ישעיהו בן-אהרן Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon
Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon, born 1955 in Israel, is a spiritual scientist, philosopher, and social activist who founded the anthroposophical kibbutz, Harduf, in Israel. He received his PhD from the University of Haifa. He is co-founder with Nicanor Perlas of the Global Network for Social Threefolding, director of the Global Event College, and contributor to the renewal of the School of Spiritual Science.
He teaches, writes and lectures worldwide on the evolution of human consciousness in the sciences, humanities and social and historical events. He is known for his ground breaking research on the apocalyptic spiritual and historical events of our times and as an original researcher in the field of Anthroposophy inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner.
His father, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon (1906-2006), belonged to the founding generation of the state of Israel.
==Publications==
Ben-Aharon has published a growing number of essential anthroposophical books:
''The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century'' (1993)
''The New Experience of the Supersensible'' (1995)
''America’s Global Responsibility: Individuation, Initiation and Threefolding'' (2004)
''The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art'' (2011)
''Spiritual Science in the 21st Century: Transforming Evil, Meeting the Other, and Awakening to the Global Initiation of Humanity'' (2013)
''Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality'' (2016)
''Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born'' (2017);
''Jerusalem: The Role of the Hebrew People in the Spiritual Biography of Humanity'' (2019)
''The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity'' (2020)
"The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, & Anthroposophia" (2022)
==Main Ideas==
The Reversal
In all of his works, Dr. Ben-Aharon uses a living concept that he created through his own life and experience: the reversal (Umstuelpung = turning totally inside out). He demonstrates how this real spiritual-scientific fact provides the basic pivot of all modern history. Modern human consciousness and life is based on turning the spiritual world into its opposite and storing it as dead mental images in the brain and nervous system. The basic function of modern consciousness and life is therefore to destroy the living truth and turn it into a merely subjective mental picture. The contemporary ego then defends this dead idea with all of its inner psychological tools and external economic, social, political and technological weapons. This is described in The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, The New Experience of the Supersensible, and The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, & Art, especially. The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, & Art pp 80-100
The positive potential in this essential human reality is that it also provides the opportunity for individual spiritual growth. If this basic spiritual scientific fact of reversal and privatization is uncovered in our own life and consciousness, then we can begin to develop into a new kind of human being. The new spark of resurrection forces given by the Etheric Christ Event, and used in spiritual scientific practice and growth, can then lead each person to develop a new kind of spiritual individuality and body beyond the confines of the shell of dead mental images. The counter-reversal or creation of a new etheric body and individuality is therefore possible. The reversal can change direction, to become a complete turning inside out of the personality. All of the wonderful qualities of becoming a personal self can be used by anthroposophical spiritual practice to create a bridge of consciousness to the Spiritual Self. This is described in Cognitive Yoga and elsewhere. Cognitive Yoga, pp. 47-51 In this way the moral failures of modern consciousness can be metamorphosed into moral and spiritual cognition and social practice. A new consciousness is formed that can both consciously die into everyday subjectivity and be awakened again into a World-wide spiritual scientific consciousness - both inside the old body and inside a new spiritual or etheric body.
The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
All of Dr. Ben-Aharon’s work is based on his personal experience in 1975 of the second or 'etheric' coming of Christ which transformed his whole life and being. Through entering into a lifelong study of the spiritual scientific writings of Rudolf Steiner, he was able to develop an advanced understanding and application of how this experience transforms thinking and sense-perception. Our normal experience of “having thoughts” must be changed into pure living thinking by training with Steiner’s earlier philosophical works. Through meeting the Christ spirit, who is now to be perceived working in the ‘etheric world,’ this pure thinking can be elevated into a new kind of clairvoyance, which is wide-awake, scientifically objective and logically rigorous. The modern experience of meeting the highest Spiritual Self of all humans can be understood correctly, only if I can perceive how thinking dies inside the human head in the normal creation of mental images and everyday thinking. On the other hand, our sense perceptions must also be elevated into a spiritual perception of fluid life streams. This unlocks a great new creativity in each human individual. These transformations and elevations of consciousness are life-changing for the whole inner human being, and are therefore filled with continual dramatic elements. Through meeting the Christ with an enlivened Anthroposophy living in our soul, we create a new ‘Act’ in the ‘play’ of our life. Such transformations of thinking and perception are painful and difficult, but they also require work with other people in groups of individuals meeting face to face. Ben-Aharon describes this work in great detail, especially in "The New Experience of the Supersensible", where he writes:
“The Christ is then seen through the metamorphosed forces of death, and is experienced through the mystery of man’s evil…[the] being of death becomes the guarantee of steadfast supersensible cognition; his soul is awakened from death into the light of true and free anthroposophical-imaginative self-knowledge. And the being of evil becomes his only guarantee of consciousness-creating and sustaining spirit morality: the dismembered soul is remoulded according to His healing presence in him. In this way the moral sacredness of anthroposophical knowledge and cognition begins to illuminate the modern Christ experience.
''Etheric Singularity''
The 'etheric' is an anthroposophical concept developed by Rudolf Steiner. It refers to a spiritual realm of pure life, light, and warmth which surrounds us and is part of us. Ben-Aharon teaches that by transforming thinking, sense-perception, self-hood, and social life through meeting with the new appearance of Christ in the nearest spiritual world, we can create a new unified stream of real life. A new living body can be formed which links up to the spiritual source of the whole world. Thus the individual can join the cosmos, and the cosmos can flow together with the Self. We find our true human potential through this. Human thinking can weave together with its Spiritual source, and even our physical body can be transformed through this Spiritual work, guided by the Spirit of our time, Michael. By this new spiritual scientific practice, we can create a spiritual ‘singularity’ - where the old laws of physics disappear and new laws of spiritual creativity and moral human work are unlocked.
Ben-Aharon writes, “The old humanism, as truthful and well intentioned as it is, must not stand still. It must greatly intensify its understanding of the human if it is going to be able to compete with the...developments in robotics, genetics, and the latter-day utopias of a scientific-technological “singularity,” in which the human will be wholly merged with AI and in which nano-technological genetics and medicine will have extended human biological life to immortality. Let humanists have no illusions about this fact: the human is about to be wholly virtualized, if not in an ecstatic apocalyptic event, then in due course. Therefore, the question must be: Can the human be virtualized in an essentially humanistic manner?” Ben-Aharon also calls this new etheric element created by working with the new Christ-forces, a spiritual 'virtuality' as in the following quote:
“In the present historical moment, the individual is becoming a source of new virtual creation, either through advanced technology or through self-actualization as a free and creative individual. We are talking here about a real singularization (the complete opposite of Kurzweil’s physical-mechanical ideal), the creation of cognitive, moral and spiritual immortality. The individual will become an agent of becoming and will do so in a fully human, non technological, way. It is indeed also the production of a new human, but this new human will be the virtualized essence of the existing human. It is also an immortalization but this one is brought about by purely human forces, that do not simply “retain” but infinitely intensify all human faculties, not only intelligence, but also freedom, love, care and creativity. It virtualizes the human, and makes her cosmic, but in an essentially human way, rather than through AI.”
Ben-Aharon describes what the experience of this new virtual or free etheric human spirituality is like:
“We can now begin to investigate more closely the three stages of the meeting and the three roles of Christ. In the preceding chapter was a description of the inner soul conditions necessary for preparing modern man for the meeting with the 'new' initiator. In order to characterize once again this existential situation, let us use here a term which, beside its common meaning, received a special content in modem physics. As was pointed out above, at the moment of the meeting with the living Christ in the soul world, man is no longer identified with his physical organism; he has actually lost his home in the physical world and become 'homeless'. Unconsciously he has already passed the first threshold, standing, unknowing, in the midst of the still darkened, but strongly felt, soul world. He is, therefore, in his human state of singularity, where all familiar laws of physical space and objectivity have collapsed, and new, unexpected laws begin their reign. But this implies that man has died without dying. He consciously experiences what everyone experiences after ordinary physical death: he dies in, and into, life, from space into living time. So we can now say: at the moment of the meeting, man is in a situation of singularity, in his absolutely unique, individualized space of freed, excarnated, life-time. He is no longer fixed and objectified as a physical point in three-dimensional space. He is already—though still unconsciously before the meeting—livingly flowing back and forth in between the two banks of the river of his life.”
==Essential Insights from His Books==
''The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century. An Imagination. The Occult Significance of the 12 Years 1933-45 in the Light of Spiritual Science (1993)''
In this book, Ben-Aharon describes the Spiritual Event that took place in the Spiritual World during the years of World War II. The essential nature of this Event is the new interaction between creative human souls, the spiritual beings behind anthroposophy, and the new work brought about by Christ's appearance in the etheric world.
In chapter 3, the author outlines the main elements of this timeless Event. For the sake of presentation, it is divided into three stages.
The description of the First Stage: the Revelation of this Event begins with the Imaginative experience of the emergence of a new sphere, when one’s spiritual scientific attention is focused on the beginning of the second third of the century, after thorough preparation through identification with the historic events and in particular the Jewish, German and Russian people. At first, this objective spiritual vision is experienced as a self-creating new sphere of existence within the earth, in the centre of which an “embryonic figure takes shape”, which “is woven of the light of its own creation [...] aflame with the fiery tongues of its own unceasing, intensive self-burning." The observer is not separated from this sphere, but actively participating in it. This new etheric or spiritual dimension is the result of 2000 years of Christ’s work in the hearts of humans, now creating his own “new human land”, called by the author the “true shamballah” or the Earthly-Human-Sun." An essential difference to previous times in both the new step of evolution taken here and in the role humans play in it is found in the fact that the substance of this new world is in part of human origin. This new sphere of life is the result of the “whole work of the Christ permeated humanity on earth...Man shapes increasingly the sheaths of the Christ being Himself. Human creation and His life and appearance merge as never before in human evolution.” Penetrating deeper into this experience, which requires overcoming strong spiritual resistance, another aspect is revealed: a bottomless abyss opens up and it is shown that humanity is completely divided. The reason for this is the fact that humanity as a whole crossed the threshold into the supersensible or spiritual world in the middle of the 19th century, but absolutely failed to consciously confront its lower nature and evil tendencies in the first third of the 20th century. It therefore had to confront these elements unconsciously in the second third, since all legitimate initiation experiences require a complete moral reckoning of one's own hidden nature. Supersensibly this is shown as a split that goes through humanity as a whole and through each human being. The author investigates this through entering into the experience of those human souls who partook in the Event, the pupils and community of Michael. While they actively take part in and experience the creation of the new sphere and their union with the Christ, at the same time they experience the split of humanity as their own inner split and as their future karmic responsibility. "For the small Michael community sojourning in the nascent etheric sphere of the newly-born Earthly-Sun, the karma of the world and mankind and personal karma became one. … For them the sublime Revelation showed itself to be the greatest wholeness on the one hand yet on the other a tormenting split of self, mankind and the world. … Revelation is Divided.” This situation leads to the central Second Stage: The great Sacrifice, which is marked by the fact that “there is no existing, naturally given power that will intervene from outside in order to correct for humanity that which was disastrously corrupted through human ignorance, pride and cruelty.” The situation is comparable to a false initiation, resulting in the captivity by the “Lower Guardian of the Threshold” and to a violent rejection of any help from the Higher Guardian (Christ). Furthermore, the humanly created, Christ permeated life-substance which was offered on the altar of the Earth-Sun temple, is depleted and a “moment of silence follows. It seems that everything is paralysed and frozen in the new land of everlasting, burgeoning Earthly-Sun life.” Now the “human aspect of Anthroposophy … had to find the truly free moral power to take upon itself the karma if humanity.” Millions of people were dying on earth in such a way that they were “passing through the gates of death in a state of great inner disturbance ... [carrying] a burning, desperate question about the nature and future of man and human life… the question about ‘Anthropos - Sophia’” The small human Michael community of souls living in the etheric realm between their death and rebirth now opened “their hearts to the upstreaming pain, anguish and despair … actively imbued their higher Michaelic being with the etherized blood of all races and nations on the bleeding earth.” Thereby they ignited a “mighty moral flame” and offered themselves on a new altar, becoming a living question of world and human evolution. “This offer of all-embracing human love will abide with humanity and the Earth until the last of its fallen creatures is redeemed.” This human sacrifice then enabled the Christ to join the work of redemption, by descending into the evil being of humanity and uniting himself with it, in a “second Mystery if Golgotha”, answering the “new, future question of human existence: the question concerning the mission and fate of evil.” This great sacrifice results in the Third Stage: Earthly-Human Sun Birth, which “completes the whole Event and makes it into a self-contained living and breathing totality.” It is emphasised that the stages are not to be understood as linear and causally-linked points in time, but rather given in the text to connect certain aspects of the wholeness of the Event with historic events. The author also indicates that only by contrasting this “end-result” with splitting of humanity in the first stage can the second stage be penetrated. The earth is now described as an “Earthly-Sun, a cosmic organism in its own right.” When the Christ merged with the evil being of humanity, “the upper kingdom of the Earthly Human Sun, until now separated from its lower, demonized self, turned inside out and around and embraced its lost half of self. … This deeply fissured self will be borne consciously from the twentieth century onward as its inwardly burning wound of unresolved past cosmic evolution.” Being a sun means, to be able top carry one's lower self, to take full responsibility for it and redeem it and at the same time to have surplus forces to nurture other beings, to be life-giving and radiating out of one's own forces. This became possible for the Earth because a representative group of humans took the karma of humanity onto themselves as a free act and thereby enabled the renewed sacrifice of the Christ, his second Golgotha. “It was the first fully conscious cooperation between a free representative group if humanity … and its all-embracing, descending, higher Self, the Christ. … The Earth and humanity as a whole passed through its first stage of conscious initiation and became a Christ-permeated, holy planet.” (Thanks to Johannes Lauterbach)
''The New Experience of the Supersensible: The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of Our Time (1995)''
In this book, Ben-Aharon relates in great detail each stage a human being can go through when meeting with the new appearance and activity of the Christ in the etheric world. He describes how this naturally-given new experience can only be clarified through anthroposophical spiritual scientific study, practice, and meditation. The central element of the text concerns the spiritual battle over the nature of human thinking. In other words, meeting the Christ spirit in this new Event can give each human being a new spark of spiritual vision that, when combined with true anthroposophical practice in spiritualizing thinking and sense-perception, will lead to new forms of scientifically objective clairvoyance or Imagination, as well as new human creativity in all spheres, especially including social life.
Chapter 5 – The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming
If a researcher is going to recreate the naturally given meeting with the soul of Christ in the invisible world of life and light, using an Imaginative and moral anthroposophical elevation of consciousness, there are two obstacles that must be overcome – ordinary thinking and ordinary perception. Furthermore, such supersensible research has to be remembered in normal consciousness, and therefore a new sort of spiritual memory must be developed. The three parts of the chapter elaborate in great detail how this can be done. He focuses on how modern subjective consciousness and possession of clear ideas is created by a mostly unconscious process of appropriating the living spiritual world (which is a wholeness into which the human being is fully woven) and reversing it. Human consciousness splits the singular spiritual ocean of wholeness into many selves, objects, and problems of knowledge. The real world of spirit, soul, and life is paralyzed, killed, frozen, and solidified into mental pictures, words, and abstract ideas. The good part is that this has allowed the modern ego to become independent, strong and free. Clear perception and logical thinking has also allowed the development of precise and orderly hard sciences, based on strict mathematical organization with a moderate degree of community verification and unbiased experimentation. In modern abstract thinking, calculation, and scientific research, thinking has finally completely broken itself off of the starry, ensouled, and living world in which it was born. This is a positive development for the earth and humanity, because it creates free individuals. The bad part is that the cognitive and moral reversal of the world is not recognized. The ego spreads its veil over the spiritual world, but the subjective human forgets it. What we are left with is a dead world, like the reflection in the mirror. Spiritual scientific elevation of consciousness must find a way to cross this canyon back to the real world.
Opening the Gate of Thinking (How to Spiritualize Thinking)
In order to do this, we have to become aware of how in each reflective thought, pictorial fantasizing, intellectual speculation, memory, and calculation, an element of our own life stream is suppressed, paralyzed, emptied out, reversed, digested, and forgotten. We have to find the original life that we strangle in every thought. This struggle to uncover it awakens an existential angst, but the inner burning fire of anguish and modern confusion at the heart of this modern problem of consciousness can be effectively used, if it is changed into a calm tool of research. We have to be able to stand the pain, suffering, and feeling of dying. When we use Rudolf Steiner’s living epistemological texts, like the Philosophy of Freedom, to uncover the pure will which is creating concepts at the center of thinking, we eventually find that Christ himself is covered over precisely at this boundary between living real thinking, and its fragmented, dead reflection. The shocking paradox is that Christ is crucified, He sacrifices Himself, in order for us to develop self-conscious thinking. Our solidity of belief and consciousness that we are living as free personalities in a world of material objects suffocates the etheric Christ. He dies where thinking dies. Where real thinking dies and becomes mere representations, He also disappears. Because He is the source of the I AM who creates and wills all spiritual, living thinking. We have to struggle to wake up to this consciously. This means to reawaken to the utmost spiritual nature of our own higher self. To stand firmly in our mental ground, we kill the Christ, but by uncovering the moment of creating the past moment, we create the possibility of consciously working with Him, learning from Him, and weaving together with Him. This is the Event of Thinking.
To find this time and place where thinking dies, and thus to awaken spiritually to the new appearance of the Christ spirit in the etheric world, we must first break through the solid ice of our reflections, and temporarily cancel our mental picturing. This reflective association of subjective ideas puts a veil over reality and the vision of the future which is always part of us. We must find and experience how the will actually regulates life and death in our conscious thinking. How is this mental image, feeling of inner self, and memory of the past formed? “There is a freezing and preservation of the difference of time that has elapsed, a stretching and spacing of time – a killing of time and a temporal immortalization and preservation of the killed time – in every act of ideation and perception...Every moment of our life-time that is raised into self-consciousness is in this way always split in two, [1] into a living and creative unknown element...pushed back and preserved as future potentiality, and [2] into something that is fixed, made non-living and hence, remains as an available element for later recollection.” We learn how to cross pure thinking and the will over and through one another in order to awaken the new supersensible vision of the invisible life that surrounds us. But a deeper and gradual soul and moral transformation must also develop.
5.B – Opening the Gate of Sense-Perception
Our senses of seeing color, smelling flowers, touching the grass, feeling the warmth of the Sun, and so on can become wakeful spiritual perceptions. Etherized sense-perception can become ‘formative world-thinking’. “Man as a cognitive being of thinking and sense-perception, taken as a whole and consciously transformed, is the twofold bridge...having individualized the abyss...and made it into his own inner world, [the human being] can carry the fruits of Earth to the heavens.” The sense objects we perceive are not really out there in space. We freeze them and squeeze out their living streams in every perception. We kill the living light, the living soul and spiritual world in every sensation, just like we do in forming every mental image. The mental image blocks us from living thinking, just as the idea of the object blocks us from spiritualized perception – so we must learn how to dissolve and redeem the living streams in the ‘object.’ We unconsciously glue together the frozen light and sensation-crystals with the dead mental image, and this produces everyday consciousness, knowledge, objects, and subjective self-security. So we must learn how to separate these elements. “An ‘object’ is, in the purely sense-world, an etheric-elemental flowing reality, fixated, cemented and sedimented, made dense and heavy through...our bodily, willed touch...In the moment we cease [the object’s] unconscious consolidation, it etherizes, becomes transparent and rent in twain, revealing the real living and ensouled world-man behind it.” How do we do this? We must come to experience how the spiritual senses of life, movement, and balance penetrate into our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste, and produce the mental conviction that I am a material body living among other material bodies that really exist.
“This process is intensified until the two streams not only reach and touch in each other’s infinite end point but, pouring themselves through the other’s infinity, merge into one stream that circles and reverses itself through a central point for both time formations at once.” The life of the fully grown plant and the seed pass into one another in a pulse; the seasons pass into each other in a crossing point of rhythmic expansion and contraction. After this life cycle in the etheric body is consciously formed, we begin to focus on the soul or astral drama of the whole cycle of life, death, and rebirth in the subtle changes of feeling throughout the year. This is outlined in Rudolf Steiner’s "Calendar of the Soul". We travel from soul sympathy, and expanding warmth and love, but then begin to dim down again in pain, coldness and antipathy. After much practice, we find that the winter processes begin to take the upper hand. The cold abyss of death and inner powerlessness start to dominate the harmonious and sympathetic development of feelings in our soul-year. We can find no power to break the increasing ascendancy of this dying, painful freezing and so this then brings the soul cycle to a complete stop. However, the pain, contraction, and dying in the life and soul can be then neutralized, and the whole process is lifted to the Ego or level of the I. “There man must struggle to discover the inner point where no vital change and no change of consciousness can overpower him...[One] can freely master the natural streams in his elemental body, and freely direct his soul attention and so cross the time streams at will.” We learn how to consciously carry the whole life cycle and soul year, but also experience the complete development of the resurrection of the ego and the whole of nature through Christ. Then Ben-Aharon gives a complete demonstration of how to spiritualize an individual perception.
5C – The Construction of the Bridge
In this section, Dr. Ben-Aharon demonstrates how tunnels or bridges of consciousness are created between the soul and spiritual Self and the living physical body and ego on the Earth. As in the earlier sections of the book, he divides this into a thinking, willing, and feeling element or an etheric, astral, and spiritual element. The bridge-construction means far more than following color streams inside the head or merely having visions in the mind’s eye. The continuity of consciousness, memory, and communication between heaven and earth is not only filled with world-images and creative soul-speech (very different in nature from visions and hearing voices), but also with moral crises of self-knowledge and soul transformation, as well as creative seeds of future spiritual-physical acts. This development of an entirely new life, soul, and spirit breathing of consciousness between the spiritual worlds and our earthly life there has an Imaginative, Inspirational, and Intuitive level in the strict spiritual-scientific senses. We rebuild our whole being.
Technique for Transforming Materialistic Thoughts or Confronting the Dragon with the Sword of Michael
Then Ben-Aharon outlines one cognitive-meditative technique so that the Michaelic force in us can battle the Dragon in order to build the shining crystal bridge. First, you begin by choosing, reading, understanding, and thinking through a specific line of scientific or philosophical thought, which is clearly materialistic (dead, abstract, ahrimanic) in its linkage and development of ideas. What do we do? Study it, and think it through very carefully and thoroughly with ordinary and absolutely clear consciousness. You must pull it deeply down into the physical brain itself, not remaining floating and confused. You use all the best forces of modern thinking. You feel that you grasp it inwardly and strongly. Only then can the ‘deactualization’ process (as he calls it in "The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art") begin.
You now separate the intellectual content (the meaning and mental pictures) from the pure form of the chosen line of thought. Then you concentrate all of your forces only on the pure development of dynamic forces or energy that is left over from this intellectual linkage of concepts in the head. The separation between form and content takes place behind the eyes, but the pure forces are poured back into the middle brain and finally down into the spinal column. When the hollow tunnel connecting the forehead with the spinal column is perceived, this signals the release of the etheric brain from the physical brain. Then you carry the pure form and force dynamic residue of the thought sequence repeatedly into the etheric body from head to heart. This can eventually lead to a battle in the human heart between your free Michaelic thinking and the dead Ahrimanic elements. This battle can create a new etheric substance. Ben-Aharon writes: “The process described above is precisely that to which Rudolf Steiner referred in the moment when he fierily exclaimed: "We must find the possibility to turn to our supersensible heart!"
==External links==
