A TREATISE ON LIVING THOUGHT
by
MASSIMO SCALIGERO
DRAFT Translation
V4.16
by Mark Nazzari Willan
Translator’s note
This translation is based on the third edition published by Tilopa before the death of the author.
I had the opportunity of working with Massimo on a translation of the first edition, which he was able to read and approve. The reason for the precision required in translation is set out in the author’s preface to the third edition , which follows.
The earlier version was based on an expedient to enable distinction between three states of thought, which the Italian language is better able to convey than English.
It had to make this distinction possible, since it is central to the theme of the work. I used “Thought” for ‘pensiero’, to mean thought in its usual everyday sense as a human faculty, and “Thinking” to express the process, or act of thinking, for ‘pensare’. These have been retained in the present version.
However, in the previous version that kind of thought which is not actively thought by a person, but simply received as an already thought-out shell was called “thinked thought”; thereby inventing a similar past participle structure as in the Italian ‘pensato’.
This rendering has now been abandoned in favour of “thought-thought”. Whilst this is still ugly, it allows the idea to be conveyed effectively. The text itself will show why “pre-thought” cannot be allowed to stand alone.
British English has been used throughout, as I am a native speaker of that version of English, and bilingual in Italian from birth. I hope this puts no-one off.
This is not a work to be rushed through - a short passage should be thought about, and truly ruminated. If, in addition, the reader adds the exercise of concentration as suggested by Steiner, to his tools for investigation, he or she too may in due time, like me, be able to certify the contents as "error-free", and vouch for them from experience.
This will not happen for quite some time for the conscientious reader, but it is a truly amazing experience. A cursory glance will put off the superficial reader, who will find that his interest lies elsewhere.
This translation has taken years, and can still even now only be considered as a Draft. Maybe in future I may be able to make it more readable - but accuracy in content has been my prime consideration. Nevertheless I hope that at least a minimum number of readers will be able to use this unique work, at least until a more favourable age dawns.
Lastly, I must thank Alba FANTELLI, Guy FACEY and Lilian SCOTT for actual practical assistance and real hard work with this new version, and many others for their active support and encouragement.
Mark Nazzari WILLAN, France 2001
Author’s preface to the third edition
The present treatise, even if it is logically laid out and accessible, proposes a task which is perhaps possible only to a very few. The concatenation of thoughts in it is devised in such a way that following them along begins to be the experience which is proposed. This is an experience which, insofar as it is realised, does not turn out to be one of the many possibilities for mankind, but that experience of mankind’s inner essence which the Spirit demands of humanity at the present time.
This treatise cannot be refuted philosophically, because it is founded on such experience : which must be carried out if anyone wants to have the means for questioning it. But whoever is able to carry it out, begins to live in a kind of thinking which has nothing to question, because it penetrates the world. It is that very thinking that is the truth of all theories and of none of them, since it is their pre-dialectic substance.
Whoever perceives the distinction between logically following an argument and moving within the thinking that weaves the logical structure itself, can verify the experience proposed. By living the thoughts in these pages, mankind can experience the power of “concentration”, or the tangible presence of the Spirit. This is the way to living thought, that transcendence which is ever-present, but unknown, in each thought Man thinks.
1
The I that Man says it is cannot be the I, if not in living thought : which is still unknown to him. It only knows thought thought, or reflected thought, but it does not know how it knows it. It must first think in order to know its own thought: it does not know thinking at all.
Man knows and works using thought thought, which, because it is exhausted through its becoming fixed, has no life. Thinking never works in Man directly as life, since every vital movement is a process in itself, which draws itself from the unknown life of the bodily organism. This is a process that draws on thought directly in voluntary movement alone; on reflected thought in any case.
At the most today, Man manages to conceive of “thinking thought” as an “act” or as a dynamic moment of thought. This is the last positive intuition of western philosophy. Man has a philosophical intuition of “thinking thought”, but nevertheless without any possibility of directly perceiving it. But it does do this with thought thought, which Man is able to know every time by re-thinking it : by making it resurrect as thinking thought.
In fact, thinking thought gives itself to Man to the extent that it does not have it. This is because it actuates itself only to the extent that it is directed toward an object, or thinking something, and not thinking as such: as pure thought. It is thinking to the extent that it can exist for a subject, without which it would not be able to be thought. It unfolds itself in various logical systems as a theory of its unfolding only for a subject, in view of the foundations and methods of science. Thinking, therefore, according to something (secundum quid): but not according to itself.
By only knowing thought thought, Mankind cannot truly say that it knows. In reality he does not really have knowing, but only the known, deprived of the inner moment by virtue of which it is knowledge. Thinking must first be thought, and fall into reflection, in order to be known by Man. But known, it ceases to be knowledge.
Thus the death of thought is the condition of its being made dialectic in various forms, which are only apparently different from one another. For which reason, if today Man were to be told the secret of Being, it would be useless to it because it would not know how to think it. Mankind could think it only on condition of reducing it to that reflection, or abstraction, at which level it is impossible for any part of Being to give itself at all.
Mankind however, may find the power of though which thinks, if it is able to discern the Being of the world flowing though it as life. That is the life of the idea which is life in perceived reality, being born in it as from the centre of the world. This is the apex of the path of thought, in that it becomes able to take itself beyond idealistic positions, beyond the dialectics of “thinking thought”, and beyond physical and metaphysical realism.
2
There is a thinking that has not yet been thought: a thinking that cannot give itself as thought, for as long as it is thinking in the process of reflection and it limits its presence to the dialectic moment, it is already determined. It is that thinking which can only arise in the contemplation of the thinking act: thought thinking itself, and thus real to the extent that it expresses its own being. This thought has no need of the reflex moment to manifest its own life ; it is thus capable of being experienced without any dialectic mediation. Such thinking is not yet known by mankind, because it cannot arise in man except as the original power of thought : as the power of life.
Such power of life is no philosophical image, but the perception of the radical being of the world, born as a force-thought unbound to any object, but containing all that is thinkable in itself, from its own essence : it being essence itself.
3
True thinking cannot be thought thought, or reflex thought, and since it is reflex, be fixed into words. But neither is it thought reflecting itself, or thinking, since it is in any case conditioned by the form of its expression. True thinking is logically the being of thought, not tied to any given thought. A being knowable as thought that, by making itself its own content, expresses that from which it springs: a higher current of life, which is present in the original giving of itself by every thought, but which is nonetheless different from that which is ordinarily known as thought.
As an experience, it is that which, above all others, has the right to be called positive, as it is the most direct one that man can perform, and for which the I can account to itself as being that which is truly objective.
But it is not speculation, it is not philosophising. It is the courage of knowing : which is to know truth : the truth that sets free. It is not arguing, but creating : it is not reflecting but dominating. It is perceiving the super-sensible in thought entities, just as the sensory is normally perceived in forms and colours.
When one really thinks, thinking thought is put into action, but to the extent that the object is already a thought thought that comes to the consciousness as a perception already wrapped up in thought - the mental picture, which tends towards making itself into a concept - or as thought of our own or someone else’s: thought in any event, about something.
We never think something that is not a subject, or an object: and a subject, or an object is always a thought thought. To the extent that it is thought thought and it is received as a thought thought it is abstract, it does not exist, it is a sign, a possibility of thought or of memory, knowledge. And as such, in other words not re-enlivened by thought, but referred to with words and used as a notion, it is rhetoric, the substance of dead culture. The culture of men who no longer think in thoughts, but in words, or in quantitative correlation, mnemonically recallable time and again in their mechanical nature.
But a thought thought can once again return to being thought, and this is thinking thought : which is the resurrection of a thought thought, or a reflection of thought : of a lifeless reflection. Whilst life is just about to blossom forth in thinking thought : it is not perceptible, because it extinguishes itself every time by making itself thought.
It is life itself, but not known, nor possessed : the life of thought, or Being of thought, that reflects itself as thinking thought, without giving itself objectively : denying itself in thought, because in each case it is thinking for a thought thought, for reflection, for abstraction. Without which, nevertheless, it would not have the stimulus to be that thought that it is ; necessary for consciousness, which tends to remain awareness of the limit from which it arises.
Thinking thought is about to, but does not leave reflection, even though it is its dynamic moment. But to perceive this moment is to retrace the process by means of which it produces itself: to raise oneself from reflection to pure Being which gives itself in it as thought. Not having fallen into reflection, thought is light, or life: still imperceptible to the I that satisfies itself with reflection, which it takes for Being; in which, as an I, it cannot be. But this resurrecting of thought as light or life or light of life requires its being willed, willed with grit, and its being brought about ascetically.
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4
The possibility of re-awakening the moment from which a thought was born and of restoring the productive moment to the products of the intellect, our own or other people’s, as thinking thought, reveals itself at a certain moment to be a function of a further possibility, in view of which alone, this gave itself : that the thought which is normally unknown because it is thinking thought be contemplated in the same way.
The force that precedes its production can arise, as thought: thinking thought, but outside of reflection, in other words not philosophical, since the process of reflection is objective for it, and at the same time it bears the life that previously was annihilated in the thinking act, and because of which this could never avoid being the fall of thought into the physical ; i.e. into dialectism and rhetoric. In truth, thinking thought cannot be known without the ascetic path of thought : without the perception of its life.
It is in truth, the life towards whose light mankind’s story turns, to the extent that it is the light which at one time, transcendent to him, lit its path for it, and, as it became individual, withdrew to re-arise from the depths of its soul: as thought which, reflecting itself in the multiple, particularises itself, but of itself (eo ipso) tends to restore the wholeness proper to its unreflected being to the divided world.
The unreflected being of thought is the primordial light of earthly life : arising in humanity from the consciousness soul, it demands its own ascetic path.
5
In thinking thought the moment of the reflection of thought may be recognised, not thought in its original being, before it flashes back reflected: not thought independent of objective contents, which nonetheless give themselves as such by means of thought: in reality to make it express itself: to awaken from it that relationship with multiplicity, or with the particular in which individual awareness determines itself.
We call living that thought which is before it extinguishes its own life to make itself thinking thought, or thinking about a subject, since, instead, it is real beyond any subject. Observation of the process of thought brings one to intuiting it; but intuiting it is not yet experiencing it. Thinking though becomes alive, if it realises the continuity of its independence from any subject.
Living thought is the ready-made unity: to be actuated and made even more creative, if one bears in mind that no subject would have meaning nor correlation with other subjects without thought: whose virtue lies in the correlation, not in the already correlated nor in any series of concepts. The objectivity of the latter, albeit by reflection has been established by thought: which could not be thinking thought and disanimate itself in abstraction, if it were not in itself pure objectivity, a synthesis independent from any determination: for which reason, through this, every object can find anew its basic unity with the universe. But it resurrects alive, because the Logos in Mankind so decides.
Living thought, or the substance of pure ideas, to whose light mankind, without knowing it, reaches out with thinking and by existing, because it is in itself the dynamics of thinking and of existing, of life: which man for now can only imagine or abstractly think: life that mankind does not in reality live, since it perceives only sensory manifestations. For this reason deluding itself that it lives it, man must die. Man’s death, in fact, despite its apparent existence, begins with the death of thought in reflexity and abstraction: which give man the image of life, but not life.
In thinking reflexity, that life which is the form of immortality and of the infinite, as the arising substance of thinking, extinguishes itself each time: for which reason, as an abstractly thinking being, mankind severs its own living being out of the living current of the Logos.
Flowing and dying in thought, life is not perceived by humanity, but merely thought, as it does not perceive the living just as it perceives, for example, forms and colours.
Where man manages to perceive the living being of things and entities, it meets the super-sensible in the sensory, the Logos that sustains the world. It is the living power of thought, which man is free not to know, but equally to receive as the impetuous self-gift of resurrection.
6
Thinking thought, that can make reflex thought resurrect from abstractness, by reactivating the dynamic moment of reflection, is therefore not yet the inner life that makes it be thinking thought, as this extinguishes itself each time it actuates itself as such. This life is indeed present in thinking thought, but in such a way as to fade away every time.
It is that life which man can receive not as life, but only to the extent that it disanimates itself, since for the time being the “disanimated” is the level of self-consciousness and of its correlation with the world. For which reason, even given thinking thought, this is the thought that can give itself to the extent that it renounces essence, because only in such a condition can it become individual experience, that is experience independent from the super-sensible, but at the same time from the unconscious dogma or illusory metaphysical tendencies, which survive in the soul which is bound to the body.
Authentic metaphysics can give itself once more in the thought that actuates itself as “pure thought”, that is to say, in the thought that being independent from it, knows what to do with this independence: which is virtual and not real. It is real only if it actuates its own nature on the plane in which it is: metaphysical perennial-ness itself.
That which was metaphysical at one time is now making itself, by its self negation, the substance of individuality : it is the disanimation of thought which, as reflected thought, projects the world into abstract objectivity.
But disanimation presupposes the moment of animation, or of life, and the logic itself of the thought that thinks, experienced fully, leads to the intuition of the timeless and incorporeal moment of thought, or living thought: an intuition which, nonetheless, is only a flash of living thought. It is not yet its being. Its real being is the Logos from which it descends, to which it is secretly directed, and which is ever ready to give itself to it as the presence of its force, identity and perennial nature.
7
Thinking thought can be made into an object, just as for the present one ordinarily manages to make abstract thought into an object. This operation is concentration of thought using a subject. It is necessary to become aware of the logical necessity of thinking ascent, on the very razor’s edge of the process of thinking
Normally thinking thought is such to the extent that it can have before it a thought thought or a subject, or a thing in its abstractness: a having before itself which is already thought that thinks. And this is the function of every thought thought: that it may ever be thought anew, being only the sign or motive for the manifestation of thought. For which reason the object of thought has always been the abstractness to re-animate: the thought thought of man, or the thought thought of the universe, which is nature.
But that reanimation, sketched each time, is never carried out because usually abstractness is thought by thinking thought, but not resolved: it is taken back to the moment where it makes itself into abstraction, not to its not being abstractness, where real thought arises. The process through which abstractness gives itself is not fully retraced: which self-giving is the ultimate meaning of abstractness. Therefore the not even the thought thought of the universe is penetrated.
Neither with abstract thought, nor with thinking thought does one leave the circle of reflexity; for which reason the I, at this level, is forced to coincide with reflexity, and is not the waking I, but that which, through limited awareness of itself, needs the support of thought: which cannot fail to reflect back to it the condition of reflexity as if it were real. The moment of thinking thought, in fact, is unconscious, since the reflected moment alone is conscious.
The I identifies itself with thought, insofar as it is reflex thought: it is subjected to such an identification because it is not the thought thought by it. In fact, even if thinking thought is dynamic in comparison to static abstractness, it carries the force of the I, but not in such a way that it may dis-identify itself from thought. The I is not the thinking I, but the I reflected in thinking thought: thus conditioned by the body. The ego.
Making thinking thought, into an object, or doing so to thought to the extent that it is a dynamic synthesis, implies the arising of the I outside the conditions of reflexity. But this is already an action by the I. In order to be, it now has no need to reflect itself in abstractness that reduces it to the sensory alone: it begins to live to the extent that it has as a support the synthetic movement of thought, in which abstractness is dissolved.
In meditation, or in concentration, not involved with the sensory, the I sees thinking as external to itself, but equally, it is not involved in the sensory to the extent that it can objectively see thought : it begins to be independent from the conditions of nature, which can normally bind the I to itself by means of thought.
The I can will itself in existing, according to freedom: it can create beyond the already created, to the extent that it begins to know in an earthly way a life that previously was foreign to it : a living beyond that past which forces man in the form of nature, tradition, or culture, and which is an error if it becomes a condition of existing, outside of the principle of the I from which it substantially originates.
The I can see free thinking in its objectivity: the thinking that thinks the world, through which it can penetrate the secret of the world. Normally, man’s adherence to the world of the senses is not its penetration, but being seized by the currents of nature.
Before the free I, the world of the senses arises as a supersensible world, because it is penetrated in its foundation: that which one erroneously seeks beyond knowing, outside of the I.
It is necessary to be the I we say we are, so as not to have against one an objective world, nature in opposition, a recalcitrant and painful reality. The I knows no opposites, if it actuates itself in freed thought, in which the essence of every entity lives : an essence which in its own essence is identical with the universe. In truth, the central unity of the world tends to manifest in man, as the nascent power of thought : through its continuous demand for determination.
8
The objects that man believes he thinks, and which arouse desire in it, its view of the world, and its culture, have in fact not yet been truly thought by it: they are only reflected by the thought of their appearance. Which is appearance for reflex thought: whilst in reality it is the request made for the being of living thought. For which reason reflexity, not reality, motivates desire and culture.
Only living thought can think objects, since it is not bound to any object, and therefore will think the object not to the extent that it is determined by it, but to the extent that, being independent from it, it shall think it by retracing the process through which it is that object, that fact, that abstractness: thus restoring to it the essence, or the life of whose absence its appearance is a sign.
True thinking is the essence that integrates appearance and therefore is the internal content which completes every fact, removing it from temporariness and from external grossness. It is the thinking that, independent from rational necessity, to the extent that it has within it all rationality, does not talk around but touches things. It does not fall into argumentation, but immediately has being, penetrating the reality of whatever it turns to: it has no need to lose itself in thoughts, because its perception is direct. It accosts the world and feels it: it has it. This thought, however, has to be won, by means of the ascent which its own pure movement demands. The Logos must be able to respond directly to this ascent, so that it might become creative, from the spiritual to the sensory.
Experiencing the being of thought as identical to that which, as the clothing of the world, makes a show of its otherness - which is necessary to external man, and not to thought - is equally the secret of the transparency and rectitude of feeling states: which can even involve the I - the aspect of the latter that is inherent in the body - through the thought-substance with which form and meaning give themselves, and through which alone they may arise to be conditioning contents.
Where the feeling states are deprived of such forms - and this is man’s art - their movement is reacquired in depth by the equilibrium of bodily nature, of whose alteration they are a manifestation, whilst the meaning of their being, that which they were to the extent that they are thoughts, becomes self-knowledge: it returns as the possibility of the thought -essence’s penetrating those depths.
Mankind must make itself. It is not the passive receiver of terrestrial experience, but a co-operator in his fulfilment : which demands its transformation from a creature dependent on nature to a free being: whose feeling states are not the play of nature in him, but the agitating presence of the spirit. From which he should realise his own state in nature: the super-natural.
It must pass from being a creature to being a being which creates according to its own principle, the Logos, each creature bound to the earthly condition awaiting its own liberation from man.
9
The experience that we mean to indicate ceases to be philosophy, being that towards which all philosophising has reached out as towards fulfilment, and to which reaches out even now man’s action in his believing be wants given objects or ideals, in mutual contrast.
The “path” to which we refer is not idealism, nor phenomenology, nor existentialism, nor Yoga, nor Zen, but something rigorously beyond them, which tends to disengage from various determinations the pure movement of consciousness that in those doctrines and in those methods is in any case identified with the objective put forward, each demand for unconditionedness falling unconsciously back into them in the manner of reflexity: which is constitutional to the psyche of modern man, who is the only interpreter of them : for which reason they are lacking the transcendent thought from which they sprang.
It is the path of mankind at the point at which it is, at the limit of the contradiction of its being with its thought: not, certainly, with the thought with which it makes its culture, but with the autonomous process through which such thought is produced : according to a transcendence which is continuously present, but unknown.
The perception of such a process, never reached by any speculation, is the secret of the identity between being and thinking, so that it opens to being in thinking. It becomes the harmony between living thought and existence, which is existence because it uses the life through which it is living. True being is thinking, if thought lives: so that life may be truly lived: according to the immediate Logos, rather than through traditional mediation. Therefore the path indicated by us goes beyond every system of the past : it demands the perennial Logos, as presence.
Normally mankind limits itself to using life, without being in such life. To live in reflex consciousness, or in never grasped sensations, is not being in life, but to continually presuppose it and nonetheless unconsciously search for it beyond reflexity, without knowing about reflexity and about what may overcome it. For which reason one does not see in the present the possibility of resolving reflexity, and continually, in the following instant, one projects the search for life: never possessed, because always escaping one. In order not to be known.
The thought that is definitively experienced is always lifeless thought, since the moment of thinking thought can only take place to the extent that it shall not be seen. It can in fact be seen and focussed on only as thought thought.
The moment of thinking thought is possible only to the extent that a theme or an object commits it: the object of thought is seen, not the thought through which the object is thought. And this is right, because contemplating this thinking, by analogy, means seeing it through a further act that cannot be seen, being a movement superior to that of thinking thought, that thinks through abstraction. This is to reach up to the transcendence of thought, or living thought.
But it is a re-arising to the “pure subject”, or the “unseen seer”, which ceases to have being as an object, being itself the essence of being: which to be has no need to place itself up against any object. The essence of the “pure subject” is the Logos of the world.
10
In thinking thought, each time the instantaneous movement of incorporeal life current lights up and disanimates itself, stops itself to be abstractness, which the limited individual consciousness needs, in order to be what it is. It is the condition in which the half-asleep I must mistake for it’s own action what is placed before it by nature, since this is the basis for waking consciousness. Mankind dreams of acting and does not realise it gives the consent of its relative consciousness to what acts through it. This is a half-extinguished movement of the I which, nonetheless, reaches out to its pure re-kindling : it commits the consciousness until, through the contradiction which is latent in its being the form of non-being, it decides to make itself the form of its own being. In thinking thought there is the kindling which is continually extinguished, and continually re-kindlable.
Abstract thought, that is the ordinary one, is not the thought in which the I can think, but that which conditions the I according to the reflexity which is mediated by bodily nature. The I does not think thought, but the soul tied to the bodily does: which wills itself through the soul, through the fact that it can become thought; thus inverting the radical meaning of the life of mankind. It is the inevitable passivity of thinking which is normally thought to the extent that it is cut out of the incorporeal current of life from which it is born, and which therefore contradicts its own spiritual nature.
To experience thinking in its birth is not a dialectic operation : it is to wilfully experience the thinking act: to insert will in reflected thought, so that it manages to reanimate itself with the inherent force from which it is born and of which it is a reflection, for which reason it is no longer reflected, but irradiates being from its own essence. One gathers it where it arises, because in its origin it is true, and immediately after it no longer is. Immediately afterwards it is the abstractness that clothes the world in provisional concreteness : the world one does not possess, because one believes the scene before one, and the object that is of itself, to be real, as it appears in its abstract garb. Whilst its appearance is already the result of interior action which is inseparable from perceiving. The truth of Science is real, but it knows nothing of the thought which fills it with reality ; therefore it goes no further than appearance.
It is the world that escapes one all the more when one believes one loves or suffers, or craves or hates, because it is in the feeling states and in the instincts that the abstractness of the world, in other words its unreality has become an inner power, a thirst for life reflectedly pictured mentally and thought : which is to say, taken on in its inversion. For which reason one believes one loves that which is the image of the continual loss of a secret capacity to love, and one hates what does not correspond to the element of craving of this illusory love.
11
Even in logically articulated and the most rationally aware thinking, the I in reality goes no further than a dream state, to the extent that it does not express its being, but instead whatever is reflected to it by the physical instrument of thought and by the corresponding condition of consciousness. This condition is analogous to that of a dream, which is the extra-sensory world reflected by the bodily, and therefore immediately translated into the symbolism taken from sensory experience.
In waking consciousness one is not truly awake, but one has the principle of being awake: images are evoked not by any supersensible experiencing, as in dreams, which ordinary consciousness cannot directly, but by a sensory experience which consciousness can follow due to the fact that it is consciousness of such a level. One can say that in the waking state dreaming coincides with the sensory experience of consciousness.
In reality, the I dreams its waking state and shall dream it for as long as conscious thought does not enliven itself with the incorporeal current of life that gives it the chance of being thought: living its own being, not alienating itself in its own reflection: not making a world out of a dreaming image, but instead realising the true waking state : the level of the I, for which it continually clamours.
The I can awaken in thought its own higher waking state, if it consciously recognises in flowing thought the being of the world, in which each time the pre-dialectic intuition becomes the awakening of its original power.
12
A thought thought is unmoving thinking, a memory, or a mere name: it is nothing if it is not thought anew. Thought anew, it animates itself and its animation is thinking thought: on the point of expressing the life from which it takes itself in the form of thought, but inevitably losing it in reflexity. Thinking, therefore, to the extent that it limits itself to the spectral projection of itself: to abstraction, without which he would not know how to be thinking. This is the limit of all idealism, of all philosophising. The limit which must be surpassed. Concentration surpasses it, by wilfully realising the continuity of the thinking moment.
Normally one does not possess the thinking thought one draws on for that which, inasmuch as it is thought thought, is extinguished at once. But in contemplating thinking making itself the form of that which as abstract "content", substitutes its own content, this can at last express itself. Then it is the thought which is perceived as resurrected, as the thinking life of the world: but it has nothing to do with dialectics or philosophising, which are its impediments.
It is the contemplating to which the not yet disanimated being of thought gives itself: for the first time not lost in thinking, but surfacing as thought-essence. Thought ascends to being living thought, it returns to being what it was originally.
To the extent that it is not conditioned by reflexity, the I that actuates itself as the subject of contemplating, is the real I. It is the I that does not need thought in order to be, being able to contemplate thought: it can see it for now as the eye sees the external world, or thinking thought does dead thought. But it is a seeing that is not a stopping at this, but a penetrating of being, which as dead thought seems to stand against knowledge, but by being is knowing itself.
Objective before the I, thought is not otherness, but transparency. It is the eye of the spirit, which does not see for itself, but through the spirit. It is not an object, if not for meditating: to extinguish itself continually as an object, in order for meditating to be fulfilled. An object which is truly contemplated as an object, is in now way fixed : it animates itself and changes, it becomes all thought, which lives, ready to give way to its “emptiness”, to essence.
The I, outside reflexity, actuates its being: by contemplating thinking, it begins to contemplate the inner reality of creation: that for which it was created. Which is more real than the created, since the created is something only to the extent that being thought, it refers to the creating force.
Contemplating thinking is the possibility of placing the soul before oneself: seeing feeling and will objectively, identifying oneself not with their egotistical changes, but with their incorporeal source. That which one really has as an object, in fact, extinguishes itself to be possessed as an essence. In living thought, thinking, feeling, and willing are one.
But it is equally being in the thought from which the history of man and the world germinates: because this thought is operating and one is not taken in by its operation: one deserves to be is the radical emanator of it.
He who contemplates thinking is freed from the necessity of binding himself to certain thoughts, having the thinking that thinks itself as an object, which it is senseless to think, just as it is senseless to think a colour.
13
In reflex thought, in the thought that does not manifest as the form of itself, but only as the form of a "content" which seems to give itself and simultaneously close itself into its otherness, the I is simply dreaming. In reflex thinking, in fact the thinking subject is missing, being itself reflected, or merely pre-thought, like all that which, to the extent that it is pre-thought, is not: thus referred to bodily feelings. Which nonetheless, even when one does not notice it, one knows of only through thought.
Substantially, by thinking mineral appearance, man thinks something that is already woven out of thought as an image: absorbed in an objectivity that one believes one has, but one does not have, because one has it as it appears: the reflection of a reflection. For which reason that of which it is a double reflection is unknown. The Logos of the world is unknown, the radical life of thought and of every being.
Thus mankind thinks nothingness: which, only after death, one will see as the nothingness one believed one perceived, which one thought, and through which one rejoiced and suffered. But it is by thinking the rejoicing and the suffering in which the I begins to operate, even if dimly.
The I continually places a sign in thinking. In every individual thinking, even if it is reflected, abstract, extinguished as a current of life, the I arises, as a reflex I. It is its inferior form, the ego: whose knowing demands the contingent spatio-temporal vision, which one mistakenly believes to be Being, for which one believes to even be able to know other worlds which are already categorised according to this kind of spatio-temporal vision, through which mankind does not even comprehend its own world.
The ego cannot know any object to the extent that it is a reflected object, and to the extent that it is reflected, it is thought and sufficient to itself, not demanding penetration, but only the indefinite series of reflected or abstract relationships. Only if the I were present could the object be known; but the I can be present not where the current of thinking extinguishes itself, but where it is alive. In living thought the being of the object coincides with the being of the I.
It is that living thought, without which thinking thought could not exist and consequently neither could reflex thought, as its negation. To this one can rise from the thought one has normally, or reflex thought, by means of the thinking thought one does not have, to the extent that it extinguishes itself in expressing itself, in fact it flashes in self-extinction. If it did not extinguish itself, there would be no dialectic thought, conscious to the extent that it is reflex, that is to say not authentic, precisely in its being furnished with name and form: whilst still arising in living thought. Whose Logos incarnated and has given the secret of name and form : which must be found anew.
Every being has its secret name, which it is waiting for mankind to pronounce, to the extent that it can find in itself the immaterial light, as creating living thought.
14
A person begins to be truly human if he or she knows how to see, even without directly experiencing it, the priority of thinking as the substanceless light, of which all thinking and mental picturing through forms is no more than a modification. This is a necessary modification for as long as man is satisfied by having thought as the form of something else, which is not thought, but which gives itself by means of thought, and this is the world: thus unknown, just as thought is.
In formless thought, or living thought, the object coincides with the subject: for as long as it does not coincide, one will always have the "realistic" illusion that the object, as an object, exists before thought. This is what appears to everyone. In reality only that which effectively precedes ordinary or reflected thought exists before it, in other words the principle through which reflexity is possible, and which is before reflected being: living thought. Which in things, in objects, in events, petrified and given substance, can be seen as the abstract thought of the universe, which awaits being really thought: abstract only for human knowledge. Thought that was living and is still living, but which for the common man, hides in the form of dead objectivity, since reflected thought cannot help but abstract the sensory from Being: the sensory that is less than that which flows in perceiving. The abstract sensory: which one believes to be the concrete, and which is concrete, but is not realised as being so.
It is nature, factuality, the subjective life of the I, the contradiction which is ungraspable by the thought that is already its product: the world of things and facts, which stands before thought as an otherness; to the extent that this otherness projects its own limit into their form, taking thence meanings that its limitation needs in order to subsist: a limitation that does not precede thought, which is in itself free of limitations.
No object pre-exists thought, if thought is aware of the giving of the unmediated tissue that translates perception into sensations or into mental pictures: sensations or mental pictures of something that is effectively there, is not a subjective construction, but whose presence in time, through which it seems to be already there, is the relationship of thinking with perceiving. It is the unconscious inherence of thinking in perceiving: the temporality that arises from thought, which is in itself timeless. For which reason man can make out time as the weaving of thought. Freeing thinking in perceiving, in fact, is to experience time as presence.
The temporal succession does not concern things, but belongs to the sensory relationship of mankind with them: it is the relationship with “appearance”, with the unconscious form of living thought supplied to the content of the world, not yet penetrable outside its external discontinuity, or fragmentation: which demands the provisional spatio-temporal connection. Which is always a connection of ideas.
The apparent pre-existence of things to thought is the allocation thought makes of them in time, and also in space, being still unable to grasp itself in its own timelessness, or in its own being the tissue of time: which is simultaneity, or true space. But equally true pre-existence.
The world essence, in fact, the series of archetypes which man finds afresh by thinking thought right up to the essence, pre-exists but this is no longer thought but Logos, the substance of life: a thought-force which thinks in every moment and which is, before it makes itself the veil of that which, once veiled, is enclosed in the external: which seems to pre-exist. In reality it does not pre-exist, but it arises as a consequence of the movement of the I, which experiences its own immediate being and provisionally finds it in the absolute unmediated outside world, space.
But even on the line of temporal progression, the animadversio (soul reflection) of man to himself, precedes noticing the world, because noticing the world is always referring it to oneself, from one moment in time to another moment, but arising from a timeless essence.
This timeless essence is therefore a-spatial, for which reason no “inside” nor “outside” exist, there is no “objective” nor “subjective”, but only the identity of the I with the being of the world : with the thinking structure of the world.
15
The world, the exterior scenario undoubtedly are, and seem to pre-exist man, who appears at a certain time and sees them. Nonetheless the authentic moment of knowledge is that which is able to grasp not the “made” but the “making”, not the completed object - which, as we will see, appears in its exhausted determination only to abstract thought - but the process through which it is completed, or completes itself: a process which is identical to the process of the thinking that retraces it.
The seen world is the frozen ready-made, and as it is already made, it is fixed by the thought that does not yet have the capacity to penetrate the becoming of inner nature, or the making, of the ready-made.
But the making of the ready-made gives itself as the making of itself of thought, that links note to note and moment to moment, and which cannot have in itself anything other than thinking: not things.
The seen object is the object which already begins to be thought: taken up just as it is seen, in reality it is arrested in this given aspect: in which instead thought should, by virtue of contemplation, see its own movement, which tends towards absolute identity with the object.
By seeing its own movement, it would see itself animate itself in things together with a more inner movement which arises from this and which is perceptible to it to the extent that it is one with it. It is the creative thinking from which the object if born. Thought that is life, revealing itself in the thought which, giving itself to it, animates itself from its intimacy with such life. Living thought. No objective reality opposite to thought exists. If something exists as an objective reality, it exists because it already arises as thought.
16
The objects and stimuli of the exterior world seem to precede thinking. But one needs to be awake in order to understand how these give themselves for a perceiving subject, who goes to meet them by means of vehicles or organs, which are already supplied with their correlation with objects: a correlation thanks to which they form structurally a single world with them. To anyone who knows how to look, the physical processes correlated to the organs of perception have nothing to do with what they transmit to the perceiving subject. The latter precedes and determines, by means of thinking, the function of the correlation. Therefore thinking exists before perceiving.
The correlation is in truth a correlation for the I, without which it would not be anything, since it reflects the otherness which is necessary so that the immediate animadversio in which the I begins to be present can make itself into self-consciousness, and continue. The correlation is the vital movement of thinking, that becomes conscious only where it becomes reflected and abstract.
Does the exterior world perhaps pre-exist thought? No, because that exterior world is not that which pre-exists, but that which begins to exist by means of thinking articulating itself in perceiving. That which truly pre-exists is supposed, but not known, and therefore assumed to be “Being”: a provisional recognition of thinking of something which is unconsciously felt as a basis, but which is in fact not perceivable by the senses. The thinking thought of the cosmos: not presupposed, but internal to thought that acquires the “basic” consciousness of itself, up to the power of its transcendence.
It is living thought, of which in fact one cannot in effect say that it pre-exists thought, since it is its timeless being, in other words being neither before nor after the thought that thinks, through which alone, to the extent to which it is reflected, the category of time arises.
Nonetheless mankind, in its normal naïve-realist attitude, holds that life pre-exists thought as an external scenario : it does not realise that it presupposes life, and by presupposing it identifies it with that which it sees, without seeing it in reality, because it only sees the physical-sensory manifestations of life, and not life itself.
Man only sees an external reality which seems to exist before thought, because it rises before it: but it stands before it as an event whose limit is the limit which arises only for thought that assumes objectivity to be other than itself, as a thought thought in which it does not recognise its own movement. It does not know how to find the living thought which is frozen in things : the thought thought of the universe that it can think again, this being its task, but which it thinks to be unthinkable, or to be a thing.
Mankind can find it alive again only if it finds life anew in itself: it is a simultaneous event. For which reason, if on looking at the seed of a plant, man attentively thinks its development into trees, flower and fruit, it can arrive at having living before him the thought of what that seed, in fact, invisibly contains. That which animates itself in thought coincides with that which will manifest itself in time, being already complete in its essence. In the essence that begins to give itself, as thought, a living image, the reality of that which is contemplated arises, or resurrects.
17
Man only sees the manifestations of life, in other words what is moved by life and he perceives as made, not as making. The relationship between one moment and another of the producing of a phenomenon, or of the transformation of an organic entity, or of a living being, is a relation of thought, not perception. It is a question of being aware of how thought works independently of its being made dialectic : not limiting it to its use with regard to objects, with a view to the results. It is necessary to see what comes from thought and could never come from perceptions alone, in knowing: so as to grasp the objectivity of thought.
Every perceiving is that specific perceiving, because with it each time it combines with an interior movement : unconscious thinking to the extent that it is deeper and more authentic. Whose unconsciousness leaves the field open to reflected thought, that at once supposes the life in the organic world: life that thus man believes he perceives and does not perceive, but could perceive as life were he to grasp that inner movement. Movement of living thought.
In reality thought can have nothing in it that is not of its own substance, nothing before it that is not thought. Perception is always noticed perception, and noticing is thought, even if it is not conscious thought.
By grasping his own thinking, man can manage to experience the super-rational or cosmic thought, which has thought, and thinks creation, as his own activity. He experiences the transcendent within the sphere of individuality: which is to carry creation forwards, which is terrestrially paralysed in reflex thought.
The thought of man, finding itself alive again, actuates in itself the thought of the Cosmos: which has expressed itself in the language of the created, in order to arise anew as man’s thought: certainly not rationality. It is the thought that, individualising itself, and at the same time its original virtue remaining unaltered, does not repeat the already made, nor is it the logic of the ready made, but is the further making of creation.
Creation continues as man’s living thought.
Human ideation, where it is authentic, is the flowering of the tree of life. The secret of thinking is its intimate transcendence, ready to reveal itself : but it can reveal itself only where it has become immanent, individual, capable in itself of absolute autonomy.
The autonomy of thought is its supersensible reality. But it is no free gift : it is the consequence of its union with the will, where such union, or fusion, does not depend on the bodily nature, but on the wilful transcending of this nature, which is potentially contained in thought, in every thought, where such is thought by the I. It is necessary for the I to be in thought: present , but not noticed, the silent power of living thought. It is usually rare for the I to be present in thought : in fact a specific ascent of transcendence is needed.
18
The long striving of mankind to escape the straits of illusion, like from the contradiction of pain and death, is in substance an unconscious seeking for the sources of thought with which it builds its own life ; a search at which it began to work since when the original wisdom, tradition, ceased to think for him. It gradually ceased to think for him when individual thought was born, in which the I, albeit reflected, began to be a subject, to the extent it was a thinking subject: and still not truly thinking, to the extent that it is thinking in the abstract.
From when the seed of self-consciousness was born, what has really made mankind progress has not been what it has thought and translated into external knowledge and progress, but the spiritual vitality of that thinking, its moral power, which has only had non-essential incidentals in culture and progress: progress and culture, which are not true in themselves, but only for that quantum of super-rational thinking which has animated itself through them, leaving them there as its signs. Which, as they are signs, are dead, are not spirit, are not culture: they are expressive only for the thinking that can re-enliven them according to its own inherent force, according to a vitality that is its own true being, independent from whatever they mean to the intellect.
The being of thought is that which radically operates in the world: not that which is thought in a given way and which, as knowledge or history, is passed down from generation to generation. The being of thought is the spirit in its infinity, having feeling and willing within itself, in their incorporeal essence. It is not thinking, but its Logos, or pure principle which thinks all man’s thinking, enlivening itself directly in those rare thoughts that do not renounce, even in the sphere of nature, the source whence they spring. They are the thoughts that tend to make flow into the world the spiritual vitality which is ordinarily extinguished in the dialectic weaving of the ideas and doctrines that make up the level of knowledge,: they lie there in fact as inanimate notions, unless a new thinking takes them up as the means for its reliving.
But merely rethinking ideas is something else, different from re-living the creative pre-dialectic moment that alienates itself in their form, reflexity being the dialectic form that, taken up as a value, becomes the false continuum of a culture which is indeed taken from the spiritual but which is in opposition to it, even when it mythicizes the spiritual.
The highest doctrine of the spirit, frozen into the reflected form in which it necessarily expresses itself, can become dogma, demanding conformity instead of inner life, if thought does not make it resurrect from its own original being. However, as much original being resurrects, as the light of thinking is able to switch on from it. Everyone finds the light-thought of which he is capable and which the Spiritual World grants him.
19
Thinking, to be worth in the human sphere what it is before it reflects itself as thought, in other words to be thinking according to its own being, and not only to the extent that it thinks a given object, does not demand only the moment of “thinking thought” or the “act” of thinking, present in any case in any effective thinking - which is the inner possibility which is lost every time - but also the willing (of) the moment of thinking thought: which is more than just being thinking according to the spontaneous process of thinking, contradicting, to the extent that it is reflected, the movement from which it is born, and from which, as ordinary thought, is always in opposition to the spirit.
The willing of oneself in thinking is the pure movement of the I; the immediate opening of oneself to the spirit: ingenuously requested of various mediations by reflex thought which does not see in itself the spiritual element that one goes about mystically or metaphysically picturing to oneself, outside oneself, outside its being.
The true ascent is that of the thought that wills itself so much in the determination of itself, that it surpasses the limit of reflexity belonging to it, enlivening itself with a will which, to the extent that it articulates itself in thinking, can will itself not according to the habitual movement in the body, but drawing on the incorporeal superhuman source directly.
True thought is the thought that wills: the thought that penetrates the world, or gives itself, or gives rise to silence, disappearing into Essence, because it wills. This willing is the flowing life of the Logos.
Turning itself attentively to an object, for its own ascent, thought at a given moment animates itself, presenting itself as the being of the object. The object disappears as what opposes itself to thought: it arises as essence.
Thought, thinking an object with conscious intensity - no matter what it is - begins to be the thinking of the I, or of the spirit: in fact it has the object, it is not possessed by it: which is the surpassing of contingent duality. Contemplated in its deep objectivity, the world arises in the intimacy of the thinking being, one with him.
Thought opens itself to its own radical force whose flow, persevering, surpasses the limits within which the object is normally confined, and through which the object is tied to a determined form: the being of thought is one with the being of the object, beyond the provisional relationship of reflexity.
It does not matter what is chosen as the thought thought to be thought anew, that is the object of thought, since each thinking belongs to the one dimension of reflexity and all subjects are equivalent with regard to the essential nature of the force which alienates itself in their dialectification. There is no thinking which is not the lower projection of the transcendent being of thought.
The transcendent being of thought, in fact, needs to become immanent, to determine itself into ideas, concepts or mental pictures, in order to express itself at the level of the human mind. It determines itself for objects or subjects, each of which therefore is the subject or object which can become the vehicle of thought, which thinks it, each time drawing on its own origin. Each subject or object can lead to the essence of all others: in the heart of the world, thanks to concentration.
It is the thought that man does not yet have the ability to receive as a direct content: which is the ultimate meaning of thought. As a direct content, it is the Logos, the universe-thought, in which mankind draws on the thoughts which it manages to think independently from its own nature.
It is the experience of freedom, which the present history of man demands, initially at least from very few, as a virtue of orientation for humanity, according to the Logos which builds life, but therefore destroys whatever opposes itself to the building of life.
The transcendence of thought can become immanent every time, thanks to pure willing. This is what, by persisting in its own movement, overcomes every human suffering due to the condition of immanence devoid of the light of its transcendence, and therefore rebuilds life: it realises the human according to the Logos which transforms, no even resurrects the human.
20
The being of thinking, or the ideating power, or original idea, in order to be, demands the intensity of a thought that receives it in its every point as in the moment of its origin, to the extent that in each moment it has its object as the thought of that through which it can be that object.
At any moment such thought therefore is the “prius” [previous], the inner giving of itself of the movement through which the object is, right down to appearance, that is up to the first “animadversio” [soul-opposition/meeting]. The point in which the thinking flowing precedes the flowed is continually drawn upon, which one has as thought and immediately as thought thought: in which it can never enclosed.
It is obvious that it is not a “changeover” from one kind of thought to another, but rather the intensification a single and constantly same thought. It is the intensification of the pre-dialectic moment, immediately lost in ordinary mental picturing, that is in the possibility of experiencing thought with intensity, which at first cannot but be a given thought - a mental picture, or a concept, or a judgement - reconstructed according to the process of its becoming determined, until through it the force expresses itself through which it can be, reflectedly that given thought. Whose truth thus is its possibility of its disappearing each time in what it is born from, to be reborn as an objective power of thought.
No given thought bears that force, and all given thoughts spring from it: for which reason truth cannot belong to any thought thought - and consequently to no doctrine, school or academy, or spiritual current - but to the thought in which the force lives from which truth and doctrines are born. Which is no longer ordinary thought.
Truth is precisely this force, not the doctrines that dialectise it, through which no knowing truth is truth, but only knowing to the extent that it is the expression of such a force: not the knowing which is pursued for knowledge, but that to which all knowledge is subordinate. True knowing is the thinking that knows how to be thought: pure knowledge.
The determinations of thought can be seen as the paths from the multiple and contingent to the finding anew of the one thought, or the original thought of the world, which manifests itself as individual thought. The Logos demands to become the power of individual light, responsibility, freedom.
The transcendence of thought, realised each time as determination, secretly demands that such an act give its own power : in the immanence the Logos be found as the power of willing. This is the secret of all human work, struggling, and suffering : finding anew the power of the act which is carried out each time, thinking wilfully : the light which resolves the darkness of the human psyche.
21
Thinking, ever inanimate in its being taken as reflected, in substance gives itself thus reflected. It is therefore the giving of itself that can be had until it gives itself essentially. One can open the threshold to it with the will, which is the limitless giving of itself of the I.
Thought can animate itself and live, if one insists wilfully in the process through which it produces itself, thinking it not in so far as it is conditioned by an object, but to the extent that, given an object, one thinks it so intensely that one grasps thinking activity objectively: which is realised independently of the object, and is authentic precisely because of such independence.
Experiencing of one’s own thinking activity is a higher level of thought, unknown to ordinary rationalising, just as to philosophical speculation, but also to that meditating that, not knowing the process of thought to the extent that it is the process of reflexity, does not know what conversion it must carry out in itself in order not to be illusory. By means of such experience, one can discover how every object is definitively a pretext for the manifesting of thought, which then has to grasp itself.
True thought is not the thought which has already fallen into form as the form of a thing or of a feeling state or of a judgement or of a knowledge - which can even be spiritualistic knowledge - but the thinking thanks to which this form arises, through which the object gives itself as thought, not seen as thought, because one believes one sees the object. But it is this thought that should be known for what it is in itself, before it gives itself as the form of appearance or of feeling. And it is the way through which alone the world of appearance and feeling states ceases to be the condition of the life of consciousness, by becoming the raw material of its independent experience, right up to clarity of soul.
Each time one thinks, thought is on the point of living, but immediately its life, by projecting itself into form, is arrested. This life can also be indirectly or through mediation be evoked in conscious thinking: if each time a thought is thought from its birth and, through dignity and a sense of value, one does not go away from the fount from which it springs, whilst continuing to give it form and word. But it is the activity of a few moments and of rare men. Nonetheless, even in this case, when it effectively it happens, it is still not that in which living thought is experienced, to the extent that one draws only minimally on its flowing: one drinks that “water of life”, but on condition of not laving it in its pure state, and not knowing how and whence it springs: what its true virtue can be. It is had only in its use, in relation to something else: in its alteration.
One does not have thought as the weaving itself of truth through which thoughts make the world real. One does not have thought just as for now, in the guise of thought, one has the perception of the world. Even if one possesses the logic of living thought and of cognitive liberation, the kindling of living thought is in any case granted by the Spiritual World, where that transcendence of the self which is in thought every time is arrived at, but which demands, in order to be noticed, clarity of the soul.
22
We can draw on living thought through given thoughts that re-arise fully as our activity. Even these do not pre-exist thought, to the extent that they are made real only by becoming the thought that thinks it. There is, in fact, no other thought outside the thought that thinks; whilst, as one has seen, only in illusion does a thought pre-exist thinking.
The moment of awakening of a thought is its timeless moment, not yet unfolded into concepts nor clothed in propositions: a timelessness that logically precedes the dialectic process, demanding temporal succession, since it is the synthesis arising in the thinker that, on the point of expressing itself, knows in one single instant what he thinks and will unfold in concepts and approaches.
A thought, where it is thought with insistence, such that in its determination the inner element or the creating moment from which it necessarily derives, flows intensified, can lead to living thought. Living thought is not experienced in itself, but the form in which it initially manifests in the soul: a form which usually alienates itself as clothed in supposed contents, whereas it is the true content. This is to be found anew: the transcendent that must be made present.
Such an experience demands the awareness that the inner growth deriving from it is not owed to a particular determination of thought, that is to the meaning of what is thought, but to the un-determined force-thought called into action through it: thanks to thinking will, or thought that insistently wills itself at the point of its determination.
Through the determinations of thought, where they are seen to be such, one can rise to pure thought, or powerful thought, because it is empty of thoughts. But such a possibility must be a human decision , being the logic itself of the process of thought: it cannot be offered to it by natural evolution. Ordinarily, in fact, the determinations, in their being the inner form of perceiving, are seen as necessary in themselves and identified with the objects which they clothe, so that outer multiplicity is projected as a series of events in inner life, regularly dominating thought. It is the contradiction that is scientifically consecrated, becoming the intricate forest of appearances, from which one does not escape except with sleep or death; or by the ascent of thinking.
This ascent is the final meaning of the contradiction; finding the Logos through what inputs it as an individual activity into the awareness, thought that is. Thought does not belong to mankind, but to the Logos; however it becomes individual in humans so that they, by means of it, may reach the Logos.
23
Whoever educates him- or herself to the contemplation of thought, according to the laws derivable from the observation of its typical process, experiences the objectivising of thought in relation to an object - which is ordinary thought, thinking or having been thought - as a preparation for objectivising thinking itself, through insistence in the initial movement of thought: which is in itself the Logos-light of thought.
It is concentration, or intensification of the pre-dialectic moment of thought, capable of being experienced at first indirectly to the extent that one turns all thinking attention towards an object. This, at a given moment, ceases to be a limit for thought, or thing assumed as thought, itself becoming all thought. Act that is thought, until it demands something more than being thought: being contemplated.
There is no object that does not present itself as thought; but it is always the thought of an object, it is not really the thought that thinks the object: the thought experiencable only as a wilful act that grasps itself in the object, assuming its own force in the form through which it is “matter”. The object as object extinguishes itself, leaving thought free.
Thinking thought is that which is never truly thought, precisely because it is thinking something. It cannot but be immobile speculation, if it does not become experience, that is if it does not actuate the life that makes it be thinking: for which reason one can be thinking in thought and not in that in which it nullifies itself. This is the path of meditation.
The difference between the philosophical intuition of thinking thought - that, when it occurs, is itself thinking thought - and the experience of it, or meditation, is the same as that between the mental picture of water evoked through the desire to drink and that water that, on being drunk, quenches thirst.
Normally the soul expresses the evil of the world, that does not come from the world, but from its dependency from the bodily and thus from its having lost its spiritual nature, that is the force that dominates the bodily. Something must act in the soul which, whilst it belongs to it, has the power of transcending its dependency from the body and has the power to awaken the paralysed eternal element in it. This something is thinking, the original movement of consciousness, which each time, in the pre-cerebral moment of knowing, lights up with the light of the Logos, but which is unknown, and contradicted by reflexity. From which there is no way out with the theory of "thinking thought".
The true action is the will of thought, that is the being of thought, which meets the Logos of the world. But such an act can only be learned in meditation, or in concentration: thanks to it, the being of the world, the origin of Heaven and Earth, the secret of the original connection with every creature, is realised in thought
24
Thought seems sufficient, when it is logical and penetrating, or subtle, and to the extent that it gives explanations for the world, things, beings and for oneself, for feeling states , memories and thoughts themselves. But this is not yet true thinking: it is not yet that thinking which has no need for topics or objects to be concrete, having its own foundation in itself: a foundation looked for through itself in other entities: thought entities, without any consciousness of having them only as thought.
Facts, things, beings, the world, demand not the knowledge with which man organises them - even if this knowledge is necessary at a certain level - but knowing: that which, usually alienating itself as their form, is their initial being. The existing world is the spiritual world, unnoticed: its being is denied in the thought which, in order to be ordinary thought, extinguishes its own being, and therefore does not penetrate the world, and does not realise itself as the power that thinks the world, the transcendence of the world. It does not know that its own Logos is the Logos of the entities.
Mankind does not yet truly think, to the extent that it believes that thinking has been given it to explain the world, events and itself to it. But this is a matter of indifference to the world, as it is indifferent for the spirit.
Mankind must be able to discover that it thinks the world, things, and itself, only so that it can be stimulated to identify the thought that penetrates the world: to notice the thought that is never noticed, because it is always mixed up in things, and used to fill the empty shell of perception. Whilst the true content, as can be directly experienced, is pure thinking, from which the thoughts which weave the form of ordinary experience, external and internal, spring.
25
The world comes to man already having a form woven of thought: which initially is certainly not conceptual thought, but, as an image, made of the same substance as this: not noticed.
The world had and thought in this way is not the world. It gives itself as a form, or a reflection, taken on as content only in order to make known the force by virtue of which form is born. Form must become content, because the formative force is original thinking: it is living thought that can recognise itself in this. And through it, it can draw on the spiritual which gives itself as the world of the senses. The pure form of thought is the true content, the thinking power of the world.
The world can be penetrated, not by the thought that does not know it is the abstract clothing of its being, received as appearance, but by the thought that puts itself in motion on this side of the limit, grasping its making itself the form of appearance, or reflexity of the world. But it is this thought that, in grasping itself, continues the creation of the world, beyond the ready-made.
That which has made and makes the world, begins to show itself in mankind, as thought, which gives itself as the form of things. This form is in itself a creative force, that reflected thought does not know and contradicts.
The world wants to be penetrated by the thought that relives the process through which it is petrified into forms, as nature, as the past, as history: because these forms, taken up outside that process through which they have arisen and have become sensations, images, thoughts, are the non-truth that makes man ill. In truth, the petrified world is the spirit: which pushes on in mankind as life.
These forms must not become reality, lust, or thought, but be the means for that thought to become aware of being that through which they give themselves as forms, feigning life: whilst they are only the sign of life. Life is never perceived but only deduced, thought, in that it is the incorporeal movement of thought and the formative force, of which only the sensory effects are taken up through perceiving.
The correlation with life is already there in perceiving, but no-one possesses perceiving in essence, to the extent that in no-one is the person who perceives truly awake. Ordinary perceiving gives itself to the subject, but it is the continual and unnoticed escaping of the object of perception in order to feel one’s own body, that is that which can be had as the sensation of self on the basis of reflected consciousness. No-one ever possesses perceiving, because no-one knows how to be present in it, or to be “motionless” before it, or given to it more than to the sensation of self.
Nonetheless people believe they perceive objects.
Only through original thinking, non-dialectic, is life met: in fact never does any sensory organ perceive it, in that each one is structurally one with the sense-world. Only one true perceiver exists in fact: the I. The error lies in the substitution of the soul for the I in perceiving and at the same time the inevitable changing of the content of the latter: duality.
The senses are organs that are structurally correlated to the world: the correlation from which the soul subtracts the intimate life for itself in the subconscious sphere, and in which the I inserts itself perceiving consciously of it only that which in such circumstances it is allowed to penetrate, as its own movement flowing in the senses usually seems extraneous or other to it, but is in itself identical to the life of the world. Unless the I awakens living thought, or pure perception: which receive the one life.
Life: incorporeal movement as thought: thus thought of the universe: thinking the form of man. For which reason one can say that nature is the thought thought of the universe, the abstractness that awaits to be thought anew, removed from appearance, which is the first movement with which without noticing it, thought fixes it into that which it would be, in order to be, and yet does not manage to be. The senses feed its otherness.
Thought has still not truly met nature, because it dualises it: it does not know how to think it, since it is not that thought that, free of name and form, can flash up as the intimate light, or creating thought of which it appears to be a petrified form. But it is that petrified form which, already simply perceived or thought, begins to resolve itself, to immediately fall back into that which appears as a petrified form, as thought is not aware of its dissolving power: the intimate power of thinking that comes into action in the will that is freely willed.
Nature is the abstraction dependent upon the pure movement that alienates itself in it, and reaches out to find itself anew though the thinking person. The form in which it can resolve itself is that through which it would like to be thought with the force-thought, which is evoked each time and extinguished in order to be only abstract form. With this force-thought, the original unity of the world tends to rise up in human awareness, as a further impulse towards evolution: overcoming appearance, abstract form and duality.
This synthesis is required of thinking, because it bears it in itself as a transcendence, which is continually about to redeem the world in accordance with the Logos, but which is always hampered by un-free will, which penetrates its reflected form, dialectics and duality: it is usually manoeuvred by powers that are adversaries to the Logos which only just comes to the surface in thinking, but which dominates the world. The Logos dominates the world, even when it appears to remove itself from its dominion.
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The entities of the world, the objects, facts, feeling states, can be seen not as entities, objects, states, and facts, but as that which must stimulate thought: so that thought can be itself with them. Then they are truly seen, because that in which they begin to be is seen, which is something else. Thought in fact expresses itself as their veil, or clothing, or form, which is why they are considered to be reality; whilst nothing is real yet.
In fact thought, becoming mental picturing and conceptual activity, evokes a reality it does not know it provides with form, and which only being real in reflexity, is already de-realised.
Certainly, facts and feeling states, once produced seem irreversible, to the extent that they can only be perceived as they have become, not becoming. But the reason for this is that one is not able to grasp and retrace the current of thought that gives them a way to pitch camp as facts within the consciousness. Thought, in fact, is reversible through contemplation: one can trace it back to its birth. It is the activity, the only one, which can know itself, its own birth.
Objects give themselves in order to stimulate thought, so that it can retrace in itself the inner current of whose deprivation they are a sign. They do not present themselves in order to subordinate thought to themselves and to rise to a reality one craves and makes itself into the foundation of a culture, whose provisional nature can only be shown through pain and death.
Things, facts, states, are logical signs: pretexts for thought, which arises unknown: used but not seen, or rather, thinkable precisely because it is not seen. Seen in things, in facts, in states: in the already thought. Not seen as thought. But the whole play is for this: so that it might enter so much into experience, that mankind notes it objectively and therefore goes back along its flow, until it recognises it as that which has its own foundation within itself. And so it might look for it, because it is the essence to which it reaches out, of things and of itself, and is that foundation: which makes the world one.
Thought must first bind itself to given contents in order to express itself at the level of sensory experience, renouncing provisionally being what it is before it binds itself: necessary to self-consciousness. In such conditions, thought does not mediate the world - as should happen - but the world, unnoticed in its giving of itself, which already is thought , in reality mediates thought: that thought that has yet to be known and whose knowledge mankind resists with all possible thoughts, chained to the world, and chaining the I to the vision of duality.
True thought has not yet been thought. Facts, things, emotions, and instincts should not have a value to the extent that, grasping thought, they become the reality that dominates man, but to the extent that thought can, as against them, perceive its own unalterable being and turn away from them towards its own essence: to stimulate the research of which they substantially present themselves, aspiring to this as towards their integrative power. The essence is the I.
Only pure thinking can take on purely in itself that feeling that is corrupted in instinctive movements and in feeling states. For which reason it is the principle of a love that is not corrupted: which immersing itself unaltered in the sense world can give itself limitlessly to the human.
Instinctive movements and feeling states give themselves not to be suffered, but to awaken thought: not certainly dialectic thought, but that which, manages to perceive itself in their being, which is, in the pure state, the substance of life altered in them. They give themselves not to be undergone, but experienced: so that the I does not have them as the forms of its subjugation to nature, but actuates that which they awaken in the depths of nature. They demand from the I its autonomy, which is their autonomy, through which they can begin to freely express themselves in the world, operating as creative forces, no longer destructive.
Thought stripped of dialectics, in itself emptied of thoughts, is the first light of thinking feeling and willing, which leads the subterranean heat of the instincts back to be the pure emanation of love once more. Faced with such a light, all perceiving is holy: being the terrestrial nourishment of the spirit.
The sensory content gives itself only to be perceived, or in other words only for the person who perceives. But the person who perceives is not the bodily being: it is the I. In the I is the Logos.
27
Thought as it comes back to life, manages to surprise its own immediate movement in the clothing in which the perceived gives itself to it. Perception in fact arises to the extent that it has already taken on in a form, which is the unnoticed meeting of the purest individual inner activity, or pre-dialectic thought, with the world. Such a meeting belongs to the spontaneity of the natural being of man, at his present point of evolution. With regard to this one is asleep or dreaming, because only the point of contact with the reflected consciousness is received: as a perceptual fact having its own objectivity: which is fictional because it opposes itself to thought and is dominated by the relation with the instincts.
Perceiving always takes place for a subject: which must be there, must be present, if the content of perceiving is to be known for what it is in essence, and not for the subjective sentient-rational reaction to the sensory fact. This is a content that has nothing to do with that reaction, nor with the physiological apparatus of the senses, whose function is exclusively one of transmission. For which reason one can say that only rarely do humans master perceiving. Normally one perceives one’s own reacting, not the object, which remains unknown: limiting thought. But only thought can place a limit on itself; which is unconscious thought.
The experiencing person can take in the secret flowing of thought, before it becomes dialectic, as the immediate form of perceiving. Before it translates itself into sensation, or mental pictures and in mnemonic correlation, the person grasps the secret meeting with his own being with the being of the world. Which is the true meaning of perceiving, to the extent that it does not remain a physio-psychic fact, but is that which gives itself for the perceiver. Otherwise it has no meaning: neither has existing: which reduces itself to chasing after what one never has at any time and is in each point an obtuse sensation of self, rather than the content of the world.
The world, whilst thought is not living, can only appear, stimulating the sense-organs and immediately becoming the sensation of such appearance. Which is not the perception of the world, but desire dominating the I, and instinctive correlation..
Perception is not the object: it is the beginning of the synthesis, which should not be seen as the object in its finiteness, or other-ness. The other-ness of the object is already the sign of thought. It is the thought of the world which tends to rise in humans as individual thought, being arrested in its initial synthesis by the necessity of reflex consciousness to feel itself through the perceived, thus not knowing perceiving: which it nonetheless believes it masters.
Only the subject of perception can perceive, actuating through this its relationship with the world: which is an incorporeal one.
In order to actuate the thought of the world, thought must grasp itself where it begins to be alive: in being objectless thought, or in perceiving, in which it makes itself the form of the perceived. It must grasp this making itself into a form, in order to grasp the being of the world as living thought.
The perceiving that does not project itself into the soul as sensation-mental picture, or as abstract thought, is for a subject, who in him- or herself has no need to feel the self in the perceived, because he or she lives in the being that is: which simultaneously comes to it by means of perceiving, as the deepest power of the Logos.
The art of pure perceiving is the thinking that immerses itself into the being of the world, without falling into reflexity: it is not dialectic thought, but its pure vitality coinciding with the pure vitality of what is perceived. It is the resurrection of the supersensible from the sensory: the new Eucharist.
Pure perceiving leaves devotion as an imprint in the soul: the meaning of the true relationship of man with being. There is no true knowledge that does not lead to devotion.
Pure thinking, present in conscious perceiving, draws its light directly from the light of the Logos, which operates within the secret structure of the Earth, as the true Spirit of matter, the hidden lightning -flash of the mineral world.
28
Nature, facts, external becoming, one’s own becoming cease to be what they seem to be and what determines us, if one manages to receive the thought that weaves itself together with the perception one has of them: thought through which they are only the means of its initial manifestation. Which goes on instead to appear as their concreteness, an illusory concreteness that sickens the human psyche, becoming the normal subject of culture and history.
The initial and incomplete objectivity of phenomena tends, through the continuous internal contradiction, to indicate that which, thus incomplete, makes it operative in consciousness: the unawareness of the deepest movement of thinking identifying itself with that which is deepest in them, for which reason one believes one has to bring about a dialectic synthesis in order to know them, whilst the synthesis is already there. It has already been begun, it is precisely that objectivity: which one will never have as objectivity, as long as one does not know how and where the relationship with it begins: how, contemplated, it is contemplation itself, in which the person who contemplates grasps their own being within being: for which reason the synthesis is continuable. An inner content that mankind can return to the world: without which the world is inevitably deprived of meaning: deprived of moral inspiration, despite every moral aspiration.
When faced with living thought, the appearance of nature, history and subjectivity extinguishes itself as appearance, because it had no other meaning. It is filled anew by internal life, of whose deprivation it is the sign: which one usually mistakes for reality.
The real can be concretely known, to the extent that thought notices the form through which it makes its being appear, and perceives it as its own activity: in which is nonetheless stamped the sign - the determination of form - of the being that still is not, but begins to be in the initial contact, or identity through which it gives itself as form.
The form is the sign, or symbol of a knowledge stopped in its arising and despite this, taken on as something complete: through which, in truth, one never has what one believes one has and one proceeds in time through a thirst for life: which one takes to be life, but is only life chased after and never grasped in any point. Where thought, recognising itself in the determination of form, and at the same time freeing itself, it can continue the contact as far as the essence.
This essence of thought, that is simultaneously the essence of the thing, to the extent that thought can be seen where, through spontaneous movement, it is identical with the thing, already is an ideal root of it: perception and not speculation, even if it can at a later stage be expressed in concepts. This is the experience of the idea as a real content, as an objective event, which links the thing to the universal reality from which it has its origin. It is the reality that, flowing into the soul, becomes the power of moral inspiration, not to the extent that it pre-supposes a morality, but to the extent that, as thought impregnated with pure will, it can go meet the entities of the world taking on the original intentions of which they are symbols: and to translate them into further forces for evolution. No thing is detached from the centre of thinking in the world, from the Logos: it is up to mankind to carry out the re-connection to that which appears to be divided and multiple on the Earth, with its transcendent origin. The redemption of multiplicity is indeed the transcendence of thought: realised.
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The world becomes true if, as abstract objectivity, it loses consistency before the consistency of thought that alone has been able to make concrete-ness out of its provisional external-ness: which in fact one never has. No-one has ever been able to hold on to a sensation or feeling, as at each point they pass over into the next instant, which is identical, in its privation, to the previous one. Desire, in fact, is rooted in reflected thought.
This is transitory objectivity or concreteness, because it is correlated to the transitory, to the extent that it is reflected, thought: concreteness, nonetheless, of something that is fact there, and is not a mental picture nor a subjective construction of thought: something that the senses actually perceive, but without its seeming to arise from the imperceptible, as the perceptible is something only for the consciousness inherent in it. A limit that is recognisable as a limit of thought, which demands to be unfettered.
It is not therefore the world, but that of it which, through perceiving, is frozen in forms clothed in immediate thought, which must be taken for the world, so that mankind, each time attracted and disappointed by them, through contradiction and pain, looks for real thought: which will rectify the vision. This vision is, for the moment, of an abstract earthliness, which one would like to consecrate through a mechanical and abstract progress, the definitive death of thought: with regard to which the meaning of this caution can be understood: “My reign is not of this world.” Or in other words of a world in which one is not capable of noticing what has the power to make its unreality appear real: the principle of its reality, that demands the redemption of thought, and the discovery of the thought that resolves appearance.
The animadversio of transcendence, however, is a gift, or a "message", which has to be deserved.
30
Thought can be known as movement thanks to which the outer world and the inner world give themselves form in consciousness: a form that is only just sketched out and provisional, for the provisional life of the reflex I. Such a movement in reality is not to make life appear to the ego, but in order that the principle of the ego can react to such appearance as it reflects to it its limit, reacting at first through the gross thought provoked by events, without which common man would not know how to think., then through the concepts and the logical connections related to facts - which is the level of science - and lastly through the thinking that grasps itself independently of facts and concepts. So that it can experience what links one concept to another, the essence which is identical in each concept, and is the secret of the power of the world.
That movement is therefore only to open the way to the more vast being of thinking: which is still unknown, because it is continually alienating itself as the form of that appearance and dialectising the appearance of otherness, that is to say that which one assumes to be an objective content. This sensory content to which thought gives the form of reality, begins in this way to manifest its being: which nevertheless alienates itself in clothing such a content, since this is mistaken for the objective world, whilst it would not be anything without that form, which is the start of true objectivity. The power of form must be experienced as the beginning of the true content: visible transcendence.
Thought must be re-awakened in oneself to such an extent that the visible transcendence is noticed. Matter, in fact, no matter how much one believes one penetrates it physically, is always an internal structure, that is to say every time it is a relationship of thought amongst perceptive data. It is the appearance for mankind which does not know how to take in what it wills to appear and freezes it in its immediate arising. This is only so for humans: the appearance that one can see only by dint of gross thinking as being objectivity finished in itself, and which takes something called matter to be the basic substance of the world , which as a basic substance is not there at any point and every time gives itself as a perceived form, and always as a similar form, regardless of the extent to which it is penetrated. This content is thus effective only in its instrumental function and can be penetrated through this provisional function by that thinking which, in order to be, has no need of it; to the extent however that it has been able to find the mental pathway through it. The transcendental content of life of the sensory form of the world, flows and dies in every thought, whilst it is nevertheless not even supposed.
In the thinking that extinguishes itself by becoming reflex thought, there is given the continuous possibility of life: that which, unknown, animates the body and flows as the power of movement in the limbs, through which mankind does not operate nor does it ever move within a force in which it directly articulates itself as in thinking or imagining, albeit as a reflex. The clothing of reflex thought takes away from mankind the possibility of conceiving that it might articulate itself in thought as in a force of life, or in motor will that comes min directly from the cosmos, and which can only be met by precisely that transcendent thought, because it is equipped with all the force of life.
It is reflexity , through which inclinations and emotions cannot be objectively perceived: they can overcome the soul to the extent that they are provided with unconscious and adialectic thought through which they manifest, inverting the order of thinking, given that the ordinary lifeless thought cannot think them. And this should be the task of thought: to grasp them and transform them into its life, as they give themselves only for this purpose.
The adialectic thought subtracted from them animates itself with the vis (power) of the altered nature, giving the sensation of a vitality that never is real, because it is pursued in its contradicting the foundation. Only non-reflex thought could think inclinations and emotions: that is to say to penetrate them with the light of which they are a diminution. They would present themselves to such thought as the substance of a living synthesis that is never carried out: as a true object, and not as that which already is to the extent that it has already grasped consciousness and tends to operate through it,: as the synthesis of the original light, or the Logos.
The being of thought, where it can be directed to the world, no longer as the thought already imprinted by the world, brings to fulfilment the synthesis only just sketched out in ordinary experience.
Instincts and emotions, in their otherness, belong to the world: they are nature, in which mankind is passively immersed and which he must resolve in inner life, in knowledge according to the Logos -I.
Knowing can have nothing before it that is not knowable. That which is before it can only be before it because it is already knowledge: even if it is not noticed.
Being there, presupposes knowing. Being there, is already thought.
Only a thought incapable of self-consciousness can presuppose being to knowing, or oppose the product of thought to thought, logic to the Logos.
In true or living thought, mankind lives in the presence of the transcendence of everything. This is the secret of thought, which it bears with it, without knowing it, even if the laws of its dialectics are known.
In truth, in pure thinking each time the current of the future evolution of mankind incarnates, independently from karma. It prepares the future Earth, the Earth which already now is being born in secret: alive with etheric light of the thought that frees itself from its condition of being dialectical "appearance".
31
The facts of the world, pleasant or painful sensations, emotive-rational events, do not ask of humans that they constitute the life of the soul, but they demand with their very reason for existence that such a life through its knowing, return to being itself, so that at last it may live them, and in living them, will take them back to its beginning: which is their beginning.
They do not ask for painful or pleasurable languishing in their factuality, but ask that mankind, noticing as its own the power through which they appear, or emerge, know this power as its first intimate penetrating of them and at the same time as the force that frees from the enchantment through which it binds itself to them: to the extent that they appear.
They are letters or a language which must be known beyond the moment in which the form of the letters constitutes the problem of learning, or the sterile drama of intellectual , psychological penetration of their meaning: which is not their singularity, nor their mechanical juxtaposition, but the synthesis through which the being of thought that fragments itself and hides provisionally in them can become the experience of the immanent I: which through precisely this intimate logic should appeal to the correlation of which they present themselves as signs.
As outer and inner events weaving the life of mankind to the extent that it provides them with clothing of thought, they have no reality if not as stimuli to thought which, determining itself through them, it can only begin to know through such a path. It is the limit of reflexity up to which it has been led: whose surpassing is the beginning of freedom.
Before such a limit, freedom is the freedom of egotism.
Reflex thought is that which, despite its being capable of thinking everything, as thinking thought, still does not have the force to free mankind from nature so that nature may be known at last. Nature is the false or lower nature, precisely because one does not know it, but one knows one’s own unconscious inhering to and being subjugated by it. It is the inherence necessary to thought, in order for it to be ordinary , or reflex thought: whose intimate virtue however is being that which can surpass and redeem nature, to the extent that it can manage to know itself as the power that pre-exists before nature .
32
Nature dominates mankind, even as spiritual nature, to the extent that it is not yet a being thinking according to the thought that is, but according to the thought that is not.
Denying itself as thought, that is as the form of its own being, thought alienates itself to clothe experience: which is looked at as reality, while its giving of itself - as we have seen - is only the beginning of a vaster experience. In its initial form it gives itself only to stimulate thought and make it be experience: which, once experienced in itself, can lead to its own objective being, which is intimately within mankind and the world. This being is that which truly penetrates nature .
Deprived of any meeting with true thought, the world is not, and its non-being is the appearance that one mistakes for being: appearance whose formal weaving, nonetheless, is thought that does not know that it flows pre-dialectically in such a form. It can know it if it actuates itself as positive thought, to the extent that it is free from the senses, or perceives itself thus freed from the senses in “pure perception” as the form of the giving of itself of the given.
The experience of living thought is the possibility of rationalism lived right down to its last instances, or up to the exhaustion of its reflexity: a possibility that can actuate itself, not through natural evolution, but through the conscious flowering of the element of freedom and will latent within rationality.
Rationality itself, where it is known in its objective process, and not by opposing one aspect of such a process to another, leads to that for which it gives itself: its own extinction: which is to say, to the threshold of living thought.
For which reason any logic that places itself as a condition of knowing, renouncing the consciousness of the principle from which it draws its own formal structure, in fact crystallises reflexity in such a structure, without any hope of retracing it. It makes metaphysics out of the analysis of appearance: a discursiveness organised mathematically or mechanically, to which to refer thought once and for all: in order to cease thinking.
33
Having projected traditions, set out the norms, set into action the culture of reflex thought, whose development is nothing other than the mechanical progression of reflexity, identical at each point, and, on the line of such abstraction, having steered the science of the measurable towards its final consequences, which fantasises even about cosmic conquests, being unaware of its own limitations, - which cannot be resolved by the possibility of passing more quickly from one physical point to another, since each point at this level of being is worth any other, nor by atomic facts which are assumed to be absolute to the extent that they are facts, become myths, which also tend themselves to substitute inner action - the movement of the spirit seems now to be impossible and inconceivable, as the presence of that which in its absolute independence, sustains the concreteness of the world,.
The spirit itself, of which doctrines speak, without knowing that they depend themselves on reflected thought , becomes an abstraction: having the value of any image whatsoever taken from the sensory world.
The reign of facts and of facts that have become myths and of myths that dominate culture cannot be disenchanted except by a thinking that, through intimate logical demand, fully actuates its movement until it draws on the source of its force. This is true positivism.
The inalterability of such a force, flowing not as thought already imprinted by the senses, but as pure thought, becomes amongst other things, the possibility of recognising the form of facts, of myths, and of culture, as its own unconscious movement: to be summed up as such. Only thus summed up does it palpitate as the first life that truly lives: in which the being of man and the being of the world begin to coincide.
Supersensible experience does not eliminate ordinary experience, indeed it demands it as the raw material for the task: necessary to the inner element that, unchaining itself, perceives through it the deepest of othernesses, and at the same time the meaning of existence: which is the meaning of its being.
Nature is necessary to the supernatural that goes on to recognise itself; but to the extent that such self-recognition gives itself, nature ceases to be mere appearance. Its appearance each time can be the threshold of supersensible experience, and is meaningful only for this.
Thoughts are not for things, but for the individuation of a thinking that is their original substance: a substance which, were it to express itself directly, could not fail to disenchant facts and myths: which, being valid only as motives of reflexity and fictional otherness, would no longer be necessary to it in the form in which they are given for now: for which reason the view of the world would change. But this is the experience that awaits mankind: the meaning of being alive, or free, in the world, as realisers of the Logos of the world.
34
At least a slender minority of ascetics should arrive today at thinking all of thought: not certainly in the indefinite extensiveness that belongs to its reflex aspect, but in the intimate movement through which it is born.
It is the task of concentration carried out according to the pure movement of thought, which already in the rigorous relational-ness that belongs to modern science, manifests a demand for autonomy with regard to inherent or influencing items of a psychic order: this autonomy is the initial education of thought, where the object is seen not as an end, but as a means for extrinsicating thought. In any case this was supposed to be the meaning of modern science: not the arising of a "scientifical-ism" involving, in the end, the elimination of thought's first movement, and thereby any healthy use of technology.
Concentration is true when it conforms to the canon itself of thought perceived by the essence, and not when it is the expression of doctrines of the past which, by proposing specific spiritual objects to thought and by removing it from its own process - a method that once upon a time had its raison d'être - today present themselves as canons of the already thought, i.e. of a metaphysical "content-ism" that paralyses the real dynamic of the spirit.
By means of a given thought, one opens oneself to the force through which one can think it, thanks to the intensity and continuity with which one dedicates oneself to it, albeit for a short period each time. It should be thought with the forces that come from thinking itself, not from any psycho-physical tension. One should not think with the being one is, but with the thinking that is itself, despite and beyond this being.
The subject, having no value in itself, but only as the means of activating thought, is any subject whatsoever, a sign or point of departure for ordinary thought: a point through which one re-enters the Infinite. The form of the subject is the thought that is now thought not to the extent that it is that given form, but to the extent that it is the thought that one can immediately experience by means of it. The attitude of concentration, in fact, corresponds to the relationship that the I in essence has with thought.
The thought that has never been thought should truly be thought: so that life be experienced at last: so that life can be experienced at last: so that at last it can be the experience not of given objects in the form of thought and thus not actually had as objects, nor as thoughts, but of thinking itself not tied to any object: without any name nor form. Only this thinking can actuate the radical communion with the objects of the world and make itself into the form of contents experienceable as such: in their foundation, or their archetypal tissue.
It is the thinking that can think reality, because it is itself it essence. It must experience itself as essential and objective in order to have the world as essential and objective: in order to realise its being one with the world. Objectivity completely experienced is subjectivity completely experienced: the opposition between them is always the situation of reflex thought. Which gives itself only in order to lead back to its origin, and not so as to be fixed dialectically in the primitive form of its self-giving, imposed by the senses.
Sensory experience is the threshold of a life that allows itself to be supposed, but not to be grasped, by the thought that arrests it in the first form of its manifesting, by taking on such a form as life - chased after and always escaping one in sensory perception - and not knowing itself as active in such supposing and assuming. For which reason one deludes oneself that one lives in all that in which life is in truth denied.
But where the denial is known as such, the knowing that arises as the possibility of being beyond the annihilation, is the principle of life to which one aspired: it is the thinking that at last thinks by virtue of its own being, not of its non-being. Its non-being extinguished, or denied, by means of a will that animates itself as thought, is the beginning of its being.
It is the life to which one obtusely reaches out to have, without noticing that one is chasing after an image, not noticed as an image, and which therefore one never has, being in every moment subtracted from reflexity. For which reason one believes one grasps it in the successive moment.
This thought is not that which arises as the crowning of logical-philosophical argumentation, nor as the cultivation of spiritualistic know-how as the noble frame for one’s own egotism, but the thought that demands dedication to the mystery from whence it springs: dedication to which any logic that is not an error of thought should lead. It demands the penetration of the secret through which in essence it is the light inherent in sensory perception: a light that is equally the substance of creative ideas, of the archetypes.
The light of thought returns love into the world: its tissue is the heat in which the instincts transmute, and returns as higher spirit powers because heat is original to them, whose purity and transcendent vitality they have lost . Thanks to the light of thought, the heat of the instincts returns as a power of love.
The final meaning of the transcendence of thinking, taken in its everyday presence, is its revealing its power to resolve the instincts, of changing evil into good, of dissolving the darkness of the human psyche, in order for it to return light: being in the final analysis the power of love, which can be recognised in thinking's incarnating transcendence, which is the incarnating of the Logos.
35
This thought is the thought that knows how to will itself without willing itself in the body; that knows how to reach out without reaching out the bodily; which actuates its own being leaving the physical-psychic being intact and involved with itself. Its art is this.
It is the thought that demands its own self-extinguishment to the extent that it is mediated by the bodily; that is born from having silenced perceiving, willing and feeling and having extinguished the movement itself of its own silencing: arising as if from the death of all that it is not. Pure thought, the flowering of a life that is the being one is in one’s depths and which does not allow itself to be grasped in ordinary existence: the being that one is at the origin of life.
It is the thought that arises when, by means of meditation, one leaves to itself the being that one habitually is, the soul-body that is spontaneously absorbed in its own original wisdom as this gradually, like a rising sun, arises. It has in itself all wisdom, and thus all love, for which reason it can give itself as incorporeal heat to other beings and flow in the world. Being one with pure willing and pure feeling, it is the only force that can operate as love: There is no hatred, nor pain nor fear that can subsist before it. Its presence does not imply any struggle: it is all.
Reflex thought, fragmented into the series of topics, notes and subjects that weave ordinary life, each time dying to its original light, now returns, as a synthesis of the reflex and fragmented series, as thought-light that has in itself all the moments of its reflecting itself as thinking thought: as a timeless and single value of sensory experience. Which for now humans can know only by abandoning the scenario of life: itself, if they dare to experience the ultimate meaning of knowledge.
This living thinking, in fact, in its making itself individual, is love that returns to flowing from its original source. The love that man does not yet know: and yet is the power of knowledge itself. It flashes usually in every knowing, unknown, as the initial life of the I on the Earth.
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This thinking cannot in reality be called thought any longer. It has no longer any need of being thought, because it has nothing to think further in the meaning of reflexity, all the reflex always being the same lifeless movement: now exhausted.
That which is thought-synthesis, or the thinking moment, is before it as an object: as its own object that, to the extent that it already is thought, does not in truth ask to be thought , but rather to be perceived, or contemplated, just as external objectivity demands from the senses. Concentration becomes contemplation, and contemplation gives the single vision of existence.
To be free is this: not being at the mercy of that resounding of the exterior in the soul, through which thought usually makes itself the vehicle of appearance: but eo ipso (from this very reason) to be able to perceive this resounding, never truly perceived because it overwhelms the soul. Independent of reflex thought, one is independent of the bodily, which dissolves and returns as pure spontaneity: One is in limitless calm, the foundation of contemplation and the motionless principle of action. In sensory perception one takes in the thought that operates in the intimate structure of the world. Not affected by the sensory, one contemplates its secret: which is to move from its essence. The essence of the sensory arises in the world as thought: mankind must become aware of this, so that the event can take place simultaneously in the three worlds: the physical, the soul world and the spirit world, in reality moving from the latter.
The event is new in the world, but is demanded by the very logic of its becoming.
In usual thinking, mankind assumes the principles of phenomena in thoughts: it manages to think the essences reflectedly. They are the abstract laws of a world that places itself ready made before humans from outside. But where mankind, by conscious determination, succeeds in having the idea as an object, it is simultaneously one with a world in which the essences are creative forces: an event which cannot happen as long as the identification with reflex thought imposes the abstract laws of nature as if they were its real principles.
When the experimenter has the idea as an object, he or she finds him- or herself before a perception that does not need any further thinking, to the extent that it does not need to mean anything, this meaning being present there, and complete and living in itself, by means of the meditating act. He or she finds him or herself before that which must reveal or make a gift of its transcendence.
Perception is now thought contemplated whilst thinking, for which reason perceiving is the rediscovery of thought in its own original activity, that is in its own transcendence, now benefiting from the gift of its immanence.
The experimenter manages to live, by contrast, in the timeless sphere of that essence that he or she searched for in phenomena in vain, because this was done abstractly or reflectedly. He or she begins to live in that transcendent thought that, having thought the world, continues to think it where reflex thought supposes life to be.
It is the thought that ordinarily, arriving alive at the threshold of consciousness and tending to go thus alive to meet being, dies in personal thoughts instead. It also flows in perceiving, animating it with its life, that is identical to that of the content of the world, through which perceiving gives itself as the initial synthesis, that is immediately overcome by the sensations and mental pictures required for reflex consciousness. Perceiving, that is thus not known for the life it bears within itself: which as such, is super-sensible.
Now this thought is simultaneously perception: whose force of life does not degenerate into mental pictures or into sensations or into thoughts, as all the thinkable is perception and perception demands not further thought, but the presence of the I before it, or contemplation.
The synthesis demanded by the otherness of the world takes place in the secrecy of the soul of the person who contemplates: it is the vision of the essence that operates at the foundation of reality, but at the same time the beginning of its new acting in it. In sensory perception, by not intervening in the movements of reflex consciousness, he or she surprises the spirit that operates through the entities. But therefore he or she is one with it.
The spirit can only perceive the spirit: it knows to the extent that it is that which it knows. To be aware of this identity is however the beginning of living it. The un-noticed identity is the limit of mysticism, or philosophy, and of science. The identity is the transcendence that coincides with immanence, by means of the Logos that unites the Divine with the human.
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The path that we are proposing is not thwarting being in thought, which in such a case would itself be thwarted, but finding anew that primordial powerful thought which is the true one, to the extent that it is thinking the world and simultaneously thinking in mankind: who ordinarily, in making it its own, deprives it of life. In fact humans separate thought from the world in themselves, by seeking to reconstruct the world for themselves through such thought: that is abstracted from the object, because abstracted from its own source. Normally mankind does not think, because its thought is dead.
This thought, re-arising to the extent that a person decides it, is linked anew with the world, of which it is the inner tissue: deprived of which, the world is non-truth: which one consecrates as truth, by means of science and culture. The nature that mankind knows is born of its having removed the supernatural from it: the supernatural is restored to the world in living forms of thought, in which the spirit flows. From the broken shell of rationality the original life is freed: it resurrects from the dead.
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Thinking is the path of the transparency of the soul and of creative freedom, available at any time. It is the virtue that heals mankind and the world. At any moment, living thought, albeit through rare ascetics, can give clarity and a positive outcome to human experience. A very small number of people are enough, to work for the whole community, because only one thinking flows in the thought of the many: the transcendence becomes immanent where thinking actuates the power of the Resurrection. In reality such thinking wins over death.
Living thinking is a limitless height to which every thinking being can elevate itself to the extent that it intends to know that which makes it think, that is to know thinking in its reality, and not only in the reflex forms with which it provisionally adapts itself to sensory experience.
It is the limitless height which at any time people can know as their world of freedom, thanks to which alone they objectively meets other beings and the world. For which reason it is the principle of being alive to others and in the world.
Dead thinking can resurrect. Mankind can receive the Logos in thought, present in any case in every thought: continually re-enlivenable, in witness of the Resurrection, at the level of the mineral awareness and of the will: attesting to the transcendence found anew in the immanent.
Thinking is pure in itself, as the pure light that normally extinguishes itself in thoughts, dying each time in dialectics, and in logic. The time has truly come when it should resurrect in accordance with its own pure being, that is in accordance with its truth or power: which is the logic of the Logos, that is capable of expressing itself also as dialectic determination: nothing existing in the human that It does not have to regenerate.
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Only humans man can transform the perceptions and sensations of the world into thoughts, which in other beings, just as in primitives, are sufficient unto themselves. Only a human can steer its own nature, which is the orientator in other beings. We pilot it by thought. And we can, by grasping thought, make the supernatural in nature an actuality.
The same supersensible force “from outside” compresses and holds the mineral down to the physical, enters into the physical in the plant and operates there as a structuring force, whilst it presents itself as mobility in the animal coinciding with the movement of the instincts; in humanity it can begin to manifest itself directly: as thought. The formative force of nature has finished its work, by leading the structure of mankind to the form that can express our spiritual being. Now the task is mankind’s, no longer nature’s.
In the realms of nature the spirit is involved in the building of life: in humanity which, as a vital-physical being, sums up the reigns of nature, life, to the extent that it is developed, can become a vehicle for the spirit. This is the meaning of life, not the expression of it by means of the spiritual.
The self-expression of the spirit through mankind, to the extent that it depends on bodily nature, is not yet its true being: as we have seen. Bodily nature has been the bearer of the spirit in the ancient world, when the spirit operated immediately upon it to make it the vehicle or its individuation. In fact, in the ancient world, self-conscious mankind was not yet born.
Whoever understands how the spirit operates in nature, and at last grasps itself in thinking humans, by means of a nervous system whose structure is the accomplishment of its long formative work, can understand the meaning of the ascent we are putting forward. The brain is not the thinking organ of corporeal life, but the organ that the spirit has formed itself to express itself consciously through bodily life. Its first self-expression is thought. Only humanity, in fact, can assume nature in thoughts, which gives itself exclusively by means of sensations. These would not mean anything, nor would they become feelings, without thought.
The self-actuation of the powerful principle that up to know has worked so as to express itself, as thought, cannot be a movement of nature or a mechanical movement, but of that which in mankind is independent of nature. The element of freedom set into thought is the conscious flowering of the spirit in the human condition.
That which can re-arise to the spirit from nature , is always re-lifted by thought: which begins by penetrating it. There is no feeling that reawakens from the bodily limit to the heights of devotion and love, if not called upon in its essence by thought. In truth no feeling gives itself that is not the clothing of light and warmth of a thought. But every thought that returns to life in accordance with the force from which it springs, clothes itself with such warmth and light.
No feeling can give itself if not to the consciousness that the experiencing subject has of it: which all the more vast, the more vastly the consciousness can open itself to it. This is a consciousness whose tissue, in reality, is pure thought.
Whoever looks for the living roots of thought finds the Divine: the true path of meditation or of prayer. In truth the most real ascent, because it is the newest, because it is the oldest, goes via thought. An ascetic that cannot see this is an ascetic asleep.
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We have shown how the highest hope of mankind is to deserve actuating the light of thought as light perceivable in its not being yet reflected, to the extent that it does not take as light its self reflection, or the ordinary thought that thinks. This is the further movement of the self-reflection of humanity, towards which at least a minority of ascetics should work. From these moves the transmission of the virtue of living thinking, that has lit up the Spirit World in them.
It should finally be understood that no thought is valid if not for the original thinking that is enclosed and altered in it; nor is there any thought that, in its birth, does not hark back to such thinking, as to the being of which it is a temporary negation. For which reason the conscious extinction of a given thought, as a real and not merely dialectic negation of negation, is the possibility of the authentic being of thought: for whose arising alone, the experience of thought has been given.
But this is not a philosophical operation. The present treatise has especially sought manner to clarify how the experience to which it refers cannot be speculation, but its exhaustion in that process, to the extent that the process through which speculation gives itself is possessed. It is a requirement of concentration, or the return to meditation, as to an operation that is urgent in mankind’s history, being the inner nourishment that was at one time given and fed to it, and that by now it must find for itself, by intimate determination, or freedom.
The misunderstanding of reducing every inner demand to a philosophy, to religion or theory or psychology, must be overcome. The inner action referred to is neither philosophical nor mystical, but an action of that in which mankind at last can be operational alone: thought as thought-force. There is no feeling or willing that gives itself without the structuring movement of thought. But thinking, ceasing to be reflexity or speculation, to the extent that it possesses and exhausts them, realises itself in essence and is one with feeling and willing . Here it receives the Logos that makes it live: it actuates its own transcendence.
In reality, thought is the transcendence that, though a continual wonder of the thinking soul, gives itself to humanity, but escapes reflex awareness, in the force of a shadowing, or of a subtle process of death in the brain organ.
The transcendence must be realised: if humanity is truly to be born and not its caricature. Thought must be thought, until it can be contemplated as a synthesis ever being born in the soul: because this contemplating is the opening of oneself to the spiritual flowing in humanity; not by means of any detachment from the human, as in the traditional world, but by penetrating the human to its very essence. Which is the final meaning of thought and the self-individuation of mankind. Thought in truth, rests in the Logos: it must deserve expressing the Logos.
Outside such a possibility, it must be recognised that no thought exists that truly thinks, if not as the philosophical intuition of something that nonetheless is not there, because it extinguishes itself each time for its object and is never graspable in itself. One can only refer to it as to the thought that at a given moment thinks an object, the object being in its determinedness the final meaning of thought, or paralysis of its being.
The ultimate meaning of thought, on the contrary - as we have seen - is that thought itself that, free of its determinations, which in any case provisional, reveals its cosmic being, to the extent that it draws itself from its own infinity: being the foundation. The only thing experiencable as the foundation: as an immanent transcendence.
It is the light of the Logos, that man is looking for, whether he knows it or not: so that life at last be life and not the logic of death.
The continual death of thought today intensely demands resurrection from the essence of the soul, as the restoration of the life from which it continually springs, without knowing it: because that resurrection is already realised in the human heart. The Saints in every part of the Earth have witnessed to this. Now, however, the time has come for conscious resurrection. The mental is not to be avoided, but transformed. By now, the I humans say they are, cannot be the I, if not in living thinking.
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Appendix
ON INNER CONCENTRATION
Thought is the immediate vehicle of the I, the pure immediacy, but not known as such to ordinary mankind, who at most recognises it philosophically as mediation.
The greatest modern teacher of thought, Rudolf Steiner, does not cease to indicate the freeing or transforming discipline, or the ascent of pure thought, concentration, in fact, as a fundamental for inner realisation. Any type of concentration is in itself an operation of thought. In such a sense, concentration is the key to every inner technique, be it of a yoghic, vedantic or sufic type, etc., but it becomes the key to authentic inner action, when it grasps the process itself of thinking which lies at the root of every inner technique: the Treatise refers to such a key.
Thought, as it is daily experienced by modern rational man, is the continuous inner deterioration, now deductive-inductive, now cerebral-instinctive, of a higher force, which is in itself a current of synthesis of Light and Life. Here thinking has within it the will, and the will has feeling within it. In a superconscious zone, the three faculties of the soul, thinking, feeling and willing are a single resplendent force. If as such, that is with its original power of Light of Life, such a force were to descend into the human organism, it would destroy it. In order to incarnate itself therefore, this force divides itself into three currents, of which one alone, thinking, becomes conscious: but it becomes conscious at the cost of its reflecting itself in the cerebral organ. By giving up its own subtle element of life, thought becomes a dead reflection, a shadow, provided with movement in which there is no longer any soul, or inner light: it is the dialectic movement, so dear to modern philosophers, materialistic or spiritualistic: the thought of impotence. The other two currents, feeling and willing, indeed maintain their element of life, but on condition of binding themselves to the subconscious somatic sphere, that is to the sentient, and vital or etheric bodies, so that their dynamic alters and rises to consciousness under the forms of emotive and instinctive flows respectively.
Normally humanity finds itself in the dream state with regard to living feeling and in a state of deep sleep with regard to living willing: it is awake only in lifeless thought. This deprivation of life makes thought independent of its original synthetic current, for which reason mankind is indeed free in thought, but with an abstract rhetorical freedom, lacking power over things, because it lacks the spirit. The empty shell of this freedom is normally filled up with instinctive contents: for such a reason mankind correctly holds itself to be free, but is substantially manoeuvred by instinct. By not being aware of the original synthetic force, thought does not manage to distinguish itself from sense contents, just as it does not manage to carry out a real synthesis of the world’s multiplicity as it comes to meet it in sensory perception: it cannot manage to carry out anything other than partial conceptual synthesis and it does not manage to move except through dialectical relationships between measurable quantities. The falling apart of thought is only just healed by the logic in physical - mathematical thought. The real thought-force in reality divides itself into a continuous series of mental pictures, whose small chaos is only just ordered by logical formalism. Instincts and emotional states usurp the consciousness, thanks to this impotence of thought, strong only on the level of abstract quantity or of absolute mechanisms: incapable of recognising the source of its minimal power.
Concentration restores, albeit each time only for a brief moment, the dominion of the I in the soul, to the extent that it demands of thought its moving according to its own synthetic power: it manages this through a topic willed for itself, as a means for the unification and intensification of the current of thought that is normally dispersed. Through the attention turned unlimitedly towards a theme, or an image or a concept, which must pitch exclusive camp in the consciousness, thought finds its original unity, the force of the I.
The common human error, just as the error of those who try to find the supersensible dimension again, without noticing that they move from a dialectic consciousness, normally lies in the fact that the real presence of the I in man is not direct, but continually reflected by the physical and thus by the sentient body or psyche, corresponding to that which is called kama rupa by the Hindus, and the “astral body” by Western occultists, that is the soul body bound to the bodily categories. In common mankind, in fact the psychic impulses of the astral body continually substitute themselves for the metaphysical impulse of the I. Through the astral body, the physical body, with its instinctive powers and its emotional demonisms, manages to manoeuvre thought. Such a situation specifically denotes modern man, whose thought has fallen so far into the cerebral, that it manages even to doubt its own autonomy with regard to the organ of the brain, and to construct doctrines and theories founded upon the conviction of the priority of the cerebral processes over thought: which is the situation in the animal world. In fact animals do not think, but operate through a wise non dialectic "thinking", whose immediacy moves from the physical body, backed up by the forces of its own incorporeal "group soul".
The exclusively rational dimension degrades mankind to the animal level: in fact its intelligence is mobilised across the globe to satisfy physical needs and to realise an iron system of economic-social organisation that corresponds to the physical-animal world view. If there is a primordial moment in human evolution, in which original humanity as a spiritual entity overcomes chaos, it is necessary to say that the present imposition of the physical-animal organisation on society, is a return to chaos in scientific-technological form. Once again the Spirit is called upon to face up to chaos, the systematic coming forth of the demonic. The drama of the present times consist in the fact that the ordinary I does not have the potential depth that the demonic has available on the other hand. The I needs the force from which it arises.
Concentration allows thinking to make its own pure force manifest, independently of the psyche. Thinking removes itself temporarily from the domain of the astral body, that is from the force of the instinctive powers. Such powers in reality are forces of the I, that is to say, forces of the deep will, deviated towards the structural bodily needs. The I undergoes them as deviating and in opposition, for as long as it is a reflex or dialectic I, lacking its own independence with regard to the astral body and thus the power to grasp it. The exercise of concentration, in reality moves from the I, and starts to restore to the I its own original dominion over the astral body.
Thought is the I's immediate limb. By dominating thought through the astral body, the bodily-instinctive forces impose themselves on the I. By freeing thinking from subjection to the astral body, the I takes control back over the soul, and thus over the body, and it controls and transforms the bodily-instinctive forces. These are in substance superhuman forces lost by the I, that the I has the task of recovering by drawing on its own superhuman power. This recovery starts by means of the correct thinking concentration: thinking must be given the means of manifesting its own objective force independent of the astral body and this able to convey into the soul the I's transcendental force: this alone can transform the instincts. Whoever aspires to Initiation in the present day, must first of all experience thinking as a pure force, independent of any object or the topic through which it manifests, and as an extra-psychic activity: in such a way he or she opens the way for the transcendental power of the I.
The meaning of the experience is the autonomy of awareness of the I with regard to its own bodily basis: an autonomy that allows the first form of non dialectic but direct knowledge of the Supersensory, and thus of the real phenomena of awareness in relation to the functional bodily "localisation" of typical; soul movements.
In this way one starts to observe how thinking activity takes place by means of the brain organ: rational awareness manifests in the head, which is basically stimulated by sense perception. The life of the feelings on the other hand has its seat in the thorax: its support is the power that explicates itself in the rhythms of breathing and the circulation of the blood. The power of the will has as its vehicle the metabolic dynamism of the digestive system and the movement of the limbs. In the same way that the three systems, neuro-sensory, rhythmic and metabolic interpenetrate one another in the physical organism, whilst each of them has a predominant function in its own seat, so the three functions of thinking, feeling and willing operate in continual combination or collusion, in accordance with a reciprocity that exceeds the functional one of the bodily processes.
A human is in reality a threefold being. The old rational psychology had intuited this trinity of the life of the soul, but not its corresponding to the three bodily seats, which is a contribution from Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science. The three seats, differentiated down to their very physical structures, whilst they correspond to the three types of conscious activity referred to, at the same time turn out to be in dynamic relationships with the four systems of the bodily organisation: the bones, the glands, nerves and the blood. We say "dynamic relationship" to the extent that the threefolding in the seat of the head, the thorax, the metabolic system and the limbs takes place by means of the same principle of psycho-somatic synthesis that governs the four bodily systems that are simultaneously present and in co-operation in each of the three seats.
A septenary system operates through the "four" and the "three". This is a basic harmony, that is not mechanical, to the extent that each of such systems, if examined on its own, may be acknowledged as operating in accordance with a type of super-sensible force that dynamically corresponds to it: the radical forces of the physical structure correspond to the mineral-bony element, and gives signs of themselves in sense perception: the gland system may be recognised as the vehicle of vital or etheric forces that form the organism; the nervous system is the support for sentient-psychic (astral)activity; the blood system bears the I principle, which manifests as self-awareness in the system of the head, by means of a special relationship with the organ of the brain.
Modern man, with its obsession for realism, is attacking the septenary order with forces of chaos: therefor neurosis and mental illness are becoming the general human ill. In fact, the four inner principles, the I, the astral, the etheric and the physical are present in simultaneous and interdependent movement in every manifestation of the three activities of the soul, thinking, feeling and willing, whilst organically they are the original forces penetrating the respective seats of them each: the higher, the middle and the lower one which each correspond precisely to the three systems of the heart, of the thorax and of the metabolism and limbs. Balance in the life of the soul can be seen as the realisation of the hierarchical order through which the principle of the I works on the astral, the etheric and the physical, by means of the harmonic relationship between thinking, feeling and willing. The I principle bears in itself the original centre of the forces. Where this principles is contradicted, chaos starts to reign in the human structure.
But chaos itself has a deep raison d'être: awakening the transcendent forces of the I, so that they may incarnate in humanity. The simple "human" has no power to dominate and transform the instincts: at the most he can come to an "agreement" with the entities that manipulate mankind through the instincts: but that is not spiritual action. It is necessary to give unbounded power to the transcendent being of the I which, being identical with the Logos in itself, has this power as the secret of the soul, as the secret of the heart.
Before the investigations of Spiritual Science, the life of the soul turns out to be bound not only to the nervous system, but also to the other systems, with differentiated relations, that ordinary awareness does not pick up, but of which it continually receives the manifestations: to which causes it may arrive not by intuitively retracing the process, because this retracing cannot surpass the limitations of the vital-animal nature, but by realising the principle that is independent of the manifestation in itself. Thinking and neuro-sensory activity can only be attributed to the nervous system: thus thought is the only activity of the consciousness that is able to retrace its own pre-cerebral process. Feeling and willing call back not to organs, but to supports that are in movement, like the blood-respiratory system and the metabolic system that do not offer the I any basis for waking consciousness, like the nervous system does. Feeling and willing, in fact, whilst they are activities in which certain manifestations are sensorily perceivable, take place at levels which for waking awareness correspond respectively to the dreaming state and to the state of deep sleep.
That which usually manifests as waking awareness, arises in the seat in which thought is produced: it is in essence thinking awareness, even when it moves for emotional or instinctive contents. Such an awareness has no direct perception of feeling or will contents, like it does for thought. Feeling and willing, which take place by means of other supports, may be picked up through the nervous system, which is not their vehicle, but the vehicle through which the come to awareness.
From the fact that instinctive-wilful and emotional-feeling movements have repercussions on the nervous system as far as the cerebral system, modern psycho-physiologists automatically deduct that the life of feelings, instincts and will impulses take place through this system. In reality the manifestations of feeling and willing, even though they manage to be picked up through the activity of the nerves, do not take place through this. Inner investigation shows that a developed life of consciousness, can allow humans to perceive feelings, or soul states, or impulses, before that enter the nerve network, that is by means of an objective prior encounter with them, through which their objective content can be received, that brings out discrimination, consent or refusal in good time. However, for this the specific ascent of thinking and perceiving is necessary, for which concentration is the preparation.
In reality, the processes of feeling and willing take place by means of bodily supports with which human awareness has no direct connection. But even when it does have this connection with its own legitimate nerve support, awareness is unable to perceive it, if it does not educate itself through an appropriate discipline. The connection exists at a level that escapes ordinary rational awareness, that is unable to experience itself independently of its support. Awareness can, thanks to a direct inner act, arrive at the source of thinking activity and be aware of being at the centre of the origin of thinking. This process, that takes place thanks to its independence, albeit temporary, from the nervous system, allows it to realise a detachment and objective control with regard to emotional and instinctive contents, that normally give themselves as sensations complete in themselves, having already involved the I, that is having already taken place at physio-pshychic level before being perceived, for which reason they present themselves with a character of necessity and compulsory nature, that makes up the real issue in inner experience.
From what has been observed, one can intuit that there is a priority for the discipline of thinking for the goal of freeing the soul faculties and for lifting up awareness to the perception of the primordial that united humanity with the cosmic. The Super-sensible cannot be grasped by dialectic thought: in its metaphysical current free thinking can only just begin to move. But thinking is not freed using methods that belong to an ancient type of ascent, to which the handicap of rational-dialectic thought was foreign, and which therefore had not need to convert the dialectic process. This conversion is vital for the modern researcher, who initially has no other means available for contacting the Science of the Sacred, other than that of the rational, and therefore dialectic intellect, even when behind that intellect a metaphysically qualified soul is driving forwards, that is one that is already in harmony with the higher impulse of the I.
Above all in the case of actual inner qualification, it is necessary for the discipline to avoid the breakdown on the higher forces through reflex thought. In reality, at the level of ordinary awareness bearing the sense of self from bodily support, supersensible forces, with regard to which such awareness is plunged in a state of dreaming and sleep, undergo an reversal, that is the reflex state, that only the waking state can face up to and gradually retrace, to the extent that, despite the limitation that belongs to the dialectic condition, it moves in accordance with the higher direction of the I.
True inner disciplines are those that allow thinking to operate, at rational dialectic level, in accordance with the higher direction of the I. We refer to the Path of Thought of the new age and to the type of concentration referred to in the pages of the Treatise. Such a path has the power to lead the researcher to where the error of the spirit dialectic ceases, as the researcher becomes, in accordance with the invisible masters, worthy to know the final meaning of the reaching and of the disciplines, the transcendence present in every thought that he or she thinks: a transcendence that cannot be subject to the logic of dead thought, nor even of thinking thought, that is to spiritualist intellectualism, since it is the Logos, whose light alone can restore the original divine nature to the soul.
INDEX
Preface
4
Treatise
5
Appendix. On Inner Concentration
95
