A Summary and Overview of Dr. Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon’s “The New Experience of the Supersensible – The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of Our Time” (1995, Temple Lodge, London) by S.E.Hicks
Introduction:
Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual scientific research showed that the Second Coming of Christ will not be another physical incarnation, but rather that He will ‘descend from the clouds’ which means that it will be an appearance and activity that will be only visible in the etheric or first supersensible world. This new Event will usher in a new kind of scientific, logical, precise and moral perception of the spiritual worlds, that will enhance consciousness and self-identity, not diminish it. The Second Coming began in 1933, but was already predicted by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon experienced this new form of the Second Coming in 1975, and has studied his continual relationship to the Christ from that moment forward using enlivened Anthroposophical concepts developed by Steiner. This book is an outcome of 20 years of research of the Second Coming. It consists of an introduction and 7 chapters. The original 8th chapter was published first as The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century (1993). This book is one of the most important works ever written. Researching it over 17 years has changed my life.
Chapter 1 – The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance (Combining a Memory of the Physical with a Memory of the Spiritual)
We are first shown how the historical Christ event (the Mystery of Golgotha) and the current second manifestation of the spirit of Christ in the life-world are united. They are united by the weaving together in consciousness of two different streams or features of reality: living and dying. For a person or a being who is awake in the spiritual worlds, the experience of entering into earthly consciousness is like dying. For a person dying on the earth, the experience of coming to wakefulness in the spiritual world, is actually a birth. But this can be experienced while we are still alive on the earth. The mighty cosmic Spirit, who is unified with the creator of the Universe in the Spirit Word, is also the source of the nature of the human, and especially the human I. This weaving together of coming to life and passing away, of blooming and decay, is at the center of the work of the guiding Spirit of all Humanity (and He really is the leader of all humanity, not just Judaeo-Christian cultures; He is not controlled by Christian churches. His work and resurrection power is for each man and woman on the whole earth). Through the New Event which began in 1933 in the etheric or life world (the closest part of the spiritual world), all of us have the potential now to awaken a new sort of scientific, precise, self-conscious clairvoyance or spiritual consciousness. This is given through Christ’s second coming. Many people have already experienced Him. The prototype of this current possibility to transform and awaken our new etheric cognition or objective, scientifically precise Imagination, is in the transformation of the state of consciousness which happened to the original disciples of Jesus on Pentecost. They really had remained unconscious about the spiritual experiences they had undergone with Jesus. They remembered during the Pentecostal period that Christ had been teaching them in the spiritual world (after he rolled away the stone), and they connected this spiritual-memory-perception with the memories of the person they had lived on the earth with for three years in Jesus of Nazareth. They knew in an Imagination who He had been. The 40 days between Easter and Christ’s Ascension were then fully woven together during the last 10 days of the resurrected Christ’s close connection with the earth, and reached a culmination in the speaking of tongues at Pentecost (50 days total). In the same way, we can now learn how to weave the memory coming from our clear sense perception and thinking in our earthly consciousness with the happenings and streams that are flowing in the life world. We can create a Spiritual Memory. Through Christ’s current work (as a soul being shining in the world of life), we are learning how to unite our spiritual life with our conscious daily life, in full wakefulness. The ray of spirit coming from Christ woke the spiritual insight of the disciples, it awoke Dr. Ben-Aharon in 1975, and it can now wake each man and woman on the earth.
Ben-Aharon writes, “The two life-streams, that of life without memory and that of memory without life, began to cross and impregnate each other...We can also say: the dead memory (intellectual) stream was so powerfully penetrated by the lifeblood stream of the Christ that it could begin to illuminate – that is, awaken – the consciousness of the purely spiritual being and essence of the Christ.” p 27. But now the creation of this ‘bridge’ of consciousness is possible for each person on the earth in the 21st century. Only part of this process is given through the natural appearance of the etheric Christ, while the selfconscious development and cultivation of this faculty must take place through spiritual scientific practice, study, devotion, and exercises. The disciples’ etheric bodies were transformed, and now our bodies can be transformed. The New Experience of the Supersensible was only made possible because Dr. Ben-Aharon’s etheric body was transformed. “From the point of view of the modern Christ experience and the event of the Second Coming...this special preparation and transformation of the etheric bodies of the disciples is especially significant...[it] contains the purest archetypal life element of Christ’s human lifetime. It serves humanity as the body of spirit memory, the vehicle of the Ur-remembrance of Christ FOR ALL AGES TO COME.” p 30 (caps added). Every link and step that is described in The New Experience is connected to 100s of quotes from Steiner’s collected works. These are not used as intellectual and abstract reports, but are linked up as lived-through supersensible experiences. Is this something that is only possible for special people like Dr. Ben-Aharon? No. A small group of people are now beginning to awaken this etheric cognition precisely through combining the New Event with Anthroposophical study in a human community. This is the Independent School of Spiritual Science, which can be compared to the leaves of a plant, that are led by its blooming flower, the Global Event College. The school is directed on the earth by Dr. Ben-Aharon, and directly linked to the Michael School in the Spiritual World, and guided by the continued work of the being who was last incarnated as Rudolf Steiner. How is this acceleration of wakefulness and insight accomplished? By first releasing and separating the light ether from its tight connection to the physical organism. The etheric body, first released from the head and taken under self-conscious control through anthroposophical work with the early ‘philosophical’ works of Rudolf Steiner, such as the 'Philosophy of Freedom,' is then freed from the physical heart and physical limbs.
Dr. Ben-Aharon’s book, 'Cognitive Yoga,' shows you how to do this in great detail. In the same way that the living light-seed of Christ’s life became an eternal feature of the spiritual world, and was incorporated into the life bodies of his original disciples, “in this preserved life-organism of the Apostles we have the key both to the Ur-Mystery of spirit remembrance and to the awakening power of the Holy Spirit which is, up to our own days, the archetypal example of the construction of a conscious link between objective and supersensible states of consciousness.” p 31. This means that we can take a copy of this lit up mirror or bud of pulsing life into our own light of consciousness, warmth, tone, and life and we can ‘fill in the outlines’ to make it our own Individual creation, in a fully free and moral way. Ben-Aharon describes from his own research how all of the esoteric Christian work that has been done since the historical event of Christ’s death and resurrection, has built a new heaven in close connection to the physical experience of the earth. It is a more humble holy spirit that encircles the earth like a spiritual atmosphere, and reflects the cosmic Holy Spirit from the highest heavenly regions. The devoted life bodies of the early Christians, as they were filled up with the light of Christ through time, have now become a luminous cloud surrounding and penetrating the earth. This pulsing inspiring aspect of the Holy Spirit is “the universally gathered, Christ-permeated fruits of earthly-human Sun life, received into the womb of virgin Mother Earth and reflected back, overflowing with earthlyheavenly life, awakening human souls to their conscious community with the Christ on Earth itself.” p 32.
This is the work that the new community of the Independent School of Spiritual Science and the Global Event College is humbly continuing and intensifying today. This requires, first, the shocking self-knowledge of seeing precisely how the dark Ahrimanic spirits are woven into our bodies, souls, and consciousness. We first must recognize how our daily consciousness (in reality, sleeping death) is created by the combination of a reversal of the spirit, and a co-working between Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits living in us.
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