Painting by August Macke
1. Look at a plant, animal, or any object, such as the painting by Macke above. Perceive the external colors and forms clearly. Then set aside the perceptual content and focus on the idea or concept in your mind's eye. Note how you form the concept and how you are drawing on the canvas of your inner imagination. Stop drawing and focus on the forces that can draw. Orient your thinking activity toward the pure content, understanding, and meaning of the content, which comes from outside all of your powers. (Thank you to Rudolf Steiner and Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon)
Now:
Awaken self-conscious knowledge of what an idea actually is, and simultaneously create and experience a directly intuited or seen idea of the essence of self-conscious knowledge as a whole. Go from one to the other in a pulsing self-conscious thinking that is directly viewed, known, and understood.
Guiding thoughts - What do all ideas have in common? What is the idea of knowledge as a whole? See the idea of what knowledge is as a whole, while seeing the ground and beginning of your thinking activity. For more direction, follow Rudolf Steiner's Truth and Science.
2. Prepare with an external plant, animal, or object as in #1. Awaken intuition or what is the same: directly view the content of your thinking with insight into its pure meaning (without images). Now intuit or directly view the essence of your willed thinking in this moment. Simultaneously note the content of the idea that you are producing and understanding. Simultaneously also note the willed activity of your own act.
Exactly what is my present thinking doing and where is it happening? Who is thinking? What am I understanding now?
Conceive of many of the possible moves and faculties of the willful thinking activity as it moves in the realm of pure knowledge (understanding, essences, universals, ideas).
Note that you create the moves from the thinking ground of the power of your own essence. You perceive this inwardly (without your senses), in your self-conscious I. This is filled with love and truth.
Tip: Do this with a partner and follow and reflect their thinking in a neutral manner. (Thank you to Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon)
3. Start with the same preparation as in #1. Separate off the sense-perceptible content. Set aside the painting on your imagination canvas. Now:
View the essence of the act of intuition from inside the essence of what is intuited.
The essence of the plant, animal, or thing intuits the act and nature of intuition (directly seeing the content of self-conscious meaning without representational images) from the outside. But you can be both inside the act of intuition and inside the essence of the plant, etc. Make this consciousness a rhythmic pulse.
4. Many people have trouble understanding what the philosophical concept of intellectual intuition means. Steiner describes it very clearly in the Philosophy of Freedom: What perception is to colors and sound, intuition is to the content of thinking. In other words you use the powers of the senses to grasp the sense perceptible, like weight, smoothness, and the timbre of sounds, and lightness or darkness of hues. You use another organ to grasp the content and the present status of the meaning of your thinking. Memory images arise through percepts, but thoughts are not copies of externally existing objects. Rather the pure percept flow joins with a concept that you create. You then bring this together (instantly and usually unconsciously) in an personal idea or representation. However, the thinking eye-ball is the organ of intellectual intuition or seeing your ideas. But this is an understanding-reason-knowledge unfolding and awakening, not an 'after-image.' Eventually the student understands that this does not happen in the head, but beyond the physical organism, but it is reflected into the brain and nervous system, just as a real being is reflected into a mirror.
The instant intuitive moment of grasping the meaning and content of a situation, in your thinking organ is like this: a blast of spiritual light or knowledge air, which brings the whole of the content instantly into your individual consciousness. It can then be organized into words through discourse, memory image and syntax. The truth of reality comes like a lightning strike in the shortest moment and can be so large in content that it can instantly be forgotten, if it is not brought down into consciousness. This bringing into my consciousness is a paralysis, freezing, and dying of the forces of the world from which the thinking content is coming.
