MAIN KEY to the WHOLE BOOK -
From Chapter 5 - addition to the revised edition of the Philosophy of Freedom (Spiritual Activity), 1918 -
"The Intuitive insight (Anschauung) [into the construction of the web of representations] I have honed in on here can be regarded as one to which man is led at first, as if by natural instinct, the moment he begins to reflect about his relation to the world. He then finds himself caught in a thought formation which dissolves and dissipates at the same time that he is constructing it in images. This thought formation is such that a purely theoretical refutation of it does not suffice. One has to live through it and experience it in order to have an insight (Einsicht) and a realization of just how far it leads one astray, and then to find the way out."
The MATRIX
In other words, each person must directly see, with the eyes of the mind, how the webs of representations, mental images, or subjective signs and strings of words in their 'heads' enclose and create a darkened closet around the human personality. One can learn to see how the plane or network or canvas on which the representations or mental images (what we normally call 'subjective thinking' that we experience 'inside the head' or just in front of the head) are projected operates. A new painting on this canvas will not allow you to see the intuitive thinking that operates beyond the canvas. This new painting or string of words grafted onto this network or 'Gedankengestaltung' (the whole picture of what has been thought), no matter how clever, will never get you to experience the I-AM-thinker who exists beyond this plane of associations, subjective memories, and projected assumptions about how the physical world operates. Only another kind of move can get you off of this 'game board.' That is intuiting a concept, or thinking before subject and object. Or if you can start to see the 'hands' that draw on the canvas, this can lead you back to the real I-AM. Or if you can consciously erase the canvas and wait in the nothing, after you have created the web and its contents, this can also lead you beyond it.
Chapter 4 - The World as Perception
Key 1 - Find your way to the place where your thinking sees the construction and essence of a concept without image. Swim with the will in your thinking into the pure meaning elements while feeling the wound of subjectivity and moral reversal in the heart.
Quote - "What a concept is cannot be stated in words. Words can do no more than draw your attention to the fact that you have concepts...Concepts combine to form a totality built up according to inherent laws...All concepts that I form of lions, merge into the general concept 'lion'...Concepts and Ideas already presuppose thinking. Therefore, what I have said about the nature of thinking, that it exists through itself, that is is determined by nothing but itself, cannot simply be carried over and applied to concepts." (1st pgh ch 4)
How to use it? Use the organ of your mind to look into the place where you think fully saturated, meaning-filled concepts. Find the thinking that creates them. If you can watch how your I-AM (not inside not outside, not subject, not object) creates a concept, you are getting close to cutting the Gordian knot and demonstrating to yourself your own Freedom! Experience the moment by moment moves of the will in thinking on the concept plane as a whole. Use Deleuze's idea of difference differentiating itself or becoming a different meaning, a different will gesture at each moment to find the place of intuition acting in pure thinking.
Key 2 - Wake yourself up to the fact, and find the reality of this: THINKING is not merely a SUBJECTIVE activity. This is the hardest reality to accept, because it goes against all of the webs of everyday consciousness.
Quote - "It is only with the help of thinking that we can define ourselves as subject and contrast ourselves with objects. For this reason, thinking MUST NEVER be understood as a merely subjective activity. Thinking is BEYOND subject and object. It forms these two concepts, just as it forms all others...I ought NEVER to say that my individual subject thinks; in fact, my subject exists by the very grace of thinking. Thinking, therefore, is an element that takes me beyond my personality and unites me with the objects."
Thinking along with other people really helps you along in this search for living thinking. If you can follow another person's thinking, it can help you see that the ocean of thinking is something out there, in which we are all swimming together. It is ultimately the ocean of spirit in which we live at every moment.
Key 3 - Take on the normal viewpoint that everything I can know is just a representation or a copy or a pale reflection of a 'real world' that exists out there. How can I ever know this 'real world' if I can only know it through my personal eyes, my own brain and its bio-chemical-electrical patterns?
Here is the argument Steiner provides which may be just strong enough to break through the fishbowl in which we live subjectively: If everything is a representation, then all knowledge of my 'eye' and 'my body' and 'my brain' is also a representation. A representation of an eye could never grasp or create the representation of the sun, only a real eye could do that. In another twist, consider this: the perception of a brain tells us nothing in itself, it is only the idea that I create about these groups of perceptions that allow me to take up the intellectual standpoint that the brain is the origin of thinking! Let that sink in - Spiritual living thinking falls asleep when it creates a representation that the place and the surface upon which it is reflected subjectively (i.e. our inner experience of thinking inside the head, or the outer scientific investigation of the percepts of a brain), is the real origin of thinking. This is the work of the ahrimanic double that works in our etheric body.
Quote - "For only my real eye and my real hand could have the representations 'sun' and 'earth' as their modifications; my representations 'eye' and 'hand' cannot have them. But critical idealism [people like Schopenhauer, Von Hartman, and Kant - although sometimes their positions are called by other names, like transcendental idealism or realism] can speak of representations only...They are insensible to the distinct reality...of what happens to the perception while perceiving takes place and what must be inherent in it BEFORE it is perceived." (End of Ch. 4)
Video Discussing and Demonstrating This
CHAPTER 5 - The Activity of Knowing the World -
Key 1 - Experiencing the thinking I AM is like waking from a dream. This does not mean your personal experience of mental images in your head.
Key 2 - Experience the difference between a mental image, a word, a subjective memory AND pure perception and sensation moment to moment. A representation is a subjective perception, pure perception is the flow of objective perception.
Key 3 - Thinking is not an ideal reflection of a real physical world 'out there.' It is a creative process of creating conceptual meaning gestures out of weaving together supersensibly with the pure essences of beings in their inner life, soul, and spirit. Plants needs soil to grow. Spirits needs humans in which to grow concepts. Humans are the soil, the light, and the water that the spiritual, soul, and etheric worlds need to grow concepts, and eventually spiritualized love.
Key 4 - The essence of a thing is never given in one moment of time; what is perceived is only one slice; only something that is timeless can grasp the conceptual and living wholeness that produces the slices of percepts in time. Thinking can grasp and create out of the whole spiritual essence of the real beings.
Key 5 - My neighbor and I grasp the same concept of a triangle, but we do it in our individual way.
Key 6 - One can hold the standpoint of naive realism only in regard to intuitive thinking. IF I experience the creation of a concept, it is right there.
via GIPHY
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