As I dive into the activity of thinking, leaving behind all the “things”, the world of “10,000 distractions” that I could think about, I find myself in a world where my being sees everything. In this activity I am that being that can live in a body, but I am not restricted to the body. I appear out in space looking around me and there I find a body that I specifically identify with and the rest of the world. Thinking is beyond object and subject, but can nevertheless live in a subject. It can live in any and every corner of the universe. It can live in any and every percept. I am this universal activity.

This universal activity seems to have a character of will. In the normal waking state its universe becomes more restricted and focuses on the impressions given by the senses. However, it is also capable of deploying its thinking activity on feelings. When we choose to go beyond merely feeling things to understanding them thinking is also there with its activity, revealing a deeper level of connectedness between the feeler (person doing the feeling) and the world. Thinking can also think about its own activity and what is written here is a fruit of this universal activity contemplating itself.

None of the above was consciously known before I wrote it, before this universal activity started thinking about itself. Yet, here it stands now as a mini-image of the divine activity that lives in us. I am inclined to think that this might be why Steiner added the biblical reference to a philosophical text, when he reminds us: “This is recognized even in the First Book of Moses. In the first six days God is represented as creating the world, and only after the world is there is it possible to contemplation it: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must first be there before we can observe it. Ch. 3