Seed of a Spiritual View

This essay hopes to build a bridge between The Philosophy of Freedom and spiritual vision, and at the same time, point out that no scientifically based break can be found between Steiner’s epistemological writings and supersensible knowledge. The higher stages are already laid down in the former.

---

Mathematics is the preparatory school for non-sensory thinking. Plato placed great importance on this. Mathematics relates to the sense realm, but the process of mathematical thinking takes place in the sense-free realm of mathematical relationships. “Learn in mathematics to free yourself from the senses; then you can hope to ascend to the perception of ideas free from the senses—that is what Plato wanted to impress upon his students.”¹

Thinking as a Higher Experience Within Experience

In the chapter “Thinking as Higher Experience within Experience” in Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge,² Rudolf Steiner points to a layer of our experience of thinking that is deeper than our everyday, habitual thinking. The exceptional position of thinking consists in the fact that, in thinking, our immediate experience is already lawfully determined. This is not the case with perception. Perception is experienced as an indeterminate, internally differentiated juxtaposition in space and time without any connections. “We must overcome the phenomena of the senses.”³ Sense-free thinking can become an experiential fact. In sense-free thinking we shape the lawfulness of the ideal world in the form of connections in our own self-generated thinking. We know the appearance of our thinking within our field of consciousness best through attentive observation, because we are the ones who bring this thinking into appearance. Still, it is not subjective because we do not generate the content of our thoughts arbitrarily. An ideal essence expresses itself within us. The connection between cause and effect, for example, lies in the concepts themselves. We cannot change this connection arbitrarily without violating the laws of logic. The concept of white is the same for all thinking people throughout the world. In the experience of thinking, the content of thoughts and thought activity, concepts, and perception become one. Likewise, with further deepening, I create an inner space by advancing from a sense experience to a body-free experience of thoughts.

The Preparatory School for Seeing

Sense-free thinking is the preparatory school for seeing. The thought content and the thinking activity unite in self-produced, self-created connections. Thinkers experience the perception of this creative activity as a spiritual experience connected with light. For attentive thinkers, the perceived light of the connection is a kind of seeing. But we can also sleep through this side of our thinking. Still, even if we don’t perceive it, that alone is not proof of the existence of a gap between thinking and seeing. The deeper layer can be found in the descriptions and discussions in the Philosophy of Freedom. But this kind of seeing can only be experienced if, during study, thinking is liberated from being bound to the brain. Thinking then becomes perceiving. Thinkers awaken to a higher state of being. This is a solitary path.⁴

The lack of success and inability that often arise in this process, which we experience in the fact that we become tired, must be transformed by the above-mentioned willed activity of thinking. It is not uncommon for despair to set in during these attempts. To further pursue these attempts, we must take up the will to think, at least in its germinal predisposition within our soul. Intuition becomes our experienced reality. “For even though, on the one hand, thinking that is experienced intuitively is an entirely active process taking place within the human spirit, at the same time, it is also, on the other hand, a spiritual perception grasped without sensory organs. It is a perception in which the perceiver himself is active, and it is, at one and the same time, an activity of the self and a perception of this very activity. In intuitively experienced thinking, the human being is also transposed into a spiritual world as a perceiver. What confronts him within this world as perception, as the spiritual essence of his own thinking, the human being knows as a spiritual world of perception.”⁵

The experience of the marriage between thought content and thought activity in individual experience is spirit experience beheld in its creative process. This fact guarantees freedom for the individual, because freedom is acquired as a spiritual asset created by human beings themselves.

Pearl of Pure, Body-Free Thinking

In connection with the thinking described above, it is important to indicate the significant passage in which Steiner points out that in The Philosophy of Freedom, the seed of clairvoyant certainty can be found in body-free thinking. Chickens are just as incapable of appreciating a pearl (according to Steiner) as human beings are of appreciating this work who have not thoroughly worked its deepest layers. “Dare to address your concepts and ideas as the beginnings of your clairvoyance. What I have now just said, I’ve said for many years, absolutely publicly, specifically, in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I have shown that human ideas come from suprasensible, spiritual cognition. People did not understand this at the time, which is no wonder, indeed, for those who should have understood it belonged, well, yes, to the chickens.”⁶ It could hardly be stated more clearly that those who remain stuck in ordinary everyday thinking, in conceptions and associations, are simply like chickens—incapable of experiencing the spiritual in thinking, the seed of clairvoyant certainty.

Further stages in this series of lectures that are of significance for our theme will now be described. Once one has experienced the solitariness and the abyss of doubt described above, the individuality experiences the rock forming beneath it, upon which it now stands firm. The force of steadfastness and stability gains ground. In a further step, inner assuredness is deepened by overcoming all dogmatism, “for he [the spiritual disciple] must make his own way from out of the origins of his own soul.”⁷

The Path to Imagination and Inspiration

When thinking’s content and joyous creative activity (as described in the Philosophy of Freedom) become one and unite, the transition to a new sphere of Being can be accomplished. Connected with this is the deepening of the perceptual component or the experiential space in the participation of thinking. The focus is no longer directly on the content of knowledge, but on the movement of thought. Through intensive spiritual work, the will to think awakens with ever greater clarity in the field of consciousness of the thinker, which can be intensified meditatively. What now takes hold with ever clearer contours in experience can be compared, in a wider sense, to an experience of color. Steiner designated this spiritual experience with the term “Imagination.” The spiritual student becomes a spiritual researcher.

Now the thought content can be erased. Thinking becomes pure will. Thought-Will becomes pure spiritual perception in the damming of the content of thought. Like a dam, the flowing water is held back and lifts into consciousness the spirit-bearing force that can be experienced in thinking or meditation as a flowing and streaming element that awakens the fundamental context-forming force in its very essence. This experience can be compared to music. The pure interval as an interval is not audible; it can only be known in inner experience. Steiner characterizes music for the eurythmists by saying that actual music is not audible. We, of course, need to be able to perceive two or more tones in a musical context in order to be able to experience an interval. In this sense, reference should be made to the stage of knowledge designated as “Inspiration.” “The weaving in the soul content attained in this way can be called a real beholding of self. In this way, one familiarizes oneself with the inner human being . . . . [The inner human being] experiences itself in itself as a suprasensible reality.”⁸

One danger should be noted here. It is not the after-effect of the meditative experience that is to be deepened, but rather the force of will that has been expended and awakened within the weaving of the soul in the field of consciousness. This force must be deepened in the further course of the experience so that the soul’s power is condensed within itself, thereby enabling this power of the soul to stand before and behold itself. “These forces stem from the etheric body, those that enable the self to transform the subjective content of Inspired knowledge into an objective intuitive beholding.”⁹

Intuition

As in the stage of Imagination leading to Inspiration, the deep beholding of self taking place on the stage of Inspiration must now be suppressed. “He must be able to free the soul from everything that has been attained under the after-effect of his practices based on the sensory external world. . . . Consciousness now no longer experiences itself as a stage upon which an essential suprasensible content is inwardly presented, but rather consciousness itself is inwardly presented.”¹⁰ The real connection with the innermost of spirit beings becomes reality. Higher beings reveal themselves in spiritual experience. The highest stage of selfless communication becomes the presence of spirit.

---

Translation Joshua Kelberman

1. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy and Anthroposophy (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1988).
2. Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge with Special Reference to Schiller, CW 2 (Tiburon, CA: Chadwick Library Editions, 2021), ch. 8, “Thinking as Higher Experience within Experience.”
3. Ibid.
4. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, The Bhagavad Gita and the West, CW 142/146 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2009), lecture in Helsinki on May 29, 1913.
5. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Fundamental Features of a Modern Worldview: Results of Soul Observation According to the Natural-scientific Method, CW 4 (Tiburon, CA: Chadwick Library Press, 2020), “Appendix I: Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918”; also known as The Philosophy of Freedom.
6. Cf. footnote 4.
7. Ibid.
8. See footnote 1. See also Rudolf Steiner, “Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” from GA 35, published in English in Esoteric Development: Selected Lectures (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.