~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seeking Truth
'It has always been the goal of the thinker to attain to Truth untainted by any personal colouring, to Truth as it exists above, and untouched by, any personal likes or dislikes, any prejudices or opinions. This was ever the ideal of the true scientist, the true philosopher: to let pure truth live within him or her. It was clear to such thinkers that true concepts are not specific to any individual. The same truth can live in one mind or in many.
Yet even when the human being has acquired the certainty that all true thoughts are universal, and that even his thinking activity itself is a universal activity projecting into him from world existence, he still brings this thinking activity unfolding within him into the service of his own self. As a being endowed with self-consciousness, a being centred in his own ego, he does not know how to place this thinking activity at the service of another being or beings.
How does one think not for oneself but for others? Even the idea of what this might be is not immediately apparent. Suppose I see someone struggling with a mathematical calculation and I offer to do the calculation for him. If I do so, I have carried out my thinking activity for his sake. The motivation may be altruistic, to some degree at least, but the thinking activity itself is no different from usual. I still have the same relationship to my thinking activity notwithstanding the fact that I have destined its fruits for another person. Even if I were to think aloud, expressing in words each step of my calculating so that the other person could follow the process, my basic relationship to my thinking activity would remain unchanged. No particular training of the consciousness is required for it. What Rudolf Steiner meant when he spoke to the young people was something quite different, as we shall see shortly.
Rudolf Steiner's statement that there is only one single concept of 'triangle', and that it is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is grasped in A's consciousness or in B 's, may seem quite obvious to us once we have read his words. And we may easily grasp the principle that the one uniform concept of 'triangle' does not become a multiplicity because it is thought by many persons. Because the thinking of the many is itself a unity. Yet there lives in universal thinking a concept, the universality of which we do not so readily recognize. It is the concept of our “I”.
Even though we may recognize in principle the fact that the “I” - consciousness of every human being is an individual consciousness of the same universal “I” – in other words, that the "I" of which I am conscious is the same as the "I" of which you are conscious -- yet something holds us back from giving up our personal experience of the "I" in favour of a larger, shared experience of it. We feel instinctively that we would be losing our own identity, even though logical thought tells us that this cannot be the case. But what is this force in us that instinctively rejects any sharing of the "I"-experience, that wants to exclude from our own consciousness the "I"-consciousness of any other being, and isolates us within our personal "I"-experience? It is the force of egoism, of antipathy, to which we owe the acquisition of our individuality and our freedom.
Now, it is quite clear that we are not intended to lose our individuality and our freedom; the whole point of Earth evolution up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was to enable us to acquire them. And we know that without the force of antipathy in us we could never have done so. But what if we now wish to follow Christ? Then the question confronts us: if we replace antipathy with sympathy and venture beyond the narrow confines of the self towards a wider, more universal experience of the "I", will we lose our individuality and our freedom? Will we lose them? Is this not the existential question today? Even when the Christian in us contemplates the great Pauline ideal, "Not I but Christ in me", is there not a voice that whispers deep down inside us: "No, no, I don't want to give up my own "I", not even for Christ. I want to be myself!" This voice is there in all of us, whether we are conscious of it or not. It is the voice of a very powerful instinct. It is our egoism, the antipathy in us.'
(Emberson, Paul [2014] “From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley” p926 to 928)
