Thinking as a Spiritual Activity

Excerpts from a recent talk.

Thinking With Anthroposophia

Sharing some excerpts from my talk for the anthroposophical youth section earlier today:

I’m a philosopher. I teach in this program, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, which includes pretty much everything. I knew from the time I was eighteen or so that I wanted to become a teacher and that philosophy was my calling. I went to undergrad and was very disappointed by what I found. I was expecting philosophy professors to be wise — to love wisdom, to approach philosophy as a way of life, as a spiritual practice. And I did not find that at all. It was a profession for them, a job, and they didn’t seem to like it very much. There was a lot of bitterness and infighting in the department, and I was so discouraged that throughout undergrad most of my study took place outside the classroom, in my own reading. I would wander the library at night and pull books off the shelf and piece together this history of thinking — East and West and South, though I’m mostly oriented in Western philosophy and history, esotericism, and religion. Eventually I found a graduate school — the one I now teach in — where philosophy was a way of life, where thinking wasn’t just something you do with the top of your head but something that can transform your entire life.

Anthroposophy was something I discovered in graduate school. I studied with Robert McDermott — I don’t know if that name is familiar to any of you; he’s now retired, but he’s been an important friend and mentor to me. He didn’t begin with thinking when he introduced Steiner to me. He began with the Gospel of Luke, and the idea that there are two Jesus children, and Zarathustra’s ego, and Buddha’s Nirmanakaya — all of this really esoteric stuff, which had me spinning. But something called me to this work that was deeper than my rational mind understood at the time. My rational mind was saying: turn around and leave. But something pulled me deeper, and I discovered that the method of entry into that very esoteric worldview and cosmology — all of the spiritual beings — is ultimately through thinking. That was my path. So I’ll try to share how that opened a door for me into what initially seemed like quite a weird world, and now feels nourishing to me.

Today we’re trying to cultivate thinking — but thinking, feeling, and willing are inseparable, so feeling and willing will inevitably come in a little bit today.

I wanted to share some ideas to set the scene, to gather us around this activity of thinking, which is very mysterious and very ordinary at the same time — because we’re always doing it, sometimes consciously, and sometimes thoughts just happen. I’ll share a few things Steiner offers and get into his cosmology, which is a little esoteric. But I want to begin with something more concrete and experiential, by drawing your attention to the feeling of your seat in your chair right now — the weight of your body, the warmth of your body. Maybe you’ve naturally closed your eyes, but I invite you to open them again and see the light reflecting off the walls and the colors of the walls. Look around the circle and see the contours of all the faces we’re sharing this room with. And now notice that you’re breathing. Before you noticed you were breathing, you were still breathing — but being breathed. What’s astonishing about thinking is that when we bring our attention to our breathing, all of a sudden we take hold of it. We breathe: we can slow our breath, deepen it, breathe more rapidly. And then our thoughts wander off, and the breathing continues without us having to pay any attention to it.

That might seem like an ordinary fact, but it’s kind of strange. I would invite us to consider the strangeness of that threshold between paying attention to our breathing — doing it on purpose — and our thoughts wandering off to something else while the breathing continues.

There are other aspects of our life processes that we’re not as able to take hold of in that way, at least without lots of training. We might be able to attend to our heartbeat and try to calm ourselves down, but there seems to be less access for most of us to managing our heart rate. And I don’t know that anyone I’ve met is capable of controlling their own digestion by attending to what’s going on in their gut. That’s a lot harder even, right?

What I’m directing our attention to is the way that, in our thinking activity, we can descend into our feeling life and gain a kind of dreamy consciousness of what’s going on in our emotions. For some of us it’s very difficult to describe how we feel; others have more facility with that. But we’re going deeper into a kind of dreamy consciousness when we think about our feeling. And when we think about our willing, it’s almost as if we’re asleep in our willing. What I mean is — it’s not that we don’t have a sense of freedom, but: I’m thinking out loud right now, and I have some intention about the words I want to share, and somehow those intentions move my vocal cords and shape my tongue and my lips, and air pressure is released from my mouth and travels through the air to your eardrum, vibrating a membrane, and all this nervous-system activity is unleashed — and then meaning arises again. I have no idea how my vocal cords work, or how speech is produced from my intentions. And I don’t think you have any idea how your ear and your brain are participating in reassembling those vibrations into something meaningful. I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of how that whole process might take place in a purely physiological or physical way. It seems that when meaning passes from one soul to another, something spiritual is happening. We can describe it through all these physical mechanisms, but my consciousness doesn’t actually know, in my thinking, how any of that is done as I intend to speak to you. Similarly, I raise my hand: I’m aware of the intention and the result, but how my muscles do all of that — how the will actually operates at the level of my body — I’m asleep to that. And yet it happens.

So in our thinking activity we can be aware of so much — but we’re also asleep. Steiner would say that in our will, we’re asleep. It’s as though, while we think we’re wide awake during the day, we’re carrying around a sleeping human being with us as well. And everything works in these polarities. You might think: oh, I should be more aware, I should think more and attend to as much as I possibly can. Well, that’s not really the lesson here. To be awake, we need to sleep — just as, to be alive, we need to die. Death is not accidentally related to life, just as sleep is not accidentally related to waking. There’s an oscillation here, a rhythm.

And so, while we want to be free in our thinking, we also have to be able to go to sleep at night. And if we’re honest with ourselves, in all humility, most of our thoughts are other people’s thoughts. Most of our opinions are other people’s opinions. We hear things, we pick up ideas, we read about things — from trustworthy sources, usually — and we say: well, that sounds good, I’ll have some of that, I’ll repeat that, and that will be good enough. When we’re thinking creatively, we’re discovering truths that have never been thought before. There are truths that only I can think and discover; there are truths that each of you can only think and discover for yourself. And we want to strive for that. But to admit that most of our thoughts are habitual — inherited from teachers, from parents, from our whole culture and civilization — is not an insult. It’s just a fact of life. We need to inherit our mother tongue. I am speaking English; I didn’t invent this language. I had to learn it through mimicry in order to express any thought at all — whether I’m just passing along someone else’s opinion, or trying to have a free thought and share a new idea for the first time. So there’s always this interplay between habit and novelty, between life and death.

To say that most of our thinking is dead — that we’re often repeating the corpses of thoughts that were once living — is not an insult. It’s not a failure. It’s inevitable. But the point is that the corpses of the past, the thoughts of the dead, you could say, are the soil out of which living thinking must grow. And we might have some responsibility to the dead: to resurrect those thoughts, to carry this activity forward into a future that, as we read in this verse, is uncertain — and yet, we have help. These dead thoughts we carry with us provide a sense of support and momentum. We don’t want to just repeat them, but we nonetheless need them to have a sense of direction.

One last thing I’ll share now. When we inherit that past — all of these dead thoughts from all the human beings who have lived before us, now living in us — it’s a gift. But there’s also a lot of trauma we’re inheriting. Pain and suffering and anger. Some of the thoughts we inherit are even seeking vengeance. That’s all there too. And the only way to step into the future, in light of all we’re inheriting, the good and the bad, I think, is through an act of forgiveness. Because when we’re free in our thinking, it’s because we’re relating to it as a kind of gift — not only a gift we’re receiving from the past, but a gift we’re handing to the future. Forgiveness is what allows us to metabolize all of that pain. And there’s also a sense in which we need to forgive in order to meet the future — forgiving the gods, even, for the fact that we die to ourselves. Moment by moment, as we’re thinking: what’s left behind, as soon as we express a living thought, is now a corpse. And we have to give that to the future just as we received it from the past. So thinking, when we’re doing it freely, is a kind of thanksgiving, I would offer.

Maybe just one more thing. Something Steiner said that struck me early in my study of anthroposophy, and has stuck with me perhaps more than anything else, is that thinking is the one place in the entire universe where, if anything is to happen, you have to do it. That’s our entryway into transformation, into participation. When I hear that, it feels like a heavy burden initially — I’ve been in moments in life where I’m afraid to be involved, and something dies in me when I have that fear. Because in our “I,” our first-person pronoun, our thinking activity — it’s up to us. No one can do it for us. No one can say “I” for me, or for you. And something in the universe remains incomplete without each of us stepping in — not just through our thinking, if that’s the doorway, but through our whole feeling and willing life. The universe lacks something if we don’t show up, if we don’t bring who we are into the mix. Again, it may feel like a burden at first, but it’s also an invitation: no one can bring what you can bring.

QUESTION: how do we know when our thinking is truly free?

That is a very challenging question to answer in general, because I have a hard enough time knowing which of my own thoughts are free. And it’s very hard, if not impossible, for me to tell anyone else which of their thoughts are free, or when they’re engaging in creative thinking and not just habitual thought. So I can’t answer for you. But maybe you can tell the difference, and maybe it feels something like this: there’s a difference between having a thought and free thinking. Free thinking feels like giving birth to a new self. It’s a birthing process — which feels different from “oh, here’s a thought; hmm, here’s a thought.” Rather: I don’t know who I am now. I’ve just become something new. Does that help?

QUESTION: what effect is artificial intelligence having on our thinking?

I will offer some thoughts here that are — well, definitely somewhat esoteric, but I think we can work with this. Steiner talked about the Archangel Michael, the bearer of a cosmic intelligence that was gradually given over to human beings. Over the last thousand years or so, we came more and more to have that thinking, that intelligence, and to experience it as if it were just in our heads — whereas it used to be experienced as living in the cosmos. You could trace this through the evolution of philosophy: something called nominalism arose, where we began to imagine that ideas were not eternal forms existing beyond our heads, but just names we give to classify things. We generalize “dog” as a category and gather all the different breeds under that name, but there is no archetype of the Dog — that would be the older, Platonic view. And as intelligence became more and more something human beings thought they possessed — some kind of brain activity — well, there is this other being, whom we may all know: Ahriman, who wants to have that intelligence, to take it away from human beings. Human beings aren’t just minds and heads; we have hearts, and our thinking is warmed by love. But Ahriman wants that thinking, that intelligence, to be mere calculation — a statistical regression, a language model that can run without blood, that has no metabolism, no heart.

That’s our challenge right now. You could say there is a battle between Michael and Ahriman — and the battlefield is the ground of your own attention. Moment by moment, your own thinking activity: that’s where the battle is occurring. And I don’t think the idea is to close the laptop, turn off the phone, and run the other direction. This technology is here to stay; we are going to have to deal with it. And we can deal with it, if we remember where our freedom is found: in our thinking, in our attention. That’s where we can remain free from the temptation to let the machines do our thinking for us.

COMMENT: Thinking isn’t merely subjective. It allows us to share a common world of ideas, if only we can free ourselves from the confines of our subjectivity.

“Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” [laughter] But it’s true — thinking does get dismissed very easily as merely subjective. And that’s something to sit with and wonder about: is free thinking just your own opinion, or are you tapping into a reality that might not be visible — you may never see the elephant as a totality — but that thinking itself, as an organ of perception, is nonetheless touching? And can we come to share what it’s touching, with a loving attitude rather than a skeptical attitude toward the potential of thinking?

There’s an image of God in ancient Greek philosophy — Aristotle — of God as thought thinking itself, in a closed loop. And for Aristotle, the whole world was in love with that circle: the plants grow toward it, fire reaches for it, the human mind tries to imitate it. I don’t think that’s the appropriate image for our time, because it’s too removed. It’s an image of a spiritual world that’s closed off from what’s happening on the Earth — maybe we can try to imitate it, but it has no relationship with us. And thinking that is just thinking about thinking for the purpose of more thoughts is that closed loop, and it leads us away from the Earth, away from each other. Living thinking, free thinking, creative thinking is not that. I think it’s thinking that is courageous enough to descend — into the earth, into our bodies, into our relationships, into society — and to bring love and attention and awareness to what’s happening here, and to learn from that. And so the purpose of thinking, I think, is to give a little bit more consciousness to the future.

That reminds me of a line from Goethe, which I’ll paraphrase: every being, lovingly contemplated, opens a new organ of perception in us. But if we move through the world trying to classify everything based on dead thoughts, without meeting each being as a unique occurrence, we miss a lot. And with LLMs — some images came to mind while you were speaking — these language models are trained on the corpses of human thought. Artificial intelligence is a graveyard. Every prompt is like a séance. We can learn a lot from the bones of the dead. But there’s no living thinking in that machine. So what are we meeting those bones with? Are we putting flesh and blood on the bones — or are we just trying to scrape the little piece of fat left on the bone? I don’t know what thinking is. But I think we know what it’s not.