Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

122 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

Within appropriate limits, this view is thoroughly jus-
tified. But those who allow themselves to be misled by
this opinion and prevented from an unprejudiced obser-
vation of the relationship between percepts and concepts
expressed here are sealing off the path to a knowledge of
the world and of human beings that is rooted in reality.
To experience the essence of thinking—that is, actively
to elaborate the conceptual world—is something com-
pletely different from the experience of something per-
ceptible through the senses. Whatever senses human
beings might have, not one could give us reality if our
thinking did not permeate what is perceived through
them with concepts. However constituted, any sense per-
meated by concepts in this way offers human beings the
possibility of living in reality. The fantasy of the com-
pletely different perceptual picture possible with other
senses has nothing to do with the question of how human
beings stand in the real world. We must realize thatevery
perceptual picture takes its form from the organization of
the perceiving entity, but that the perceptual picture per-
meated by an actually experienced thinking contempla-
tion leads us into reality. It is not the fantasy depiction of
how differently a world would look for other than human
senses that can enable us to seek knowledge of our rela-
tionship to the world; rather, it is the insight that every
percept gives only a part of the reality hidden within it,
and that it thus directs us away from its ownreality. This
insight is then joined by another—that thinking leads us
into the part of the percept’s reality that was hidden by
the percept itself.