The Work of the Global School of Spiritual Science directed by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon
“I will begin by a short description of a spiritual-scientific esoteric method, which has developed since the beginning of the 21st century. More and more people are asking for such a method, because they wish to become relevant to the world’s real social needs. Social engagement is an esoteric art of living, of being active in the real world in a wholly transformed manner. Many well-meaning activists today, even those with anthroposophical backgrounds, want to change the world but they want to do this by means of improving the soul faculties that they already possess, in order to achieve greater results in influencing the social situation. There is no question, of course, that our ordinary soul qualities must be greatly improved. This will always belong to any true esoteric work. But this improvement of our ordinary faculties is not done in order that we will be more capable of changing things that we don’t like and implementing things that we happen to like, because what we like and don’t like is not at all important for the real world. It is about finding the way to know in the first place what is right from the point of view of the real world, not what we believe is right because of our likes and dislikes. But what does this mean in reality?
When we face any given situation or event, our task is first to transform it into “Event,” with a capital E. What changes a small event into the big Event is this: that we struggle to find a way to get out of ourselves and our habitual soul patterns of reactions, which include our desires and wishes to “change” the social or political aspect of whatever world situation we confront. The whole point is precisely to get out of our habitual soul patterns, reactions, and desires, and not to seek for a way to improve them in order to change things according to our wishes. This means, not to grasp the event and use it for whatever we want to use it for, but to reverse this attitude entirely, to turn it inside out. To be grasped by the real spirit of event is what transforms the small “e” to a bigger “E.” And this is possible only if I merge with a given event, or situation, and let the Event change me, instead of trying to change the event to suite my wishes and beliefs.
Being transformed by this merging, one becomes its expression; one becomes the Event’s implementation, its self-actualization through one’s self. But the same applies not only for our desires to change the external social world, but also for our inner desires to develop higher spiritual capacities and experiences. Both have the same problems: they wish to implement their own wishes, desires, likes and dislikes. How do we know if anthroposophical study and meditation are real events and not just self-reflecting, inflating, subjective illusions and dreams? Only if they take us out of ourselves entirely, if they truly plunge us into the altogether different, non-personal, non-subjective, spiritual reality of the Event. The difference between this experience and all others is as essential as the difference between, say, the experience of being burnt by real fire and a mental representation of fire. So the person that experiences the difference will never be prone to confuse it with subjective soul experiences, feelings and mental representations of thinking. Grasping an objective event means being reciprocally being grasped by IT. This is the essential difference between the subjective and objective in spiritual cognition and practice and in social activism and its practice, and this is therefore the beginning of true, social esotericism. Being grasped by an objective event, I am becoming this Event. I don’t make an inner representation about it, or indulge in my sympathies and antipathies to it. The world situation becomes self-conscious through us, as we let objective events be transformed into intensively experienced, heartfelt questions of conscience. These must be strongly distinguished from the subjective soul reactions that we experience in each event.
The soul reactions are natural, and sometimes also justified (although often they are not), but the point is not if my reactions are justified or not from this or that point of view, but precisely that they are my natural, habitual, characteristic reactions in the first place. Events and situations occur in the real world. Your reactions can tell you a lot about yourself, if you are truly interested in acquiring real self-knowledge, which would mean to meet yourself objectively as a world Event as well. But your reactions will certainly tell you nothing about the essence of the real Event. If I notice my reactions and wholly put them aside for a short time at least, I can let the Event speak in its own language, in its own right. And I should feel this ever stronger: that the Events have the right to speak about themselves in me, not only to hear my soul chatter about them. In our hearts, we learn to listen to the Event’s language and the Event’s thinking, and what we hear is transformed into existential problems and questions. The hearts begin to have real, world-related, world-imbued, questions and problems. This means that if we truly experience that the problems have emerged from the world, we will no longer be happy with our own common answers. Because these new problems do not come from our inner reactions, pleasures and displeasures with the world, so also the answers will not originate there.
As the term “dialogue” has become overly psychologised, I am reluctant to apply it to the esoteric method of working with real, existential, spiritual events and processes. So let’s say that the transformation occurring between external events and inner questioning allows the spiritual world to fire our hearts and offer its own interpretation of the Event, revealing its own perspective. We are not less free, but far more free now, to actualize what we perceive, as our sense of freedom has also been transformed in the process. I say, I want to be free to truly co-create with the will and thinking of the real Events and beings of the real world. This leads to an objective inspiration or an Inspired Event and the result is a fully individualized and embodied moral-social evaluation and judgment, which directs our will and resolution toward the truth of the matter at hand, awakening and firing our will, pointing to what needs to be done.
Can we let the objective spiritual content take us into itself instead of taking it into ourselves to use it for our personal aims and gains? And what is experienced when we let this happen? We would experience how we are assimilated so deeply into the objective contents of the event, be it a person we meet or any other event or process in the real world, until we are ready to become what it really is, which in any case, is not our own self. What a wonderfully refreshing experience to become a wholly different and unknown self, to forget all about our ordinary self, through the other. Then to experience, not the results of the privatization and appropriation of the other person to our own inner subjective reactions, needs, desires and interests, but the very opposite, the very reverse of this. How the other person, as an unknown, unexpected, often truly unsettling and perhaps “not nice” or pleasant being, is becoming so infinitely interesting and worthy of my love. And this means that the true esoteric life of the Event begins when I experience this “not I but the other in me” as a reality.
In this way, as Rudolf Steiner recommended, real spiritual events can flow as spontaneous impulses that can unite themselves with us because we feel that this is what we truly want to become, and that these are our own immanent spiritual ideals. Michael is a spirit of action, initiative, courage and universal human cooperation, who is beyond sectarian differences of language, culture, gender, religion and ideology. Esoteric life and practice of the Event, means, therefore: reversing our common and unconscious appropriation of each event, transforming each event into a real Event, working with the world’s inspiring forces, with the other’s inspiration of real forces. We work in and out of the given situation, changing and shaping social reality and changing ourselves as part of the world in which we work and strive.” (From Spiritual Science in the 21st Century, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, 2013, pp. 38-40)
Do you want to learn more about this work? Do you want to join us in this work? If so, contact Scott at zoltelitichts [at ] protonmail.com
“The goal of the school is to use written texts and life's experiences not for knowledge's sake but as fertile compost in order to practice, real, active, soul and spiritual training of new faculties in and through the meeting with others. Spiritual knowledge is not transmitted to encourage the pupils to gain more knowledge that can be privatized and appropriated, carried in memory as dead, conceptual scheme and entrenched in sectarian and dogmatic personal and social habits. The school is founded on the conviction that only real meeting with the self through the other, and vice versa, can develop the faculties needed to create healthy and productive personal and social life in our time.” (Dr. Ben-Aharon)
