42 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
cannot escape thinking in this way. If I want to look at
thinking, I cannot leave thinking behind. If we distinguish
preconscious thinking from later, conscious thinking, we
should at least not forget that this distinction is quite exter-
nal and has nothing to do with the matter at hand. I in no
way make a thing into something else by contemplating it
in thinking. I can imagine that a being with altogether dif-
ferent sense organs and with a differently functioning in-
tellect would have a very different mental picture of a
horse than I do, but I cannot imagine that my own thinking
becomes something else because I observe it. I myself ob-
serve what I myself produce. The issue is not how my
thinking appears to an intellect different from my own, but
how it appears to me. In any case, the picture ofmythink-
ing in a different intellect cannot be a truer one than in my
own. Only if I were myself not the being who thinks, and
this thinking confronted me as the activity of a being alien
to me, only then could I say that although my image of its
thinking arises in a certain way, I cannot know how its
thinking is in itself.
For the moment, however, there is not the slightest rea-
son for me to regard my own thinking from a different
standpoint. I contemplate the rest of the world with the
help of thinking. Why should I make an exception for my
thinking?
I believe I have now justified beginning my consider-
ation of the world with thinking. When Archimedes had
invented the lever, he thought that he could use it to lift
the whole cosmos on its hinges, if only he could find a se-
cure point to set his instrument. For this, he needed some-
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