the New Clair-Thinking in Practice
It is common among many anthroposophists (those who find
themselves to be students of Rudolf Steiner) to conceive of one
supposed product of initiation: Imaginative Consciousness, as involving
a kind of inner supersensible picture-like symbolic intercourse with
the spiritual world. Between ourselves - our own I - and the
world of spirit there comes to be a kind of dialog taking the form of
pictures or images. For the old clairvoyance this was true.
For the new thinking clairvoyance this is not exactly true.
The place to start, in terms of understanding this, is
with Steiner’s observation that the insertion of the human being into
earthly reality, splits that reality into two components. This is
why he calls The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4) a
monism. The point of this particular kind of study of the our
mind (and/or soul) is to learn how to reunite what appears to us
naively in the first instance in the form of two kinds of
experience.
In A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception (GA 2), Steiner expressed this division as experience on the one hand and thought on the other. In The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity he called
these two components: percept and concept. So percept and experience are essentially similar, as are concept and thought.
These facts are part of the background to there arising,
in the systems of anthroposophical thought, two Paths or Ways.
The Path of Knowledge
of Higher Worlds (GA 10) works through the
study of the nature of our activity related to sense experience.
The Way of The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4) works
through the study of the nature of our activity as a producer of
thought. These Ways are distinguished in Steiner’s Occult
Science: an Outline (GA 13), by his saying
that while the former Path will lead to its goals of supersensible
knowledge, the latter Way is not only more sure (as a Path), it is as
well more
exact.
In GA 10, the exercises are sense-based exercises.
We use the imagination in order to deepen our ability to
appreciate what underlies sense experience. GA 10 also contains many admonitions as regards
moral or character development. It is a Path through the sense
world. In GA 4, we are to face the
question of thought experience. As to the moral or character development matters,
we are given in GA 4 specific instructions for our introspective
observations and disciplines regarding: moral imagination; moral
intuition; and, moral technique. In GA 13, Steiner has
pointed out that the Way through the thought
world, the world of concepts, is a path which
begins already in the world of spirit. When my total organism
underwent the change of egos around 1970, I woke up in this
spirit/thought-world, but had no concepts from the prior ego’s
experience in which to note what had happened. I was awake enough
to know soon thereafter that as a materialist I had somehow to justify
to my conscience the use of my intuition (thought) as it related to my
experience.
Beyond that I was as lost as are the rest of the folks
experiencing ordinary consciousness. My world view, in the Age of
Science, took no proper account of the meaning of thoughts and concepts
at all. If I was to learn something, I assumed and was taught
that those experiences and concepts would be poured into my mind from
the outside via teachers and books, but my own intuition simply lacked
the right basis as a vehicle of knowledge. We have the same
problem in the Society when people are encouraged to surrender their
own intuition to the Great Initiate. We do this because we have
not yet understood the reality of monism, or just what a gift to the
future is hidden in GA 2, GA 3 (Truth and
Knowledge) and GA 4.
Let us shift our discussion now, to the sense world
itself, yet as seen from the point of view of the world of thought.
It is frequently stated that the sense world is a world
of maya - of illusion. This is a half-truth, maintained in large
part because of its connection to ancient Eastern spiritual traditions.
The reality in the Age following Christ’s Incarnation is that the
sense world is part (one half) of the Embodiment of the Word. Now
with the change of consciousness to modern times the real nature
of monism, when fully practiced, is to find that the thoughts and
concepts (the other half) correctly belonging to the sense world are a
kind of Speech. There is divine order in the sense world, and it
is the task of the human being to find the correct thoughts belonging
to this world. It may be maya in one sense, but it is not at all
empty of Meaning.
The means for appreciating this was given to us by
Steiner in GA 2, and its development over time of the idea and practice
of Goetheanism. In Goetheanism we no longer just think about
the Natural World, or the Social and
Political World (which has emancipated itself from Nature to a degree),
but we learn to think with what comes to us through not only our senses and the
results of our conceptual thinking as well. Goethe learned to
read the Book of Nature, and I have learned to read the Book of the
Social-Political World. To think with requires that we surrender antipathy and sympathy and
just accept the what-is, for that what-is is the distributed* Christ Embodied speaking to us His truth via our very
own mind (as the creator of concepts). The human being is to
overcome the split in the world between thought and experience by
reuniting them out of our own free cognitive activity.
[For details on the *distributed nature of the Creator forces - or the Christ Impulse -
see my book: The Art of
God]
One of the difficulties is that for Goethe he only had
to recreate in his imagination the exact nature of what the world of
Nature did - to think with Nature’s activity. For us to read the Christ’s
(the Creators) speech in the Social-Political World requires that we do
more, for our concepts of this latter world are not part of what
Steiner called in GA 2, the necessary given. Our
understanding of the social-political comes not so obviously as a necessary given as does the shape of a leaf, which we see with our eyes.
We don’t see with the eyes a family or a community or the
evolution of consciousness. We only behold it with the thinking
activity.
In order then to think with
the social-political world we have to take full responsibility for the
very concepts themselves, which we create. This picture-like
concept-creative activity is discussed in GA 3, Truth and
Knowledge (or sometimes Truth and
Science)
The disciplining of thought on the Way of GA 4 is the
key to much. This sure and above all more exact (GA 10) thought-creative activity is central to the
healing (monism) of the split between experience and thought into which
we are thrust while incarnated on the Earth. Perhaps now we can
appreciate what Steiner pointed toward in Awakening
to Community, lecture three, in speaking of
the consequences of failing to read GA 4 in the right way: “The way it should be read is
with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way
of thinking and willing and looking at things....The trouble is that
The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have
been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be
sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is
not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does
fall behind, anthroposophy’s conveyance through the Society will result
in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be
endless conflict!”
If the Anthroposophical Society does not renew deeply its
relationship to the problem of knowledge, as expressed in GA 2, GA 3
and GA 4 - Rudolf Steiner’s true legacy, namely how to heal the split
between experience and thought, will be lost to the whole of the Third
Millennium. Learning to think in the new Ways - to
clair/clear-think with rather than merely about
- is the first step that leads to understanding the World. To see
(as in think) our experience, our percepts, as the Embodiment of the
Word, is itself a Living Imagination appearing directly to the senses
and the awake thinking when coupled together in ordinary consciousness
in the right way. Keep in mind that Americans do this in a
natural way - it is embedded in our ordinary consciousness, and the
biography is meant to lead us into an awakening as to this form of new
cognition. It is not about learning to do something new.
Its about learning to see what you already actually do; that is,
to take something out of instinct, and by seeing that, then raise it into full consciousness.