The Fallacy of the Passive Observer

"In our ordinary mental lives, thinking is almost always mixed with other activities, such as perceiving, feeling, willing, and so on. These other activities originate in the body. But thinking plays into them. And, to the extent that it plays into them, something occurs in and through us in which the body has no part.

Those who deny this cannot rise above the illusion caused by the fact that thinking is always observed together with these other activities.

With inner effort, however, we can experience in our minds the thinking part of our inner life in itself, apart from all the other activities of our inner life....

Once this is understood, it can no longer be doubted that the mind can have supersensible experiences outside the body, for this would mean denying what we know from firsthand experience.

Why, we may wonder, are people reluctant to accept this confirmed fact?

The reason is that [this supersensible experience] does not reveal itself unless we have first put ourselves in the mental state capable of receiving it. People, however, are generally suspicious if they are required to make an effort of a purely mental nature for something to be revealed to them that in itself is independent of them.

They believe that because they have to prepare themselves for its revelation, they have actually produced its content by themselves."

- Rudolf Steiner

This is a brilliantly enlightening intuition of the psychological state underlying a prevalent attitude to mind. Generally, then, I'd say it applies to most of philosophy, and especially to phenomenology, and even more to Husserl's phenomenology, dependent as it is on the epoche, which is literally putting oneself in a mental state in order to engage something not perceivable otherwise.

The corollary, I think, is the belief that sights, sounds, smells, feels, tastes that we experience, that constitute our experience, are entirely free of thinking. It's the belief that, self-consciously but without any mental effort, we can distinguish thinking and perceiving, because the two are self-evidently separate.

Which they are not.