It Thinks in Me

It Thinks in Me

Earthly, Transcendental, & Spiritual Logic: From Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy

Scott Hicks, Amazon publishing, 2019.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1701334690/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

 If you are interested in actually active spiritual science, and  if you are searching for the narrow pathway between Ahrimanic dogmatism and sectarianism or Luciferic speculations and fantasies, well, then, for you- and only for you- I will warmly recommend Scott Hicks new book,  Earthly, Transcendental, & Spiritual Logic -: From Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy. A survey of the anthroposophical literature on Husserl and Phenomenology in the last century, shows that this book is, from a scientific and academic perspective, the best one to date. But to say this will be to greatly belittle its essential being, because it offers much more than a dried bony skeleton of thoughts as introduction to Husserl and his relation to Steiner. It is, in truth, a real, actual and creative, fruit of spiritual scientific thinking, that demonstrates the fact that- provided one has the verve and nerve for it- it is possible today to progress with the spiritualization of thinking to a certain height and depth, which were not reachable in the last century. Hicks doesn’t shy away from saying very directly, what his purpose is,  which is to take hold of the cosmic intellect, that fell into our dead Ahrimanic brains on the earth, and return it back to its true Michaelic home, in and through our actively thinking human hearts: “This element living in the pulsing memory of the world mind can be developed further now, resurrected in human consciousness and its sap can flow and grow in the wakening working body of the Christ Event that is happening in the body of the new solar earth in which we live. I offer my work, which is the creation of this new spirit-organ of phenomenology, a new etheric oculus of mind-heart-will, as the smallest gift to the Michaelic school in the spiritual world”.

 One can indeed feel this intention as a real force that streams through the whole book, even in its most technical philosophic parts. And a fine result of this will be that one would also feel a need to go directly to the source itself, to read Rudolf Steiner himself again, something that only few people have ever ventured to do, and even less people venture to do today. But if we use Hicks' creative energy as a launching site, we will not approach Steiner’s books as so many graves of dead occult memories, but as powerful living seeds, awakened to new life in our active hearts, minds and deeds, becoming in us what they are in the spiritual worlds, living and eternally pulsating spiritual events and beings, nourished by the living spirit fountains of future evolution.

 Therefore, one fruitful result of delving into Hicks’ book, would be to be inspired to read Rudolf Steiner again, but one will be inspired to do so in an entirely new way; one would realize, nay, perhaps only begin to humbly surmise, the extent of the immediate futurity (if this paradox will be allowed) of Rudolf Steiner, his absolute spiritual vitality, calling and conversing with our courageous spiritual activity-in each moment- from the farthest horizon of potential human thinking, feeling and doing. And if this book will awaken in the reader this enthusiasm to become a real spirit student of Rudolf Steiner, to resurrect his past physical creations from the graveyard of our own old and dead thinking, habits and norms- then, I believe, this book would have served its real purpose!

 What is most of all forgotten and buried in the grey grave of history is the fact that for Rudolf Steiner, all real spiritual activity and experience, whose first level is pure, intuitive thinking, is a matter of actually becoming what you experience. There is no question here of exercising ordinary intention, reflection and representation of what you experienced, but only fullest self-forgetting in becoming a totally different, entirely other thing, process or being. The spiritual scientist is always becoming what he is experiencing. After the experience, he may, if he wishes to communicate it to his ordinary self and/ or to other humans, he will consciously downgrade his spiritual experience, cloth it in the envelops and sheaths of ordinary soul-and mind forces, and translate it into concepts, representations and words, taken from our physical thinking. But if you want to communicate through ordinary thinking and language what the spiritual, cosmic being of a frog truly is, you must first of all lose entirely all your human forms, mental forms, mind forms, soul and bodily memories, habits and instincts, and become totally a frog, star, or Angel. And one of the most difficult yet immensely rewarding mysteries of modern spiritual science is that the power that let you metamorphose and become so many, indeed, infinitely many, different things and beings, from all the visible and invisible kingdoms of nature, and from the whole spectrum of the divine hierarchies, is the power you extracted on the earth from your body free, intuitive thinking. And while you cannot- and you will also not want- to take with you to the higher worlds your ordinary concepts and representations, soul habits and bodily instincts, that you used in order to develop this thinking, you will be able to take with you what became you, the very force of your becoming pure thinking; the pure energy, the pure force that fired and actualized this thinking, you will be able to take with you in your wandering in all the worlds, the snake’s elemental power, as it were, without his skins! And this wonderful power, flowing through pure thinking- “love in its spiritual form” as Rudolf Steiner called it in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity- is the power that becomes you, and while you become other beings, this power, that you became and that became you on earth, remains with you and connects your frog, star or Angel identities with your earthly identity. It alone will make it possible for you not to forget out there who you are down here, and what is more, It alone will make it possible for the higher spiritual beings to grant you spiritual self-consciousness while you become other than yourself; It- the power of pure thinking- will let them think themselves in you while you become them, allowing you to think, imagine, inspire and intuit their being and becoming in the universe as part of your own human becoming.

 And this is the hallmark of real spiritual scientific work, like Hicks’: It awakens in you the longing to read Rudolf Steiner again- in a wholly new, invigorated, and fresh manner. And if you do so, you would certainly experience his words differently than before; as if they come to life in you- but also as you awaken to new life through them; as if they are actual world forces, that pulse through your soul, become potency and power, and you would feel: until I begun to read in this way, I was actually asleep, and now I begin to wake up! You will feel that you are addressed now, you are experiencing the real flow of living thinking as a real world being, that streams through you and works in you, carry you and become your future self:

 “By really thinking, one finds oneself already in the region of a living supersensible world. One says to oneself, ‘There is something in me that fashions a thought organism; I am, nevertheless, at one with this something’.  By surrendering oneself to sense-free thinking one becomes conscious of the existence of something essential flowing into our inner life... ‘Something real proclaims its presence in me that binds thought to thought, fashioning a thought to thought... I surrender myself to what ‘thinks in me... ‘Something possessing the nature of being acts within me’”. (Occult Science, an outline, chapter 5, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds).

 And you will understand why pure thinking is such a special path that in Rudolf Steiner’s time only very few could even begin, but that in the first part of this century, must become a real-life path for ever more. And you will begin to understand- and each page of Hicks’ book will awaken this living undersigning in your soul- what  Steiner actually meant when he wrote that if we practice and actualize, not merely study his books, Goethe's Conception of the World and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, then we will experience ourselves how “pure thinking works within man like a living being… Anyone who allows these books to work upon his whole soul, already stands within the spiritual world, but it appears to him as a world of thought. Those who are in a position to allow this intermediate condition to act upon them, will be following a safe and sane path and can thus win for themselves a feeling concerning the higher worlds, which will for all future time ensure for them most abundant results”. (there).

  Hicks’ book is a potent seed of what is growing and becoming today and tomorrow in the real garden of the true spiritual stream of Michael. And if we read Hicks and enter into his living activity of thinking, then we will surely become Hicks and experience with him what says: “I am contributing a new leaf to the evolving conceptual artwork pulsing in the living being of organic knowledge as a whole. To read this book, you have to become the book, because it is the new supersensible leaf”.