We live in a time where belief and knowing are constantly getting mixed together. Some voices tell us to just believe. Others say only what can be measured is real. In both cases, something essential is missing. This series takes up a different approach: that knowing is something we have to practice. It begins with the recognition that our minds are not as steady as we think they are, and that without training, we are easily pulled into fear, reaction, and secondhand ideas.

Across seven lectures, Dennis Klocek works through this problem step by step, as a lived process. Drawing on the work of Rudolf Steiner alongside practical observation of thinking, memory, imagination, and will, he introduces exercises in concentration, contemplation, meditation, and prayer. The aim is to develop the capacity to stay with a question, to think more clearly, and to experience something of truth directly. By the end, the work opens into prayer, as learning how to free the will and create a space where something real can meet us.

Lecture 1: From Belief to Knowing

Begins with St. Augustine’s idea that to know, you must first believe, and turns it into a real question: what does that actually mean? The lecture explores how the human capacity for error is not a flaw, but part of how learning happens, and why, without training, belief can easily be shaped by fear, habit, or group thinking rather than direct knowing. (believing and knowing, two parallel biographies in one life, spiritual practice, healing dreams, levels of will)

Lecture 2: Training Attention and Perception

Looks at how truth is not just “out there,” but depends on the relationship between the world and how we meet it. Through simple but demanding exercises, participants begin to see how easily the mind drifts, and how concentration can be developed so that perception becomes more reliable and less reactive. (truth, belief, symbols, neurology of senses, concentration exercises, mental images)

Lecture 3: Imagination and the Life of Thought

Explores imagination as a necessary part of thinking. The lecture connects imagination with memory, sleep, and the rhythms of the body, showing how symbolic thinking can help loosen rigid patterns without slipping into fantasy or confusion. (fantasy, neurotransmitters, lucid dreams, drugs, REM sleep, abstraction, living concepts, morphological concepts)

Lecture 4: Changing Ways of Knowing

Traces how human consciousness has shifted over time, from direct experience of the spiritual world into modern intellectual thinking. The focus here is on learning a more mobile kind of thinking, one that can hold multiple perspectives without collapsing into fixed ideas or quick conclusions. (contemplation, intellect, alchemical tradition, archetypal being exercise, training the heart, ABC technique)

Lecture 5: Entering Meditation

Introduces meditation as a practice of working with thought itself. Participants begin to experience what happens when thinking is no longer driven by external input, and how this can lead to moments of clarity that feel very different from ordinary thinking. (akashic record and human consciousness, thinking off of the brain, spirit and will, mantras, rotating through ideas)

Lecture 6: Faith as Experience

Revisits the idea of faith, and how it can arise from experience, through working with mood, perception, and natural processes. The emphasis is on developing a steadiness that can remain intact even when certainty falls away. (meditation, gemüt, mood motifs, manas, working with symbols of the self, tolerating ambiguity)

Lecture 7: Prayer and the Freedom of the Will

Brings the work into the realm of prayer, understood not as asking for outcomes, but as learning how to use the will in a different way. The lecture explores how to create a kind of inner space, where questions can be held without forcing answers, and where something beyond our usual thinking can begin to respond. The result is a greater capacity to meet life with clarity, resilience, and care. (prayer, faith, grace, crisis of belief, moral imagination, creation of sacred space for rituals, gematria)