My favourite subject at school was English literature and creative writing, and this was what I planned to study at university. I was on the train on my way to Liverpool University for an interview, trying to work out what I would say in my motivational speech, when it suddenly came to me: I don’t want to study English literature at university level, I don’t want to learn about iambic pentameters, how to deaden and analyse everything living and magical about writing and literature… “I do not want to go to university to learn what to think, I want to learn how to think.” I went on to study philosophy.
I longed for a university life of deep questioning and meaningful philosophical exchanges - instead studying philosophy at university seemed to be more about describing what highly specialised philosophers said in highly technical detail and language, and then describing what other philosophers said about them, and arguing for and against their positions in a way which never led to any conclusions, didn’t seem important or relevant to the way we live our lives, which I could not engage with, and which never made me think. There was no mention or teaching on ‘how to think’. I could not seem to meet anybody in a deep philosophical way, which is what I longed for. My clearest memories are of the personal research I did in the university library and bookshop, research about spiritual philosophy and psychology, about another way of seeing and understanding the world which took into account our humanity in its deepest, widest and highest sense.
After graduating, my eye fell on a philosophy book ‘The Meaning of Meaning’ by Charles K Ogden. "The meaning of meaning?" I said to myself. My mind began to chase its own tail, round in circles, and it suddenly seemed to me that the title of this book summed up for me how impossible and unsatisfactory my experience of philosophy was, constantly turning in meaningless circles of speculation, argument, criticism and counter criticism. I couldn’t make any ultimate sense of it, I couldn’t connect to it, and it hurt my head! It was in this moment I decided to give up philosophy, and went on to work on social problems in the London area, coordinating voluntary projects which included designing and running training courses. My last job in England before I left for France to join Jean-Christophe, involved working with prisoners. Jean-Christophe and I married and had two children, now grown up.
Much later, I returned to philosophy, through a meeting with a philosophy book whose key message was ‘thinking about thinking’, "Thinking about thinking" my young self would have said to herself! When I was 42 life arranged for me to meet this book, ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’ by Rudolf Steiner, which for me finally began to make sense of philosophy, a book which gathers up the main streams of human philosophical thinking so far, and takes it forward as an invitation to philosophise our true self, towards our true freedom, looking deeply with logic and reason at who we are as human beings and how we actually operate, and which offers a way of escape from the prison of our minds and limited materialistic thinking…if we know how to think it.
A key moment for me came in 2021, as I was recovering from Covid, after twelve nights of fever alone in an empty house. I came to realise with strong and painful clarity, that we humans are here on earth trapped in a materialistic dumbed-down thinking of appearances, we are contained within an institutionalised thinking-prison, and that we none of us came here for that - and I woke up to a sense of responsibility to do something about it, anything I could, even if I did not know how. As I am coming to understand it, not knowing how to think, having mistaken ideas, not being able to heal our thinking or know who we really are, is at the root of all our increasingly difficult problems here on earth, and it is in the heart of thinking, renewed thinking, that the problems can be healed.
I knew what I wanted to do was to help others to learn how to think with the extraordinary guidance of Philosophy of Freedom, and that I could only do that by starting with myself, intensifying my own research and self-transformation, clarifying and strengthening my thinking. More and more I realised that in this we could all benefit from structured, adult education, study guidance and individualised accompaniment as we work to transform our thinking, rather than struggling alone, or getting involved in discussions and debates on meaning. We need to experience what is written, in our own thinking, we need to develop our thinking. I have since been developing and testing training methods and materials of all kinds, in partnership with Jean-Christophe. The wonderful thing about working in the spirit of helping others to understand is that it also helps me to learn, increases my questioning, intensifies my consciousness, gives me good strong motivating deadlines, helps me to be dedicated and alert and work regularly as I progress along the path of developing stronger, clearer thinking. Working together on this project with others creates unique relationships which continue to deepen as we progress.
Now I am again working with ‘prisoners’, this time, with all of us who are imprisoned in rigid and incomplete thinking about ourselves and the world, and I am able to accompany and guide people as they learn how to think, which just as I wanted to learn how to think when I was 18.
Gratitude and credits to all the people who have inspired and taught me on this path, in groups, individual sessions and training courses, in particular: Ian Bass, Nicole Barr, Yeshayahu Ben Aharon, Claire Laronde, Inessa Burdich, Pauline Marksteiner and Ian Trousdell.
Jean-Christophe
Interested from an early age by the question of knowledge in the service of humanity, I became an engineer, after obtaining a diploma from a major French engineering school and a Master's degree from the American University Georgia Tech. In my research on the knowledge process I was particularly interested in Artificial Intelligence, and I worked as an engineer in this field before taking management roles in various multinationals.
I gradually realised that our way of thinking about engineering and technology was nolonger at all suited to our world and our society. I then sought to understand what was wrong with our cognitive processes. Where had we gone off track? Why do all the solutions attempting to resolve the problems of our environment or our society systematically turn out to have deleterious effects contrary to the original intentions? I then became interested in philosophy and in particular in epistemology to get back to the source of the problem. I thus became aware that human intelligence was, in its foundation, far removed from so-called artificial intelligence and that the latter had even become an obstacle to the development of a true creative human intelligence.
A few years ago I changed my career to become a maths teacher. At the intersection of my research on knowledge and my need to serve humanity and in particular new generations, so that they develop a healthy and new way of thinking which will resolve (dissolve) and heal at the root the problems that besiege us.
