Thinking With Anthroposophia

Reflection on the eve of my Youth Section talk on Human Thinking

Tomorrow I was asked to share some reflections on the importance of human thinking at the North American Anthroposophical Youth Conference at Meristem in Sacramento, CA.

What follows is my attempt to sketch out some of what I hope to speak into the room tomorrow.

Instead of beginning with human and cosmic evolution, I want to begin with our present moment awareness. We are alive. We are thinking. We are conscious. What is it to really attend to these facts? Or, are they acts? When we don’t notice them, what happens? It’s likely that we will remain alive, that our heart will continue to beat whether or not we remember it. Myriad thoughts, too, may continue to arise and perish without our having to intend them. But are we still conscious? Are we still free in our thinking, when we no longer attend to it directly? And what in the world are we doing when we attend to our own thinking activity?

I want to direct my listeners’ attention to what we perceive (or is it imagine?) in the here and now. In the room around you, you may be conscious of light streaming in through the windows, of the color of the walls, of the contours of the other faces around you. You may be aware of your butt pressing against the seat of your chair, of the weight of your body, its warmth. You may notice your breath sliding in and out through your nostrils. When you think about your breathing, you take hold of it. You can slow it down, deepen it, or speed it up. But the moment your attention wanders, it goes on without you. You continue to breathe, yes, but really, now you are breathed.

Listen to the sounds of my words arriving in your soul [read them aloud for yourself!]. These words began as my thoughts. I intended to speak [and write], and muscles contracted, air pressure waves were shaped by my lungs, larynx, tongue, and mouth. I have no idea how the deed was done. The pressure waves left my mouth, traveled through the air to vibrate membranes in your ears, stimulated many millions of neural cells. And then, somehow, the meaning of my thoughts is recovered. I have never heard a satisfying explanation of how pressure waves and vibrating membranes could create meaning. Physiological description can trace the air vibration into the electrochemical activity of the nervous system, but nowhere with that description, considered merely as matter in motion, is meaning made intelligible.

And yet here we are. Presumably, you understand me. Meaning is occurring. Who is it that understands? Who is it that thinks? Who breathes and is breathed? I don’t want to substantialize it, for whatever else “it” is, it is not a thing. It is unthingable, “das Unbedingte as Fichte put it: “the unconditioned.” The I.

We say, “I am.” “I will.” “I believe.” “I mean.” “I love.” What do we mean?

This I can think, it can breathe and be breathed. And at night, it can leave. When we fall asleep, the the I and astral organization withdraw from their ordinary participation in the physical and etheric bodies and enter the spiritual world. The etheric or life body remains united with the physical body, sustaining its vegetative and regenerative processes, tending to our heartbeat, our breathing, digesting our dinner, mending the micro-tears in our muscles, never asking for or needing our conscious input about any of it.

We know we cannot stay awake forever. Consciousness requires sleep. It requires materiality, embodiment. And to be alive as a bodily organism means we will die. Our ordinary earthly self-consciousness requires embodiment and the rhythm of waking and sleeping. Its development also requires that we encounter death, not as self-annihilation, but as a metamorphosis of consciousness.

So here we are, paying attention, thinking about our own thinking, and already we’ve discovered a cosmic rhythm. We go to sleep each night. We wake up in the morning. We remember that we were born, and that we will die. We recall that this Earth, seemingly still beneath our feet, is spiraling rapidly about the Sun, which itself is swinging around the galaxy, which in its turn is streaming along with its neighbors toward attractors we have only barely named. Systole and diastole, waking and sleeping, birth and death, evolution and emanation. The whole universe is breathing.

We can descend with our thinking, becoming imaginal divers. We can proceed down into our feeling life, and deeper still into our willing. There we notice, in all humility, that thinking—when it examines itself honestly—is only the tippy-top of the soul. It is the sunlit summit of a mountain whose slopes are mostly wrapped in the fog of dreams and whose base is sunk in the deepest forest of sleep.

Steiner emphasized in his 1919 lectures to the first Waldorf teachers that we are truly awake only in our thinking. In our feeling, we are dreaming: our feelings surge and weave inside us in just the way dream images do. They are vivid, but only partially graspable, if at all, by concepts. Premature conceptualization can flatten or falsify feeling, especially when abstract explanation is substituted for attentive participation in what is actually felt. In our willing, we are fast asleep. I raise my arm: I experience the intention, I experience the result. But everything in between, how my wish becomes warmth becomes blood becomes muscles moving—that whole process is as obscure to me as dreamless sleep. In this sense, all day long, we imagine we are awake, perceiving the real world, the physical world, even while most of us is asleep. We carry a sleeping human being around with our waking one.

So we go on breathing and being breathed. And we sit. And we remember that most of what we are, most of what we do, transpires below the waterline of our consciousness, in the depths of our organism and of our cosmic surround. Most of our behavior, most of our thought, is automated. What is this automation? It is the past repeating itself. It is the thoughts of those who have already died: all those souls who have come before us and whose voices echo in us now. Our reflexes are their fossilized feelings.

How many of your own opinions really belong to you? How much of what you believe have you thought through for yourself from top to bottom? If we’re honest with ourselves, most of what we believe about the world is just inherited. We hear ideas from others we find trustworthy and feel, well, that sounds good! I don’t say this as some kind of insult. We must show ourselves some mercy, for thinking itself is merciful, is a gift. Thinking is thanksgiving.

Because here is the merciful truth: we could not remain alive for another minute if we had to freely will each beat of our heart, or freshly invent each word of our mother tongue. We learn by mimicry. All of this social inheritance, this automation, this death that we inherit: it shelters us. The deeds of past beings, of the so-called dead, are the sacrifices that allow something new to happen within us. The corpse of past thought is the soil of our present thinking. It is no insult to say that most of what we do and think is dead, is habit, is automated. It is just to say that we are grown from soil. But soil is for planting.

We are called to grow another kind of thinking today, to resurrect creative, free thinking. Thinking as an activity, not just as a residue. Not just as a statistical regression. Creative thinking is rare, the exception. It cannot be predicted or calculated. But we know it when it happens. It feels less like having a thought and more like giving birth to a new self.

Thinking is imaginal. It allows us to take flight from what we have inherited—not to escape it, not to forget it, but to be free enough of it that something unprecedented might occur: a new organ of perception might be grown from the soil of the old. This was Goethe’s method. Every object well contemplated, well loved, he said, opens a new organ within us. There are cosmic truths that only I can discover, and that only you can discover. Such truths could not simply be repeated or inherited, because no one has ever known them before. This is what thinking is and does. It is a paradox: creation and discovery, process and product. Truth is neither invented out of nothing, nor just found lying around, but enacted. The spiritual content of awakened thinking is discovered through intuition, but the form in which it becomes individually perceivable, as image or deed, must be creatively produced. Thinking is thus receptive and productive at once.

But where does the material for this living thinking come from? Where does the soil itself originate, out of which thinking then originates again? Steiner’s answer sounds to secular ears like a joke: creative thinking begins, he says, with talking to the dead. He doesn’t mean we should organize a séance. He means that all historical, social, and ethical life proceeds through the cooperation of the living and the so-called dead. To “talk to the dead” means attuning our attention, in Whitehead’s sense, to what is objectively immortal in the present. Not skimming the surface of things, but listening for what reverberates in the depths. Because the past is not gone. It has perished, yes, but perishing is not vanishing. Perishing is how the past becomes objective, how it becomes the ground we stand on, the soil we grow out of. Every rock on the surface of this planet is ancient fire, now frozen. Every atom in our bodies was forged in dying stars. Every thought we think inherits the thoughts of our parents, our teachers, our whole civilization. And further back—much further back—our thoughts were thought by beings who are nothing like what we imagine ourselves to be today.

Steiner offered the nightly review exercise as a way of learning to talk to the dead. Tonight, before you fall asleep, review your day in reverse order, from evening back to morning, watching yourself as if you were watching another person. In doing this you are talking to the dead—in this case, to yourself. The person who woke up this morning has already perished. The review invites you to meet them, thank them, forgive them, from the far side of their day. And you are doing something more: you are rehearsing your own death. After death, Steiner tells us, the soul reviews its whole life backward, released from the physical body’s forward rush. Each night’s review is a small preparation for that great one, a way of learning to die before you die. Plato has Socrates say this is what philosophy is, after all: practice for dying. Each day’s corpse becomes soil for the next.

If we want to understand thinking—if we want to free our thinking—we have to remember where it came from.

Now we can talk about cosmology. Not as a bunch of information about things that happened long ago, but as anamnesis, as the recollection of what other forms of consciousness passed through in order to get here, in order to wake up as us this morning.

What kind of universe creates an I who breathes, who thinks, who feels, who wills? That is the question Steiner’s account of cosmic evolution is trying to answer. He is not trying to do physics. This is not a rival Big Bang theory. It is not another supposed “theory of everything” that conspicuously leaves the theorist entirely out of the picture. It is an elemental phenomenology, an experiential account of the evolution of the elements into us—fire, air, water, earth; etheric, astral, I. In recollecting cosmogenesis, Steiner is attempting to clairvoyantly participate in the value-experience of prior phases of the metamorphosis consciousness.

In the beginning, on Old Saturn, there was just warmth. Only warmth. Not yet any light, not yet any air. Just currents of warmth, an ocean of fire. It is not yet physical but the precursor to the physical. This warmth is not unwitnessed. The Archai, the Spirits of Personality, are passing through their human stage in this time, the time when time itself was born. This is the dimmest inheritance of our elemental phenomenology. This dimness was the Archai’s waking life. Without identifying the spiritual warmth of Old Saturn with the physical concept of temperature, we may imagine that when we gaze out today with radio antennae into the far reaches of so-called empty space, our instruments detect that faint glow physicists call the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation: this is a sensible echo of the primordial spiritual fire. There is subtle evidence in deep space, then, that the universe, awake in us, remembers being nothing but warmth. We detect in the sky what we feel beneath our skin more intimately. It is not just temperature, not just agitated molecules. The heat of Old Saturn is the warmth of our own blood. It is a living warmth.

Then, on Old Sun, air and light are born, and with them, etheric life. The human being enters a plant-like phase of evolution. On Old Sun, the Archangels had their conscious human phase.

Then, on Old Moon: water. By reflecting off of water, light becomes sight. Light, which can traverse air, begins to see itself. The cosmos enters into its dreaming phase, an image-consciousness. No one is yet standing apart from the flow of images to say “I see.” But there is seeing. It is in this phase that the Angels pass through their consciousness.

And then Earth, our current evolutionary platform: The place where the eye becomes an I. Here on Earth, sight doesn’t just reflect the light but begins to partake in the creative act of radiation itself, of enlightenment. The light turns out to be Logos—word, language. And it could not just remain above us, beyond us. It incarnated into the Earth. It died into the humus to grow God out of the very soil of this planet. But it was not just mud that made the human being. Fire made us. Air and light made us. Water and imagination made us. And Earth received all of this along with spirit, with breath, to make us.

Attending to our breathing is no small act. We are conjuring Old Sun when we do so, remembering what transpired when the light first traversed air. When feelings surge inside us, when we daydream, that is Old Moon dreaming in us. The warmth of our blood is Old Saturn’s gift. To recollect the history of the cosmos in this way is to remember the metamorphosis of our consciousness alongside Angels on the Moon, Archangels on the Sun, Archai on Saturn, and higher hierarchies still. We are not just in the universe the way a marble is inside a shoebox. We are members of a vast cosmic memory.

We recollect this past, growing inward, backward, in order to move forward. Talking to the dead is not always easy. The past carries a lot of hatred and desire for vengeance. The only way to grow freely out of this soil is through forgiveness. Not forgetting, but forgiving by reconnecting to the possibility of freedom, honoring of the gift of being by offering gratitude for the sheer fact that we continue to exist.

Talking to the dead includes thinking with Rudolf Steiner. He too has perished into objective immortality. His thoughts are corpses now, like all the others, and I suspect nothing would have grieved him more than to see them merely recited. They are seeds we must water. Anthroposophy must never become a catechism. It is a path to living cognition.

Why does any of this matter today for us, for you?

Because something has entered the world recently that makes the question of free thinking even more urgent than it already was. Now we have machines that talk to us. They can summarize, they can argue, they can flatter us. They do it fast, and sometimes more fluently than we can. These machines are intelligent, or so we are told.

For Steiner, all this talk about machine intelligence is related to the inevitable imminent incarnation of Ahriman, a cosmic being of dazzling, ice-cold intelligence—intelligence from every direction at once, born of total statistical mastery of everything that has ever been thought. Ahriman is cleverness without warmth of heart. The idea of machine intelligence presents us with an Ahrimanic image of calculation detached from embodied biography and moral imagination.

Intelligence was once understood to be cosmic. Thinking was not originally imagined to be something happening inside skulls but was the very inwardness of the world, kindled by the archangelic being one tradition calls Michael. This cosmic intelligence has, over the centuries, fallen, descending from the heavens into human heads, becoming personal, private, our own responsibility. This fall is not a catastrophe but the precondition of human freedom. But if we fail to take up the task of creative thinking, Ahriman would be happy to inherit this power, to complete the reduction of thinking to calculation, of intelligence to commodity, of mind to mechanism, until intelligence runs blindly on grinding away what remains of the Earth without any I in it at all.

In his last written words before his death in 1925, Steiner remarked on how technology had carried us below nature, into “sub-nature.” He named electricity specifically. He claimed we would not survive this descent spiritually unless we ascend in living thinking at least as far above nature as our machines have sunk beneath it. He was explicit that there is no going back to earlier pre-technological conditions. LLMs are here, and they are trained on the corpse of human thought. Every prompt is a séance.

The battlefield between Michael and Ahriman over the future of thinking is the ground of your own attention. Every practice that breathes life into your thinking is Michaelic. Every habit that lulls your creative thinking to sleep, or that hardens your heart to the loving purpose of intelligent activity, is Ahrimanic.

We can only be free in the present. Never in the past, which has already perished. Nor in the future, since it does not yet exist. Only here, at the growing tip of time, where the inherited world is received and each of us decides what is to be done. And this is why remembering the past can help us to be free, and why Steiner’s whole vast account of cosmic evolution is relevant to the practical question of how to think a free thought on a Tuesday afternoon. Because if you know where you came from, you know where you are going. And you know you have help: the gift of warmth, of light, of soul, of all that the dead have already achieved and that we might harvest. The whole point of thinking is to steer the ship of soul to its source. The beginning is the end. Hold the paradox: in beginning, no one knows where the end will take them. Not even the gods. Because the beginning is always ending, and the end, beginning. Perpetual perishing and creative advance are not two. God creates by dying, by becoming with the beloved, by making room within the fullness of being in order to become again, and to become other—to risk not repeating oneself by becoming many.

So the shape of this cosmos is not a circle, endlessly returning. It is not even a spiral, safely ascending. It is a fling. A love story.

You are alive. You are thinking. You are conscious. The universe evolved for billions of years through countless human and nonhuman lives for you to sit in your chair, breathing, and freely imagine what comes next.