Reaching the intuitive level of pure conceptual thinking or pure thinking is an essential part of Rudolf Steiner's concept of freedom. Freedom originates in pure thinking. How does pure thinking compare to everyday thinking? We need to explore this from many sides. One simple way is to look are the following examples. Steiner refers to Johannes Volkelt's description of everyday unthinking experience in Truth And Science and this is followed below by an example of pure thinking found in the Philosophy Of Freedom Observation Exercises. The examples below have been shortened. You can see right away that thinking requires more attention while non-thinking is more a passive flow of thought-chains.

EVERYDAY NON-THINKING EXAMPLE
Suddenly there appears the perceptual picture of the door opening and of the mailman entering. The mailman disappears from my consciousness, and the mental pictures that now arise have as their content the sequence: picking up scissors, opening the letter, criticism of illegible writing, visible images of the most diverse written figures, diverse imaginings and thoughts connected with them, and then there arises a mental picture with the content that a difficulty believed to have been resolved in the course of today's work was not resolved; entering at the same time are the mental pictures: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, value of virtue, absolute chance, incomprehensibility, etc.; these all join together with each other in the most varied and complicated way; and so it continues.

PURE THINKING EXAMPLE
The parts of a whole can be in a spatial or temporal relationship to each other, like pieces of a cake or the hours in a day. In both cases, the whole is the unity of the parts, which is not the same as the sum of the parts: the unity takes into account the specific composition, the specific spatial or temporal arrangement of the parts into a whole. Every part must be in its proper place - in space and in time.