The Gentle Will: Meditative Guidelines for Creative Consciousness

The Gentle Will: Meditative Guidelines for Creative Consciousness: From What Is Thought to Thinking, from What Is Felt to Feeling, from What Is Willed to Willing, By Georg Kühlewind. Lindisfarne Books, 2011, 114 pgs.

Review by Joyce Reilly

On the cover of the Lindisfarne Press edition of Georg Kühlewind’s The Gentle Will there is a lovely photograph of hands poised at a keyboard. The long slim fingers are touching the keys, but not yet pressing down—the music is all in potential, the keys await the music. The fingers are transferring the pianist’s intention, and are about to become instruments themselves. This expressive moment shows us the essence of what we are to encounter and work through in the one-hundred-plus pages of this slim and powerful book: the essence of the gentle will and its power to create, respond, repair, and express. This photograph becomes even more touching when we learn that the hands at the instrument belong to Georg’s grandson, and that in his own early life Georg had a passion to perform at the piano.

The book is itself organized musically, with four “preludes” framing the content and a progression in subject from thought to thinking; from thinking to feeling; and from feeling to willing; ending with the cosmic background of the will. In each section, Kühlewind assumes that we are there to be engaged not as mere readers or spectators, and he invites us to practice what he illuminates in his preludes in a particular form. There are sections entitled “Contemplation” that are meant to be thought through, pondered, and exhausted on the level of everyday thinking. Then there are parts called “Contemplation/Meditation, “where the reader is invited to use the contemplations as a means to enter into real bodyfree thinking, into the meditative path. This is perhaps a unique feature of Kühlewind’s work, that he repeats ideas from his earlier works and practical advice on how to achieve what he is speaking about, treating his books as a means rather than an end, almost as workbooks rather than pure text.

Michael Lipson’s translation is clear and elegant, and his long association with Kühlewind is such a help here. In his workshops, Georg often compared studying meditative texts in a state of ordinary consciousness, as if they were ends in themselves, to confusing the runway with the flight! To study like that is like grasping a magnifying glass with head down, testing the strength of the surface, and perhaps raising our head to calculate the wind’s velocity, without realizing that the runway is only the preparation for our own earth-free journey, our sense-free flight. This is both an amusing picture and a sad one, and Georg made it his life’s work to help free us of constraints so we could enter the world of spirit.

The first line of the “First Prelude” is: “We live in a world of meanings, though we are convinced that we live in a world of things.” This sentence alone could summarize everything that Kühlewind brings us, in this book and in so many others. It also relates to his endeavor to understand the experience of the small child, and his conviction that the trauma of birth is not the arduous process of emergence from the maternal body (traumatic for the mother, perhaps!) but the realization that we have emerged from the spiritual world of meaning into the material world of things. We knock up against that which has form but is hollow, and must elevate and infuse our experience with meaning ourselves, through our own effort of will. We then begin the work of the book—that is, we start to contemplate and meditate, at first around the theme of how we think. The outcome of these exercises—that we begin to experience the I am, that we know ourselves to be an eternal, spiritual being rather than a complex of outer circumstances and inner reactions—is valuable enough to justify the whole book. The further benefit of this section, when it is worked through—that we begin to experience the objects that we use for concentration exercises as meaningful, sacred things—gives us entrance into the world from which we came.

The “Second Prelude” takes us from thinking to feeling, and, of course, by “feeling” Kühlewind is not referring to emotion, but to the feeling that leads our thinking, that guides our logic, which he calls cognitive feeling. Kühlewind elucidates this difference, as well as the difference between the I and the Me, and prepares us for the next “flight.” These exercises lead us quietly yet dramatically away from the ordinary experience of emotion to the world of feeling; to differentiation in feeling; and then to meaning—and along the way we begin to realize our freedom. We begin to experience our inner world as “purified” of forms, and our outer “sight” as clarified and exact. Again, we could stop here and be infinitely enriched, but we are urged to go on.

The “Third Prelude” begins again with the thought that we do not know how we think, but now the emphasis is on the will: we do not know the connection of our thoughts to our will. We are used to exercising our will in action, but are not aware that everything that is formed has will, is formed with will. We can be awestruck by great art or music, by science and architecture, as well as by the majesty and ferocity of nature—and there we can directly experience a forming will, a will that is not mine, a will that is beyond anything I can imagine and therefore alerts me to the world beyond my experience. This momentary lapse in our egotism can lead to a moment of receptiveness, to a feeling of thy will not my will—which can also be experienced as grace. This receptive will is also the basis for our earliest learning, for the possibility to imitate, for the possibility to be imprinted with the first hundred words—with all that surrounds us as infants. In this section, the purification of the will becomes a possibility as we move into exercises for the will, and realize the importance of relaxation! We then confront speaking, remembering, imitating, reading, and the body, and our exercises bring us into touch with the gentle will itself. We are now ready for the “Fourth Prelude.”

The importance of this book lies in the realm of the gentle will. Kühlewind states that whenever we do not know how we do something, we receive a gift. We work very hard at our exercises and in our everyday life, we increase our attentiveness and our awareness in each moment that we can—and then we are able to reflect, to be attentive, to be in tune with what we are doing, and so on: is this of our own making, or is this a gift? And through this gift, the whole objective world is revealed to us. Why is this not universally recognized? Why do we need to lay claim to our thoughts and ideas, as if we were not being allowed to participate in the spiritual world? Kühlewind points to this misunderstanding as a basis for much of our suffering. At this point, we are eager to go further.

In the fourth section, Kühlewind begins tracing the spiritual or cosmic origins of the will. Far from a flight without a runway, he takes us back to the essence of our humanity—our attentiveness. He states that the profaning of human life began when religions siphoned meaning into their own domain and left everyday life on a different plane. Everyday life began to be all about usefulness, manipulating the world of things, with an inevitable slide into commodification, and human life became simply a part of this useful thing-ness. The exercises in this section begin with silence and progress to meditation itself. The author presents different types of meditation: on a sentence or an image; perceptual meditations; and ends with meditation that poses a question, or meditative research. We are now at the moment when the gentle will can be seen as the fruit of all our efforts, and we are freed to be instruments—of art, of knowledge, and most importantly, of “the peace,” according to St. Francis. One is reminded here of the saints in their purest attitudes, such as St. Catherine: “All the way to God is God, for has he not said, ‘I am the Way?’” and of the words attributed to St. Francis: “Always and everywhere preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.” We have now reached the point where the exercises mean to take us: to freedom of, or gentle, will.

The rest of the book contains further exercises and meditations, and several sections that could be studied on their own but are probably best realized after the work of the earlier chapters has prepared the reader to take them up actively. In the appendix titled “Reversal of the Will and Encountering the Power of the Logos,” Kühlewind speaks about the difference between thinking or thought and the experience of thinking, and the will and the experience of willing, with direct references to Rudolf Steiner’s Riddle of Humanity and The Philosophy of Freedom. He ends with quotes from Dante and Rilke, two of his most cherished writers. In the appendix, “Art and Knowledge,” he explores what are at first seemingly obvious differences between the two; unpacks these ideas and brings us to a childlike and playful, “gentle-willing” experience of both; and then emerges with us into a field where we are both more aware of the origins of ideas and creative expressions, and know ourselves to be capable in these realms. Indeed, the future health and existence of our world relies on our ability to be in a state of gentle willing.

Kühlewind is, above all, a teacher, guide, and traveler who stops along the road and waits for us to catch up with him. In all his books, as here, one finds not only his own careful journey explained, but also his deep respect for his readers, his conviction that we are all capable of being in a state of non-duality, neither everyday nor spiritual, simply— here. Kühlewind does not hand us anything completed, but opens a door—and sometimes puts out a hand to bring us over the threshold. If you are looking for a definition of will, or of anything else, you will be frustrated by this book—you will be asked to have an experience rather than seek definitions, and you will be invited, but not coerced. If you have the patience—and, indeed, the will—to take this journey, you will be more than pleased. I feel a sense of connectivity, of community, when I think of others across the world reading this book, working through its content, and consulting with each other about the experience—its difficulties, its joys. Indeed, in each of the many languages it may be translated into it will have a slightly different flavor, but no matter. This community of striving human beings, creating itself through individual commitment and mutual trust, may be small and not yet recognized as mighty. Perhaps this is the answer, seed-like as it is, to the question Kühlewind poses at the beginning of this book: In the face of human folly and suffering, what is to be done? We must answer that question with him.