Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

94 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

ourselves produce at least a part of this relationship
through making mental pictures of the things and pro-
cesses in the world. Our attention is thereby withdrawn
from what is outside in the world, and turned toward our
inner world. We can begin by reflecting that we cannot
have a connection to a thing or person if a mental picture
does not arise within us. From this, it is but a step to the
realization that, after all, we experience only our mental
pictures; we know of a world outside ourselves only to
the extent that it is a mental picture within us. And with
this, the naive attitude toward reality, taken up before any
reflection on our relation to the world, is abandoned.
From a naive standpoint, we believe that we are dealing
with real things. Self-reflection drives us from this point
of view. It does not allow us to look at a reality such as
naive consciousness believes it has before it. Such self-
reflection allows us to look only at our mental pictures;
these insert themselves between our own being and a sup-
posedly real world of the kind that the naive standpoint
imagines it can assert. Because of the intervening mental
pictures, we can no longer look upon such a reality. We
must assume that we are blind for that reality. Thus the
thought of a thing-in-itself, that is unattainable to cogni-
tion, arises.
Indeed, as long as we continue to focus on the relation-
ship to the world that we enter through the life of mental
pictures, we shall never escape this thought-construction.
Unless we wish to close off the urge for knowledge arti-
ficially, we cannot remain at the viewpoint of naive real-
ity. The very existence of this urge for knowledge of the