Practise Spirit Beholding (Part 1)

The work on the Foundation Stone Meditation, which began in 2016, has so far been mostly about the practising of Spirit Recalling and Spirit Awareness. In 2020/2021 we will work on deepening the appeal of the third stanza: Practise Spirit-Beholding.

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Climate crisis, the refugee crisis, the growing gap between poor and rich, meaninglessness and epidemics – what we need is an understanding of these phenomena that is not merely concerned with symptoms but that is able to inspire a fundamental transformation of our situation. For this to happen, we need to understand the nature of thinking. If we shy back from allegedly theoretical discussions, we fail to realize that thinking is both the origin of and the bridge to our relationship with the world.

In the age of the consciousness soul, gaining self-awareness requires us to understand the essence of thinking, because this is not something that is immediately obvious, as Rudolf Steiner points out in his Philosophy of Freedom. “This is the characteristic nature of thinking. The thinker forgets thinking while doing it. What concerns the thinker is not thinking but the observed object of thinking.”*

This, according to Rudolf Steiner, is the nature of thinking. When we forget what we are doing, we can, however, not foresee the consequences arising from the forms of our present thinking. Many problems of our time are due to this forgetting of our own thinking.

Free space within the soul

It is our thinking, however, that shapes our relationship with the world and that gives us orientation in the world of percepts, with the help of the concepts that we draw from the spiritual world. Rudolf Steiner’s main philosophical work, The Philosophy of Freedom, provides an important basis for understanding the process of cognition and its connection with the primal – spiritual – ground of the world.

In the first essay of his book The Threshold of the Spiritual World (GA 17), which is about trusting in our thinking, Rudolf Steiner describes how thinking resembles an island in the heaving river of our soul life. Even as we doubt our thinking we are trusting in it, because there can be no doubting without thinking.

The third stanza of the Foundation Stone Meditation appeals to the soul to practise “Spirit Beholding in stillness of thought”, so that we can “truly think in depths of human spirit.” Spirit Beholding demands of us that we consider, with our thinking, this formerly unobserved element of our soul life. Where we used to be wholly devoted to the objects of our thinking contemplation, we now begin to observe a kind of spiritual in-between sphere where we look at what we have thought. This is the first step in gaining consciousness of our thinking activity. A further step can be reached if we practise to halt the thought that we have been thinking and practise “stillness of thought”. In doing this, we create a free space within our soul that allows something from the spiritual world to come towards us.

Uniting with the world

As we continue practising Spirit Beholding, we learn to perceive the world of thoughts as a living world of the spirit, where thoughts articulate themselves. The call to “practise Spirit Beholding” opens up our space of freedom, a kind of freedom that enables us to become aware of the “gods’ eternal aims”. A will is inspired in us that enables our ‘I’ to unite with the wider world. It is this step that it is our task to take today.

Do we realize what it is that we are perceiving? Do we perceive the true essence of nature, the cosmos and of the other person? Are we open to the needs these beings have in relation to us and can we respond to them? Or are we still caught up in the mode of the mind soul, meeting the world as an object that serves for our pleasure and benefit alone? The crises we are facing today show us that this relationship with the world belongs to the past and is no longer appropriate. The old orders and habits that used to carry us are breaking away.

The Foundation Stone Meditation opens up a new horizon for our existence. The soul can awaken “in the spirit’s world-thoughts”. This is the spirit realm where, through thinking, the soul becomes aware of its essential kinship with the world of ideas to which we can all gain access and that is home to the thoughts of the world. As human beings we all have this in common, although we each have our individual intuitions. Their common source is the primal ground of ideas that connects us all.

The scope and significance of this essential foundation of spiritual science cannot be valued highly enough. And yet, this original ground is not generally accessible, because the soul needs to awaken in order to allow for this access. As we practise Spirit Beholding we become increasingly aware of it. We need to conquer this ground whose existence becomes a reality as we practise and increase our spiritual faculties. In the understanding we have of life and science today, this foundation – or we could also say, this developmental goal – does not figure. Instead, we speak of the limits of knowledge and seek consensus between different approaches through communication.

United with hierarchical beings

Thanks to the development that we can achieve through anthroposophy and that is given to us as a path of practice in the Foundation Stone Meditation, we can, through thinking, access the realm where the “light of cosmic being” appears to us. We can experience the activities of the third hierarchy and the approaching of the Christ being, and so recognize and feel ourselves united with hierarchical beings within the cosmos.

We will continue this more macrocosmic aspect in Anthroposophy Worldwide 5/2020 and look at it in relation to current events. A list of recommended study material will also be added then.

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