknowingly deceiving yourself into thinking that your thoughts ABOUT having room for the spiritual world ACTUALLY make that room. On the contrary, if the TYPE of thinking that you are using is only appropriate to material processes, then even if the CONTENT of your thought is about the spiritual world, you won't get very far towards experiencing the ACTUAL spiritual world. And if you really thought it through you would see that the type of thinking (the mode, the process-level) is materialistic; what is needed is a NEW TYPE of thinking. We probably all have the experience of people who give lots of outward, explicit signs that they are "spiritual" but whose thinking processes are bound to all the various modes that make it UNFREE. If you believe in healing crystals or disembodied spirits or MATH because someone you consider an authority does, or because a part of you WANTS it to be true, or because having that belief satisfies some part of your soul, then you are not thinking FREELY. Remember that bit about being fierce with ourselves? Yeah.

So much for chapter 10.

In chapter 11, we see Steiner introduce the idea of PURPOSE, and in typical Steiner fashion does so in a way that may seem a little bizarre at first. This is again because Steiner is working out of a whole constellation of experiences that are not explicitly contained in this book but which directly inform its content (and method). Didn't you find it bizarre that he says that "true purposefulness really exists only if, in contrast to

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the relationship of cause and effect where the earlier event determines the later, the reverse is the case and the later event influences the earlier one"?? How can we understand this?

Steiner gives us the way: by utilizing the very important distinction he has labored to produce earlier in the book between percepts and concepts. He shows us that while the PERCEPT of the cause will always come before the PERCEPT of the effect, the REVERSE is true in the conceptual world. In fact, it is ONLY in the conceptual realm that an effect can influence a cause. How does it do this? BECAUSE THINKING IS NOT BOUND BY SPACE AND TIME. It is spaceless/timeless. Or rather, it is FREE from the bounds of space and time. Think of the laws of a triangle; they don't have anything to do with time, and although they are ABOUT space, the RELATIONS that ARE the laws are not THEMSELVES bound by space (this is a subtle point). Did you know that this is also true for the laws of physics -- they are also spaceless and timeless. Indeed, physicists have NO BASIS for decided which way all the equations go; they all can be run either forward or backwards! The LAWS are not "in" time; they are purely spiritual, and thus accessible from ANY time. For example, even if we all lived on a non-Euclidean surface (say, a hyperbolic surface, where the interior angles of a triangle DON'T add to 180 degrees, but less than that), we could STILL discover the laws of the triangles in Euclidean space, because thinking is FREE, as the most direct expression of the spiritual world, it is not bound in its own realm by any physical processes or percepts. When Steiner says thinking is (at least potentially) FREE he really means it!

So the point of this chapter is to show that just as there is only one FREE source for human moral action (intuitive thinking), so too there is only one place in which we can rightfully speak of PURPOSE, and that is in the context of an individual human being who (through intuitive thinking) grasps an IDEA (a content from the spiritual world) and makes it his or her own, setting it before him/herself as an IDEAL. This setting forth of an idea before ourselves takes place in our MENTAL IMAGING. In this process, the potential of the future deed acts on us in the present, causing us to act. So we have here a future action ("effect") influencing the present ("cause") through the intermediary of the mental image. But remember what the mental image is: it is an individualized concept. And remember what Steiner just said in the addendum to the last chapter; it is ONE process that grasps the idea in its universality and ALSO makes it the individual source of moral action. Is it coming clearer now? See how this all fits together?

The only place in which a future deed influences a present mental image through its connection with an ideal element (law) IS IN HUMAN BEINGS. This "future deed" is really none other than the CONCEPT OF THE FUTURE EFFECT. We can speak of lawfulness in nature, but not purpose; to speak of purpose requires more than the fact of a concept that links two percepts (cause and effect). Rather, it requires that this concept becomes the driving force and motive (re: chapter 9, how these two become united in intuitive thinking!) of our present deed, i.e. the "cause".

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This is what makes us special in the grand hierarchy. This is why "purpose" in Steiner's view is STRICTLY a human affair, because it is what happens when a human being, on the basis of a freely realized intuitive idea, makes that intuitive idea an ideal for one's own action. Purpose is what OCCURS when we do this. Thus the only purposes that exist in human life are those we create for ourselves, in the moment of their creation (and re-creation, and re-creation and ... again the "work" has to be done every time if it is to exist; otherwise we are abstracting a piece of ourselves as an "authority" that then is taken to be "external" from us in just the same way as if it were any other authority! The purpose -- to the extent that we have one -- only exists in the actual act of setting the idea before ourselves as an ideal. No one said this would be easy!!)

OKAY!

The task for this week's discussion is thus:

1) Reflect deeply upon your actions that you take in your daily life. Intuitively choose three actions from your week that carry a moral quality and which will be the subject of this exercise. Briefly describe the three actions. (Use the following format: Action#1: ... Action #2 ... Action #3. You will add things to this and just post a single final list... see below)

2) Take some time meditating on all the various sources at work behind these three actions. Pull out as many individual sources of motivation as you can. List them in a very straightforward manner (Earth), with no judgment. Just add them to your list, one per line below each action. When you are done, realize that you are probably missing some. Go deeper. (Use the following format: 1a ... 1b ... then 2a ... 2b ... etc. for each separate identifiable motivation).

3) Okay this is slightly ridiculous but it will force you to try to come to grips with the process: On a scale of 1 to 10, rate each individual source of motivation in terms of the extent to which it is a FREELY INTUITED IDEA MADE INTO YOUR IDEAL (10 is "completely free, thank you very much!" and 1 is "not at ALL free in any way; I was completely compelled in this respect". Just add this as a number after the description of each in 1a, 1b, etc.)

4) Now for each source of motivation that is not free, imagine the same scenario in which you did the particular action, but this time WITHOUT that motivation. Remove motivations one by one until you are just imagining the deed JUST AS A FACT, without any motivation at all... like you are just watching a video of the event (but a video that can capture all the aspects; sights, sounds, smells, feelings, emotions, thoughts, the whole bit... but just FACTUALLY, like you are just watching it all play out). Now try to place into the stream of the event the single motivation of LOVE FOR THE DEED ITSELF. In order to do this 'successfully' you will have to intuitively find something in the ideal realm (a concept) that can support and allow this love to flourish authentically,

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so that it is not forced for the sake of the exercise. Don’t' worry if you can't do this successfully -- the point is to do your best, and to fail, so that we can see by HOW we fail something about what may be possible for our own development. Post, after your single consolidated list, something about what this experience was like.

So your post will have a form like this:

"Action #1: <description of action> 1a: <motivation a> <Rating from 1-10> 1b: <motivation b> <Rating from 1-10> 1c: <motivation c... and so on> <Rating from 1-10>

Action #2: <description of action... and so on, following the pattern>

<Response to #4...>

OF COURSE, please also post any reflections and ideas about the actual readings themselves; feel free to make a separate post if you wish, or combine it all.

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CHAPTERS 10-11 EXERCISE: (NANCY)

Performing a Free Act

Hello Everyone! I'm back from my little break. I've been checking in periodically to see that you are all deeply engaged in the course content. There were some really great posts and discussions too. You are all awesome.

In fact, you are soooo awesome, that Seth and I thought that this week, you could find your own exercise and post about it online. Its meta-purpose will be to enhance and embody the understanding you are gaining of Steiner's idea of freedom. Here are the criteria for your exercise.

1. Identify a task that you will perform with as great a degree of freedom (the kind Steiner is talking about) as possible.

ONCE YOU IDENTIFY AND PERFORM THE TASK, POST THE FOLLOWING:

2. Tell us what your task is/was. This can be something in which you are already engaged, but the key idea is that whatever you are doing, it is being done in freedom – not because we told you to do it or because you HAD to do it for this class.

3. This free deed has a purpose. What is the idea that you are trying to embody that lives behind that purpose? Post about what you believe it to be.

4. How did you do with the task and with understanding the idea behind its purpose? Were you successful? Was it a terrible failure? Or something in between or otherwise?

5. How do you see your task, its purpose, and the idea behind it, as connected to the whole of human destiny and striving?

TO AID YOU IN YOUR CONSIDERATIONS: A LITTLE SECRET (shhhhhh)

"Behind each single member of the evolving College of Teachers we see his Angel standing. He lays both his hands upon the head of the earthly Man entrusted to him. And with this bearing and this gesture he enables strength to stream forth. This strength endows the work to be done with the Imaginations that are needed. The Angel stands behind each single one to awaken creative Imaginations full of strength.

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If we raise our gaze, we see a group of Archangels sweeping along above the heads of the evolving body of teachers. As they circle around and return, they carry from one individual to the other what is coming to birth through the spiritual meeting of each individual with his Angel. They then bring back to the single member the strength which has been enhanced through uniting with all the others.

Within this circling, which works like a spiritual sculpturing, a chalice is formed above the heads of those who are united in a common striving. This chalice is composed of a very special substance: it is fashioned out of courage.

At the same time, the circling Archangels who unite the teachers, allow creative forces of Inspiration to stream into their moving and shaping. They open up the springs, whence the Inspirations we need for our work well forth.

If our gaze is raised to penetrate still further, it reaches up into the sphere of the Archai. These do not present themselves as a totality, but from out of their sphere--the sphere of light--they allow a drop to fall into the chalice of courage. We can become aware that this drop of light is given to us by the Good Spirit of our Time, who stands behind the founder and the founding of this new school. In this gift of light creative forces of Intuition are at work in order to awaken the Intuitions needed for our new educational tasks.

In this way, the Third Hierarchy--bringing gifts of strength, courage, and light--takes part in what has now been founded. These Beings have the will to unite themselves with our earthly deeds, working through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition."

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Moral Intuition, Imagination, and Technique

Okay! This week I'm going to do less summarizing; I'm only briefly going to set the stage for the work that you will do.

In chapter 12 we see Steiner coming at the basic idea of freedom from a slightly different perspective (this is his modus operandi -- describing the same thing from multiple points of view). Here he is placing it in the context of thoughts about EVOLUTION. He wants to show that his view, which he calls ethical individualism, is in no way incompatible with "standard" evolutionary theory. He wants us to see how freedom is compatible with evolution, and how ethical individualism actually follows from evolutionary theory.

In order to do this Steiner has to come to grips with a basic thing about evolution, which is the premise that later organisms arise through changes in previous organisms. In other words, that what is here NOW is a consequence of what is PAST. But this would seem to go directly against everything he is saying about freedom, which requires that the source of our actions NOT be determined by anything in the past, but ONLY by the finding -- RIGHT NOW -- of the moral ideal in the spiritual world through intuitive thinking and making that the basis for action.

YOUR FIRST TASK for the reading this week is to discuss and try to understand how Steiner resolves this conflict.

1) How can ethical individualism (the science of freedom) be compatible with the science of evolution?

Also in this chapter Steiner attempts to get very practical. He importantly distinguishes between MORAL INTUITION, MORAL IMAGINATION, and MORAL TECHNIQUE.

YOUR SECOND TASK for the reading is to discuss:

2) What are the distinctions between these three things?

3) How do they relate to each other?

4) Why does Steiner see it as necessary to make these distinctions? What is his motivation for doing so?

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CHAPTER 12 EXERCISE: (NANCY)

Poetry and Moral Imagination

YOU ARE INVITED TO A POETRY READING

BY YOU

In preparation for our Skype call next weekend, your exercise task is simple but profound. We would like each of you to create a work of poetry as inspired by the reading from this week on Moral Imagination.

No other specific requirements - you have freedom in what and how you choose to work. Our Skype call will be a poetry reading. Each of you will have a few minutes to read your work. We might make comments about it or ask questions of you, but each of you will have a time to share.

The call will last for one hour. If we have time after the readings, we can have a live discussion about anything you like related to the course and your work within it. Time is still TBD - but we'll post an announcement when it's determined. Seth will initiate the call.

If you can't make the call, post your poetry here. We can all post so that everyone can at least read what we've written. There is something about hearing the poet read in his/her own voice that brings this work to life in a special way. Don't worry about "I've never written poetry" - your willingness and engagement are the two most important aspects of this week's exercise.

If you haven't weighed in about the call time on the forum or haven't posted your Skype name, please remember to do so.

ABOVE ALL

Love the deed and have fun!

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The Value of Life This week's reading is a little different. Steiner just finished talking about more practical matters in regards to morality, with the distinction between moral intuition, moral imagination, and moral technique. Now he wants to look at how we value life itself, or rather how, given what he has laid out, we should think about the valuation of life.

To be honest, this chapter was the most annoying in the book for me, because here Steiner's thoughts are developed mostly by virtue of contrasts with views that were current at his time but which are less so now. It is also one of the longest chapters, so a lot of time is spent rebuffing the alternative vision that is less relevant (although not completely so) today. It reads like a pretty straightforward piece of late 19th / early 20th century German philosophy, and is even very Socratic in its implicit structure. In other words, not the most exciting reading! Additionally, and some of you may find this strange, the bulk of the chapter deals with various thoughts having to do with measuring quantities of pain and pleasure, which Steiner is very adamant is possible. For someone who so clearly in almost all his works demonstrates adherence to his own principle that quality is more important than quantity (at least in most cases), this may be seen as an odd departure. But we shouldn't let this annoyance obscure what Steiner is trying to get at here, which really is working naturally from his beginning points early in the book to a summary and application at a higher level. It may help to understand that at the time and place Steiner was writing this, the influence of figures like Schopenhauer and Hartmann was felt very deeply (and with respect to Hartmann, felt even more so by Steiner in particular). Schopenhauer, who was really the first major Western philosopher inspired by the Vedic texts of the East, found much in the doctrine of annihilation (nirvana). He felt that the world's ground was an irrational will blindly trying to resolve itself, and that this happened endlessly. His view, along with Edward von Hartmann, created quite a stir at the time, and were both "pessimistic" views which require evil and suffering as an essential part of the actual EXISTENCE of the world. What this means is that the only way to get rid of suffering is to CEASE EXISTING. Now you understand why this is called pessimism!

We can already very easily state, without even having to read this chapter in its entirety (but do so anyway!) how Steiner will respond, because we understand the basis that he has laid out in the book up to this point with respect to thinking and morality. The pessimists say that there isn't an intrinsic value to life, or that its value is eclipsed by the pain that necessarily goes along with it. Steiner says that the value of life cannot be found abstractly in this or any way for all humans, resting on a metaphysical assumption, but rather can only be determined in EACH INDIVIDUAL CASE, BY THE INDIVIDUAL. Just as a moral action can only be one that the individual has come to without reference to outside authority or any motive that is not chosen

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freely by the individual, so too the value of life (of our experience of life) can only be found through the actual living itself, in the context of the specifics of the individuals development. The question -- and where the rubber meets the road -- is not about abstractly weighing up pleasure and pain, but rather about HOW we ACTUALLY find, integrate, and carry out what our intuitively developed thinking finds in the spiritual world. In other words, it is about the extent to which we CAN actually set for ourselves our own goals that are based upon the ideals we intuitively discover in the spirit. The valuation of life flows from the extent to which we have moral intuitions that are the basis for our actions, whether we can take those intuitions and translate them into rich mental pictures that individualize the concepts, and whether we have the resources and skill to carry out actions that lead to the implementation of those mental pictures, and thus the ideals. The actual value of life depends upon the extent to which all of this actually happens; we find experienced value in life when we achieve the realization of actions that have been discovered through our intuition and integrated into our being through mental imaging. Each must discover, take in, and try to realize the moral principles for oneself. The extent to which this is done gives value to life. Steiner acknowledges the vast differences in situation and capability for human beings. We are not all alike; spiritually we are each like an individual species unto ourselves, and thus have quite different starting points for our journey here. This means that not everyone is capable of penetrating equally deeply into the spiritual world through intuitive thinking to discover for oneself the basis for moral action, in the form of ideals. This is why characterological development is FIRST ON THE LIST for anyone who wants to be a free human being. This is why Steiner spent time in this book discussing in detail the sources of motivation and the driving forces behind action, the difference between perceiving, mental imaging, and thinking, and the difference between willing, feeling, and thinking. All together these ideas lay the deep framework for just these sorts of questions about value, and you can see how EVERYTHING hinges around the central pivot point of the entire book, which is Steiner's concept of thinking as the spiritual activity seeking purely spiritual content. Everything else in the book flows from this one central insight about the nature of thinking. From that, Steiner is really and seriously trying to give a FOUNDATION that can be USED by each individual to actually implement and carry forward in one's own life the principles that lead to FREEDOM, which are the basis and prerequisite for moral action and any valuation that accompanies moral action. Steiner shows us that by UNDERSTANDING all of this, we place ourselves in a better position to actively work with and realize the principles in our own lives. We can certainly stumble towards freedom and find success in this or that action, but Steiner is addressing those of us who wish to take self-development into our own hands and be proactive about becoming free human beings.

SO. What is the task for this week's reading?

First of all, you need to make sure you understand the above, and more generally, how Steiner contextualizes questions of valuation. Let's assume you've done that. :-) Your task for this week is a group activity. You need to get into your already-established groups

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(click "Groups" in the TOP navigation and choose the group you are in), then go to the forums for your group (click Forum at left after you are in the group area).

NOW HERE'S THE SCENARIO:

A 5th grade teacher has a student that is bullying other students, particularly those in lower grades. For example, the teacher saw the child teasing another child who was having difficulty accomplishing a simple physical feat involving some shoveling. The teasing ramped up and harsh interaction occurred that made the student being teased cry and leave in shame. The teacher has observed that the child is very keen on situations in which weakness is displayed; the child's bullying seems to get triggered in situations where an interaction occurs where some definite signs of weakness are present. The teacher has also noticed that the mother is often late in bringing the child to school, and doesn't seem to proactively inquire about her child's progress and behavior in the school. When approached about the tardiness, the mother was very dodgy in her attitude, and made excuse after excuse. The teacher had a strong feeling that the mother might be the subject of some abuse of her own at home, because the father didn't seem to be in the picture very much -- he never came to school functions and would only occasionally pick up the child from school. The mother never hears much about the father from the mother, except what she judges to be rationalizations: he's always at work, he has other commitments, etc.

YOUR TASK:

In your group, each person will take on the perspective of ONE of the following individuals:

• teacher

• mom

• student who is bullying

• student who is bullied

• student witnesses of the bullying

If you have more people than characters in this scenario, double up as you see fit, or come up with another relevant party and take that position.

Now that you know who you are 'playing', your task is to live into the situation of this person from their perspective, and to make the distinctions about the following:

1. What, if any, moral intuition is at work with this character? What is the IDEAL (or IDEALS) intuited? What is the moral principle or principles that motivate this character?

2. Imagine how this moral intuition gets translated into the specific individuality of your character in the form of mental images in one's moral imagination. What mental images is this person likely experiencing? That is, what kinds of 'thought scenarios' run through this person's head as they picture the various events and consequences and emotions and so forth? Don't get carried away too much; pare it down to the most relevant (YOU judge this).

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3. Finally, what are the OPTIONS for realizing some specific actions -- what are the moral techniques that flow from the need to act upon the mental images that occur for this person in moral imagination? What specific actions are likely to follow from the moral imaginations?

Post these answers/speculations to your small group and use it as the basis for a discussion about the scenario. Try to come to an agreement about how this situation should/could be handled, and make a single post in the main/normal discussion room for the week. The floor is then open for a full discussion amongst the group.

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Values

So this week's exercise is short and direct:

WHAT ARE THE VALUES THAT YOU HOLD WHICH HAVE ORIGINATED SOLELY OUT OF YOUR MORAL INTUITION?

Why is this an 'exercise'? Because in order to answer this question you need to go deeply into yourself to find those places where your values arise not out of any external authority, not because your culture implies them, not because your family was such and such, not because you want to be perceived of or thought of in a certain way, not because it is convenient, and certainly not because God wants you to think or be this or that. To KNOW those values as those that you have freely chosen through your moral intuition to be your ideals is an extremely powerful thing. This is something given to human beings that even the highest hierarchies cannot take away, and it thus carries a real spiritual power.

Once you have found a few values (or values that get as close to meeting the criterion as possible), recall a time in your life when those values were 'tested' in some way. See if you can go back into the scenario and experience for yourself the moral intuition itself, then the various mental images that arose through moral imagination, and any actions you took in regards to the intuition (moral technique). Try to parse out the three aspects with respect to the particular event. The point of the exercise is to try to get a sense of your OWN capacities for moral intuition, and to see HOW you translate it into moral imaginations and moral techniques. Each of us does this differently, and has strengths and weaknesses; being aware of our own patterns gives us a basis for a second-order way of working with situations that call upon your moral intuition, imagination, and techniques, where you can change the sets of alternatives that you experience; you can change the sets of alternatives that EXIST, because your free moral intuition is CREATIVE.

Post what you feel comfortable with that follows out of the above instructions, and use it as the basis for reflecting on how this week's content sits with you.

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Individuality and Genus Alas! I know you were all so sad to see this moment come -- the end of the book! Let's jump in...

In chapter 14 Steiner elaborates the consequences of his philosophy for the question of individuality. You can see this chapter actually as a kind of example of the whole book, where Steiner utilizes his own intuitive thinking with respect to the concept of individuality, when taken in the context of his previous discussions on the nature of freedom. He finds the idea of individuality and makes it an IDEAL, which he then translates into his own specific mental images that have to do with his time and place and circumstance, and then acts on those mental images, in this case by writing us this last chapter.

He shows us that a human being is an individual only inasmuch as he or she is free. He speaks about emancipating our being from what is given to us, either by nature (our bodies, physiology, basic capacities, feelings, etc.), or by our culture (family, race, social institutions, religion, etc.). The vast majority of life is full of what is "given" in this way, and these factors all serve to make our being general, in the sense that these factors are EXTERNAL to the part of ourselves that has the potential to become uniquely ours from the INSIDE. One can look at all that makes a human being not a SPECIFIC individual human, but a member of the totality of humanity in general, or a member of one sub-group, culture, family, race, and so forth. These factors are all precisely those that are SHARED between various groups of humans. Yet, we do not have to be determined by all of this alone, because we are capable of becoming INDIVIDUALS and not just members of this or that group. Steiner would also extrapolate to say that it is not by virtue of any unique combination of external factors that we become individual -- for example if there was only one person on the planet who was both a member of an atheist society and a member of a Baptist church. Even though such a person would be unique by virtue of the combination of these factors, because the factors THEMSELVES remain generalizable (categorical), they cannot constitute the basis for true individuality.

Steiner makes this point very strongly, and in a way that wasn't very popular at the time, with respect to gender. He very clearly shows how his ideas about freedom and individuality entail the equality of women as INDIVIDUALS, not as part of the category "female." He would make the same argument about race, sexuality, nationality, belief system, or any other general grouping; such groupings are never the basis of free moral actions, precisely because to have a motive with roots in only one group or another means that one's action is necessarily limited by virtue of the specific characteristics of the group and NOT the individual's free moral intuition.

Thus individuality and freedom are inseparably intertwined. True individuality can only arise when we become FREE; the extent to which we are not free is the extent to which we are members of some other GENERAL grouping -- whether that be biological (we have two arms), or cultural (Canadian). The sources of our actions when we are not free can be traced to some combination of these general groupings, but not to our individuality. Indeed, our individuality is ITSELF DEVELOPED precisely by virtue of freeing itself from the generalized limitations that

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make up any categorical grouping. Steiner knows that "no man is all genus, none is all individuality" -- we are all hybrid beings, sometimes free, sometimes not. But the extent to which we can realize freedom (in the sense laid out in this book) is the extent to which we are INDIVIDUAL, even if our action and the principle behind it are shared. The point is not the NUMBER of people that form a grouping, but the PROCESS by which one becomes a member of that group. If the process is one that is FREE, then we are individuals; if not, then not. We can even feel this directly -- the difference between when we act out of freely discovered moral ideas that we then set before ourselves as the basis for our action feels very different inwardly than when we act out of our physiology, out of ideas given to us by others, whether our family, faith, government, or even our past self.

This is a very fierce position, because "only that part of our conduct that springs from our intuitions can have ethical value in the true sense." Yup -- if you behave in a way that is outwardly following some moral code, but not because you have freely penetrated the idea of that code with your intuitive thinking and chosen to adopt it for yourself in a given action, then that action isn't really ethical, even though everyone else would label it that way. We are not talking here about RESULTS, but about PROCESS -- it's about HOW we are, not WHAT. You can see this throughout the book, which (despite all its overt content of thoughts) is really meant to indicate a path of development. Steiner would be the first--and most vehement--in calling us UNFREE if we were to adopt his own system of thinking about freedom without ourselves DOING THE WORK of the intuitive thinking required to fully grasp the content for ourselves. "The individual must get his concepts through his own intuition." This, then, is "ethical individualism": the joining of freedom and individuality as a spiritual action.

Steiner says many times that the whole basis of anthroposophy is presented in this one book -- that all the basic principles are there, upon which we can build a foundation for our own discovery and development. So despite all the other crazy and amazing things Steiner says in his lectures, he's given the most important secret already in this work: an invitation to both the WHAT and the HOW of intuitive thinking. His book "Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment" is the sort of "companion how-to guide" that takes a more practical approach, but following what he says there is made much more efficacious when we understand where it comes from, which is this book. It's a book you can return to again and again and again, being on the one hand the most "basic" (fundamental) book, and the most "advanced" at the same time. The more you read it the more you will have a real sense of what is happening not in what is being said overtly, but in HOW it is said, and what is left out, implied, or avoided. It is in these spaces in between the words that the work will come alive for you and begin to be like a companion that you can consult, disagree with, challenge, and otherwise use to propel yourself forward in your own development.

THIS WEEK'S READING TASK:

As you read this week's content, what I'd like you to do is to come up with your own questions for discussion. The questions can be from this week's content or from the whole book. This is an opportunity to consolidate what we have learned and to take it further, and to tap into the considerable group wisdom represented by all of us here. (You'll notice I didn't summarize the

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chapter on monism... I expect there may be questions from that short but very intriguing chapter!) I encourage everyone to post at least two questions, and to attempt to address at least one other student's question in some way. This is kind of a free-form way of allowing us to mull and explore a bit in this very unique space we have all created together.

GOOD LUCK!

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CHAPTER 14 EXERCISE: (NANCY)

From Genus to Individual And now for a little story: Once there was a student teacher. She was very conscientious and had planned out her block meticulously. She chose a school with lots of diversity in which to carry out her student teaching because she was drawn to diversity, and was herself, quite diverse, even if she didn't "look like it" on the outside. This teacher was doing a fabulous job. The host teacher and other faculty were impressed with her work. She had undertaken some serious self-transformation over the time she'd been engaged in teacher training, and everyone agreed that her ability for self-reflection was amazing. It gave her deep insights into how she could relate better in the classroom. She was with the students all day long. She observed specialty teachers with them, though she didn't have to do so, she wanted to learn from watching more experienced staff and experts in various subjects bring lessons to the group. She began to really bond with the students. One day, when she was almost done with her block, she was observing a movement lesson and noted a few girls fooling around, not listening to the teacher. This tended to be a repeated pattern with these girls, and so the student teacher approached the group of girls to say that it was important to listen to the teacher and carry out the movement exercises being brought by her rather than ignoring her and teaching each other different movements during the class. That could be saved for recess or another time. To bring her point home, she asked one of the girls to take a few moments to sit out, rather than to continue disrupting. Once a few minutes had passed, she instructed the girl to rejoin the group. The girl went home and told parents that she was told not to dance a certain way, a way that parents perceived to be an expression of the girl's African American heritage. They felt the girl should be able to express herself in this way at any time. The next morning, the mother of the girl insisted upon a meeting with the student teacher and the Administrator during the normal main lesson time. She also insisted that the 11-year old girl be there to state her point of view. After the student teacher was brought to tears, the mother seemed to be satisfied. After school, the student teacher took it upon herself to introduce herself directly to the father of this girl. She wanted to meet him face to face and human being to human being. The father was very angry and verbally attacked the teacher. He stated that perhaps she should take herself to another school where diversity would not be such an issue for her. He continued to berate her there in public during the dismissal process with both his daughter and her friend looking on in amusement.

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When he suggested that his daughter actually join the conversation, the student teacher walked away and looked for help from other staff members. The father tried to make the point that he'd never heard of a school or a teacher who would not allow a child to dance and to express a feeling for her heritage. He felt his child's self-esteem had been damaged and that the teacher owed her an apology. He, not so subtlety, accused the teacher of racism and told her that he was "Not interested in meeting her as one human being to another." He was blind to individuality, to the circumstances, and to the teacher's honest attempt to reach out. What he didn't know was anything about the student teacher's background, racial heritage, or experiences with diversity in her own life, nor was he interested in finding out. What was important to him was that his daughter be allowed to express herself as a member of a particular racial/cultural group - a genus. He was unwilling to look at the individual circumstances of the class disruption she was part of. He was unwilling to accept the student teacher as an individual - or even as a teacher. He was interested in imprisoning the student teacher within an assumed genus of his own making - without ever making an individual connection to express his feelings. He was ready to write her off without question, without true meeting, without human communion.

• What story do you have where either you and/or someone else was imprisoned within a genus, unable to act from an individual position?

• How do you think this could have been shifted to disarm that positioning?

• How can we prepare ourselves, as teachers, to act as individuals even where someone else would like to hold us captive within a purely genus-driven story?

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CLOSING READING DISCUSSION: (SETH)

Steiner’s Preface and Appendices The last week is here, and we are wrapping things up with two very short appendices (in the Wilson translation the first appendix is actually at the beginning of the book as the "Author's Prefaces"), in which Steiner says some things that reinforce his basic message. I'd like to point out the amazingly wise way in which Steiner deals with the problem of KNOWING. He re-orients knowledge away from external sources -- he doesn't discount external sources, but he wants to re-humanize the process of knowing in a very personal way that is specific to EACH INDIVIDUAL. Knowledge that is "given" from outside sources is not like knowledge that we earn through our own experience, and it is to "our own experience" that Steiner is constantly trying to re-orient how we think, feel, and act in the world. Indeed this even goes so far that it can be seen as detrimental to fostering human freedom to RELY upon authority for knowledge, because it takes away the very ROOT and SOIL within which and out of which human freedom grows: our actual individual experience. "From anyone who is not driven to a certain view by his own individual needs, we demand no acknowledgement or agreement. Even with the immature human being, the child, we do not nowadays cram knowledge into it, but we try to develop its capacities so that it will no longer need to be compelled to understand, but will want to understand." Is this not the kind of view that is so systemically lacking in our modern (essentially industrial) modes of education, which place such great emphasis on standardization (i.e. NON-individualization) and abstract forms of accountability that, because of the need to measure (in order to control things such as funding, resource allocation, access to materials and so forth) de-humanize and de-individualize the experience of education -- for both the children and the teachers??? How different would our society be -- as a whole -- if we were able to take to heart this perspective that Steiner so clearly offers over a century ago! By re-orienting from PRODUCT to PROCESS (the main conceptual move of the book), Steiner is inviting us into a much more personal, living, exciting, dynamic, and UNCERTAIN world. It is a world that in which human knowledge is not arbitrarily limited, and becomes a realm in which individual responsibility is front and center. The task of the teacher, then, is not to teach FACTS, but to literally "educate" -- to LEAD FORTH, which is to say: to prepare a PATH, not to provide a destination. Re-orienting education in this way is a fundamental shift that as a society we have not yet taken, but it is the kind of r/evolution that will support the overall human struggle towards freedom (in Steiner's sense). To help us on the way, Steiner plays this tune for us as a kind of meta-game in the form of the content of the book itself, in which he lays out the PATH to the PATH, so to speak. He not only describes the path and shows us what it looks like, but the way he communicates this is designed so as to lead us forth -- to educate us towards freedom -- so that we can discover the

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path for ourselves. He wants us not to just be able to admire the scenery along the way, but to become artists ourselves of our pathmaking. He wants us to be artists in the realm of concepts! And here he leaves us with a meditative predicament the consequences of which we see all-too-prevalently in our society today: "One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage." Steiner exhorts us to develop our faculties of thinking so that we can not only be artful creators in the conceptual realm (the spiritual realm), but because the extent to which we do NOT do this work is the extent to which we unknowingly limit our own freedom. The ideas of which we are unconscious, the ideas we have not penetrated and experienced for ourselves directly, are precisely those that can influence us without our knowledge or consent. The most basic picture of this is with the laws of physics, for example, gravity. We are all subject to gravity, but by knowing the law by which it operates, we can gain a certain mastery over it. We can use our knowledge to accomplish real deeds that would be impossible otherwise (such as going to the Moon). In this way we are no longer merely subjects of the law of gravity, but co-participants in its unfolding -- we work WITH it, in accordance with the purposes WE set for ourselves. So much for the first appendix (/preface). The second appendix also contains some amazing pieces; in particular he deals directly with what is known in the philosophy of mind as "the problem of other minds" -- i.e. how and if we can know the contents of another's thought. This question is dealt with by Steiner in a way that points beyond the material of the book as such, being an extension or extrapolation of it. If you have read his (unfinished) "Anthroposophy, a Fragment" you will see some parallels in how he speaks here. Remember way back in the beginning of the book where he characterizes thinking, pointing out how, because thinking is precisely that which we ourselves produce that we have difficulty observing it (because we more readily observe just those things that we ourselves DON'T produce, because they confront us as OBJECTS)? In the second appendix that comes back into play, but now instead of observing our OWN thinking, we are in the position of observing ANOTHER'S thinking, and the same basic rule applies! So we have difficulty KNOWING that we are thinking another's thought because we have united ourselves with it in just the same way that we are united with our OWN thought in the process of thinking. But in this case, when our own thinking unites with another's, we don't experience our own consciousness any longer -- we don't have TWO consciousnesses happening simultaneously, but just ONE. It should probably be said that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it is a gradient. We can 'sort-of' awaken in the other while 'sort-of' sleeping to our own consciousness. What is interesting is that the ability to perceive another's thinking rests not simply upon our own capacity for thinking, but rather upon our capacity for PERCEIVING the other. We must ATTEND to the other in order to grasp their thinking, and this can't be done abstractly, but must be done actually. The way in which the percept of the other is digested and turned into thinking in me lays down the path that my thinking has to follow -- IN REVERSE -- in order to enter into the

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thinking of the OTHER. This is a great mystery that Steiner is barely even glossing over here. What it means is that WE HAVE TO PENETRATE OUR SENSE-LIFE WITH THINKING. This is THE TASK of contemporary humanity in the 'grand' scheme -- this is where the 'leading edge' of conscious evolution is happening in the widest sense for humanity. It is through this activity (which is implicated in the book anywhere a phrase discussing the "meeting of percept and concept" occurs) that the main spiritual drama is playing itself out for humanity. Steiner wants us to enter this drama as skillful actors; he wants us to be artistically engaged with these processes. He wants us to become artists of our own freedom.

This final conversation area for the course is now open to you.

The content will be precisely what you make it.

There are no rules, only a space for enacting the

purposes that you set for yourselves.

What is living in you that wants also to live in the group? What do you wish to bring forth?

transforming thinking - a study course in rudolf steiner's intuitive thinking as a spiritual...

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