Intuition, says R.S, is living in spiritual content and is what defines thinking. If you come to accept this, says R.S, you come to realize that the human organization (I read this as: the human brain) doesn't influence thinking, contrary to the common sense opinion. For example in the contemporary philosophy of mind, the reductionist would give this kind of explanations to sensations: the sensation of pain is the excitation of the c-fibers from the brain - and I suppose they had a similar conception on what thinking is.
Steiner says that thinking takes as a point of start the human organization, but then it makes it stop what it does and is occupying its space. Is maybe hard to imagine what is happening in the head when you think. But when I think most intensely sometimes I feel as I'm above my head and there's this flow of energy pouring in to me from above, and sometimes I start even to hear some non physical sounds that sound more like a wind blowing through a hole. The usual counter-image of thinking (as R.S calls it and which he describes as lifeless) stops its activity and makes place for real thinking!
Another phenomenological observation that I made is that when I read the brain is making thinking (the common opinion) something in me was quite satisfied with that thought. And most of my life, my double was very satisfied with the materialism-conception. I do wonder why :)
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Its good to understand these terms. The dictionary says that organization means Something that has been organized or made into an ordered whole.
"the human organization doesn't influence thinking"
All of these parts; body, memories, feelings, past thoughts, mental-pictures etc. are part of our whole nature (organization) that normally determines our thoughts and actions. This is not hard to experience as you have done by comparing serious thinking with non-focused passive thinking that happens to you. I experience it when perhaps I am distracted with emotional issues or old habitual complaints, then I enter attentive conceptual or universal thinking over something in POF and the other stuff disappears as I think. I find it to be a safe and healthy place if I am being distracted.
Ok, so the human organisation is: physical body, memories, feelings, dead thoughts, mental-pictures. None of those influence real thinking. And when real thinking is taking place, all those retreat. Now, is clear. Thanks.
One's individual organization is usually mentioned in POF as the thing that forms one's initial perception picture that is illusion and overcome by thinking. It mentions the bodily and also mental organization. Materialism does connect them both with the physical in POF 10.1 “For whilst I consider myself the author of my action, it is the matter of which I am composed and the movements which are going on in it that determine me. I imagine myself free, but actually all my actions are nothing but the effects of the metabolism which is the basis of my physical and mental organization.”
We have the psycho-physical (soul-body) organization mentioned in chapter 9 that has no influence over real thinking as a non-physical experience. So the organization must refer to the organization of our mental psychology world and physical body. The psychological organization is a more permanent organization that may have some relationship to the physical, I don't know where our memory is stored other than the brain without spiritual speculating.
Hmm..I messed things up than with my interpretation for human-organization.It makes much more sense the way you put it.
Thanks for posting. The human organization takes us up to the presentation of the world of appearance described in chapter 4, the “world is my mental picture”. This is as far as the human organization --built up from physical, cultural, and our past thought influences-- can take us. This has value only as a place of experience where thinking can begin. Thinking has to have something to think about. From here thinking goes to work and provides a better grasp of what is really going on.
In daily life first impressions tend to be filled with our usual habitual subjective thoughts and don't tell us much other than about ourselves. Thinking can wake us up to let the old thoughts pass and try to look deeper (within and without) for something new.