Thought Exercises
GA 108 Die Beantwortung von Welt – und Lebensfragen
durch Anthroposophie p256-275
- Making a series of mental pictures, eg weather conditions, with the stress on individual details and them being consequtive. The value lies in seeing how in reality today and yesterday are linked. You should avoid trying to speculate, but trust in the fact that a relationship exists between yesterday and today. By withholding speculation the astral body ‘world thoughts’ can work in you.
- With things we understand you should try to make predictions about something and then wait and see if it happens in reality. When your thinking dupes you must work out why you made the mistake. Thus you learn to think according to the inner neccesity of things. This exercise can be done into the past or future. Goethes gegenständliches Denken. Thinking and objects must become one and the same thing.
- To improve ‘Einfallsvermögen’ spend ½ an hour thinking about something specific rather than simply letting your thoughts fly away. The important aspect is to consciously choose the content of consciousness and is better when the content would normally pass unnoticed in the daily routine.
- To improve memory choose a recent memory and spend time trying to create an ever more detailed picture of what you saw. In the event of not remembering you must insert something deliberately false. The effort of trying to artificially create a complete picture will mean that next time you will pay more attention to detail.
- In the face of various possible options you should think up to possible solutions and then stop at that and sleep on this, even if this causes, even if this causes nervousness at first. Avoid feeling that you have to make a decision immediately. Then the next day things will have changed and two more possibilities can be thought up.
