Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

246 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

with my own. I have really perceived the thinking of the
other person. The immediate percept, extinguishing itself
as a sensory appearance, is grasped by my thinking, and
this is a process lying completely within my conscious-
ness, which consists in my thinking being replaced by the
other thinking. Through the self-extinguishing of the sen-
sory appearance, the separation between the two spheres
of consciousness is actually suspended. This is represent-
ed in my consciousness in that, in experiencing the con-
tent of the other person’s consciousness, I experience my
own consciousness just as little as I experience it in
dreamless sleep. Just as my daytime consciousness is
shut out in dreamless sleep, so is the content of my own
consciousness when I perceive another person’s. The il-
lusion that this is not so persists because,first, when per-
ceiving another person, what replaces my own content of
consciousness is not unconsciousness (as in sleep) but
rather the content of the other person’s consciousness;
and,second, the oscillations between the extinction and
re-illumination of my consciousness of myself follow
one another too rapidly to be normally noticed. The
whole problem cannot be solved by artificial conceptual
constructs that infer, from what is conscious, other things
that can never be conscious. It must be solved through
true experience of what results from a union of thinking
and percepts. This applies to many questions that appear
in the philosophical literature. Thinkers ought to seek the
path to unprejudiced, spiritually-oriented observation,
but instead they slide an artificial conceptual construc-
tion in front of reality.