Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

124 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

this immersion in the depths — this attainment of re-
ality—should never be confused with encountering a
broader or narrower perceptual picture, in which there is
always only a half reality, as determined by the cogniz-
ing organism. Anyone not lost inabstractions will real-
ize how relevant it is for our knowledge of human nature
that physics has toinfer elements in the perceptual field
to which no sense is attuned as directly as for color or
sound.Concretely, the essence of the human is deter-
mined not only by the kind of immediate perception with
which we confront ourselves through our organization,
but also by our excluding other things from this immedi-
ate perception. Just as both the conscious waking state
and the unconscious state of sleep are necessary for life,
so both the sphere of sense percepts and a (much greater)
sphere of elements that are not sense-perceptible, in the
field from which sense percepts originate, are necessary
for human self-experience. All of this was already ex-
pressed indirectly in the original presentation of this text.
I add this extension of its content here because I have
found that many readers have not read it with sufficient
precision.
It should also be kept in mind that the idea of theper-
cept, as developed in this text, must not be confused with
that of external sense perception, which is only a special
case of it. Readers will see from what has been said, but
still more so from what will be said later, that everything
both sensoryand spiritual that meets a human being is
here taken to be a “percept” until it is grasped by the ac-
tively elaborated concept. “Senses” of the kind normally