what is the source of thinking?

Submitted by John Ralph on Thu, 06/25/2009 - 8:33am.



Midsummer Study Group Reporting from Aberdeen
We studied Chapter 5: 19-22. It was very helpful to have the German original text available and 2 participants with German as their first language. We discovered that the inner gestures within the text have a rhythmical repetition within the paragraphs we have looked at so far. As I do not have the German text to hand I cannot recapitulate the example here.

In one sentence we found a confusion in the inner gesture transleted from the German; "But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us from the universal world existence." (http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/3579) The word "projects" was originally a word that describes the way mountains reach up into the sky. Perhaps someone can post that German word for me as this comment is probably gobbledegook without the fact behind it.

A question we took away with us: what is the source of thinking?

‹ Who is lost in their World of Mental Pictures; Professor Gates or the Police Officer? What we direct our thoughts to in the world ›

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role of outlooks in directing thinking

Submitted by Tom Last on Thu, 06/25/2009 - 8:59am.

what is the source of thinking?

Chapter 1 ends with the question it says it will address next; what is the origin of thinking? Then chapter 2 goes into a discussion of various world-outlooks such as materialism, spiritism, and idealism. These outlooks involve directing thinking into a certain realm of existence, such as the material world, the spiritual world, or the world of ideas. So the particulat realm that we direct our thinking into relates to the source of our thinking. Chapter 2 warns of the one-sidedness that results from becoming fixed on one particular realm to try and answer all questions that come up such as trying to explain everything from the view of spiritual theory.