The founder of the Waldorf educational movement and biodynamic agriculture, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), also gave new directions for architecture, the fine arts, medicine, and socio-economic life. His collected works, dedicated to his spiritual view of the human being, called Anthroposophy, are filled with a wide variety of concrete spiritual scientific exercises and meditations. But he also left small hints and general indications about new kinds of spiritual scientific practice that he did not complete during his lifetime. One of these hints about a future kind of spiritual practice suitable for modern humans concerned a ‘Michaelic Yoga.’ He mentioned this briefly in some lecture courses from 1919/20 (GA 194 and 322). This new rhythmical practice would not focus on the physical breath, like the pranayama exercises of the older yoga, but rather on spiritualizing thinking activity and sense-perception, trading back and forth, one after the other.
First, thinking activity can be transformed into a beholding of essences outside of mental pictures and second, sense perceptions like sight, sound, and smell can be ‘vaporized’ and woven together with the body. In a cyclical pulse, we can unite the interior of our concepts with the world of Ideas that we behold in willed thinking (this is like ‘breathing out’), and then we pull in the living forces behind color, sound, scent, touch, and warmth into our expanded body of life and light (this is like ‘breathing in’). This practice, accomplished through penetrating into the unconscious elements of cognition and perception, and also elevating forces of morality by examining our ego, and our subjective projections, needs, and desires with rigorous and objective self-knowledge, gives rise to a new kind of spiritual Self. This seems like a difficult process!
However, in the wonderful new book, 'Cognitive Yoga, Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality' (translated into German as 'Michaelic Yoga'), we are thankful to discover that Dr. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has developed Steiner’s hints into a complete practice over several hundred pages. Ben-Aharon is a leading spiritual scientific researcher, who has published 10 books, beginning with 'The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century' in the 90s and most recently, 'The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.' Michaelic Yoga does not merely collect Steiner’s quotes about Michaelic Yoga, but Ben-Aharon develops a new cognitive yogic practice that is a real addition to the richness of Anthroposophy. Nearly every sentence of this book is a step by step direction about how to perform this new art, meditation, and cognitive spiritual practice. It is a robust and deep introductory class on how to change thinking and perception into a new kind of Imaginative or clairvoyant insight. It is based on Anthroposophy alone, and does not mix in other streams or approaches.
After giving an overview of Steiner’s indications on the subject matter, Ben-Aharon shows us that the first step to be performed is to clearly separate our sense impressions on the one side, from our mental picturing, remembering, imagining, and reflections, on the other. In other words, we learn how to look at an apple and separate the color and sensation from our ideas about the apple, in the moment by moment flow of consciousness. This is directly related to the real spiritual scientific practice of the substance of Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom, where noticing the difference between percepts and concepts is fundamental. Ben-Aharon compares this first step to separating water into Hydrogen and Oxygen through electrolysis.
After we learn how to ‘decompose’ the mental image at the basis of normal consciousness, Ben-Aharon is careful to emphasize that none of this practice should diminish the sense of self-identity. On the contrary, the practice of the Cognitive Michaelic Yoga should only build on the strong sense of self-consciousness, and the modern feeling of being an individual ego or self. The limitations and isolated nature of the modern ego, can develop into a free and creative spiritual individuality with the balancing forces of the new etheric Christ impulse and gifts. We read this astonishing statement, “Even in the higher spiritual worlds, among the highest beings of the spiritual hierarchies, you cannot find self-consciousness or freedom as humans can develop on earth. Nor can it be created there. Subsequently, there is no individually developed capacity for love to be found in the divine worlds, which can only be born out of true freedom…This is what is mean by Spiritual Science when it speaks about the Christ impulse – finding in the earthly ego the true Self, and if we accomplish this, the more we truly transform our egoism…” (pp 47-48)
Then the first steps of perceptual transformation begin, with chapters on the ‘etherization’ or the spiritual development of sight and smell. I have never read any other books that have anything in common with these rich practices. This material is absolutely original and I would say, unparalleled in anthroposophical literature. In the practice of ‘color-breathing,’ Ben-Aharon travels far beyond the moral sense of the pure qualities of the colors developed by Goethe. He uses the example of separating the red from a rose, and experiencing the pure intensity of giving oneself over in devotion, shocking moral self-knowledge and humility to the spiritual becoming process of the being of redness. He writes, “Only by means of generating…this selfless motivating force, and surrendering all that we have to the becoming red process, can we let red substitute itself fully for our own ordinary self. World red becomes one’s self and guides one…Precisely at that moment when we have become wholly red, the former experience of the quality of red, which we abstracted from the physical object, disappears. From this moment on...we have not only lost any ability to represent the external color, but we also lost its qualitative soul experience…this colorless color becomes pure intensity, which feels, wills and thinks itself through us.” (p 66) And this is only an intermediate stage!
During the development of the Michael Cognitive Yoga practice of many decades, Ben-Aharon discovered that there is a large blockage or gateway that closes off the purest etheric forces in the lower part of the body. The key to opening this blockage lies in the spiritualization of the senses of smell, taste, and touch. He focuses primarily on smell to give an overview of how it is accomplished with the other middle senses. This requires finding a third stream of the sense of smell behind the nasal cavity and following it down into the etheric body and sentient soul. We discover through this process that the sense of smell actually unconsciously builds a large part of our sense of being embodied and living in a solid physical shell. He writes, “Trying to let go of this self-loving…warm body of smells, tastes and…internally bodily touching and sensations, is like making a volitional choice to die; separating from a beloved and comfortable place of a secure and hidden, private, earthly dwelling. Only when we are ready to face this fear and let it go, will the scent aura and substance really be free to leave us…As an act of thankfulness for this selfless liberation, [the smell] may gracefully allow us to participate in its return to its cosmic source and share its true being and becoming as a real objective world force…” (p 111)
The most advanced part of the book then describes the freeing and individualization of the whole etheric body and the creation of a new etheric individuality. He then shows us how we may enter into a new educational garden in the new earthly-human sun sphere that is growing inside the spiritual foundations of our earth right now. The final chapter culminates in a description of how this etherization process gradually can lead to an intimate meeting with the second coming of Christ in the etheric world. I have found that practicing this new art of Michaelic Yoga, even in the first steps, is a difficult but healthy spiritual endeavor. I can only give this book my highest recommendations. What an inspiring treasure!
Scott Elliot Hicks, author of ‘The Resurrection of Thinking’ (2018) and ‘Earthly, Transcendental & Spiritual Logic’ (2019).
