Presence of mind, Geistesgegenwart, is the trained capacity to seize a fleeting inner experience at the instant it arises, before it fades from consciousness.
Presence of Mind (Geistesgegenwart) in Anthroposophy is the trained capacity to grasp an experience in status nascendi, at the moment of its arising, before it dissolves. Rudolf Steiner names it among the preparations required for higher cognition in his lecture of 30 September 1921 at Dornach, published as Cosmosophy, Volume I (GA 207). His claim is unusually testable: supersensible impressions press in on every person at falling asleep and, above all, at waking, and the reason almost nobody reports them is not that the impressions are absent but that the faculty which would catch them was never cultivated. Where presence of mind has been schooled, Steiner says, the waking moment opens a whole world of flowing objective thought, distinct from dream reminiscence, observable with the same composure a chemist brings to a laboratory bench. In Steiner's soul map this thought-weaving plays between the physical body and the etheric body.
Presence of mind is the faculty Steiner asks a student of spiritual science to build first, because every other observation depends on it. The inner world does not wait. A thought-picture rises at waking and is gone in a second or two, and the untrained observer registers only the gap. Schooling this alertness turns the threshold of sleep into a place where something can be read.
In Steiner's Own Words
Among the preparations necessary to attain higher levels of cognition you will remember that mention was made in the books already referred to of the cultivation of a certain presence of mind [Geistesgegenwart]. One hears so little said in ordinary life of the observations that may be made of the spiritual world, because people lack this presence of mind. Were this presence of mind actively cultivated among human beings, all people would be able to talk of spiritual, super-sensible impressions, for such impressions actually crowd in upon us to the greatest extent as we fall asleep or awake, particularly as we awake. It is only because this presence of mind is cultivated so little that people do not notice these impressions. At the moment of awaking a whole world appears before the soul.
What it Means Today
The state Steiner is pointing at has a name in contemporary research: hypnagogia, the border consciousness of sleep onset, and its mirror at waking, hypnopompia. Andreas Mavromatis gave it the first book-length scientific treatment in Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1987, and his central methodological problem is exactly Steiner's: the material is real, it is abundant, and it is almost impossible to report because it evaporates the instant attention turns toward it. Laboratories now solve this mechanically. At the MIT Media Lab, Adam Haar Horowitz, working with Robert Stickgold and Pattie Maes, built Dormio, a wearable that detects the loss of muscle tone at sleep onset and speaks a prompt to rouse the sleeper just far enough to report what was there. Subjects reliably produce imagery they would otherwise never remember.
Thalira synthesis: the laboratory buys with a device what Steiner asked the student to grow as an organ, and the difference is not accuracy but ownership, since a rousing tone can only retrieve the content while a schooled Geistesgegenwart can stay inside it and keep observing. Steiner's practical instruction follows from this. Do not chase the threshold with strain. Practise the composure first in daylight, in small unremarkable moments, until holding steady while something moves quickly becomes ordinary, and then carry that steadiness to the edge of sleep.
Where to Read More