136 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
misunderstand what the unprejudiced observation of
thinking provides. To observe thinking is to live, during
the observation, immediately within the weaving of a
self-supporting spiritual entity. We could even say that
whoever wants to grasp the essence of the spirit in the
form in which itfirst presents itself to human beings can
do so in the self-sustaining activity of thinking.
In examining thinking itself, two things coincide that
otherwisemust always appear as separated: concepts and
percepts. If we do not understand this, the concepts devel-
oped in response to percepts will seem to us to be shad-
owy copies of these percepts, while the percepts
themselves will seem to present us with true reality. We
will also build a metaphysical world for ourselves on the
pattern of the perceived world. Following the style of our
mental imagery, we will call this metaphysical world the
atomic world, the world of the will, or of the unconscious
spirit, and so forth. And we will fail to see how, in all of
this, we have built up only a hypothetical metaphysical
world on the pattern ofour perceptual world. But, if we
see what is really present in thinking, we will recognize
that only one part of reality is present in the percept and
that weexperiencethe other part—which belongs to it and
is necessary for it to appear as full reality—in the perme-
ation of the percept by thinking. We shall then see, in what
appears in consciousness as thinking, not a shadowy copy
of reality, but a spiritual essence that sustains itself. Of
this spiritual essence we can say that it becomes present to
our consciousness throughintuition.Intuition is the con-
scious experience, within what is purely spiritual, of a
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