Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?

GA 57 — 11 February 1909, Berlin

The Practical Development of Thinking

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, which will be presented here in these lectures, naturally only in bits and pieces, is probably regarded by many people who do not know it or do not want to know it as a field for dreamers, fantasists, and those who, as it is so easily said, are not really involved in real, practical life. However, anyone who wants to learn superficially about the content and goal of Spiritual Science from this or that brochure or from a single lecture will easily come to such a conclusion, especially if they are equipped with the limited will to penetrate the real spiritual realms, which is so abundant today, or if they are equipped with all the prejudices and suggestions that arise so frequently in our contemporary culture against such a field of research. And if, as is not uncommon today, there is also ill will, whether conscious or unconscious, then the judgment is easily made: Oh, Spiritual Science deals with things that practical people, people who want to stand with both feet firmly on the ground, should not concern themselves with!

However, the Spiritual Science itself feels closely related to the most practical areas of life, and when practiced correctly, it attaches the utmost importance to ensuring that the surest guide through real practical life, thinking, also receives a completely practical education. For, first of all, Spiritual Science should not be something that is unworldly and distant from the world, floating somewhere in cloud cuckoo land and seeking to draw people away from ordinary everyday life. Rather, it should be something that can serve us at every moment of our lives in everything we think, do, and feel. And secondly, Spiritual Science is, in a certain sense, a preparation of our soul for those stages of knowledge through which human beings themselves penetrate into the higher worlds. It has often been emphasized that Spiritual Science is not only of value to people who already have open eyes to penetrate the spiritual world, but that common sense, unclouded reason, and judgment are able to understand what the spiritual researcher has to communicate from higher worlds, and that accepting these communications is of infinite value to human beings long before they themselves can penetrate into the spiritual realm. It can be said that Spiritual Science is a preparation for everyone to gradually develop the higher organs of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, through which the spiritual worlds become perceptible to us.

We have already spoken in part, and will speak further, about the various methods and tasks that human beings must undertake in order to ascend into the spiritual worlds. But there is always one unconditional prerequisite: Anyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual worlds, anyone who wants to apply the methods precisely specified by spiritual research in order to open their spiritual senses, should never, ever venture into the higher realms of life without standing on the ground of healthy, practically trained thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif for entering the spiritual worlds. And the best way to enter is through the methods of Spiritual Science, for those who do not disdain to train themselves strictly in thinking that is bound to reality and its laws. However, when one speaks of real practical thinking, one easily comes into conflict with what is called practice and also thinking practice in our world. To characterize this, one need only recall something that has already been hinted at here several times. Many in our world claim to be practical. But what is the practicality that so-called practical people talk about today? Somewhere, someone is apprenticed to a master. There he learns all the tasks and measures that have been carried out for decades, perhaps centuries, and that are strictly prescribed. He acquires all of this, and the less he thinks about it, the less he forms his own independent judgment, the more he follows well-trodden paths, the more practical the world finds him, especially those who are active in this field. Anything that deviates even in the slightest from what has been done for a long time is often called impractical. Maintaining such a practice is usually not bound by reason, but solely by force. Anyone who holds any position in life and has to carry out tasks in a way that seems right to them insists that everyone else working in this field must do exactly as they do. And if they have the power to do so, they push out anyone who wants to do things differently.

In many cases, life practice is based on such assumptions. This can also lead to the right thing, as in the case where a major advance was to be introduced: the first railroad was to be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. The opinion of an eminently practical body, the Bavarian Medical Association, was also to be heard on whether this railroad should be built at all. This opinion can still be read today. It stated that no railroad should be built because traveling on it would ruin people's nerves. And if railways were to be built, they would have to be fenced in on both sides with high wooden walls so that people passing by would not suffer concussions. This is the opinion of practitioners. Whether these practitioners would still be considered practitioners today is the question. Probably not.

Another example that can really show us whether progress comes from those who call themselves practitioners in life or from other people: You probably find it very practical that you no longer have to go to the post office with every letter and that the postage has to be determined according to the distance from a travel book. It was not until the 1840s that uniform letter postage was invented in England. But it was not invented by a practitioner of the postal service. When the matter was to be decided in parliament, one such practitioner said, first, that he did not believe that it would bring about the advantages that Hill had calculated, and second, that the post office building would then have to be enlarged. He could not imagine that the post office building would be designed to accommodate traffic and not, conversely, that traffic would be designed to accommodate the post office building. And when the first railway from Berlin to Potsdam was to be built, a practitioner, namely the one who had been running two stagecoaches to Potsdam for years, said: If people really wanted to throw their money out the window, then the railway could be built.

Because this practice of so-called practitioners is so impractical when it comes to the big things in life, one can come into conflict with these practitioners when talking about practical training of the mind. The unbiased observer can find examples in all areas of life that show what true practice in life is all about. I once encountered a very vivid example of what can prevent practical thinking. A friend from my student days came to me once, excited and with a red face. He said he had to go to the professor right away and tell him that he had made a great invention. He then came back and said that he could only speak to the expert in an hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device that used a very small amount of steam power to set a machine in motion, and this machine then performed an enormous amount of work continuously. My friend was amazed that he had been clever enough to make such an invention, which surpassed everything else and was so economical. I told him to reduce the whole thing to a simple idea. I said, “Imagine you are standing in a railroad car and you are trying to push hard against the walls inside the car to move it forward. If you succeed in moving the railroad car while standing in it and pushing, then your machine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”

It became clear to me at that time that a major obstacle to all practical thinking could be described with a technical term: you are a “car pusher from the inside!” That is roughly what applies to the thinking of very many people: they are “car pushers from the inside.” What does that mean? Nothing other than that one is capable of surveying a certain narrowly defined area and applying what one has learned in that area; but one is also forced to remain within that area and cannot see that everything changes significantly as soon as one steps out of the “cart.”

This is one of the principles that must be observed above all else in the practical training of thinking: that every person who is active in any field must try, quite independently of their own activity, to pull the strings of what borders on their field. Otherwise, it is impossible for them to achieve truly practical thinking. For it is a peculiarity associated with a certain inner inertia that human thinking likes to encapsulate itself and forget what is outside, even if it is tangible.

I recently mentioned in other contexts how one might prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once upon a time, there was the nebula. For some reason, it began to rotate, causing the individual planets of the solar system to gradually separate and acquire the motion they still have today. This is made very clear in a school experiment known as Plateau's experiment: a small ball of oil is allowed to float in a vessel of water. An equator is then cut out of a sheet of cardboard. This is placed under the oil droplet. Then a needle is stuck through it, turned — and small oil droplets separate in the equatorial region, like planets, and they move around the larger droplet. In terms of thinking, something very impractical has been done: one has forgotten oneself, which is sometimes a good thing; one has forgotten that one turned the object oneself. Of course, one must not do that, forget the most important thing about something. If one wants to explain an experiment, one must bring into play all the things that matter; that is the essential thing.

The first thing that must be present in those who want to experience a truly practical training of the mind is that they have faith and trust in the reality of thoughts. What does that mean? You cannot scoop water out of a glass that has no water in it. And you cannot take thoughts out of a world in which there are no thoughts. It is absurd to believe that the entire sum of our thoughts and mental images exists only within ourselves. When someone takes apart a watch and thinks about the laws according to which it is assembled, they must assume that the watchmaker first assembled the parts of the watch according to these laws. No one should believe that any thought can be found in a world that is not built, designed, and shaped according to thoughts. Everything we discover about nature and its events is nothing other than what must first have been placed in this nature and its events. There is no thought in our soul that has not first been out there in the world. Aristotle said more correctly than many moderns: What man ultimately finds in his thinking is first present in the world outside.

But if one has this confidence in the thoughts contained within the world, then one will very easily see that one must first educate oneself to think about the world with interest, to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking that distinguished Goethe: objective thinking, that thinking which separates itself as little as possible from things, which clings to things as much as possible. Heinroth, the psychologist, was able to use the beautiful saying in relation to Goethe that his thinking was objective, that his thoughts expressed nothing other than what was contained in things themselves, and that nothing other than the real creative thought was sought in things. And if one has this confidence, this belief in the reality of thoughts, it is easy to see how one can educate oneself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality, to a truly practical, healthy way of thinking that does not stray from things.

There are three things to consider if one really wants to undertake an education in the sense of practical thinking: First, one must and should develop an interest in the external reality that surrounds one, an interest in facts and objects. Interest in the environment is the magic word for the education of thought. Desire and love for what we do is the second. And satisfaction in what we contemplate is the third. Anyone who understands these three things: interest in the environment, pleasure and love in doing, and satisfaction in contemplation, will soon find that these are the main requirements for a practical education of the mind. However, interest in our environment depends in many ways on things that we will only discuss in the next lectures, when we talk about the invisible links in human nature and about temperaments.

The greatest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If one believes that only one can think and that things do not have thoughts in themselves, then one is actually hostile to the practice of thinking. Let us imagine that a person has formed some narrowly defined mental images about human beings, has formed a few stereotypical, schematic concepts about people. Now he encounters someone who has characteristics that roughly fit his template. Then they have made up their mind and do not believe that this person can tell them anything special. If we approach everything around us with the feeling that every fact can tell us something special, that we are not entitled to judge things other than the things themselves, then we will soon realize what fruits such an objective sense bears. The belief that things can tell us much more than we can say about them is another such magical ideal for the practice of thinking. Things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.

Imagine that a person could bring themselves to use the following two important educational tools for their practical training in thinking: He confronts himself with some fact, for example, that someone took a walk there or there today. That is what he experiences first. Now the person in question wants to educate himself through thinking. It is good if he says to himself: I have experienced this and that, now I want to think about the causes of yesterday, the day before yesterday, and so on, that led to today's event. I go back and try to form an idea of what might have been based on what is happening. Once I have chosen such an event and selected the cause for it according to my intellectual imagination, I can investigate whether the real cause corresponds to what I thought. In such a coincidence or non-coincidence, I have something very important. If my thoughts correspond to what I can experience as the cause, then that is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates where one was mistaken and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the correct course of events. If you do this over and over again, you will notice that after a shorter or longer period of time, you will no longer make mistakes, but that you can extract such a thought from a fact that corresponds to the objective course of events. — Or you can do the following: Take another event and try to construct in your mind what might follow from this event tomorrow or in a few hours. Now wait calmly to see if what you thought will happen. At first, you will find that what you thought is not true. But if you continue, you will see how your thinking becomes so attuned to the facts that it no longer forms arbitrary mental images, but that your thoughts will run as things run. This is the development of a sense of reality. If you also forbid yourself to form abstract concepts, you will see how you gradually grow together with things and how you gain a sure judgment.

There are people who are guided to such thinking by a certain sure instinct. This stems from the fact that they are born with a special aptitude for developing such thinking. Goethe was such a person. He was so intertwined with things that his thinking did not take place in his head at all, but inside things. Goethe, who had once been a lawyer, had sound judgment and a sure instinct for how to approach things. There was no long searching through documents and studying files when a case had to be taken on. That was not the case with Goethe. He was a practical man. And once all the ministerial files of the Weimar minister Goethe are published—I have seen large parts of them—then the world will see how Goethe was an eminently practical person, not an unworldly man. It is well known that he accompanied the Grand Duke to Apolda for the training of recruits. He observed everything that was going on—and in the process he wrote his “Iphigenia.” Compare that with all the things that a poet today must not be disturbed by while working. And yet Goethe was a much greater poet than all those who must not be disturbed today. Because of his eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, when he stepped to the window: We cannot go out today, because it will rain in three hours. He had studied the clouds, but had not formulated a crude theory. What developed in his mind was a reflection of what was developing in nature outside. This is called objective thinking. One acquires such objective thinking by doing exercises such as those just mentioned. This is, of course, connected with a certain selflessness, strange as that may sound. But there are also laws in the soul, and those who only think of themselves will not achieve much when they do such experiments. For example, if they look at a fact and immediately say, “Aha, didn't I tell you so!”, that is the surest obstacle to practical thinking. We could cite many examples to show how one can systematically take hold of the interesting attachment of thoughts to things, so that one learns to think in things.

The second is pleasure and love in everything we do. They are only truly present when we can do without success. Where success is all that matters, pleasure and love are not present in their full measure. Therefore, those who are only interested in success cannot develop the calmness in trying that is necessary for pleasure and love in doing to gradually inspire us. We learn more by trying our hand at everything possible, while renouncing all so-called success. I knew a person who had the habit of binding his own schoolbooks. It looked bad, but he learned a tremendous amount from it. If he had focused on success, he might have refrained from doing so. But it is precisely in doing that we develop the qualities and abilities that then enable us to become skilled in our work. We will never become skilled if we focus particularly on the success of our actions. If we are unable to tell ourselves that we love the failures in our actions just as much as our successes, we will never reach the second level, which is necessary if thinking is to be developed.

Thirdly, we must find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that seems so undemanding and is most often opposed today. How often do we hear people say: Why do our children need to learn this or that? They can't use it in practical life. — This principle of only considering what one can use is the most impractical principle of all. If a person wants to think practically about life, there must be areas where the mere activity of thinking gives them satisfaction. If a person, whatever they may be: mechanical engineer, painter, poet, philosopher, bricklayer, carpenter, shoemaker, tailor — if they cannot find time, even if only briefly, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually—for example, thinking about certain questions whose solution he is curious about or about contexts in life that have nothing to do with his profession—if he cannot find such an area, he can only remain on well-trodden paths. But if he finds something that he does purely out of inner interest, then he has something that has a great, powerful effect on him, something that influences the finer organization, the finer structure of his organism. The things that bind us to life, that make us slaves, never have a creative, formative effect; they wear down our abilities and rob us of our vitality. But the things we do purely for our own satisfaction create vitality, create new abilities, penetrate the finest organization of our being, and enhance our education and the finer structure of our organism. Not by working for utility, not by working for the outside world, but by working for our own satisfaction, we create something that takes us one step further in our development. When we then approach practice again with this finer organization, it has an effect on practice, and everyone can see that it is right.

Take a picture, for example Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and place a human being and a dog in front of it. The picture will make a completely different impression on the dog than on the human being. The same is true of life practice. If we remain tied to life, things always make the same impression on us, and we are not able to intervene creatively. If you develop your thinking to a higher level, you face impressions as the same being in two different forms. One time you stand before it with what you have not yet worked on in yourself, the other time with what you have worked on in yourself. We become more and more practical in life because the impressions that things make on us become ever greater. Therefore, although there is a loss of time when we do something that is not directly related to practical life, it indirectly promotes practical life in an extraordinary way.

These are the three stages of any practical training of the mind: interest in the environment, desire and love for trying and doing everything, and constant self-control. See, for example, how one of the people who looked into the connections in an extraordinarily astute way, Leonardo da Vinci, describes how to proceed when trying something new. He does not shy away from saying how one can gradually learn to draw through practice. He says: Draw on tracing paper, place what you have drawn on the template, and then look at where the drawing is incorrect. Then do it again and try to correct the mistakes. — In this way, he shows how pleasure and love are important in activity. The third is satisfaction within reflection, which disregards the outside world and can remain calm within itself.

These are the kinds of things that can initially show us how, through trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world's thought structure, we can grow into a truly thoughtful practice. But we also make progress by believing that thinking itself is a creative force. Those who systematically do the following will do a lot for their practical training in thinking: they think about something, for example, what they have to do, or a question of worldview; it can be the most everyday thing or the most sublime. If they are quick to find a solution, they will generally not develop practical thinking. Rather, it is important to say to oneself: You must interfere as little as possible with your own thoughts. Most people can't imagine what that means when you say it. That is a key requirement: that we allow our thoughts to work within us, that we become accustomed to becoming the scene for the workings of our thoughts. We might think that there is only one way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one answer to a question. But we are not dogmatists for whom only one answer is correct. If we want to learn to think practically, we must try to give ourselves another answer, perhaps even a third or a fourth; indeed, there are things for which one can think of ten different answers. One must carefully paint all of these before one's soul, of course only in cases where this is possible, not in cases where things must be done quickly; in such cases, it is often better to do them poorly than too slowly. If you have ten possible solutions, think through each one carefully. Then say to yourself: I don't want to think about it anymore, I'll wait until tomorrow and let the thoughts work their way through me. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even when I am not consciously thinking about them. I'll wait until tomorrow or the day after, and then I'll bring these thoughts back to mind. — Perhaps I will do this a second or third time, and each time I will be able to see the individual things much more clearly and make a better decision than before. This is an incredible exercise in practical thinking: to consider various possible solutions to a problem in your mind, then let them rest and return to them later.

Those who do this for a while will see how versatile their thinking becomes, how, with a little practice, they develop presence of mind and quick-wittedness. Then, precisely because of this, they will grow together with life in even the most everyday things and recognize what is skillful and unskillful, what is clumsy and what is wise. It will not even occur to you to behave as so-called practical people often behave. I have met many practical people who are very good at navigating the well-trodden paths of their profession; but when you see such people in other situations, for example when traveling, their practical skills often appear quite strange. The proof that practical training of the mind can lead to real life practice lies in experience. It will affect everything, right down to the hands, to the way one touches something. You will be much less likely to drop plates and pots than other people if you work on your inner self in this way. Practical thinking affects even your limbs. When it is active and not undertaken in an abstract way, it makes you flexible and supple.

But impractical thinking is most evident precisely where intellectual practice should be effective, for example in science. I have given you the hypothetical experiment from astronomy as an example. We often have the opportunity to experience how terribly impractical today's scientists are. Our science, with its real methodological work and its excellent activities, should not be attacked in the slightest. But the thoughts that people today entertain are often downright horrifying. Our microscopes and photography are very sophisticated. One can observe all kinds of mysterious facts about various small creatures. We observe plants and see certain strange structures on them, such as faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and on some plants we even see something like lenses in this or that place. On other plants, we see how certain insects are attracted, then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. All of this is observed excellently. But how can these phenomena be explained with the impractical thinking of the present? People confuse the human soul, which internally reflects external processes, with what is observed purely externally in plants. They talk about the animation of plants and confuse the souls of plants, animals, and humans. People confuse these concepts. Certainly, there is no objection here to the wonderful observations of nature that are made known to the world through popular writings. But the thinking of our contemporaries is confused when someone says that certain plants have their stomachs on the surface, with which they draw in and devour food. This idea is roughly the same as if someone were to say: I know of a creature that is ingeniously organized and has an organ that exerts a kind of magnetic force on small creatures, so that they are attracted and devoured — this creature I have in mind is the mousetrap! This idea is exactly the same as that which assumes that plants have souls. You could speak of the mouse trap as having a soul in exactly the same sense as you speak of plants having souls, if you really think in this peculiar way.

The point is to be able to penetrate the very nature of thinking and not to become an “inner wagon pusher” in this area either. And there is something else that is important for the practical training of thinking, and that is to have confidence in the inner spiritual thinking organ. In most people, benevolent nature ensures that this spiritual thinking organ is not ruined too much by the fact that human beings have to sleep. And because the spiritual does not cease, because it is always there, this thinking organ works on its own, and human beings cannot continually ruin it. But it is quite another matter whether people leave thinking to nature when it comes to important and serious facts of life, or whether they take it into their own hands. Allowing the thinking organ to work within oneself without being present is a very, very important principle. And this is practiced by trying, even if only for a short time during the day, not to think at all. It takes a great, tremendous decision to sit or lie somewhere without letting thoughts run through your head. It is much easier to let these fluctuating thoughts play within you until you are relieved of them by a good night's sleep than to command yourself: Now you will be awake, and yet you will not think for yourself, but you will think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or lie still and think nothing while fully conscious, then the thinking organ works in such a way that it gains strength, accumulates strength. And whoever repeatedly puts themselves in this position of not thinking while fully conscious will see how the clarity of their thinking increases, how their quick-wittedness grows, not merely by leaving their thinking apparatus to itself through sleep, but by allowing this thinking apparatus to work under their own guidance.

Only those who are abandoned by all spirits of spirituality can believe that no thought is being thought at all. Here, Goethe's words about nature apply: “She has thought and continues to ponder.” Even the deepest inner being of man has thoughts, cherishes thoughts, even if man is not present with his conscious thoughts. And even in cases where the human being is not present in his thinking, something is still thinking within him, only he is not aware of it. In these moments, when the human being lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher is truly thinking within him, and this higher power has an enormously formative and educational effect on him. It is essential and important that human beings also allow the superconscious, the divine, to work and weave within them, which does not announce itself directly, but in its effects. Gradually, one becomes a clearer and more quick-witted thinker when one has devoted oneself to such thinking exercises. It takes a certain amount of energy and drive to cultivate such thinking exercises.

You can see from the individual examples given today how this thinking can be cultivated through one's own efforts. Only a few examples of self-education of thinking could be given today, but these examples have shown that it is possible to point to real remedies for thinking, the fruits of which can only be given by experience, by life itself. Those who train their thinking in this way will find that, on the one hand, they can ascend to the highest realms of spiritual life, but on the other hand, they can also apply this thinking in the realm of everyday life. What is gained from surveying the great spiritual facts should be applied to practical life. All areas of daily life, but especially education, could experience tremendous enrichment as a result, and a completely different view of life would prevail around us. But even those who want to develop their dormant qualities in order to penetrate into the spiritual realms would have a secure basis and stand firm in life. This is something that must be demanded before anyone can penetrate into the higher spiritual realms. And even ordinary science could gain enormously if it allowed itself to be enriched by Spiritual Science.

The cart pushers of thought, who often consider themselves great practitioners, do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are unable to trace anything back to a simple, comprehensive thought. This is what Spiritual Science gives us: it enables us to see what is otherwise small and detailed in life from a broad, comprehensive perspective. This enables people to gain an overview, to think about small things from a broad perspective; then they are led to real life practice.

Let us look at Leonardo da Vinci, who was a practitioner in many fields; we can take him as a role model. He said: Theory is the captain, practice is the soldiers. Anyone who wants to be a practitioner without mastering the perspectives of practical thinking is like someone who goes on a ship without a compass; they have no way of steering the ship in the right direction. Goethe repeatedly showed, based on his practical way of thinking, how scholarship, through impractical thinking, leads to fruitless speculation. There are people who reduce the outside world to atoms, and others who reduce it to movements; still others deny movement altogether. In contrast, the most practical thinkers point out that simplicity comes from the greatness of one's worldview. This saying is quite apt, and we can picture Goethe's saying before our eyes:

Enemies may appear,
Remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Walk around in front of their noses.