Excerpt from my Introduction to Rosenkranz's Life of Hegel

 

Introductory Kernel for Future Work: From the Hegelian Conceptual Dialectic to the new Etheric Cognition 

Scott Elliot Hicks 

    At the heart of Hegel’s philosophy burns a purifying, crystallizing fire. His speculative logic represents the preparatory steps toward a fully modern, Michaelic form of cognition: a clairvoyant thinking in which will-filled acts of human meaning and perception merge with the new life flowing through the world.  Michael is the leading spirit of our time and is pouring down the highest new impulses of heart-thinking into humanity right now. Taking up these new seeds, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) pointed the way beyond the brilliant extract left behind by Hegel (and Fichte and Schelling): “The profound ideas of German idealism must gain further substance through what can come from the spiritual domain, enabling them to be raised from mere ideas to living beings of the spiritual worlds.”i In this light, Hegel’s system appears as a mighty, necessary precursor, a burning tornado in the furnace of thought that prepares the soul for true spiritual experience in the spiritual world itself. We can become more than faithful dogs or cows trapped in the night. 

    For Hegel, the Absolute is not an eternal, static perfection shining like a star at the top of a Christmas tree, but a dynamic, self-actualizing Spirit. As H.S. Harris notes, “The Urbild or archetype for the mind’s image of itself is its conception of its place in Nature.”ii The Absolute must particularize itself, becoming determinate through its own logical necessity. “It is rationally essential,” Hegel insists, “that the absolute not be something indeterminate, but instead particularize itself... and be recognized, known, and envisaged in it.” This is the archetype of self-actualization: the Absolute comes to know itself as determinate knowing, as Concept (Begriff), as Spirit. 

    In Hegel’s Science of Logic, the Concept is the living, self-moving totality in which thought and being are unified. It is not a token or symbol culled from sense experience, but the dynamic essence that generates and determines reality. Unlike the static categories that the Understanding provides to structure reality into little boxes, the Concept is reason in action, the concrete universal that particularizes itself, passes through difference and negation, and returns to itself enriched. As Hegel states in the Doctrine of the Concept, it is “the realm of subjectivity or of freedom:” the logical structure of self-consciousness actualizing itself in the world. The Concept unfolds in three syllogistic moments: Universality, Particularity, and Singularity. This triadic movement is not linear, but a circulatory process in which each moment mediates the others. In essence, the Concept is the logical expression of the Absolute’s self-actualization.  It is Spirit thinking itself into existence. Crucially, in the Greater Logic, the Concept sublates or distills (aufhebt) the earlier doctrines of Being and Essence, preserving them within a higher, self-transparent unity. It becomes the “truth” of Being, because here determinacy is no longer immediate or reflected, but self-posited and self-comprehending. Thus, the Concept is the “free, creative power” that “gives itself its own content.” It is the rational core of all reality: the living fire of Spirit in its pure logical form, before it externalizes itself as Nature and returns as Spirit in time.

This process of human knowing (Erkennen) is no abstract, passive mirroring of the forms of nature or the technological artifices of mankind. In the Encyclopedia Logic (§24) Hegel clarifies: “The original calling of man, to be an image of God, can be realized only through Erkennen.” Cognition is the etherization of the will, the transformation of thought into world-working life. The human being is not only a cosmic mirror, but is united with its creative unfolding. This is speculative Idealism’s core: “The Idea,” Hegel writes, “is at once what is quite simply effective and actual as well” (E.L. §142). The Idea or flexible rational archetype has outputs in two directions: both in rational concepts and in the limestone, the fir tree, the clover.

    The Concept’s work leads toward the overarching experience of the Ideal. The Concept is the luminous, dynamic node where thinking organizes comprehension in a field of pure knowledge. It is immanently real, active, and historical. Concepts are not isolated; each shines into another, linked to its opposite, its contradiction, its death and rebirth. To think the Concept is to experience a morphing, self-generating world of ideas—to participate in God’s creative work. It is like a revolving door that peers into infinite revolving doors on all horizons. Hegel leads this activity to a complete self-grasping of the human I in God’s I, as achieved in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s “Absolute Knowing.” Yet this occurs in a conceptual world not yet inhabited by living spiritual beings, such as the angels, spirits of fire and spirits of personality. Steiner’s work provides the crucial step: to pass through the door of the Concept into real spiritual life, love, and community with beings—the transition from Vorstellung (representation) to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. The complete transformation of the lower self into the higher spiritual self is then accomplished through the ‘essence exchange’ discussed in Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s Cognitive Yoga... 

    Read more when the book, "The Life of Hegel" by Rosenkranz is released in a few weeks. 

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger - Meditation on the First Chapter of Ezekiel

יְחֶזְקֵאל  Meditation on the First Chapter of Ezekiel

For Demonstrating the Idea of Life

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger 

(This was published as an addendum to his work "Theology Drawn out of the Idea of Life." (orig. 1765). The first translation of the Theology, by Oetinger, a leading Pietist thinker, will be available in the Spring of 2026). 

It was stated in the Preface that life is a binding together or a complex of powers freely emitted from God, immersed in the atoms of mass, so that by a continuously rotating motion originally impressed, the passive is elevated through the active. This idea is demonstrable from the nature of things only to philosophers possessing the science of life, such as the Arab Artphulius. We, professing Theology, abstract from those, aiming only to prove such things from the oracles. God aids the weakness of our intellect through the first chapter of Ezekiel, where nothing but wheels and circular motions are hinted at as the principal phases of life divinely arisen.

Ezekiel saw: 1. A whirlwind from the North and in the midst of the whirlwind a concentrated fire. 2. From the midst of this fire he saw the appearance of four beings of the most vivid kind, or living creatures. 3. He saw the course of the living creatures to have proceeded straight forward, although distinguished internally by a flashing, intersecting motion. 4. He saw on the earth one wheel near the living creatures looking towards the four sides. From these things, I will give here only those most precisely to be observed which present a clearer definition of life. Its first moment is that life is a binding together of powers freely emitted from God; that this may be understood, even though it does not agree with ideas hitherto accustomed, it must be noted first, from a comparison of the Apocalypse of John and the wheels of Ezekiel, that the wheels in the Apocalypse were not seen, but only the living creatures, yet those then full of eyes internally; but since in Ezekiel the eyes were fitted into the wheels, it follows, since the eyes and wheels are internally of the Apocalyptic living creatures; hence the living creatures denote the exterior of life, the wheels the interior; it follows further that the living creatures and the wheels, although depicted separately and optically as different, nevertheless denote the same thing.

It must be noted secondly that the wheels appeared to Ezekiel indeed as one wheel, but there were four wheels interconnected with one another, just as animal within animal; hence it becomes clear that life in living creatures is something intense, where power is within power, and thus a complex of powers bound together into one through the spirit of God. For there was one spirit of the whirlwind, the living creatures, and the wheels, distinct from the powers of which they consist. But that the powers are freely emitted by God is clear, both from that very distinction of the spirit of God from the powers of the wheels, and from the gyratory motion itself, which must be accomplished by contrary strivings, centripetal and centrifugal, divinely and freely coordinated into contrary directions.

Someone may object that it is not yet certain that the things represented to Ezekiel denote spiritual things; but it is responded that it is most certain that the origin of the four living beings is described as flashing forth from the north wind. What are these now if not spiritual things? That the vital powers have their beginning from that which they themselves are not, namely from the north wind, which indicates something chaotic on the invisible side, a certain abyss; but what is this abyss other than a spiritual and potential origin, known only to God who acts most freely. 

This is illustrated, moreover, from the musical basis: 1^infinity, 2⁵, 3², 5¹, 7⁰, where the unity, from which the powers 2, 3, and 5 proceed, is the point and the septenary, without which in individual octaves innumerable tones would be given, because the basis would not be sufficiently limited by 5; it is also the point or concentrated circle; where neither the point 1^infinity nor the circle 7⁰ can be subjected to comparison or homogeneity with the powers 2, 3 and 5, for the unity, with which 1^infinity and 7⁰ coincide, is not in the series of prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., but generates it from itself in a manner transcending every rule. Therefore each constitutes the abyss, which is neither a mere chaotic potential point, nor an absolute nothingness of differentiated things, but something positive acting ideally and plastically with the quaternary (4) and senary (6); for just as unity in itself makes a distinction through the double expression 1^infinity and 7⁰ of the foundation of all musical harmony, so the same also really distinguishes all numbers from 1 to 7 in its ground 1^infinity, 7⁰ from one another. Thus, the terminus of musical (i.e., creative) activity is not singular—not only the center (1 to the infinite)—but also involves another, fundamentally distinct principle: the Circle (7⁰), which generates a point through concentration. Hence, 1 raised to the infinite power = 7⁰ is that Abyss; 2, 3, and 5 are the Powers; 4 and 6 are the operative Ideas. The powers bound together from 2, 3, and 5 are also, as revealed to me, Essences in the process of becoming.i

I must be very brief; hence I proceed to the other moment of distinction, which is, that the powers are immersed in the atoms of mass and thus the passive is elevated through the active. You will say, whence do the atoms of mass arise? Response: From the spiritual abyss, through the flashing and intersecting collision of powers of different intensity and direction, while the goings and returnings of the powers are incessantly continued crosswise and cyclically through points on account of the law of Gyration once and freely imposed by God upon the powers, whence it follows that the passive and active arise, or the atoms of mass and the Spiritual chasm from the same abyssal points, the passive is precipitated and that it is always revolved through that active, called the chasm by Ezekiel, and elevated into a more vivid state, just as brute matter is elevated into animated matter, and in this consists that notable circle of Genesis, the νόος γένεσεως or the wheel of created nature naturing, indicated most briefly by James (Ch. 3,6), although noticed by very few in the German version, indeed not even by Luther himself. You will object again that the breath of life, nishmat chayim, in Genesis is life per se, before the powers were immersed in the atoms of mass. Resp.: In Ezekiel, relating each thing more fully, who does not see that something corporeal, and thus atoms of mass, concur to the figures of the living creatures? But how this happens is hinted at somewhat obscurely, while the internal motion exerts itself in the manner of lightning (V. 15. 14); but lightning arises from the collision of hot and cold, active and passive, and thus a continual subaction and elevation of the passive occurs in the internal vital motion. We, accustomed to successive geometrical figures, bear these simultaneous concepts with difficulty, but it suffices that God shows us the wheel of nature is not conceived by the Geometrical method, unless one is accustomed to recall the most principal Geometrical theorems under one simultaneous view, with an artifice of the most intense universalification aimed at squaring. For us here it suffices to be taught the ideas of life from Ezekiel; if we do not exhaust all things, yet many things are helpful.

Therefore, let it be well weighed what Ezekiel says about the course of the living creatures, that they ran and returned in the appearance of most vehement lightning (v. 14; although it was said before they did not turn, V. 12), then it will be understood that the life of the living creatures retains in its interiors the force of quadratic, intersecting lightning, while in external affairs the motion is most simple. But lest anyone say that Spiritual things are nevertheless conceived materially, I will say in the briefest terms: the immateriality of spirits is far better preserved by this way than the Wolffian. For first, the two chaotic points and the powers themselves are something most immaterial; powers in power are something intense, not extended; but that a certain material type always enters these concepts, is from this, that both the formal and the material have their origin through the operative ideas of the quaternary and senary from the same chaotic points, so that the material and immaterial are discriminated by a perpetual law and again united with the atoms of mass; but this cannot be sufficiently vividly figured by successive types in the Geometrical manner, as is clear from the first chapter of Ezekiel. Each mode of conceiving, the Wolffian and the Ezekielitic, has its own knots, at least with this difference, that a) there the word of God suggests no norm of conceiving, here certainly not none, b) that there the corporeal as a mere Phenomenon, here as real, c) that there the corporeal is joined to the incorporeal only by an external harmony (if however it can be called harmony), here by an internal one. Furthermore, in either mode of conceiving the material and immaterial are indeed presented as different, but among the Wolffians only nominally, among us really. And this already emerged long before Spinozism in Jewish Spinozism, so that the Marcionites held the body of Christ only as a Phenomenon. 

You will say: You certainly make a composite out of the soul? I respond: If you call that a composite which is joined part outside part like a board, then the soul is not such; if you call that composite, insofar as it is something united from powers, then composition no less prejudices the soul than the composition of the Theanthropes prejudices God. It pleased God that all the fullness of the Deity should dwell in man bodily. This is perfection, not imperfection. The soul in this sense is not composed materially, but is essenced from 2. 3. 5, that is from the intellective 2, the potestative 5 and the sensual appetitive 5 through the principiative points 1 and 7 united with 4, into a substance complete from powers. Then the soul as a hypostasis complex from diverse powers is simplified divinely through the Logos.

You will say: What new word is this, 'essentiare'? I respond: It is to reduce to the intensity and inexistence of power in power. Thus the contradictory concept of antitypy is guarded against, offering the greatest escape to the Leibnizian monads, together with the principle of indiscernibles. The unity with the septenary are the first chaotic powers, and as the monad corresponds to the septenary, so the binary harmonizes with the senary, the ternary with the quinary. Only the quaternary stands in the middle, and is the formal principle with respect to the rest, mixing the atoms of mass with the formal origin of essentation. Thus we place the intense before the extensive, and we render those metaphysical terms of principle, essence, substance far more intelligible, since among metaphysicians they are most difficult to distinguish, indeed they differ only nominally. The principles to me are 1 and 7 with 4, the essences 2 3 5, the substance is all those in one. No materiality of the soul is inferred by us, but a true enduring perduration of matter surviving. Then also the principle of individuation depends for us not on an omnimodal external determination, but on internal manifestives of itself. But in the Leibnizian system, that which is called of itself is lacking in the indivisible manifestive, because there no genetic essentation, no circle of genesis originally impressed by the Father of lights, can be discerned there, but only mere representation. 

Here indeed the powers are essenced, here the intellective power makes its own Logos, the potestative with the sensitive in union with the intellective manifest themselves.  All powers entering the musical substrate operate also in the innermost of other subjects that are not externally musical, according to the law already received by the learned: The square root of elasticity/density, through which, what is lacking in attraction, the great Euler corrects, touching the innermost life of nature more closely, and then the dense is essenced through the subtle, and this through the dense. The power 5 denotes something dense, 3 with respect to this something elastic, although it is a certain medium between 2 and 4, which, since they are in struggle through 5 that works retentively and through 5 that works extensively; these effect  continuous division by means of the rest, yet with division always again simplified, i.e., recalled through simpler radical numbers to unitive essentation. I confess that naturally we do not know that such a thing underlies spiritual things; but through the first chapter of Ezekiel we are infallibly taught that the matter stands so also in spiritual things, albeit in an eminent mode.ii

Therefore, no bad consequences for Epicureanism, for the destructibility of the soul, can be connected. The life of the soul, although it is not incapable of being dissolved, like the divine, nevertheless cannot perish on account of the divine simplification. All things ought to be well considered before objections are formed. All objections can be answered. Let the fair weighers of truth now judge who is nearer to metaphysical or physical Fanaticism, the Leibnizians or the Newtonians. The former deduce all things from the ideal nexus of substances of God, reducing the great principle of sufficient reason to a phantasm, i.e., abusing it, where they subject God himself to this principle. The latter, however, so commit the inexhaustible freedom of God and his most free actions with the nexus of substances, that it is plain that God subjected all things to his will, his command, and the divinity tends that finally after a certain cycle of aeons he may be all in all.

WRITINGS

Books:

- (2018) The Resurrection of Thinking: Steiner's Anthroposophy & the Postmodernism of Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida & Levinas

- (2019) Earthly, Transcendental, & Spiritual Logic: From Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy 

- (2005) The Shattering Light of Stars - A novel 

I am an anthroposophical researcher from Pennsylvania and a faculty member of the Global Event College, directed by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon.

Current Research:

Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling; Spiritualizing the contents of Aristotle's philosophy in an anthroposophical sense; The history of the Concept of Intellectual Intuition (Anschauung). 

Youtube Video Demo

My Youtube Channel

Spiritualizing the Concept of Currency through Husserlian Phenomenology and Spiritual Science

 This is an extract from chapter 9 of my book "Earthly, Transcendental, and Spiritual Logic: from Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy." (Amazon.com) It is slightly revised, since I am updating some elements as I translate the book into German. 

Husserl did not recognize the deeper reality of the cosmic organology of logic. But we can look at precisely what he did accomplish. For him, the transition from logical thinking to phenomenological insight takes place when the meaning elements come to awareness in a fully saturated intuition or viewing of the sense of concepts in the thinking-terrain. However, this particulate substance on which the mental images and logical eidetic structures are projected seems to extend to infinity if it is not bypassed through moral development and heart thinking. When it is bypassed through the power of love dissolving its frozen power, we enter into another world, as our soul expands. In this moment we look back to find that the etheric grid is located fairly close to the physical body (in a spatial sense). In this moment we also recognize that every thought picture is a projection onto the dying light grid around the physical body, but that truly soul experiences and spiritual Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition take place beyond this fabric of receptivity of light-forms used in personal thinking. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has carefully taken this insight into deeper territory in his books, such as volume 2 of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, but showing how one can enter directly into this dead etheric skeleton, and through the new etheric Christ forces, resurrect its very substance into new life. In this way, we do not fly away from the body and the earth in a luciferic manner. 

It is important to also note that for Husserl part of the powers of human judgment concern the capacity to repeat the viewing of the identical essential concept or judgment again and again. For logical truth to consist, it is necessary for Husserl that the essential elements remain identical. But this quest for secure identity is problematic as has been shown by Derrida and Deleuze, among others. Can logic function, if the content of P is different every time I think it, even in a single syllogism? Is my father the same, every time I think of him? Is what was true of my sister yesterday, still true of her? 

       Let us look at an example. I am wondering whether I will receive a significant return on my investment on a particular stock on the stock market.  First, in analyzing this question, what is the value of the phenomenological turn?  What is the value of intuiting the meaning of the concepts with a direct and full saturation in the Husserlian sense?  First, it is important to distinguish between pure perception and thinking. I learn nothing from the white papers of businesses from merely staring at the computer screen and seeing black lines on white paper. I can only synthesize the various lines into something meaningful in the first place through thinking. Seeing random faces of the ‘development team’ means nothing until thinking combines the ideas of their accomplishments together into the concept of a company or a business, and their successful cooperation.  A green piece of paper means nothing if I do not consciously understand the meaning of the concept of currency. As Heraclitus rightly pointed out, a donkey will choose hay over gold. The donkey obviously perceives the gold, but does not think the significance of the value of gold in the economic processes of humans. 

       Now, if I analyze and dive into the meaning structures and experiences themselves inside the phenomenological reduction, if I look into the direct evidence of flowing in the experience of thinking the concept of currency, stocks, and profit, this is different from making a decision about the value of a particular investment. The externally perceptible elements are gone, and in the Husserlian sense, I can intuit the concept of currency, profit and loss. When I look into the noematic appearance of the concept of currency, I find that if I can set aside the specific memory images or received ideas about currency, I can find an element that is activated in pure thinking. I can note that there is a meaning-material and a quality associated with the viewing or intentional analysis of the concept of currency. In the thinking act, I can differentiate the meaning of currency as a medium or a representation of value that can be exchanged in a local economy from the concept of a nut, for example. I find that there is a noetic act or a thinking act which can move from observing the concept of a nut as the intended reality or intentional ‘matter’ or content and can go back to the meaning-limits of a currency.  The will is working as I focus my intuitional gaze on the meaning structures of one content vs. another. I want to keep the two circles of the Venn diagram from overlapping, but I am a witness to the causal meaning scope of each concept in full saturation. For example, I can trace and locate the precise boundary in the viewing of concepts between green paper and real US dollars. We might be fooled by a counterfeit dollar in our perception, but we can always differentiate between the concept of a real dollar and the concept of a counterfeit dollar. There is a meaning-boundary between the two.  What power in me is able to think the difference between the two?  How do I return to or, in Husserlian terminology, ‘intend’ [toward] the same concept?  Who thinks and how does the thinker weave through time and memories while retaining an identity? These are Husserlian questions.  

       Steiner would go further and suggest that when the thinker or the I AM wakes up and observes the very activity of creating, combining, differentiating, and linking up concepts in the non-imagistic, non-subjective thinking sphere, another realm opens up that is beyond the physical (and the dying etheric grid of representations) altogether. This can happen if we are able to both hold the two currents in the head apart, and also activate the middle zone with devotion, morality, spiritual scientific fundamental exercises, and self-knowledge. We can experience the spiritual I or thinker outside the body, thinking in the midst of a world of flowing concepts, moods, and Imaginative folds and world-large Imaginative pictures that are supersensible. The whole ‘body’ is involved in this process, not just the head. Thinking is then recognized as an activity that precedes all experience of concepts, and creates concepts by which it orders reality in terms of inner, outer, space, time, quantity, body, etc. The observation of self-thinking activity surfs on top of the observation of the concepts created through thinking, and the emotion and will clouds. We can also become aware of the warm, will-walker, and the spirit-heart gestures, which constitute the soul and spiritual logical actor. The complete logic farmer is present, able to morally walk and plant in his fields, with the sun shining down, supersensibly. And at the far end of this activity, I can give my own personal thinking to be carried by the essential loving cosmic thinking of the angelic hierachies. I am thought as a human persona inside the concept of living cosmic currency. 

       But the investor might argue that neither the Husserlian nor the further Anthroposophical dimension improve her capacity to make a winning trade.  She might look on the phenomenological move as perhaps opening up a new realm of experience but as a useless addition which adds nothing to her clarity of judgment, like someone who creates a glass dishwasher that is visible on all sides to watch the moment by moment workings of the spraying water, dispensing of soap and rotating arms. Does this really help the dishes get any cleaner? A person thinking in the same vein would argue that I can drive a car without knowing how internal combustion works or how rubber is made. Phenomenological viewing and the further spiritualization of thinking do not provide any ‘real world’ advantage, they might say.  One type of investor might go so far as to suggest that if you really believed in spirits, you should command them to show you the future prices of the cryptocurrency or stock markets. 

       On the other side, the visionary would try to tell the investor that the amazing landscapes and the blissful feelings that one experiences as you learn to see intense and vast images in the mind’s eye are far more valuable than making money in the external world.  Once a person has seen the incredible architecture and the impossibly beautiful lands that are within our inward vision, they can never turn back to the ‘dark and dirty earth, with its greedy people.’ This might lead to a new age conversion, where one could become a dharma bum. Husserl does not go this far, but his phenomenology could be distorted into connections with the mystic visionary.  Steiner goes in an entirely different direction, but his ideas can also be distorted into a support for personal, subjective soul development. 

       But if we can truly penetrate into the middle zone between these two extremes, we can find that the spiritualized thinking, which experiences the freedom of the I who thinks both inside the body and outside the body without leaving the earth behind, can experience the most valuable element in the truly moral dimension. Through the spiritualization of thinking, which passes beyond the eidos in Husserl’s works, we come to see out the back of the flexible and open concepts of currency. We find an element in the concept of currency that we never noted before, because we never recognized how our own subjective greed, love of personal comfort, and our hatred of other people were wrapped in the experience of investment in the first place. We can now look back at our whole constitution of soul, feelings, desires, and body as a stranger and can see how that aspect of inwardness distorted all of the meanings of all of the concepts.  The reversal was inside every meaning, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century.

     Now the spiritual event of the I waking up and being woken up inside the spiritual world of thinking as living beings co-working, wrestling, and producing world consecration, is recognized for the first time. We note that currency is primarily a spiritual living idea of humans giving and taking in a community of soul and spiritual exchange. I become something else by receiving your karmic treasure. The will acts that undergird the economic processes are always already spiritual processes, woven with the whole cosmos. It is not true that I meditate and then bring back subjective inspirations that I then apply to a pre-existing physical world, to transform it economically. Rather, every economic transaction is already woven into all spiritual beings. Only when I begin to perceive this with pure intuitive thinking or with Imagination, can I carry out a free moral technique in the real sense. Thinking with mere representations has also limited anthroposphical endeavors toward threefolding in just this way. 

This free intuition of the meaning content and spiritual inspiration behind money, of course, is a different idea than accumulating material wealth or buying material objects to support my ego being. But this doesn’t mean we have to suddenly give away all of our money or possessions. All the potential of trying to pass on spiritual treasure and the most intimate gift to one another rises across the threshold. We hold a gift in our spirit-self which allows the other to find his or her way into a higher grasp of his own self.  The spiritual currency is the exchange of transformed consciousness arising through meeting the other.  I may even take on the debt of the other as we enter into a spiritual community in spiritual and soul wakefulness. This insight into the spiritual concept of money can then totally change our relationship to investment and the notion of earthly money.  Can I invest my own spiritual quest in your spiritual awakening and growth? How can our spiritual wills truly work karmically together, which must transform our whole world? 

None of these moral elements are really recognized by Husserl.  Yes, he is not concerned with getting rich, but on the other hand, he does not recognize the cosmic supersensible and moral struggle through which Michael and his co-workers are trying to lift up and transform the merely earthly picture-reasoning through memory images inside and around a body into something else:  a co-working with the true spirit of humanity and the angelic hierarchies, to transform the evil in ourselves and the world. We need to get real with one another. The deeper meanings and a truer insight into the whole of life is only found through spiritual scientific consciousness. This has nothing to do with following a particular guru or losing my own independence. The spiritual scientist can understand and utilize the ideas of the earthly investor or mechanic as well as the phenomenological researcher, but not vice versa. Multiple new currencies can arise, with the highest beauty of art and utility. I give part of myself to the other, when I give her supersensible ‘currency,’ and she gives part of herself to me. We need the gift of the Other to find the deepest answer to ‘making a living.’ 

Link to the book on Amazon

Etherization of Thinking - The Complete Stages from Ben-Aharon's Modern Christ Experience Vol. 2

 

Etherization of Thinking – the complete stages from Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's 'The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming', Volume 2, summarized by Scott Elliot Hicks 

1. Start from absolutely clear and awake, logical and rational modern scientific thinking. 

2. Perceive and understand through objective self-knowledge that this normal everyday thinking is constructed out of the forces of death; our normal thoughts are never living, no matter what the content of our ideas are, whether materalistic, mathematical, mystic, or anthroposophical. The form of these thoughts must die in our heads to become conscious in our modern age. This suppression and paralysis and freezing of the real streams of supersensible life in our normal consciousness produces a split between self and world. This was necessary for modern freedom and individuality to arise. Now we must look at the process clearly in order to self-consciously transform it.

3. Our job is to find a hole out of these dead forces, and then to use the new Christ forces that are pouring into the etheric world, to transform the dead form of the content of our mental images, memories, and representations into a wide awake pure thinking, or clairvoyant thinking. The concepts themselves change into Imaginations. But first we must taste the painful and bitter reality that all of our inner experience of being a personality, all of our inner personal thoughts, all of the content of our consciousness and ideas, no matter how spiritual or mystical or materialistic or anthroposophical are only dead, small mirror images. They are nothing. We must cross the abyss through Michael and Christ’s real forces, seeing and knowing the real threshold between sense-experience and true spiritual clairvoyant thinking (Imagination) that is carried across the abyss. 

4. We must not run away from the painful self-knowledge that sees that every single thought we have ever had has been made by killing the spiritual world, but we must look, know, penetrate, and courageously dive into the forces of death themselves. Christ’s key of death is just the magical power of using his resurrection forces to transform the condensing, freezing, paralyzing inward flow of destroying life in our heads through ahriman’s power, INTO new spiritual thinking that lies outside and beyond the head (and beyond representations of inside and outside). Through this Hegelian tarrying with death and dismemberment, we can convert it spiritually into being.

5. Etherized or spiritualized perception (see Chapter 3 in Volume 2 and Cognitive Yoga) can be consciously brought in and merged with this dead thinking to help to resurrect it. This is the Michaelic and Goethean way of resurrecting and spiritualizing thinking. In other words, some of the riddles of spiritualizing thinking can be essentially helped through the other pole: spiritualizing the sense perceptions. 

6. Find the point and time where thinking dies in the point above and behind the eyes. Feel the burning anguish and suffocation when you watch the spiritual streams coming into this point, to become little mirror images that then are grasped inwardly by our devouring intellectual being in the head. This riddle must become a drama of life and death in your feeling and will; no further addition of the content of ideas can help with seeing and stopping this stream.

7. We perceive the dead part of the etheric body (the dead etheric thought skeleton paralleled to a certain extent visibly in the nervous system) that supports our everyday consciousness. This will eventually be recognized as woven together with the dead part of the etheric body of Christ, through which we will begin to clairvoyantly think and imagine first (with the colorless head clairvoyance or modern Imagination). He appears through the dead part of His etheric body first, where He (or more precisely the angel in which he appears in the etheric world) is cast out of the etheric world and killed in our ahrimanic thinking. Out of this gloomy abyss, He will first appear.

8. “The true Michaelic spirit rejoices in a pure thinking, which is born in death and owes death its light-filled precision. But also, by overcoming death, such pure thinking can become the new crystal clear eye of the spirit. Therefore, without entering with our whole soul force into this abyss, and feeling it personally as our own absolute crisis of knowledge, the age of Michael cannot be actualized…” p. 57 volume 2 

9. Split your consciousness into two parts, one creating the spiritual source of thinking in your archimedean point (the true source of free thinking active before and outside concepts of space and time), and the other part watching the living thinking as it dies into the subjective experiences of the head. Because I can now watch how the living spirit dies in the third eye point and behind it in the head, we can also consciously learn how to: both form this dead thinking, but also how to resurrect it. This forms a stable and firm foundational process, immensely helped and created from The Philosophy of Freedom. I can now watch how I create the etheric dead skeleton of inner personal modern thought. I see how I am the annihilator of life to become a modern thinker. But this is the way to go toward and through Christly resurrection. I must follow the way of Christ’s cross. Here also the spiritualized perceptions through Chapter 3 of volume 2 of The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming and Cognitive Yoga work can help the process. They bring invigorated and freed etheric forces to the moment. 

10. We must clearly see the dead corpse of thinking dwelling in the center of our heads. We don’t run away from it, but since it secures our modern consciousness, this dead pile, this tomb, this thorn bush, this infernal factory, this machine must be the very thing we enliven through Christ’s new forces. We can combine the perception of the spiritual source of thinking, arising from my own I activity with this dead pile, this corpse in our heads. This combination and resurrection overcomes ahriman in the head.

11. We resolutely stand over the abyss, and then plunge with all our feeling and will into the momentary living source of free pure thinking beyond the supports of our brain, the past, and our personal self built out of thoughts. We dive into the self-creative free thinking in the archimedean that happens not outside, not inside our heads and bodies, but in a spiritual activity that can be perceived through and through – a living concept that acts before these representations take over.

This stage may often be accompanied by pain, bitterness, nausea, anxiety, the taste of ashes in the mouth, as it is described in The Cucumber Law lecture from Spiritual Science in the 21st Century (chapter 7). 

12. Stop the unconscious freezing and hardening of the inner mental skeleton and corpse. “Those parts of the nerve-sense system, and the higher functions of the brain that serve this killing process, are the first in which the undermining of the mental grounds takes place; and in this grave of thinking, the first germination of the supersensible cognition appears.” p. 62. This is also outlined quite clearly in Cognitive Yoga pp. 30-37. We begin with a clear mental image based on an external perception, of a leaf, an animal, a red patch, and then we suppress the image, holding the two parts of its composition apart: keeping its perceptible qualities flowing in, and the connection with the concept or idea of what the thing is, at bay. We don’t let the memory picture, representation, inner mental picture (Vorstellung) to be formed out of the combination of these two parts; instead, in the grave, we hold the two hands apart and wait patiently for what arises in the middle.

Scott’s addition – Push the incoming thinking stream back out through the third eye, out into the etheric world; this reverses the streams or deactualizes them.  

13. There is the temptation at this stage to return to old forms of pure Being and Truth, but let us hold fast to the free modern self-conscious I power, formed through working on finding the creator of all pure thinking in The Philosophy of Freedom (the best way to work through this careful liberating process is to study the text slowly in a group). This is expressed in Cognitive Yoga chapter 4 as not throwing out the pearl of great price, our free modern sense of I am. This idea is also expressed in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art as virtual actualization (chapter 3). We search to find how the true spiritual power of thought is awakened through the Imaginative Christ impulse, and how this new power of thought is ‘resurrected in Christ’s stream of living time.’ (Rudolf Steiner, quote in Volume 2, p. 67) 

14. Uncover, perceive clearly and think through how ordinary consciousness of I perceive and I think (the dead inward personal head thinking) arises out of the living supersensible consciousness in the etheric brain. See the two archimedian points that are now constructed: the dead grave inside the head, and the new mirror formed in the etheric brain that reflects what is happening as pure thinking is created in the present, beyond the head.

A. “In each moment and place in which the etheric brain penetrates the physical brain, an act of freezing and killing of living time takes the place of living time.”

B. “The killed piece of time is preserved in the dead part of the etheric brain, as an en-gravement of memory.” 

C. “It preserves the difference of time that has elapsed from when the etheric penetrated the physical brain, between the pre-conscious spiritual act of thinking AND perceiving its coming to conscious reflection in ordinary consciousness.”

This is a “temporal immortalization of the killed time.” p. 69 volume 2. See also The Three Meetings, Chapter 5. 

15. Throughout this process, we always ennoble and grow in our moral development, our devotion, and our love of goodness. We must learn how to die into the life of Christ. We must also “strengthen and consolidate our ability to stand consciously poised in between birth and death, day and night, conscious and unconscious life, in the living middle of the divided halves of our life, in the presently burning fiery core of life’s annihilation and resurrection.” p. 75, volume 2. This power of life and death is found to be directed all throughout our life by our higher self. At this center point, we are building a bridge from one side to the other. “Here we begin to practice and experience our own, always present, event of etheric crucifixion, death and resurrection as the mystery drama of modern cognition.” p. 76 volume 2. This begins in the two petalled lotus flower with its two arms. Then eventually this center of the drama and consciousness descends to the larynx, heart, and then deeper into the body.

16. Here we must recognize that we have taken in death to become annihilators of spiritual life. We befriend death, in order to enter into it and let it be resurrected through Christ’s resurrection forces. The forces of death itself are transformed into life, my self-conscious spiritual activity. This is the first realization that comes in the first meeting with the etheric Christ, and is the first stage in the self-conscious recreation of the meeting.

________________________

Toward the Second Stage – the Will 

1. “Between the thinking and the will power that creates and directs it, are found the etheric life forces. Therefore, before we can grasp the will for itself, as a purely spiritual being, we must first grasp the forces of life as they die and arise anew through thinking.” p. 79 volume 2 

The Self

 My true spiritual I is a willing limbed man that can walk through all transparencies, like a giant walking and cleaving through mists, over the countryside. But these moving transparencies are in the invisible life of growing nature. I am pushing them aside like grasses and lilies in the swamp. The giant mover walks through transparencies of feeling and desire, like pushing aside clouds and driving away smoke with a cloth. But in spirit land, the giant of the I remains the unmoved mover. Here the spirits are experienced as his family, part of himself, part of his land. They move his moveable elements. Yet the intention of his thinking and also his observation power moves real lands in the worlds of living truth. His will is spiritual fire, working through spiritualized warmth and blood. Here he is transparency among transparencies, so the wakefulness of color, sounds, and love must move the world individuality - to make moral advancement in the act of loving, as a spirit in spirit-land. And inside the center of this world individuality, the I AM of Christ, who moves the mover, who creates the sense of I inside the I of me. 

Transformation, Growth, and Expansion of Novalis (Spiritual Songs #2) from the Forces of the New Etheric Event Happening Now

 

Spiritual Song of the Earthly-Human Sun - Scott Elliot Hicks

(Inspired by and modelled on Novalis' Spiritual Song #2, and the work of Rudolf Steiner and Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon)

With the crack of the hammer on the mountain, 

Dawn shines forth clearly from the East, awakening consciousness in human spirits! 

The gray old times of the past are growing younger and younger in this Sun. I become a mature and gentle child, made wise only by the spiritual world with love and humility.

Let us take a long and deep drink in our soul and spirit from the clear water, flowing with colors at the source of light and life, the rainbow well, unveiling miracles!

Like the white swan drinking sips of water in the clear pool, reflecting the stars in the cool night, being healed completely; regenerated completely, awakened completely for the new day coming. 

Let us be completely penetrated in our hearts, heads, hands and feet with the love coming from Christ, filling us with His glory, as we are transformed and resurrected in His divine transfiguration, His eternal becoming. Joining Day and Night. This is the fulfillment of what we have always wanted in our deepest heart. 

We become the free and individual child, born out of all of the Heavenly-earthly, angelic matter, coming down, born in the new Earthly-Human Sun. 

Rising up, breathing in sound, breathing out healing. My I AM was nourished from the outside over ages by nature; it was elevated and grown from the inside by the spiritual world. 

My I AM is free, but He lives inside the fabric of my I AM nature. This land of Selfhood is His land. It is wide and open. All are welcome there: all genders, all nations, all peoples. 

We fly on the living spirit winds blowing around the earth, our souls, minds, and life carried in new starry and human Imaginations. I become part of the swirling creative song, spoken by the spirit out of the deep black crack. 

Out of the ashes, new sparks flash out, young flames leap up --- swirling, circling and joining together. 

We become the I flame, eternally bright, awakening together in His wakefulness. 

From graves everywhere on the earth, springs up new life and new etherized, spiritualized blood. 

Together the universal spirits and I create new soul veins between people, so that this harmony can flow between our human hearts, freely and consciously. 

We dive in our free I with Christ beneath the waves of our sense life, deep beneath the waves of our old ideas into his Earthly-human Sun. He stands in the middle of us, His eyes and heart holding us, touching us: yes, Christ is seeing us. 

He lovingly, like a good friend, awaits to answer each request, each prayer, in line with our Karma. 

Let his mild looks go deep into your soul. 

Let his resurrection forces go into your spirit, soul, and body. 

Behold your own self, grasped in his complete acceptance of all of yourself, highest and lowest. 

His eternal happiness and bliss is to be welcomed into your heart. The copies of His cosmic-human self are waiting to be taken in by free humans; yes, they are waiting! 

Let all hearts, spirits, and sense perceptions begin a new etheric dance, 

Expanding beyond old forms, words, feelings, and sensations. Dance in the pulse of the etheric form that is alive, flowing through your whole living body, flowing through the whole etheric geography of the Earthly-Human Sun. 

Reach out boldly for His hands, impress his face on your mind. You can always turn to Him, like a blossom searching for the sunshine. 

Show him your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole life, your whole body. He will stand by you, in you, dwelling in you like a true faithful wife, a sister, a brother, a comforter of truth. 

He is becoming in you, you are becoming in him. The time for fear of the spirit is over. He is awakening new heavenly sprouts in north, south, east, and west. In the center of the earth, in the new etheric heavens, in the middle zone. 

So let us stand up, walk, think, and speak in the new full etheric gardens of the spirit, searching, waiting, and creating together with our angelic brothers and sister, new buds, new blossoms, new human beings. 

-----

 Novalis' original Spiritual Songs (Geistliche Lieder) #2 

2.  Fern in Osten wird es helle, 

Graue Zeiten werden jung;

Aus der lichten Farbenquelle 

Einen langen tiefen Trunk!

Alter Sehnsucht heilige Gewährung, 

Süße Lieb' in göttlicher Verklärung. 

Endlich kommt zur Erde nieder 

Aller Himmel sel'ges Kind,

Schaffend im Gesang weht wieder 

Um die Erde Lebenswind,

Weht zu neuen ewig lichten Flammen

Längst verstiebte Funken hier zusammen.

Ueberall entspringt aus Grüften 

Neues Leben, neues Blut,

Ew'gen Frieden uns zu stiften,

Taucht er in die Lebensfluth;

Steht mit vollen Händen in der Mitte

Liebevoll gewärtig jeder Bitte.

Lasse seine milden Blicke

Tief in deine Seele gehn,

Und von seinem ewgen Glücke

Sollst du dich ergriffen sehn.

Alle Herzen, Geister und die Sinnen

Werden einen neuen Tanz beginnen.

Greife dreist nach seinen Händen,

Präge dir sein Antlitz ein,

Mußt dich immer nach ihm wenden,

Blüthe nach dem Sonnenschein;

Wirst du nur das ganze Herz ihm zeigen,

Bleibt er wie ein treues Weib dir eigen.

Unser ist sie nun geworden,

Gottheit, die uns oft erschreckt,

Hat im Süden und im Norden

Himmelskeime rasch geweckt,

Und so laßt im vollen Gottesgarten

Treu uns jede Knosp' und Blüthe warten.

II.  English translation by MacDonald:

DAWN, far eastward, on the mountain ! Gray old times are growing young ; From the flashing colour-fountain, I will quaff it deep and long. 

Sacred boon to old desire's rogation ! Sweet love in divine transfiguration ! Comes at last, our poor earth's native, All-heaven's one child, simple, kind

Blows again, in song creative, Round the earth a living wind, Gathers, blows anew to flames of heaven Sparks long ages since asunder driven. 

Everywhere, from graves abounding, Rises, new-born, life and blood, Endless peace for us firm founding, Plunges he into life's flood ; Stands amid, with full hands, gaze caressing,Waits but for the prayer to give the blessing.

Let his mild looks of invading, Deep into thy spirit go, By his blessedness unfading, Thou thyself possessed shalt know.

Hearts of all men, spirits all, and senses, Mingling move,—all new their dance commences.

Grasp his hands with boldness yearning, Stamp his face thy heart upon, Turning towards him, ever turning,

Thou, the flower, must face the sun. Who to him his heart's last fold unfoldeth, True as wife's his heart for ever holdeth. Ours is now that Godhead's splendour

At whose name we used to quake ! South and north, its breathings tender Heavenly germs at once awake ! Let us then in God's full garden labour, And to every bud and bloom be neighbour!

The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

 

The 1500 page, 4 volume hardback set of this extensive expanded edition of the 1995 book, The New Experience of the Supersensible is now available at Amazon everywhere. It has approximately 10 times the content of the original edition and all of the content has been heavily revised. It is certainly one of the most important Christian, epistemological, philosophical, and Anthroposophical books ever written. No book has ever been published like this one before. For those who can see and hear the sign of the times, let them ponder what the publication of this book by this author truly signifies for the evolution of humanity. The true continuation of the ever present work of Rudolf Steiner. 

Available at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.se, amazon.fr, amazon.it, amazon.pl etc. Order it from the amazon closest to your country. The paperback edition will come out in March, 2025, and the complete 4 volume ebook will come out at Christmas 2025. 

Complete Contents - 

Volume 1  -  The Modern Christ Experience

Chapter 1

The Mystery of Spiritual Remembrance 

How the disciples were transformed into apostles; Teaching of the resurrected Christ and the transformation of memory through the Mystery of Golgotha; Spiritualization of the etheric body and memory and the construction of the modern bridge to the etheric Christ.

Chapter 2

Saul-Paul at the Gates of Damascus

Paul’s meeting with the resurrected Christ is the archetype of the modern Christ experience and the knowledge drama of the Second Coming; Consolidation of the duality of human nature and the opening of the wound of Amfortas; Mystery of the giving of Christ’s ‘I’ and the individuation of Christ’s given keys of Death and Evil.

Chapter 3

The Conditions of the Modern Christ Experience - The Evolution of Freedom

The meeting with the etheric Christ is only possible in the age of the Consciousness Soul, when man has become free; Man’s severance from the spiritual worlds, caused by the dying out of the ancient clairvoyance, must precede and prepare this fully conscious meeting; Present release of the etheric body from the physical body causes a far-reaching transformation of the entire human constitution; Meeting with the Christ occurs at the climax of the crisis of individuation, in the moment of ‘the most significant disharmony in human feelings that ever existed in human evolution’.

Chapter 4

The Modern Christ Experience - The Meeting with the New Initiator

The three main stages in the meeting with the etheric Christ: Experience of the death and resurrection of cognition, experience of evil and the healing of the soul, and the experience of the future potential of the complete transformation of man; In the first stage, the etheric Christ demonstrates the spiritualization of ordinary cognition into imaginative cognition; In the second stage, His living words heal the discord and degradation of the separated soul forces; In the third stage, He shows how the physical body can be spiritualized; In the human spirit, soul and body, the Christ plants three golden spirit seeds, as potential for future development, which man can only develop further by means of his free spiritual activity; This development is the task of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. 

Volume 2 -  The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming


Part I

Chapter 1 

The Spiritualization of Thinking

Spiritualization of thinking confronts and overcomes modern ahrimanic thinking; Resurrected from the grave of the brain, thinking returns to cosmic life; Separation of past and future time streams and thinking, feeling and will; Deepening of the meditative practice of Occult Science with the exercises to attain Inspiration and Intuition; Liberated being of will, guides us into the mysteries of birth and death, past and future life; Resurrected etheric Christ appears from the ‘dark-gloomy world abyss’ when feeling is liberated as well. 

Chapter 2 

The Spiritualization of Sense-Perception

In the Michaelic Yoga, the spiritualization of thinking is followed by the spiritualization of sense-perception; Oblivion stream of Lethe experienced at the threshold of perception; New Mysteries of Hades and Persephone revealed on the other side of this threshold; Further development of Imagination through the meditative exercises of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds; Experience of etheric Christ in the etheric world through spiritualized perception, reveals the etheric ring around the sun-becoming-earth; Man becomes a creative partner of the Christ in the creation of the earthly-human Sun. 

Chapter 3 

The Preparation for the construction of the bridge

Construction of the bridge prepared by weaving the forces of spiritualized thinking and perception, which augment each other; Spiritualization of the etherization of the blood and the etheric body; Formation of spiritual memory on which the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness is founded; Specific esoteric practice prepares the etheric and physical brains to reflect conscious supersensible experiences. 

Chapter 4 

The Construction of the First Etheric-Cognitive Layer of the Bridge

Builder of the bridge, the true ‘I’, actualized by the activity of spiritualized thinking; Development of two petaled lotus flower between the eyes; Merging the forces flowing between the two petaled lotus flower and the higher self in the pineal; First formation of Spirit Self; Deeper confrontation with Ahriman in his workshop in the modern brain; Construction of the first etheric-cognitive layer of the bridge from the head, through the larynx, to the heart; Battle with luciferic-ahrimanic forces in the heart and the sacrifice of the Green Snake.

Volume 3 - The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, Part II: 

Chapter 1

The Confrontation with the New Forces of Evil in the Physical Body

 Conscious return to the physical body fraught with great difficulties in the present age; Entry into human evolution of radically new force of evil; Spiritualization of the blood necessary to confront it; ‘Follow the path of cyanide formation from above downward’; First confrontation with Asuras in the heart and the path into the metabolic-limb and reproductive systems; Searching for the meditative praxis to spiritualize the forces of will, early childhood, karma, and limbs.  

Chapter 2 

The Michaelic Kundalini Meditation 

In 1906 Rudolf Steiner gave a pupil a meditation aiming to develop the forces of the higher self and spiritualize the physical body through the sacred fire of kundalini; It creates the forces required to penetrate into the metabolic-limb and reproduction systems; Nine steps of the meditation and their results; Spiritual role of cerebellum, pineal and pituitary; Activation of the four petaled lotus flower at the base of the spine in connection to the sixteen petaled lotus flower in the larynx; Renewed confrontation with the Asuras in their stronghold in the reproductive system; ABC and DEF of black magic; The fundamental problem of the wound of sexuality and mortality must be confronted in the present age of Michael.  

Chapter 3 

The Healing of the Wound of Sexuality and Mortality

The modern riddles of the wound of Amfortas are discovered, the deeper man delves into the reproductive system; Asuric and Soratic usurpation of the divine forces behind sexuality; ‘Fragment after fragment will be torn out of the ‘I’; Magically closed wound and the temptation of Asuric immortality; Radically divided human constitution and decisive Michaelic battle with the Asuric forces; Birth of Anthroposophia in the larynx; The portal that leads to the mysteries of the Phantom.

Chapter 4 

The Construction of the Third Spiritual-Physical Layer of the Bridge

Formation of lasting etheric foundations for the third layer of the bridge; Merging of Christ’s Sun forces of midday, midnight, and cosmic midnight hour; Cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity in the earthly-human Sun temple; New metabolic knowledge attained in the spiritualization of breathing, eating and speaking, nose and mouth, smell, taste and touch; Digestive threshold and probation: Sweet as spiritual honey and bitter as karma; Spiritualization of metabolism through the six petaled lotus flower; Renewed confrontation with the Asuric forces; Highest hierarchy revealed in spiritualized metabolism and physical body; Chemical Christological process produces the philosopher’s stone from the spiritualized forces of earthly and cosmic nourishment, karma and love; Chemical wedding of heaven and earth in the human heart and birth of the spiritualized body; Umstülpung of the threefold human constitution; Loom of creation on which the Phantom is woven; Making the philosopher’s Stone through the spiritualization of breathing and carbon; Mysterious bone Luz; Shall the dead bones awaken?; Fountain of eternal life in bone’s marrow; Imagination of the Phantom; Midsummer alchemical Christological process; The Foundation Stone of love.

Volume 4 - The Creation of the Earthly-Human Sun

The New Human Meeting and Michaelic Community

Chapter 1 

The Creation of the New Earth and Heaven of the Earthly-human Sun

The old earth has sunk into the abyss during the apocalyptic twilight of humanity in 1933-45; In the etheric world, it has arisen anew as the new Earth and Heaven of the new earthly-human Sun; Resurrected earth must be formed consciously on earth in the 21st century in the school of Michael; Imagination of the Old Sun reflected and embodied in the creation of the earthly-human Sun; New Earth created from spiritualized will, new Heaven through spiritualized thinking and perception; the heart of the earthly-human Sun, that connects the new Earth and Heaven, is formed through human meetings. 

Chapter 2 

Christ’s Appearance Between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’- The New Michaelic Community

 Social and karmic chaos brought about a darkening of the earthly-human Sun in the 20th century; Social-moral life of humans is a planetary creative force, that either destroys or creates the rhythmic system of the earthly-human Sun; Human meetings today perceived as ominous social and karmic sleep, total forgetfulness and denial of karmic relationships and obligations; Awakening from social sleep through Christ’s appearance between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’; Mutual karmic Healing and the creation of the new Michaelic community; Etheric Christ as living healer and comforter in our midst.

Chapter 3

The Formation of the Earthly-Human Sun

The seed of the earthly-human Sun embodied in man’s creative forces; Transubstantiation of man substantiates earth’s resurrection body; Imagination of the earthly-human Sun and it’s temple; Cosmic Dance of the earthly-human star and its new journey in the universe.

 

 

 

The spiritual scientific definition of Force:

 The concept of the expression of an essence; but this expression lacks the self-conscious awareness of the unity of the will, the self-conscious will of the human self, with the will of the interior of the essence. The concept of force by its very activity excludes the self-conscious will of the I and the intellectual intuition or insight into the spiritual core of the essence, which it attempts to explain through the notion and calculation of forces. 

Transformation of Psalm 98 through the New Impulse of the Second Coming and the Renewed Foundation Stone

O sing unto Christ a new song! 

For he has done marvelous things! 

His right hand and his holy arm have created, demonstrated, grasped, and achieved the victory of the new resurrection! 

The Lord has now made known again his salvation; through his uprightness, his goodness and love, 

He has openly shown his I AM in the sight of mere mortals and unbelievers. 

He has remembered his mercy and his truth toward all mankind. 

All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of the resurrected and triumphant Christ! 

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, our brother and friend, all of you on earth. 

Make a loud noise and rejoice and sing praise! 

Sing unto the Lord with the harp of our Spirit, with the cornet of our Soul, and the voice of our body. 

With the trumpet of our heart and the ringing chimes of our elevated thinking, 

Let us make a joyful music before the Lord, Christ Jesus, the Sun King. 

Let the sea roar and the fullness of the sea. Let all beings on the earth sound forth their love, 

And all that dwell there. Let the floods clap their hands! Let the hills be joyful together before the Lord. 

For he comes to renew the earth, to make it into an earthly-human Sun! 

With his upright I AM, shall he work with mankind to free the world,

To resurrect the people with balance, love, and mercy. 

[Written in the year of the rising of the new spiritual temple of the earthly human Sun] 

Meditative Content to Awaken the Act of Pure Thinking outside the Physical Organism

                                                                        Painting by August Macke 

 1. Look at a plant, animal, or any object, such as the painting by Macke above. Perceive the external colors and forms clearly. Then set aside the perceptual content and focus on the idea or concept in your mind's eye. Note how you form the concept and how you are drawing on the canvas of your inner imagination. Stop drawing and focus on the forces that can draw. Orient your thinking activity toward the pure content, understanding, and meaning of the content, which comes from outside all of your powers. (Thank you to Rudolf Steiner and Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon) 

Now:  

Awaken self-conscious knowledge of what an idea actually is, and simultaneously create and experience a directly intuited or seen idea of the essence of self-conscious knowledge as a whole. Go from one to the other in a pulsing self-conscious thinking that is directly viewed, known, and understood. 

Guiding thoughts - What do all ideas have in common?  What is the idea of knowledge as a whole? See the idea of what knowledge is as a whole, while seeing the ground and beginning of your thinking activity. For more direction, follow Rudolf Steiner's Truth and Science. 

2. Prepare with an external plant, animal, or object as in #1.  Awaken intuition or what is the same: directly view the content of your thinking with insight into its pure meaning (without images). Now intuit or directly view the essence of your willed thinking in this moment. Simultaneously note the content of the idea that you are producing and understanding. Simultaneously also note the willed activity of your own act. 

Exactly what is my present thinking doing and where is it happening? Who is thinking? What am I understanding now? 

Conceive of many of the possible moves and faculties of the willful thinking activity as it moves in the realm of pure knowledge (understanding, essences, universals, ideas). 

Note that you create the moves from the thinking ground of the power of your own essence. You perceive this inwardly (without your senses), in your self-conscious I. This is filled with love and truth. 

Tip: Do this with a partner and follow and reflect their thinking in a neutral manner. (Thank you to Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon)

3. Start with the same preparation as in #1. Separate off the sense-perceptible content. Set aside the painting on your imagination canvas. Now: 

View the essence of the act of intuition from inside the essence of what is intuited. 

The essence of the plant, animal, or thing intuits the act and nature of intuition (directly seeing the content of self-conscious meaning without representational images) from the outside. But you can be both inside the act of intuition and inside the essence of the plant, etc. Make this consciousness a rhythmic pulse. 

4. Many people have trouble understanding what the philosophical concept of intellectual intuition means. Steiner describes it very clearly in the Philosophy of Freedom:  What perception is to colors and sound, intuition is to the content of thinking. In other words you use the powers of the senses to grasp the sense perceptible, like weight, smoothness, and the timbre of sounds, and lightness or darkness of hues. You use another organ to grasp the content and the present status of the meaning of your thinking. Memory images arise through percepts, but thoughts are not copies of externally existing objects. Rather the pure percept flow joins with a concept that you create. You then bring this together (instantly and usually unconsciously) in an personal idea or representation. However, the thinking eye-ball is the organ of intellectual intuition or seeing your ideas. But this is an understanding-reason-knowledge unfolding and awakening, not an 'after-image.' Eventually the student understands that this does not happen in the head, but beyond the physical organism, but it is reflected into the brain and nervous system, just as a real being is reflected into a mirror. 

The instant intuitive moment of grasping the meaning and content of a situation, in your thinking organ is like this: a blast of spiritual light or knowledge air, which brings the whole of the content instantly into your individual consciousness. It can then be organized into words through discourse, memory image and syntax. The truth of reality comes like a lightning strike in the shortest moment and can be so large in content that it can instantly be forgotten, if it is not brought down into consciousness. This bringing into my consciousness is a paralysis, freezing, and dying of the forces of the world from which the thinking content is coming. 

From Lacanian Affects to Qualitative Spiritual Geometry

 

In her fine book 'Lacanian Affects,' Colette Soler writes the following: 

"Affects drift in the chain of signifiers, except for those that are not related to 

signifiers but rather to the unspeakable object; anguish is the first among the 

latter, insofar as it is moored to this object. But anguish is related to 

the temporality of the moments at which encounters occur, whereas 

the affective palette that is signified in everything the subject says is 

a constant of joui-sense. 

"On the contrary, the discordance of certain unpredictable affects – 

affects that are discordant with respect to discourse as well as to 

fantasy, and that inevitably surprise the subject himself – turns out 

to have a different origin, these affects originating in knowledge of 

lalangue that will forever be unknown." p 106 

This approach may be confusing to people who are not acquainted with Lacanian analysis and post-modern philosophy and so on, but the idea is as follows:  We have certain emotional and psychological disturbances, symptoms, and problems of our character and/or our inner nature that we cannot solve so easily by superficial methods like going to the gym, just talking to a counselor, re-arranging our house, journaling, even meditating. Coming from a Freudian tradition, Lacan (see his excellent 'Four Fundamental Concepts') and his students like Soler, have uncovered the phenomena showing that the source of these psychological problems lie in an unconscious region that is not easily or directly accessible to rational and wide-awake self-conscious penetration. But the unconscious elements which are at least partly at the source of our deep-rooted psychological problems and the pain, fear, distress, and so on that accompanies them, CAN come to consciousness in a symbolic way, or in a linguistic way that can be understood by the rational mind to a certain degree and can provide clues for healing. But right at the source of these symbolic or linguistically arranged elements, there is a black hole or a primordial aspect that escapes consciousness. Yet, because it lies right in the doorway of the unconscious spring, it is hanging around in the background of every psychological aspect that comes to light.  Lacan has a lot of fun ways of trying to describe its nature by showing how it is embedded in the playful origins and creative etymological elements of language itself. He calls the function of this productive black hole, or this unknown actor that hangs around backstage, the object little a - or objet petit a.  The emotional or 'affective' partner of this black hole is jouissance or orgasmic enjoyment, which also can transform into depression and pain. Soler's point here is that the feeling or affect of anguish seems to be directly connected to this unknown director or actor hanging out behind the curtains in the black hole of our psyche. So the riddles of enigmas of such deep feelings (which are structured in a psychological-symbolic language or lalangue - the French word for tongue or language). Joui-sense is the fun linguistic way of pointing to how there is a play of meaning or sense that arises through the enjoyment and pain that is attached to our psychological and character difficulties or fetishes, and so on. In French there is such a strong connection between the notion of sensing or smelling something with our body and creating meaning or knowledge in consciousness through thinking. 

We can make a transition to spiritual scientific research, analysis, and experience by extending Soler and Lacan in a new direction. For it is truly the case that the affective part of the soul connected to lust, desire, pleasure, animal sensation, and smell has its relations to the mineral body and also to the images in the etheric body, and the way that thinking and its linguistic correlates are organized rationally or irrationally in the etheric body and nervous and lymphatic systems. 

Now the difference is that one who is developing Imaginative consciousness in the anthroposophical manner can begin to see with spiritual organs in a clear fashion what is happening behind the surface of what Lacanian analyses are uncovering. You can see that Soler and Lacan still set up a kind of Kantian limit of consciousness and knowledge - they say that there are some things that cannot be accurately conceptualized or grasped in clear thinking. But following Rudolf Steiner's indications and our experience we want to use pure thinking (without images and outside the subjective pictures in the head) to grasp any phenomenon, whether mineral, representational, psychological, or spiritual (See Rudolf Steiner's "Truth and Knowledge" for more on this).  Because the world connects to the life that is at the center of thinking, we can meet the essence of the world in pure thinking.  In this I find myself in a center of the world's activities. 

But the fine clue given in Soler is the emotion of anguish. We can follow the existential anguish that we find in ourselves at the border of knowledge, and painful self-knowledge, when we look at ourselves like a stranger. Tolstoy's fictional writings are great teachers of such an honest self-examination, by the way. I experience that I am partly a mature and serious spiritual researcher who has truly grown, but also one who has elements of animalistic, chaotic, selfish, aggressive tendencies in myself that are very hard to change. I am only partly human at this point. This split in my soul, my life, my hopes and my self - instead of depressing me too much - can instead lead one beyond one's own personal or character troubles. The anguish gives me a thread to the unseen other. To remain truthful, we can follow this thread into my own memory fields. These memory fields are also connected to the historical events in the earth - so I can follow their light and life beyond my own lifetime into the center of the 20th century. This can lead us to the Event of the 20th century, described by Ben-Aharon in his first book. I see and feel connected to the fact that the potential of the highest spiritual development, gentleness, wisdom, and goodness is shining into the human project, but I also see that the most evil and demonic elements are also trying to create an anti-human - the most cunning animal who uses machines for selfish purposes. In spiritual-historic reality, the greatest light was shining into the spiritual worlds while below people were murdering each other with vast machines in the most barbaric way. In reality, all humans are connected spiritually throughout history, therefore I am also morally and karmically connected to this 'past' historical fact. 

But in being connected to things larger than my personality, I am also healthily woven into the various rhythms of the world: in breath and out breath, the pulse of my heart, day and night, warming and cooling, the rotation of the moon, eclipses, comets, asteroids, planetary rotation, the stars moving ever so slowly, the turning of the earth, the seasons, the work and growth of people, animals, plants, life and death, etc. And not in an abstract sense - I am directly and minutely connected to just this particular plant, to just this way that the sun shines at dawn on my little house, to just my community, to this turkey in my backyard at this hour. This must be kept in the highest aristotelian and scientific precision of individualities. And there are specific spiritual and elemental beings who are connected with each hour, location, season, type of animal, stone, plant, folk. 

These world-rhythms can be quantitatively understood - the patterns can be expressed by numbers. In the soul world, I am woven out of living rhythms, or numbers, a geometry of soul life. We can paraphrase Rudolf Steiner in this way. The zodiacal life that is unique can show up in the images and linguistic elements that arise in a symbolic way during psychological analysis. And I am connected to the Spirit-Word that does indeed weave my Spiritual Nature out of the Highest Christ-like element beyond the Angels and Zodiacal Beings. In this way, we see that Lacan's linguistic healing games are a much lower reflection of this living Word activity. 

The inner gestures of my heart as a spiritual organ produce an Imaginative landscape in devotional and reverential knowledge, that is connected with a thinking that is awake to its spiritual life in the world (outside the head). This gives rise to new concepts and ideas (and not merely to visions and feelings of ecstasy inside the mind's eye). I gently open the black hole at the center of my existence to Christ and in powerlessness but hope ask that His Spirit may fill and transform me. In this resurrected heart-thinking, Michael works with Christ's growing appearance, as Ben-Aharon writes in his recent books, such as The Three Meetings. 

In such an experience, one can see, feel, and experience that any twelvefold experience in the heart is not just made up of geometrical lines or visions of transcendent geometry, but rather one is pulsing in a moral world, made up of the highest sensitivity of beauty, gentleness, humaneness, and love. Thus what could be called a Qualitative Geometry of Schiller's highest hopes can arise - an artform that he is searching for in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. I am living in a eurhythmic group expression of gesture in an art of creating concepts of my I AM. My imageless meaning life arising through intuitive thinking then can become world-wide colored Imaginations, like on the ceiling of the Goetheanums. Each side of this heart-human dodecahedron is simultaneously a doorway to the inside-out. Each edge of each side is a different color, mood, sound. Some are more rounded, some are more narrow. I do not have to stop at the mere 3-dimensional geometrical representation of a pentagonal dodecahedron, as I lower it into my heart, following Rudolf Steiner's acts of the laying of the Foundation Stone. Instead the rich, colored, singing life of the spiritual worlds speaks into my heart in a new language, and gives me the impetus to grow, grow, grow!  

For more on these issues, you can find my books here: 

 

via GIPHY