Review of "The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, and Anthroposophia" by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon (2022)

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In 1975, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon had a life-changing spiritual experience of meeting Christ face-to-face.  He is not the only one to have experienced this meeting in the 20th century, but what is extraordinary and original about his life and writing, is that he didn’t stop there. Instead, he has worked with this graceful Event for decades and enhanced his understanding and self-consciousness through Anthroposophical study to research what happened and exactly how it happened and how to return to this ever-present spiritual Event. He turned the living instruments found behind the pages of Rudolf Steiner’s books into faculties in order to work with this etheric Second Coming, this new appearance of the Christ again and again as his daily, individual self-conscious achievement. In The Three Meetings, Dr. Ben-Aharon puts it this way: “When the given meeting is transformed into the voluntary meeting, we realize that the copy of Christ’s ‘I’ that we receive and individualize consciously, was contained in the being of the Christ that we experienced in the first meeting...Then we discover, in the light of spiritual knowledge, radiating from the Holy Grail, that the Christ Himself is the source of the copies of His ‘I’.” (p. 5)   Steiner laid out a vast laboratory of tools in his unparalleled philosophical and spiritual scientific writings, including his understanding of the nature of the Second Coming from direct experience as an initiate of the highest caliber. Steiner died in 1925, but actually his books are still the most relevant, potent and youthful on earth. The seeds and faculties given by Christ to Ben-Aharon in the first meeting were joined to the new faculties that were developed through Anthroposophy, so that a new form of human and spiritual co-working could arise: a new Imaginative-Spiritual Scientific Knowledge or a marriage of Anthroposophia and Christ. Beginning with the spiritualization of thinking and not elsewhere, Dr. Ben-Aharon developed the blueprint for these new kinds of faculties which now can be achieved by any human being sooner or later, if they take up the difficult task of anthroposophical self-development (“This means that in our age, through the etheric Second Coming, it becomes possible for more and more people to prepare themselves to receive the Ego-copy of the Christ.”, p. 6). A new rigorously scientific etheric clairvoyance, developed under the guidance of Christ as a friend, has now developed. Ben-Aharon published the first results of his detailed methods and research in the 1990s in two books: The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century (1993) and The New Experience of the Supersensible (1995).  

The content of his newest book, The Three Meetings (2022, Temple Lodge), started as an expansion and rewriting of the introduction (about the first 20 pages) of Dr. Ben-Aharon’s The New Experience of the Supersensible. Ben-Aharon is currently finishing up his huge 4 volume expansion of this masterpiece, and The Three Meetings opens a doorway and shines a light onto what is soon to come. Although this new text does provide a preface to that larger work in a greatly expanded form (The Three Meetings is around 140 pages), and gives an overview of the whole of Ben-Aharon’s life’s work regarding the joining of Anthroposophy and the new Christ Event, The Three Meetings can also stand alone. It is self-sufficient, because it is also connected to the living spiritual substance that lies behind the words of the text, which the attentive reader can also enter, if one studies the text with one’s whole soul. In that sense, this book is an extremely precious and rare gift to the world, filled with sparks of life that can change one’s whole approach to modern spiritual development. Furthermore, such a deep reading can allow the student to begin her own path toward the free experience, testing, and verification of the spiritual content itself. This may take many years, but patient study and reflection will be rewarded. The book is filled from its very spiritual core with the spiritual impulse of freedom and the development of modern and clear self-consciousness and the strengthening of the sense of I AM. 

The text describes how the meeting of the Christ can lead to a meeting with the leading spirit of our time, Michael, and also to the living being of Anthroposophia as a person. The text is not primarily concerned with outlining visionary experience, speculative assessments, or abstract intellectual judgments. Instead, spiritual scientific concepts and clear thinking become windows through the world, which when joined with the knowledge faculties awakening in the spiritual heart, and the intuitive knowledge of the etheric Self, lead one into world-wide Imaginative spiritual pictures beyond the idea of the physical body. This knowledge has unfolded above all through painful self-knowledge and moral development and co-working with the spiritual world itself. The book is a conversation in the deepest sense and an unfolding of Anthroposophy 2.0 and we could also say, Christianity 2.0. 

      The book is divided into eight chapters, which discuss the Pauline method, the development of the new Cognitive Yoga, crossing the Threshold, and meeting the three great spirits mentioned in the title. It also discusses how one has to wrestle with and change the faculty of knowledge when encountering the spiritual world and the Second Coming, and how an anthroposophical bridge can be built to and from the spiritual world and the etheric Christ. The book is full of spiritual research that we have never encountered before (that was not present in the original short outline in the 90s, nor in his other books) but is it firmly based on Rudolf Steiner’s research. In fact, Ben-Aharon explicitly quotes and refers to around 60 different volumes of Steiner’s collected works in this book of modest length. He knows Rudolf Steiner’s work better than anyone I have ever studied or encountered, but it is not just a matter of academic knowledge. Rather the living seeds in Steiner’s work have been grown and developed in Ben-Aharon’s own life and have sprouted in new ways, since these seeds have been nourished with the world-changing pulses coming from the Christ Event in the world of formative forces. A case in point: he has taken one small section from Steiner’s Truth and Science (GA 3), and has expanded it into a complete exercise to prepare oneself for entering the spiritual world. What was merely hinted at in the introduction to The New Experience of the Supersensible is now rounded out into a carefully explained exercise for noting and separating the influence of the 4 bodies (physical, etheric, astral, and ego) on our experience of the world. It is still a difficult exercise! But we now have another blueprint to help us to develop the new faculties of the Michaelic age, based on spiritualizing thinking and perception, rather than falling back onto older and easier practices. 

      Let us now turn to the some of the details given in this book. In chapter 1, we find that Paul’s meeting with the Christ supersensibly on the road to Damascus contains the essence of what can be experienced today in our meeting with the Etheric Christ. Such a Pauline method consists of seeing and experiencing Christ’s lifetime as an imaginative wholeness, and simultaneously perceiving how the forces of death in oneself are transformed through Christ’s spiritual life. “Overcoming the death forces inherent in the modern ahrimanic intellect is indeed the starting point for the knowledge drama of the Second Coming...and the source of the forces of resurrection...is found in the appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ.” (p. 10). Rudolf Steiner showed that Krishna, the sublime being who gave the original impulses for the ancient Yoga, was also present in the incarnation of Jesus, and that through his incarnation, yoga and the essence of the Bhagavad-Gita were raised to a higher development and given to all humanity. Krishna’s light shined onto Paul and the light of Krishna shines from the etheric Christ today. Ben-Aharon’s Cognitive or Michaelic Yoga (see his book from 2016) was developed through the wedding of Anthroposophy and the Etheric Christ Event. “This means that the source of the modern form of yoga, in its anthroposophical-Michaelic form described by Rudolf Steiner in 1919-20...is the etheric appearance of the Christ, because in this experience one becomes part of this new etheric breathing with one’s etheric body...through the etherization of thinking and sense-perception, as described...in Cognitive Yoga.” This luminous pulse of knowledge gave birth to the esoteric instruction created by the student of Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, in ancient Athens, where the ‘inhalation’ and ‘exhalation’ of life and death, and being and nothingness led to a living experience at the point of their crossing. This new yoga impulse was the source of both negative theology and the ancient Greek dialectic of its greatest philosophers. Dialectic, a rhythmic process of reaching true knowledge by separating and combining elements of reality, and awakening original memory to perceive the Ideas, lies at the essence of accessing truth in Plato’s Dialogues – it is a process to ‘carve reality at the joints’ (Phaedrus). This spiritual intuitive process is dampened down into a more modern logical process emphasizing the connection of sense-experience with strict scientific principles, genera, and categories in Aristotle’s works. The complete elaboration of every possibility of thinking activity was given in Aristotle’s works, which in turned influenced all of Western thought until the 15th century.  Plato’s intuitive knowledge was combined inwardly with the development of Christianity during the same time period.  

      Therefore, one of the primary tasks for the end of the 20th century, which Ben-Aharon primarily contributed to, was to resurrect and transform what had become dead in modern intellectual processes and in anthroposophy and merge it with a renewed and enlivened dialectical or yogic process linked to the ancient Greek philosophical worldviews or streams. “Both streams could only be spiritualized through the meeting with the etheric Christ, because only this source of wholly new spiritual forces could bring both to Imaginative consciousness. Building on this foundation, one could use this united spiritual force to create the knowledge drama of the Second Coming and build the foundations for the new School of Michael in the twenty-first century. As Aristotle had to kill the divine method of Plato, and transform it into earthly logical thinking, Rudolf Steiner’s karmic task was to resurrect this dead dialectic and create modern spiritual science out of it. In the way he grasps the living essence of the Dialectic, we can find the seed of its resurrection through the etheric Christ impulse and the Michaelic Yoga.” (p. 19)  We see what potential is truly available in the deepest esoteric sense, for anthroposophical forward development and for human evolution. Even though this light shines from the spiritual world closest to us, the Etheric Christ and living Anthroposophia are, unfortunately, almost totally unperceived today, even by those who profess to be interested in the spiritual path and Steiner’s contributions. But Michael’s rhythmic pulse is active everywhere. 

In chapter 2, the essence of this new cognitive or Michaelic yoga is described, where one spiritualizes thinking according to the pathways of The Philosophy of Freedom, and spiritualizes all of our external senses through an anthroposophical deepening of Goethe’s natural scientific power of observation and sense-perception. Through Christ’s new impulses flowing into the middle of their crossing point, one can develop such a new dialectic, yogic, or rhythmic spiritual scientific practice of mutual essence exchange with the spiritual world. “Only by means of this practice can we find the truly modern way to the most important event in the evolution of humanity and the earth in our age: the new appearance of the Christ in the etheric world. Only in this way can we illuminate His etheric appearance with the resurrected light of Michael’s intelligence and thinking.” (p. 27) 

In chapter 3, we find an inspiring description of a new type of spiritual development and an outlining of a new knowledge process which is totally unique in anthroposophical literature: how Dr. Ben-Aharon transformed his first meeting into a voluntary meeting with the Christ impulse through a combination of the forces lying behind Rudolf Steiner’s works, The Philosophy of Freedom on one pole, and The Riddles of the Soul, on the other. This concerns what it means to build a bridge from everyday consciousness up to the spiritual world on one side, and from the other side, to consciously devitalize spiritual experiences outside the body, in order to build a bridge back to the brain and body from the etheric world downwards. This chapter, “The Platonic-Aristotelian Essence Exchange at the End of the Twentieth Century” is outlined in the context of a mutual enlivening of the worldviews and spiritual influences flowing broadly from Aristotle and Plato; what was described in terms of the new Michaelic plan in Ben-Aharon’s The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, is concentrated into one human experience here. He describes his struggles in his mid-30s (after a decade of anthroposophical work with the original 1975 given experience, focused primarily on the Philosophy of Freedom pole): “The spiritualized thinking that I used to bring my Imaginative perception to fully conscious supersensible cognition, was not flowing from the etheric to the physical world and back to the etheric world; it remained active in the etheric body in the etheric world; and I couldn’t bring my imaginative faculties to penetrate the physical brain and transform its intellectual forces from within...This must be distinguished from the ability to work from above into the etheric body, because in this way, one reaches down only so far as to imprint in the etheric body the etheric correlates of the spiritual experiences that one investigates...Therefore, the problem that I faced was...how to bring down the living imaginative forces and condense them to...become a force of cognition inside the physical body.” (p. 40)  At this moment, he came to study The Riddles of the Soul, which gave him the impetus to finally condense these Imaginative experiences in an Aristotelian way down into the physical body itself. “I found out that, paradoxically, when this ahrimanic force that causes the killing of spiritual perception and its paralysis...is spiritualized, it has the opposite effect. It saturated the original imaginative perception with inspired and intuited forces, from which the bridge could receive its necessary solid etheric forces and substances. An enhanced imaginative faculty was the result.” (p. 53). This process is described in great detail in the text.  

       In chapter 4, he writes about the ever-changing process of meeting the Christ in the etheric world:   

“There is absolutely no fixed and separated being in this stream of perpetual becoming. And if this is true for each single being and process, we must realize to what extent this applies to the appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ. He appears as the cosmic heart centre and life fountain of the world of etheric becoming; He is the being of infinite becoming; His etheric appearance, words and deeds consist of perpetual actualization of metamorphosis, transformation, change and growth. And this is the spiritual essence of the ‘I’ that He gives us. Therefore, if we want to investigate this experience and recapitulate it voluntarily, we must become His becoming, in a conscious way. The threefold spiritual meeting with the Christ: His imaginative appearance, inspirative words and intuitive deeds, not only demonstrate the objective becoming process of humanity and the earth, but His ‘I’ demonstrates it through and inside our ‘I’. He is therefore the supreme teacher of the mutual human world becoming in our universe. This means that our spiritualized cognitive activity is not taking place outside the being that we know, but inside this being, and our cognition is spiritualized by means of the force of spiritual becoming that flows from this being, the etheric Christ.” (p 66)

     In Chapter 5, “The Abyss and the Event of the Threshold” we learn how to become conscious of, separate, and voluntarily erase elements of our everyday experience in order to approach the chasm between sense experience and the true spiritual world in a prepared, balanced, and fully modern way. Then, if we can hold onto our faith and trust in the goodness of the spiritual world, IT may, when it wishes, resurrect us into true spiritual consciousness. This systematic and moral approach is developed, as mentioned above, from Rudolf Steiner’s Truth and Science. Ben-Aharon writes, “Now we must feel the reality of the corpse of thinking intensively. We must feel how our personal identity crystallizes around this memorized, habitual, dead soul content...We begin to experience that, by means of the sum-total of the mental pictures that man has engraved in his soul during earthly life, he becomes a free being on earth, but has also died to the spiritual world.” (p 74) ...“Then man can be granted the modern Pauline Christ experience: Not ‘I’ (in so far as this ‘I’ is embodied in the contents of earthly consciousness), but my Self is active, therefore I AM. This becomes our new situation and event meditation. This meeting and essence exchange between the ‘I’ of Christ and the human ‘I’, becomes thus the living centre of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. This experience constitutes a new ground of the groundless, self-less, self-conscious spiritual becoming at the Threshold. But only through the repeated practice of the living annihilation of all soul contents and habits, does man develop the power that gradually cracks the hardened shell of his enclosing mental egg. And it is out of this hardened enclosure that the ‘wings of passage’ are released in due course, carrying him over the grey and dark-gloomy abyss into the luminous spirit land in which the etheric Christ appears. When we practice this spiritual activity, we feel how the dead forces of the Mind Soul die out, and the youthful and vibrant forces of the Consciousness Soul emerge and flourish.” (p 75)  

We find in chapter 5 that when our Michaelic Yoga practice is developed far enough, the spiritualized thinking pole penetrates to the origin of Imaginative perception, and perception joins the essence of spiritual thinking – there in this middle or twilight zone, the night awareness and the day  awareness can unite into a single spiritually awake consciousness. In addition, Dr. Ben-Aharon gives us a clear indication of how J.G. Fichte’s true spiritual experience of the I AM, can also be our center point for entering pure thinking and spiritual scientific Imagination. 

The later chapters of The Three Meetings describe deep esoteric details about meeting with the Christ, Michael, and Anthroposophia from direct experience. The words written in the text are life-changing, but must also be handled with the deepest responsibility because they operate from the direct source of the Mysteries. For this reason, those elements are not covered in the context of a public book review. 

But, what a book! We can truly celebrate with the greatest joy that a bridge-builder is incarnated on earth today, who maintains a clear connection to the living being of Anthroposophia, Michael, and Christ. Through his books and his schooling, Dr. Ben-Aharon is helping us to develop in the clearest and most up-to-date manner possible. The Three Meetings does not resort to symbolic language, mere emotional enthusiasm or preaching. He instead works intensely with the most difficult elements of cognition and spiritual scientific knowledge, and untangles spiritual and soul encounters that are shockingly turbulent – but putting it forward in a concise manner so that the anthroposophical student of the 21st century can do his or her best to study it and progress, no matter how difficult or intense the real spiritual essence is in reality. His works do come out of his own life, but they do not really only concern him personally. Ben-Aharon is a human, learning how to grow with all the rest of us. His books give the reader a universal human spark, and not only a personal myth. Steiner and Ben-Aharon have taught us that we must grapple with the deepest forces of cognition in approaching the door of spirit. I know this intimately from my own work in this direction. From my own modest development in spiritual science as demonstrated in my recent books, I can confirm that what Ben-Aharon writes comes from legitimate spiritual development in the Anthroposophical sense and is directly connected with Rudolf Steiner’s continued work and the living work of the spiritual beings that are mentioned in the title of this work. Let each person calmly dig out his and her hidden serpents of criticism, in the way elaborated in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and instead locate the open door! Let the truth be heard by those who have opened the ears of the heart! Let people gently gather around the light when it appears and let this spiritual light be magnified through both study and faith! The Second Coming is a present reality, and Rudolf Steiner’s continued work is a present reality – now let each one of us rise to the occasion and let our tasks also become a present and living spiritual reality, linked to Christ’s true light and true gift. Humanity can and must do this TOGETHER. 

Scott Elliot Hicks, author of The Resurrection of Thinking (2018) and Earthly, Transcendental & Spiritual Logic (2019).   

Medieval Philosophy and the Active Intellect - the Connection with Astronomy and Spiritual Science

     

                                                                            Scott E. Hicks 2023

 Davidson wrote the following in his excellent book on Averroes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi: 

"In the medieval Aristotelian universe, a series of incorporeal intelligences parallels the series of celestial spheres, the transparent spherical bodies that carry the planets and stars around the Earth. In the version of the Aristotelian scheme of the universe endorsed by Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, the active intellect, the factor leading the potential human intellect to actuality, is added as a final link to the chain of intelligences. It therein parallels the sublunar world, which stands as the last and least cosmic body, at the end of the series of celestial spheres." (p. 13) 

     We can connect our contemporary spiritual scientific worldview with this older cosmic schema, in the following way: the I AM is now able to self-consciously think and see its thinking both on Earth and in the sublunar world, which is now becoming visible through our Imagination that can see the Etheric. This is now available because of the Etheric appearance of the Christ Being, which began in 1933. The teaching that we have received from Rudolf Steiner enables us to interpret Aristotle's statement from his the Generation of Animals that our thinking capacity and reason is a divine element that enters into the soul from outside of it, namely from the Spirit proper. The etheric world is the first world that we can now enter, when we have enlivened our thinking, our morality, and our imagination through anthroposophy and the Christ Impulse. 

     Thinking penetrates into all parts of the corporeal body of the human being, but also exists in its supersensible elements outside the body, linking up with the celestial living spheres in a way that can now arise in our consciousness in a healthy manner. In this way, the Michaelic mission begins to take on form, because thinking is lifted up once again into the celestial spheres, but now having taken the extract from mineralized thinking, death, clarity, and earthly science and having woven this together with the strong sense of Ego that has arisen through perception in our earthly incarnation. Through the spiritualized memory substance, and the spiritualization of our sense of I and our thinking, we can now become conscious in our superlunary extensions. 

     In addition, Alfarabi speaks from experience of the fact that in the same way that the sun creates the light which permits vision to take place, "an emission from the active intellect...illumines the human material intellect." (p. 50 in Davidson)  Today, through the inspiration we have received from Ben-Aharon and Rudolf Steiner, we can take the illumination from the world-mind as it thinks in me, and bring it down into the cold grave of the brain, feeling its powers becoming icy and dead. But we use the warmth of the original inspiration from my Spiritual Self, to pull its energy down into the heart and there to wage the battle in the heart discussed by Ben-Aharon in Chapter 5 of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (Expanded edition of New Experience of the Supersensible). Here we take what is true in materialism, what is healthy in perception, and what is solid in the creation of our I AM, and we work with devotion and also wait with patience for "a connection with a matter different from and more divine that the so-called elements" to appear (Aristotle, Generation of Animals 736b30). This quintessence is the bridge that can become now a self-conscious "resonant chamber" (I borrow this from Torbjorn Eftestol's work on Deleuze and music) and a living garden of lights in which we pray to open our self-consciousness with full awareness to the knowledge process as a whole to appear as new heavens and new earth. Let us also follow Christ and build this bridge of knowing and actively-seen-thinking down into the sub-earthly - to spiritualize fallen matter, electric and symbolic logic, tech and the immoral egotism living in us and in our bodies, minds, souls, and spirits. 

     Alfarabi says that "the rational part of the soul is very similar to the incorporeal beings" and the "soul joins the company of incorporeal beings." For the soul has become "free of matter", can "dispense with matter", and no longer "requires matter for its existence." Since immortality means simply the ability to exist independently of a body, immortality is thus a concomitant of the stage of acquired intellect. The soul liberates itself from matter even before the body dies and "remains in that state perpetually, its eudaemonia (blessedness or theoretical bliss) being complete." (Davidson p. 56) 

'The imagination, Alfarabi explains, is a faculty of the soul located in the heart and standing immediately below, and serving, the rational faculty. It stores sense perceptions, or the impressions of sense perceptions, when the objects of perception are no longer present. It manipulates sense perceptions, disassembling them or combining them into configurations...It can create figurative images...that symbolize, rather than strictly represent, a given object.' (D, p. 58) 

He also said that imagination can lead to clairvoyance in divine matters, where the imaginative faculty 'sees figurative images of incorporeal intelligible beings and other supernal beings.' The active intellect (nous poetikos) gives the imaginative faculty, and the imaginative faculty receives and sees figurative images of the incorporeal intelligible beings and other supernal substances. (p 59-60 D) For Alfarabi, the active intellect emanates from the First Cause. 

    For Avicenna, memory provides a gateway to understanding the nature of the active intellect. Sense perceptible contents can be stored at least partly in the body. But intelligible contents, which are concepts, are indivisible and therefore cannot be stored in the body. He says that the active intellect emanates such concepts down into the soul, where the soul can remember their thought content.  

    About Avicenna, Rudolf Steiner makes the following points: 

"Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above...In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.

"Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way — the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it." (GA 204) 

    But now the situation is totally different, and can be transformed more and more deeply, the more we individually develop self-consciousness, love of inner freedom, and our sense of an I AM who is independent.  Now we are capable of awakening to the individually thinking I, the human active intellect, in a way that brings it not only into the head, but into the heart, and connects earth with heaven in a Michaelic way. Although still feeling our connection to the whole world of nature and spirit, we grow beyond our old pantheism. The individual spirit is raised to full self-consciousness through the intuitive experience of the I AM, grasped through pure thinking as an inner perception. This happens in the moment of instant understanding of the contents of a thought that you created AND which is perceived as existing before the body, outside the body. There is a GIANT difference between representative image thinking, taking place within the skull, and intuitive self-conscious, spiritualized thinking that is observed at the same moment as my I AM, before the concept of inner and outer is formed. In addition, now the spiritual relationships between individual humans arise in fuller consciousness. Individual human spirits can now unite with each other in a free community, but indeed given their inspiration and power of freedom through the activity of the universal I AM of Christ - He who belongs to all nations.