82 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
HowI am organized to comprehend things has nothing
to do withtheir nature. The divide between perceiving
and thinking comes into being only at the instant that I,
the observer, come over against things. Yet which ele-
ments belong to the thing, and which do not, can in no
way depend upon how I come to know those elements.
Humans are limited beings. First, they are beings among
other beings. Their existence belongs to space and time.
Therefore, only a limited part of the whole universe is ac-
cessible to them. This limited part, however, is linked on
all sides, temporally and spatially, to other things. If our
existence were so united with the things that every world
event was at the same time ourevent, then there would be
no difference between us and the things. But then, too,
there would be no individual things for us. Everything that
happens would continually merge with everything else.
The cosmos would be a unity, a self-enclosed whole. The
stream of events would be interrupted nowhere. Because
of our limitedness, what is not really separate appears sep-
arate to us. For example, the individual quality of red nev-
er exists in isolation. It is surrounded on all sides by other
qualities, to which it belongs and without which it could
not exist. We, however, must lift out of the world certain
cross-sections of it and consider them on their own. From
a many-hued whole, our eye can comprehend only a suc-
cession of individual colors. From a connected conceptual
system, our reason can grasp only individual concepts.
This separation is a subjective act: it depends on the fact
that we are not identical with the world-process; rather, we
are single beings among other beings.
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