As we dig deeper into the exceptional state we inevitably becoming more aware of how the content of our thinking directly impacts our experience of life. As Hegel tells us, thinking turns the soul, with which beasts too are gifted, into spirit. In TPOF we are reminded that thinking, in the conceptual life, is that which when added to perception restores a reality that was
sundered by our own organization.

Let us consider a wolf and a few of the concepts that we might connect with it (fur, speed, hunting, pack animal, vicious, dog like, Fenris, acute sense of smell, night vision, camouflage, cunning, intelligence etc etc). Unbiased thinking will recognize that all of these concepts that
describe the wolf are present in its being whether we are aware of them or not. Nature doesn’t care whether we know about the concepts that are active in her, that determine her content. However, when observing nature we complement observation with thinking we restore a unity that was only broken because of an insufficiency on our part. When we undo this sundering we feel the pleasure, a re-establishing of wholeness, that accompanies understanding something that previously was opaque and not permeated by reason.

But where does this thinking, this other half of reality come from? In the exceptional state it becomes a direct inner experience that concepts are birthed within us, we intuit them, some unknown being breathes them into us. We can show a dog a million ABC books, but it will never arrive at the concept of a letter, let alone what various arrangements of these letters are capable of achieving. The point here is that observation does not lead to concepts. Instead a concept must be intuited in us, born in our spirit through the activity of thinking. This concept is then recognized in the outside world. Our responsibility is to create a state in which these concepts can be consciously received. The concept lights up in our spiritual activity of thinking and completes what is observed with the senses

This intuition or birthing of concepts is something that becomes ever clearer to a person who practices entering the exceptional state. In this experience we catch glimpses of a being living within us which is of a purely spiritual nature. This point needs to be highlighted, we are not hypothesizing this being, but directly experience its being in our souls. I no longer merely believe in spirit because I experience it directly. In a similar way I don’t need to say I believe in tables because they are a direct experience. As this state is intensified we become less inclined to perceive ourselves as the creators of thoughts, but instead experience how a thought might live in us. We are inspired. We become less possessive of (our) thoughts. Thinking is experienced as the outflowing of a being and that being is your own I. The
exceptional state means that I observe what I previously created out of my own being. I can never observe this activity directly. Instead, it must occur within me and then using the power of will and memory this activity can also become the substrate which can become the new stimulus for thinking activity, ie deeper conceptual understanding. A deeper permeation of nature with truth and love.

It is useful to remind ourselves time and time again of the dimension that clear thinking and clear concepts add to our lives. The more personal examples we can think of the less we experience thinking as something abstract and merely theoretical and realer the experience becomes. With that in mind here is another example before proceeding to Dostoyevsky’s double. Let us imagine that we grew up around the Mediterranean and
we never learnt at school (or we imagine a time when humanity hadn’t even
conceptualized the idea) about tidal waters and never noticed that the level of
the sea regularly change by a few centimeters.

Life then leads us to live on the northern coast of Devon, England. Here, all of a sudden, we are confronted by a sea that behaves completely differently to everything we had previously experienced. Inevitably we are confused and astounded because here the height of the sea can vary at certain times of the year by 7-8 metres and several times a day. This lives as mystery in us for a long time and eventually we feel compelled to ask around and see if anyone can explain why the sea moves so much. We find such a person and we learn about lunar cycles, land formations and other key concepts that remove the mystery and allow us to understand why it happens and when the next high or low tide will be and its amplitude. Now imagine explaining all of that to a dog. I believe he will be as unimpressed as he was with our attempts to get him to learn his ABC. There is another fundamental difference worth pointing out here, namely that the dog doesn’t even know it doesn’t understand. The dog is blissful in its ignorance, human beings often experience this ignorance as painful or troublesome. The concepts that we birth in the inner activity of thinking not only act as a medicine against this pain, they also, concept by concept, remind us that the world is reasonable. The confidence in the potential of thinking is strengthened as we experience time and time again how life isn’t a product of random events and chance. There is order in the universe and thinking will reveal that order. This was the credo of the period of enlightenment, only later did it divorce itself from its Christian roots to become a materialistic science incapable of connecting the spirit with the material.

A disadvantage with the above example is that the reader is likely already familiar with the concepts that are described so can is forced to use the imagination. Therefore, I offer up a 2 part question and a point of departure which can, if followed some distance, lead to a picture of the solar system that goes way beyond the lifeless picture of the solar system so common in academic text books. The question is: Why is the surface of the sun hotter than its centre, which is the supposed source of the heat? What does this have to do with the end of the last ice age? Suggested point of departure https://www.youtube.com/@Suspicious0bservers. Enjoy the experience and feel the energy of rediscovering the world from an alternative vantage point, ie observing the world together with thinking. Learning about life is invigorating because the ideas that create in nature also become alive in us.

When we recognize that intuitive thinking is itself spiritual activity we can also follow the reasoning when Steiner tells us that using this spiritual activity to investigate itself will lead to a deepening of our understanding of our own spiritual essence. In this process navel gazing converts itself into a contemplation of the divine umbilical cord from which we cut ourselves when we were born. Wordsworth’s poem an Ode to Immortality receives an added dimension when viewed through this lens. In the appendix to the 1918 edition of TPOF (Steiner had suggested the English title “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”) he writes: “A living comprehension of what is meant in this book by intuitive thinking will lead quite naturally to a living entry into the world of spiritual perception.”

What though does this have to do with Dostoyevsky’s double?

The more we enter into contact with our own spiritual nature through living in the exceptional state the more we come to experience it as a real entity, instead of as just a thought or idea as it might expressed in everyday language.. Through the intensification of the experience of thinking we understand how through our own spiritual practise we have brought about a healthy split in our being. It is healthy because it is something over which we have conscious control. Schizophrenia would be an example of an unhealthy split. Due to the exercises we have an increasingly conscious relationship to the spiritual aspect of our being. We become increasingly adept at consciously connecting with our spiritual essence whilst not losing our connection with physical reality. The soul has learned though direct experience, rather than a given teaching, that it can choose and either turn its attention to the realm of the senses and the intellect or it can turn to the realm of the spirit and start taking its first baby steps to understand this new world. In the middle stands the soul, strengthened by the exercising.

In the Double we find Dostoyevsky encountering this question of the duality of the self. This meeting with a Dopplegänger describes what according to spiritual science is a truth of our human constitution. We have a lower and a higher self. When we seek to achieve goals we are at present not capable of we are already in touch with something higher than ourselves. The more we can connect with this state the more likely we are to achieve what is lacking. Conversely, when from this higher perspective we look at what we currently are we see a less perfect, less intelligent, less…… ( choose your adjective) being.

It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning when Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin, a titular councillor, woke up from a long sleep. He yawned, stretched, and at last opened his eyes completely. For two minutes, however, he lay in his bed without moving, as though he were not yet quite certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real and actual, or the continuation of his confused dreams. Very soon, however, Mr. Golyadkin’s senses began more clearly and more distinctly to receive their habitual and everyday impressions.

However, as the novel proceeds we realize that Golyadkin becomes increasingly incapable of distinguishing the real and actual with the inner life of his confused dreams. Dostyevsky’s magic consists, at least in part, in letting us live in soul of someone who experiences at a level far more intensely than the average person this split that lives in all of us. That which is and that which wants to be. Golyadkin understands that he is not well and seeks the help of Krestyan Ivanovitch Rutenspitz, Doctor of Medicine and Surgery. He is at a complete loss on how to help Golyadkin and it is no better 170 years later in your average doctor’s surgery. The best modern medicine can do is to dampen down the inner life so that the duality of the self is not experienced so strongly. The name Golyadkin (го́лый – naked, bare, unmixed, pure) could be taken to mean that in its naked state, the human being is a split being as was discussed above. This dual nature of the human being is a topic often explored in literature. What is so poignant in Dostyevsky is the starkness of its description and this is especially so for people interested in spiritual science, because according to this science we are moving towards a future where the experience of the double will become both more common and more intense for ever greater numbers of people.

Golyadkin is extreme in the sense that he experiences the truth of the dual nature of the soul in a way that many don’t. Let us again create an example of a phenomena that happens dozens or perhaps even hundreds of times a day in each and every one of us without us recognizing the dual nature of what is occurring. I am sitting on the sofa, my mind is focused on a train of thought. This inner life is interrupted by a soft scratching sound which reaches me through my ears (outer life). My inner life through the capacity of thinking adds to these sounds the picture of a door and cat’s paws and despite not being able to observe knows with 100% certainty that our cat is outside and wants to come in. 15 minutes later my ears hear a soft scratching sound. However, whilst similar it is slightly different. I listen much more attentively and my inner life tries to find an image or set of circumstances. This time the inner life is incapable of giving that 100% certainty. Even though I can’t see it I have located the origin of the noise spatially. It is coming from the hall. I get up slowly listening attentively. My thinking (inner life) begins to present more details. The hall, our dog, unusualness of sound. Before I have seen the cause (outer life) the activity of thinking (inner life) suggests that I don’t let my presence disturb what is causing the noise otherwise I might not find out that cause. I approach slowly and see our dog pawing at her rug in the hall. I have never witnessed her doing this before, but if at sometime she does this in the future my thinking (inner life) will add itself to the auditory sensation (outer life) and I will see the whole situation without actually seeing it with my eyes (outer life). These 2 simple examples are given only as concrete experiences of how the inner and the outer life are in continuous interaction, but often thinking inserts itself into our outer life without us being fully conscious of the fact that it comes from an inner life that is always active, always taking stimuli from the outside world and adding its own activity to add missing details.

In the picture we have in the outer world (red) which receives the inner life (blue). Through practice we come to experience that the inner activity is not caused deterministically by the outer. Instead the outer is merely a stimulus for this inner activity. The clearer we become about the separateness through direct experience the clearer becomes the duality of our character. We are soul beings, the crossover part in a lemniscate, who can direct attention to the outer world of the senses. Without the capacity to think we would never be able to say anything about this outer world. Conversely if we live exclusively in thinking we lack the sense of reality and form and appear to live in a dream. In this dream our ability to reason and act takes place entirely in an inner world of our own making, though how we make it and who we are, we have no idea. If our physical bodies were not there to wake us up, we would continually live in world of thought with little or no consciousness of self. Put in impossible (from a non-dreaming perspective) situations and left to experience them at an emotional level, ie with pain or pleasure, happiness or sadness, love or hate or frightening or inspiring.

A topic for a future article is how this duality can be confronted in a healthy way. Golyadkin was not able to find a centre that could hold the tension of these 2 polarities. Steiner, Nietzsche, Jung amongst many others pointed towards the forceful way in which the inner life can explode into outer life if it is suppressed, if it is not dealt with at a conscious level. The same is true at both a societal, group and individual level.