עברית The living, unobserved, activity of thinking, ‘love in its spiritual form’, as Rudolf Steiner names her in his book, The Philosophy of Freedom
Modern Cinderella
“...It is only the corpse left behind after she (the living, unobserved, activity of thinking, ‘love in its spiritual form’, as Rudolf Steiner names her in The Philosophy of Freedom), has completed its daily physical work, unseen and unappreciated like Cinderella...”.
Cognitive Yoga: Building yourself a new etheric body and individuality
From Chapter 2: The composition of ordinary cognition
Knowing is killing
The more we achieve this `stopping of the world' the more we liberate the soul forces invested in the consolidation of ordinary consciousness. In this way we discover, step by step, that in the daily process of cognition, we take into our consciousness two subtle and fleeting ethereal elements, sense perceptions and thoughts, and we compose and condense them together. This composition degrades them both by compressing, contracting and condensing them to a far more solid and less vital level. In each mental picture that we make of any experience, be it sense perception, feeling, deed or external object, we enact a remarkable transformation.
For example, the `red object' that we `simply perceive' is in reality something we remember, recognize, re-present and name it, when we are conscious of it as an object of our perception. What we mean in daily life when we say that we `simply see' something is always already known in advance; it is re-membered, re-cognized, re-presented. The red color we believe that we `purely' see attached to a piece of cinnabar is already a dead, condensed part of the mental picture of the already known object `cinnabar', and not at all a pure flowing, living, etheric, sense quality or intensity. It is also objectified in our mind and has become part of a mental representation of an object, which has many other perceptual qualities and modalities, all of which are synthesized and solidified in the same manner. Likewise, a patch of color or a red beam of light is just our mental representation and not at all `pure red in itself'. The red we picture to ourselves in our conscious mind is represented and hence not present in its full cosmic vitality and majesty. In short, by the time we have become conscious of anything at all, by the time we have re-cognized and named any experience, it has already died out in becoming our mental picture. It is actually a leftover corpse of its real and vital cosmic being, just as the human corpse is in comparison with the living and fully incarnated soul-and spiritual human being. It is no longer the thing in itself, independent of our cognition and as long as we remain in the confines of ordinary cognition, we will never know what red is in its true, free floating and streaming, cosmic state. And if we merely philosophize about this given state of cognitive affairs, we must invariably become loyal Kantians, because Kant was perfectly correct in maintaining and meticulously proving that ordinary cognition can never know from direct experience what the “Ding an sich” (or thing in itself) really is. And the same is true in regard to the experience of `thinking in itself (Denken an sich)'. We have no experience of `thinking in itself', only its mere intellectual shadow and image, as long as we merely reflect and represent it in our self- conscious mind.
For example, when we consider that act of thinking by which we form the concept of a triangle, we find that the mental object we recognize and name is not pure at all, but rather a fixed object which we must imagine with attributes (like its particular shape, position and size) that we have borrowed from former sense experiences. The mental representations of even the most abstract mathematical and geometrical objects are not essentially different from the representations of any external object. Anything that truly comes to full consciousness, anything we name and `know' in ordinary consciousness, is always only the dead corpse of a real, living thinking and perception that we just don't experience in our ordinary consciousness or cognition. Even the mental picture we make of thinking is not a present, living, active, and streaming experience of thinking in itself; it is the dead product of an unconscious past activity. Thinking is never experienced consciously in ordinary cognition as streaming and living cosmic force and neither are sense perceptions. It is only the corpse left behind after it has completed its daily physical work, unseen and unappreciated like Cinderella. This unrecognized princess connects all of our experiences, naming and recognizing them, so that we can organize and control our daily lives in the physical world. When we say: `this red object is cinnabar', we have named the finished result of an unconscious cognitive activity that has already been killed, crystallized and condensed. But as long as thinking Cinderella remains unknown, unappreciated, her true spiritual being remains hidden from us. To make her the queen that she truly is, not only in the unconscious night sleep, but in midday, in full consciousness, is the first goal of cognitive yoga.