Nowadays our thinking is often very earthly in a literal sense.  When we observe the stars, the planets, the clouds, the wind all around us, and try to understand them, sometimes all that comes to mind are the kind of dry concepts we learnt at high school.

Nowadays our thinking is often very earthly in a literal sense.  When  we observe the stars, the planets, the clouds, the wind all around us, and try to understand them, sometimes all that comes to mind are the kind of dry concepts we learnt at high school. Those concepts include - empty space, gravity, atomic particles too small to see with the human eye, rigid bodies, electromagnetic fields and so on. 

Even now when we as a society "know" so many facts about the physical aspect of the planets and stars, the behaviour of wind and weather and so on we still find it difficult to bring life into our thinking about them, to achieve really relevant and living knowledge of them.  Our thoughts about them can sometimes just sit there inside us like a heavy meal in a bloated stomach and either eventually dissipate into nothing or be regurgitated by us without a real individual understanding ever developing. 

This kind of "knowledge", perhaps better described as information mistaken for knowledge, can be experienced by us as being given stones not bread to satisfy an aching hunger to really know, to really connect.

These abstract, dry physical concepts are drawn from our earthly experience.  They are abstracted from our own observation of and reflection on hard, rigid, predictable physical objects interacting (or not) with each other under strictly controlled conditions.  Within these strict conditions they can be applied quite well.  But do they enable us to know all that is within our capacity to know?  Do we need to expand our thinking, to introduce other concepts, other ways of thinking into our consciousness?

Science tells us, and our own observation of the reliability of daily television internet weather reports will confirm, that complex physical systems like the weather cannot have their future behaviour predicted to a very high degree of accuracy at all. 

I will probably try to remember my umbrella if the weather report predicts rain this afternoon, but I won't cancel a planned picnic next month if I see a prediction on the television that it will probably rain next month.  That is for the simple reason that the forecast for next month is probably right, but predicting which day(s) next month it is likely to rain appears to be impossible for any modern weather predictors, at least when they base their predictions on conventional material scientific methods.

However, I have yet to see any of the local "psychics" in the phone book set up in successful competition with these conventional weather forecasters either, so I'm not getting rid of my Google weather forecasting widget just yet...:-)

Many will have heard something of Chaos Theory and its application to the real world - in simple terms, Chaos Theory points out that the "simple" physical systems we learn about in school like pendulums, blocks on frictionless planes and so on are the exception, not the rule.  Real world systems like oceans, weather systems, planets, solar systems and human bodies are better viewed as chaotic systems (a technical term, not a value judgement!) whose behaviour cannot be fully predicted from observations of their current physical state or condition, no matter how accurate those observations are, even if they were infinitely accurate.

This can lead us to think many things, but one thing that can arise as a feeling from this experience of incomplete and unsatisfactory knowledge is the sense that something is missing in our view of the world.  What is this something? 

Fortunately one critical thing that is missing from this view is very near at hand, it is something I am doing right at this very moment - I am thinking.  I as a thinking, feeling, observing being am not totally separate from this "objective" physical world I have built up for myself in my imagination.  I am really a part of it.  If I were not participating in it as a thinking, knowing and feeling being, I would not be able to experience this dissatisfaction with my current view of the world and even more strive to correct it.

The book, the Philosophy of Freedom, by Rudolf Steiner, starts us on this road to reinstating this something missing in our world view.  Through our own efforts we can find it and re-find it at every moment in a fully conscious, thinking and rational manner. But in a sense this means that I must start again (and again, and again) in building my world view now that I have found the way back to what is missing.

Where to start?  There are many paths from here, and the many books, lectures and practical initiatives that form the body of work given to the world through the life and work of Rudolf Steiner provide numerous indications and ways into this future path of building a new, human science.  One path involves experiencing the concrete way in which my activity of thinking, feeling and willing manifests here, now, in my own body and its environment.  In a previous posting http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2307 [1] I mentioned aspects of the human head and how it seems to be very earthly, but also almost a kind of planet in itself floating above the surface of the earth, just like one of those billions of atoms or almost infinitely distant balls of gas (also known as "stars") we are so fond of mentally picturing nowadays.  This one just happens to sit at the top of our neck, however, and enables us to think!

But when we start to consider, in a feeling and living way, what takes place in our body below the neck, we can find that there is something present which is not merely earthly in this literal sense, and which is much more than just pieces of meat connected by tubes.  Unfortunately, our current medical science tends to be so separated and abstracted from the living human body that it can only tell us what it finds at post mortems and during surgery, not so much the actual truth of what a fully human, living body is.  And the body is nothing short of a living miracle!  It is not for nothing that Jesus speaks of his own physical body as a temple in the Gospels.

Take the heart, the lungs, the breathing, speech, the larynx, our hearing.  These are constantly interweaving, interacting at many levels between themselves and with the outside world and our own inner being throughout the day.  If we can only look at what we really feel with regard to our heart activity and all that is associated with it from our own feeling experience and carry a renewed thinking experience into this as well in the way Philosophy of Freedom can enable us to do, we may begin to feelingly think: My heart is not merely earthly in the way my head is.  My heart is constantly connecting itself to and manifesting the true inner nature of the wind, the water, the movement of the stars, the sun, the moon and the planets.  Out of my own experience I can begin to understand that my bodily organs in their living, real essence are of the nature of the heavens also, not only the earth.