Practical Training in Thought is Steiner's 1909 exercise course for disciplining everyday thinking: exact observation, patient judgment, and memory work that make thought conform to reality.
Practical Training in Thought in Anthroposophy is the exercise course Rudolf Steiner gave in Karlsruhe on 18 January 1909, published in GA 108, The Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence, for making everyday thinking conform to reality. Steiner distinguishes genuine thinking from so-called practical thinking, which merely runs in habitual ruts, and grounds the training in one conviction: the world is built by thought, so thoughts can only be drawn from things that already contain them. The exercises work through the astral body, the vehicle of thought life, which receives the imprint of world-thoughts when speculation is held back. The course prescribes exact observation of the weather, picturing sequences of events without premature inference, testing predictions against what actually happens, recalling yesterday in full sensory detail, and deferring decisions overnight. Practitioners of Goethean observation still use these exercises as a first schooling in objective thinking.
Practical Training in Thought is Rudolf Steiner's short course of everyday exercises for sharpening observation, memory, and judgment. Given to a small audience in Karlsruhe in 1909, it asks for no special setting: weather watched at sunset, a neighbour's actions followed into tomorrow, a decision held back overnight. The training rests on Steiner's claim that thinking becomes practical only when it follows the inner necessity of things.
In Steiner's Own Words
Goethe was such a man. He was a thinker who always lived with his thought within the things themselves. The psychologist Heinroth's book in 1826, Anthropology, characterized Goethe's thought as “objective.” Goethe himself appreciated this characterization. What was meant is that such thinking does not separate itself from things, but remains within them. It moves within the necessity of things. Goethe's thinking was at the same time perception, and his perception was thinking. He had developed this way of thinking to a remarkable degree. More than once it occurred that, when he had planned to do something, he would go to the window and remark to the person who happened to be with him, “In three hours we shall have rain!” And so it would happen.
What it Means Today
The Karlsruhe course is a working manual, and its exercises ask for nothing beyond ordinary life. Each evening, observe the weather exactly: the cloud forms, the light at sunset. Hold that picture in detail until the next evening's observation stands beside it, and let the two images melt into one another without drawing a single conclusion. For events already understood, picture what your neighbour will do tomorrow, then check the outcome and trace any error calmly back through your own reasoning. For scattered minds Steiner adds concentration: in a spare half hour, choose one remote subject, something noticed on a walk two years ago, and think only that for five minutes. Memory is trained by recalling yesterday's encounter down to the buttons on a coat, filling gaps with invented detail until sharpened observation makes invention unnecessary. Judgment is trained by patience: picture two ways of executing a plan, stop, and decide tomorrow.
Thalira synthesis: this is solar work, will poured into thinking, the point where Steiner's path stops being doctrine and becomes a discipline measured in five-minute units, practiced at the kitchen window rather than the meditation cushion. The lecture of 18 January 1909 has stayed in print as the pamphlet Practical Training in Thought, in Henry B. Monges's translation revised by Gilbert Church in 1966, and study groups still assign it before Theosophy or Occult Science because those books presuppose the kind of thinking these exercises build. A neighbouring term from the same lectures is Novalis.
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