Intuitive Consciousness and Earthly Thinking

How Young Children Bring us Non-linear thinking

My daughter and I love to do puzzles together.  Always the ones with the soft, watercolor painted, Waldorf themed images, or better yet wooden ones, the hand-carved, plant dyed ones.  One day when she was six I said to her, let’s make our own puzzle.  Then it can go together a different way every time.

In that moment I had discovered what had always tugged at my Waldorf teacher conscience – the younger children do not naturally believe things have to be done just one way, and games like puzzles teach them they do. 

We drew pictures of butterflies, trees, rabbits, a princess and a tractor, and cut them out in gently wavy lines.  Now, she was able to put the puzzle together without my help, and we also took turns telling a story about the characters in the new little world we were creating.

What is the harm in letting a four or five year old put a pre-cut, fixed puzzle together?  To answer that, we have to look at the nature of human thinking. 

In the “Tablets” of his Esoteric Lessons, Rudolf Steiner describes how, on the Earth, we experience our own drive to know who and what we are.  We are taken on a journey through these verses in which we hear the voice, our own voice, asking what role earthly time and space have in bringing to our ears the eternal command, “know yourself”.

What is meant here is:  the ability to experience time or space is unique to this earthly world.  The friction caused by that experience allows us to discover who we are.  In the heavens, where children have just been, things are otherwise. 

Children under, say, nine, tend to make up rules for games, or are unable to follow fixed rules at all.  Should we try to make them follow the rules? 

The younger children do not have this free-form experience of life just because they are not yet mature enough; it is because they are still partly living in the expanded, un-contracted thinking of the world they come from.  We take this from them at our peril.

In the same verse, Steiner hints that you lose the “power of thought” as a result of exposure to time.  Together, the three Tablets create this picture:

Just the way we gradually incarnate into a physical body, the thinking also incarnates.  What was a creative, living force contracts down into the intellect, which has the properties of the physical world, ordering things and concepts into relationships according to space and to time.

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So what happens when young children who have an un-fixed thinking learn to solve a puzzle which has only one solution?  They are learning to think with the intellect.  If this happens before the thinking has naturally incarnated to this level, the more flexible thinking is being supplanted when it still has work to do.

Many types of games are introduced to children far too early.  Legos, for example, disturb the development of a young child’s sense of space and position/movement, because they don’t need to be put together according to the rules of weight and balance like wooden blocks do.  If the sense of space is developed, as in the school child, playing with Legos will not interfere with development (unless swallowed!).¹ However, it continues to reinforce adherence to the rigid rules of assembly.

The greatest lies of all are told by cell phones and computers, which in reality only work one way, but give the illusion of being alive through their complexity and the choices they let you make.

Beeswax modeling is a sensible alternative for children up to 8 or 9.  It responds to one’s own body, to the warmth that softens it and the fingers that shape it.²  Completely flexible, the form is unfixed while the child gently learns the limitations of the material itself.   

There is a point in a child’s development when working to solve a problem within the constraints and limitations of the situation strengthens the incarnation of their thinking.  If their inner life has been allowed to remain flexible longer, they will approach these more mature problems very differently.  Instead of looking to the limitations for an answer, they listen to the need at hand.

Since intellectual thinking is meant to work like a machine, it is goal oriented; it starts with the solution.  Creative thinking is meant to be non-linear.  It is capable of looking at things from different sides simultaneously, as it is based in the world where one is not as bound by the constraints of time and space.

This is the nature of creative problem solving.  In his article about the “opposable mind”, scholar Roger Martin illustrates how successful leaders have the capacity to hold in their minds two opposing ideas at once and creatively resolve the tension between these two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of both but is superior to both.³  He comes to the conclusion that we are born with the ability, rather than to make either-or choices and settle for the best available option, to creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas, generating innovative outcomes.⁴

Waldorf graduates often develop this capacity for creative solutions. 

The truth is, things do not go together in just one way.  Games are more fun if they change; relationships evolve over time; the same punishment doesn’t fit every crime and no two students are alike.  We are well advised to learn this from our children rather than pressing them into the mold of the intellect.

Playing with fixed games too early does not build that creative flexibility because it makes the world black and white.  A game which is more open and creative lays the foundations for a future adult who has the flexibility to find new and appropriate solutions to problems.

And here we are yet again - the same thing, educating children, can have not just different forms, but directly opposing intentionalities. Do children deserve to have the innate, living consciousness they bring to the earth carefully guarded and nurtured? The answer is in the kind of young people we want to have leading our world. Could it be a good thing if they had the capacity to grasp situations from several sides at once? If they instinctively understood there is no one right way to do something?

As schools struggle to reconcile teaching children the basics this world requires of them, while they also know what Rudolf Steiner emphasized about conventional methods of teaching reading, they find themselves in a bind. What Steiner said more or less was that if reading is taught in an abstract way, it is extremely difficult to overcome that - specifically in terms of fully becoming the human being you were meant to be. (To be fair, sometimes I wonder if my efforts to prevent my children from learning to read really balanced out my other parenting mistakes)

And that is one little part of education. We now have smart phones and tablets in kindergarten. What is a puzzle next to a screen with interactive games and “learning” programs? Are those likely to make us more intuitive and mentally agile, if used before the appropriate age?

The capacity of intuitive thinking is so big we can’t see it. Sometimes you can tell what someone needs even if they don’t tell you. This week someone told a sensitive person I know how they seem to have sought out friends who aren’t really able to connect emotionally. In that moment, he knew what she needed to hear - do they share your life goals? What would it be like to be around someone who made your life’s purpose their own? And that changed something.

Imagine that, times ten. That is literally what the soul is capable of, and what is unfolding with palpable force and speed in this moment in time. Every effort to support the welling up of what is truly human will bring a return for our world.

1. Das Goetheanum, Die Entwicklung der Sinnen

2. Marilyn Liebowitz, sculpture teacher, New Palz, NY

3. Roger Martin,  “How Successful Leaders Think”,  Harvard Business Review,  June 2007

4. Ibid