The first Chapter of PoF is Conscious Human Action, and the first sentence of this Chapter is a question: Is man in his thinking and acting, a spiritually free being, or is he compelled by the iron necessity of purely natural law?
If we look at some of the ideas in modern biology, particularly evolutionary pyschological biology, we will find that this question remains with us today, albeit in some quarters fully decided. We can find there the view that our modern behaviors are "hard wired" into our brains by the long term effects of natural selection. "Iron necessity" or "hard wired" - take your pick - both view the human being as not free.
The promise of PoF is that we can, through introspection following the methods of natural science, discover that in spite of such views we are in fact free (or perhaps more accurately: can become free. At the same time: Where do we begin the adventure of introspection?
Everyone has to make their own experiences in the end, but I thought I would make some suggestions that I learned through experience might be useful. Clearly in the first sentence above, with reference to man in his thinking and acting, we are given some aspects of the problem. Already, since we have been studying the text, we know that thinking is a significant matter with which to become acquainted, so lets begin there.
Discursive Thinking is a term that is used to describe our ordinary inner state when thinking, so lets turn our attention inward into our souls and take a look at it. Close your eyes, and before you read any further do the following: Count in your inner voice from 1 to 33 and then reverse the sequence.
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If you have done this, now ask yourself whether you did this without the interruption of any other discursive thought. Did you remain focused on the counting, or did other thoughts intrude, such that you might have counted to 23 and then said to yourself this is stupid, or counted to 22 and then had the associative thought (again said to yourself) that 22 is an important number in Kaballah. There isn't any right answer, yet it is important to notice what actually happened.
Now reread the above paragraph and try to notice whether or not you sub-vocalized while you read.
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Next, get up from the computer and walk around the house or the room and think about anything at all the comes to your attention, and then return to your desk.
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Have you become aware through these experiments that part of ordinary thinking involves this inner speaking? What or who is speaking in this inner voice? Who or what is listening? Haven't we all heard the mother yelling from the kitchen to the children fighting over the TV: "Stop all that noise, I can't hear myself think!"
It is important to notice Discursive Thinking, for it has all manner of unusual properties. To give a hint for further introspective work here is an analogy: We place a piece of paper over a magnet, and then pour some iron filings on the paper. The lines of the magnetic field are revealed by the way the iron filings become organized.
So also with Discursive Thinking. It constantly reveals order which is beneath it in a kind of way (in the sub-conscious or the supra-conscious). When you counted your will and attention were active, and the inner speaking took its shape from this activity. When you read the paragraph, the words on the page guided the Discursive Thinking - the sub-vocalizing, but at the same time something else happened, for in order to understand the paragraph (the words on the page) something in addition to Discursive Thinking had to be involved. What was that?
To help with this question, gather several books into a pile (or magazines, what is needed is just different sources of reading material). Read a paragraph or two in each and simultaneously try to notice how your Understanding of the text is created. Is understanding coming from the same spacial place in your inwardness as is Discursive Thinking.
Notice I used the terms "same spacial place in your inwardness". Sub-vocalization (Discursiving Thinking) comes from the spacial region of our inwardness we might later call the larynx or Throat Chakra, while Understanding (relational thinking?) comes from that spacial region of the soul we might call later "between our eyebrows" or the Brow Chakra.
In these simple observations is serious food for further thought. The danger, however, is to leap ahead. Far better is to do just very simple observations, for our thinking in the beginning is more or less completely undisciplined (no control of thoughts), which is why Steiner gives the 6 Basic Exercises. These exercises discipline the soul, so that as our introspective work proceeds in a competely emperical (scientific) fashion, we don't form concepts which might be called loose associations. A loose association is generally driven by something deeper in the sub-consciousness (a field influencing the order of discursive thought that yet remains beneath or outside our conscious awareness.
Consider this. Steiner's first sentence used the terms: thinking and acting. When we counted intentionally, or when we read, we acted inwardly. At the same tiime, there is no movement in even Discursive Thinking or Understanding that can't arise without our consciously willling it. We think and understand all the time from sub-conscious movements in the inwardness. So we remain, even after the above, with a dilemma or riddle: If I am not consciously willing my discursive thinking or understanding, who or what is willing it? Thus we return to the mystery of the First Chapter: Conscious Human Action.
joel
To Joel
Hi Joel
This is a great exercise! I never actually thought about the difference between different kinds of thinking before. The different places they originate in the head become very clear after doing the exercises. It's especially good that one is asked to do the exercises on the spot, while reading, rather than putting them off for later.
The last paragraph is rather tricky, did you do that on purpose? This sentence: "At the same tiime, there is no movement in even Discursive Thinking or Understanding that can't arise without our consciously willling it." seems to contradict the following: "We think and understand all the time from sub-conscious movements in the inwardness." It took me quite awhile to figure out what the double negative meant. Is that a demonstration of our Understanding trying to grasp something difficult?
I think this is a great start and it's just what would have thrilled me to find when I was first trying to study PoF.
Lori
triple negative
That is actually a great sentence for localizing the Understanding because as I was reading it over and over that part of my head started to hurt. While the Discursive part just didn't feel a thing.
L.
Great Joel
I really like this Joel, thanks, your insights are amazing! Like Lori I also initially had some doubts about the last paragraph but eventually got what you were talking about.
In terms of context in the larger flow of thought in someone working with the Philosophy of Freedom text, I wonder about the dangers of locking the student into a network of "thoughts about thinking" too early in a study course. Part of the beauty of Steiner's book to me is that he keeps the network of required concepts very small and sparse quite deliberately to help us to discover for ourselves that much of our everyday "thinking about" the world is actually abstract nonsense. That is one reason he has what I call the philosophical "straw men" like Spinoza, Kant and others whom he introduces with very short quotes and then proceeds to demolish their arguments.
Everyone who works with PoF develops their own thoughts about the world and also develops their own "exercises" formally or informally one way or another. Life itself is just a series of exercises in one way. I really like what you've done with the text here and look forward to learning more of it! Another example in this area, of course, is Tom's great work in relating the text to the Human and Cosmic Thought worldviews. The challenge in a study course may be to represent this diversity of outcomes, which is why the wiki approach may be especially suitable.
ordinary text book
I would like to turn POF into an ordinary text book with self-observations. This is a path of introspection. (know thyself). I don't see any other way for it to have broad impact. Steiner says the content is of value even though it is not what is of the most value in the book.
Learning the content like you would in any other school course would have significant impact I believe. It also seems to be the only introductory level that would work as we have witnessed. This would mean having terms and defining them. Of course the key ideas in POF are defined using 12 views so it is a broad minded definition.
The original book is always around for those who want another experience (proper reading) and I don't think it needs much more than a better English translation. After taking an introductory course they will realize the importance of deepening intuitive capacity which could inspire them to take up the practice of the proper reading of POF. Though the POF path of introspection will go a long way here.
Textbook?
Tom, I'm not sure what this kind of "textbook with self-observations" would be like. Do you mean it would be like a workbook that would accompany PoF? Would people taking the course not be reading PoF? Since it's going to be on-line, I assume there would be many links to go deeper into the various topics. Is that right?
The public hasn't shown any
The public hasn't shown any interest in reading POF. I could see selecting many key quotes from POF for the text book. I can see a box with a reworded description of an observation described in POF. I can see a section very much condensed and rewritten in a way that is understandable.
I think people want to read books that can be immediately applied and put into action in todays world. They have no interest in philosophy. You have to work with clear simple concepts to be able to grasp them and apply them. Of course you can provide links to various things.
Contemplation of Thinking section 3-4
Introspection
The thinking to be observed is never that in which I am actually engaged, but another one.
1. observe your past thinking
2. follow the thinking process of another person
3. follow the motion of billiard balls as an imaginary thinking process
Explanation
Productive activity and the simultaneous contemplation of it are two things which are incompatible with one another:
Examples
creating art
I wonder
Can we move these comments to another thread? Like maybe the one where we are already talking about this kind of stuff? That way we'll always know where to find what it was we were talking about instead of having to look all over!
p.s. I don't know how to move stuff!
Bony Question
You're talking about the skeleton of the thing, I hope?
Who participates
What the study course will end up being will depend on who participates. It will need good writing and to be successful we will likely need to find a good character illustrator.
To end up with something requires concrete work be done. If someone has ideas it would be helpful if they apply it to a section as an example.
Character Illustrator
Hi Tom,
What do you mean by a character illustrator?
A character illustrator
A character illustrator would just be someone who could illustrate characters. Even a cartoon illustrator. Images would add so much to a study course. It may be too much to ask to find an illustrator. That is why I have been experimenting with finding and creating images on a computer.
The Free Spirit and the 12 Curmudgeons
You can usually find in each section of POF in Part II a determinant that is compelling action contrasted with a description of the free spirit. This encounter occurs 12 times in a chapter. This could be illustrated as the free spirit meets the 12 curmudgeons representing traditionalism. Do we have any character illustrators around?
Discursive Thinking
Since I enjoy incorporating all kinds of different ideas into the simple exercise of concentrating on a pencil, I tried to find a way to use the discursive and then the understanding type of thinking on the pencil. I noticed several things about it. First of all, the discursive thinking is framed in words, while the other kind comes in images. I was able to learn something about the pencil that I hadn't known before (even after a whole year of looking at it every day) by visualizing how it was put together and realizing I had the sequence wrong. With the discursive thinking as I was doing it (maybe other people do it differently) this wouldn't have happened. Also, the discursive thinking is reversible only in blocks -- that is, in sentences or at least clauses, because you can't really reverse language word by word or syllable by syllable. But the visual thinking is quite reversible.
This exercise gives me the idea that discursive thinking is not as much alive as the other kind. It expresses what one already knows. While the other kind of thinking is more alive. Naturally in real life they work together and aren't so separate, one hopes! Or nothing much could be gained by words.
Wordless concentration is part of the object-concentration exercise as presented by various writers, though I don't remember if Steiner mentioned it specifically. Anyhow, I wonder if "understanding" thinking in itself is always wordless.
to Lori on DT
Dear Lori,
Thought (?!?!?) you'd find stuff with this..., by the way sorry for the head pain...
There is another Chakra above the Brow Chakra - the Crown Chakra. Tomberg provides a picture in some of his writing (an actual drawing) of two eyes, not side by side, but one above the other, with some real separation (farther apart in an upward direction than the eyes are in the face).
True thinking is kind of bi-polar (an above and below - the two eyes or the Brow Chakra and the Crown Chakra). The trick (as it were) is where is the attention. Usually the attention of our spirit in our consciousness is on trying to understand something, so we do strive to picture things (as you noticed) in a kind of wordless perceiving.
We could then recognize (as Kuhlewind suggests) that the living thought falls into consciousness and dies there. So the discursive thinking is something dead (a leaf fallen from a tree), but the picture understanding gesture is more alive (this is where you go when you practice phenomenology - creating something out of the imagination).
Understanding is less conscious to a degree, having a kind of "feeling" quality. Don't we often say in ordinary language something like "I feel this might be true", and in that moment we are slightly conscious of this quality - this feeling aspect of striving for understanding ("reach out with your feelings, Luke" says Obiwan).
Now we often exercise discursive thinking when we ruminate on something, when we worry it. This is very useful, this talking to ourselves. So it is important not to downplay discursive thinking, or think it isn't important. What often happens is that memory is playing a role here. We have some concepts or pictures in memory (anthroposophists have great memory storage devoted to "Steiner said", and these too come into discursive thinking.
So what about the Crown Chakra to introspective observation?
All of this seems to take place in the head (from the Throat to the Crown). If discursive thinking is most conscious, and the understanding less conscious, then what happens in the Crown might be even less conscious. If we strive to drive the attention there (to the Crown) this is very difficult (except in meditation, when we have no distractions at all).
Do these three Chakras operate together in order for us to think? Is there any reason, in fact, to move the attention anywhere but where it usually wants to "sit" when we "think"? If the will-in-thinking is to understand, then perhaps we are in the middle between the Throat and the Crown in the Brow Chakra. MIddle is always a good place to be, isn't it?
So when we introspect, where do we want to be? We want to be trying to "understand" ourselves, in particular the phenomena of the soul. However, any given moment is only a snapshot of something that is in constant movement. The soul and the spirit in the soul are never at rest. We can in looking backward over the day imagine our inwardness in movement. But to do that we have to have the snapshots in the first place, which we have added to memory by acts of introspection.
The sequence then of questions in PoF, if we are reading the text and looking inwardly at the same time, will give us matters on which to focus. The book guides our introspection toward very specific inner percepts, which we seek to understand. Further, as these percepts are not static, any time we can review our inner activity, and join remembered introspective snapshots to each other, this will give to the understanding its nourshment. We learn to read the book of the own soul.
We can also "experiment". Just like I had you count, you can intentionally form pictures. Make up your own experiments! Kuhlewind directed me years ago at a very odd one, but which gave birth over time to a great deal. He suggest we contemplate how all the parts of speech feel to our thinking-understanding. Are nouns "felt" to be the same as articles. Are verbs and adverbs different or the same. This can wake us up to certain qualities that individual concepts can have that appear both in discursive thinking as they do in a different form to our understanding. So we have the word or term "chair". Then we have specific mental images in memory of individual chairs we have experienced. Then we have the concept of chair, which can be so generalized that we recognize not memory chairs but the function which once might have been called chairness (a place to sit, such as a tree stump or a turned over large tub).
When we have the time, we can do all kinds of "experiments" with out consciousness according to our own interest. Plus, we can do this riding in a car (not driving of course) etc. Again, there seems to be a "purpose" connected to Steiner's organization of PoF that can be trusted. For example, can we want what we want? One can think about this in concepts, or we can make introspective observations of ourselves in moments of desire. Does the desire drive the thinking or does the will-in-thinking drive the desire? The introspective percepts will be far more instructive than just playing with perceptless concepts about the question of whether "can we want what we want".
Sorry if I got carried away, but the thoughts were there and they sometimes just like to be recorded, without a lot of second guessing.
joel
Crown Thinking
Dear Joel
Thanks for this. One interesting thing about it is that, as part of the First Exercise, one is directed to imagine a kind of energy in the front of the head and move it back over the top of the head and down toward the neck. The energy of clear thinking. Waking up the thinking on top of the head?
I imagine that your original journal entry here would make a good introduction to the chapter, because not only does it start us right out observing our thinking (so that we gain confidence that we actually can do this) but also at the end it brings us back to "the mystery of chapter one" with a light touch.
I think it would be quite wrong to underestimate the basic incompetence that people believe they have in doing introspection, in observing their own thinking, and in thinking "pure concepts". I know this from my own experience, and I'm quite a thoughtful and inward person. Yet I've always felt that "pure concepts" were some kind of esoteric thing that I'd never be able to manage, because, in truth, I don't know what they are. So they seem far out of reach. If you could show people that they really are capable of doing these things, then they would have some starting point right there, instead of far away over the horizon. You would be like the Wizard of Oz when he showed the scarecrow, lion and tin man that they already had what they were looking for!
Getting down to it
This is very interesting, Joel. I would like to ask about something that I have learned that extends beyond what you have written so far. Please feel free to move this to another Journal if I am interrupting with a distraction.
Where to place the focal point when thinking? I place it below the 3 positions you have been describing, Joel, in the centre close to the heart. Starting from being a non-visual thinker, more of a touch and feel thinker, this is where I find the wisdom of silence that pervades all other chatter of thinking. It is where all the answers to all the questions take a walk.
Given that there may be considerable scope for misperception, do you have any experiences that would place this activity in context with what you have written above?
to John Ralph on where to put the focal point (the attention)
Dear John Ralph,
This leaps ahead a bit, but is worth it I believe. My experience is as follows.
The spiritual activity we are trying to understand involves the will-in-thinking. The focal point (the term you use) I would call the attention. Where is the attention when we think? I was writing above about where we "find" the attention when we think in our ordinary consciousness. We are trying to "understand", and in a semi-conscious way we think from the head (between the brows). The living thought itself (as an independent entity) enters through the crown chakra, and falls through the understanding coming to rest in the larynx or throat chakra (the dead wording of discursive thinking).
The understanding being in the middle is an instinctive gesture of the person trying to think freely today. This fall of the "thought" is not unlike the "fall of man", and gives to the thought characteristics which lend it capable of being used by the threefold double-complex and thereby become luciferic and/or ahrimanic. The modern instinctive thought is fallen (materialized)
If we are on a path to becoming more conscious of these inner processes (and less instinctive), then we need to come awake not only to the attention (the focal point) but more crucially to the intention. Both are aspects of the will-in-thinking, which it is the purpose of PoF (as Anthroposophy) to unfold. At the end of the experiences of the soul, as guided by PoF, we become fully conscious of the role of the attention and the intention, as these influence thought, but more particularly as these influence the mood of soul (the feeling life).
When the feeling life remains instinctive (sub or semi-conscious), these uncultivated moods of soul will form the inward fall of the thought in certain directions according to the qualitative nature of the mood of soul. Recall what Steiner wrote about idealized feelings being a core work.
Discursive thinking can be observed, and in it will appear patterns when we reflect upon it (remember what Tom shared above that we can only reflect on previous thinking, never in the moment thinking). Some of these patterns in discursive thinking will reveal emotional states. To actually "control thoughts" we need inner equilibrium (six basic exercises). If feelings are unmastered, there is no (or little) control of thoughts.
The key to this, as revealed by PoF, is the intention. We start to work on this right in the beginning when he points out that to want what we want, we have to place in front of the want a freely chosen moral (or ideal) impulse. This is our intention. The more our intention is to the good (ethical individualism as applied to processes in the soul life itself), then feelings will be warmed and thoughts will be illuminated.
It is the fire of will in the intention (the idealized feeling) that creates in the soul warmth of heart. The intention and attention then are focused on our will to do the good inwardly, and as a consequence the heart warmth (etherealized blood) rises in the soul toward the region of the head, so that the thought falling inward from the spiritual is met by an intended mood of soul, containing moral qualities of renunciation and love. The upper three chakras then become a heart warmed (etherealized) chalice into which the thought (it thinks in me) comes in such a way that by the time it reaches the understanding we "know" it to be true and good. The soul has become a temple and the holy spirit (the wind) expresses ITself in the soul out of ITs own will because of our renunciation and love (selflessness).
My experience is that to focus the attention spacially on the heart may lead to insight, but this only opens part of the lotus flowers there (atavistic insight). Rather it is the will that has to be awakened (the attention AND the intention), and even this has to spend a lot of time coming to intimate self knowledge (understanding), for the shadow will require a great deal of us before we are ready to receive the wind (the holy spirit). Remember, the wind comes by ITs own will, not by ours. We make the temple of the soul ready, and because we are thinking selflessly and modestly (chaste and without ambition), the wind blows into the soul not for us, but for the other - the Thou - to whom we seek to do the good. We will gain a certain amount of insight (understanding) as we explore the soul, but the true living thinking is not for ourselves, but for others.
joel
The wind blows for you
This is most helpful Joel - thank you.
It is true that the wind comes for the other. When I try to think something into being for myself alone, it never quite works. When others are involved, then the breezes blow.