Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

232 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

has a real connection with the whole cosmos, which is
broken only for our perception. At first, because we do
not see the ropes and pulleys by which the fundamental
powers of the cosmos turn the wheel of our own lives, we
see our individual part as an entity existing by itself. Who-
ever remains at this standpoint sees a part of the whole as
an actually independent entity, as a monad, that somehow
receives information about the rest of the world from out-
side. The monism advocated here shows how such inde-
pendence will be believed in only as long as thinking does
not weave what has been perceived into the network of
the conceptual world. Once this happens, the existence of
separate parts is unmasked as a mereillusion of perceiv-
ing. Only through the experience of intuitive thinking can
we can find our total, self-contained existence within the
universe. Thinking destroys the illusion of perceiving and
integrates our individual existence into the life of the cos-
mos. The unity of the conceptual world, which contains
objective percepts, also includes the content of our sub-
jective personality. Thinking gives us the true form of re-
ality, as a unity enclosed within itself, while the
multiplicity of percepts is only an illusion conditioned by
our organization (cf. pp. 79 ff.). In every age, cognition of
the real, as opposed to the illusion of perceiving, has con-
stituted the goal of human thinking. Science has striven to
recognize percepts as reality by discovering the lawful
connections among them. But wherever it has been be-
lieved that the connections transmitted by human thinking
have merely subjective significance, the actual ground of
unity has been sought in an object set beyond our world