WRITINGS

Books:

- (2018) The Resurrection of Thinking: Steiner's Anthroposophy & the Postmodernism of Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida & Levinas

- (2019) Earthly, Transcendental, & Spiritual Logic: From Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy 

- (2005) The Shattering Light of Stars - A novel 

I am an anthroposophical researcher from Pennsylvania and a faculty member of the Global Event College, directed by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon.

Current Research:

Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling; Spiritualizing the contents of Aristotle's philosophy in an anthroposophical sense; The history of the Concept of Intellectual Intuition (Anschauung). 

Youtube Video Demo

My Youtube Channel

Spiritualizing the Concept of Currency through Husserlian Phenomenology and Spiritual Science

 This is an extract from chapter 9 of my book "Earthly, Transcendental, and Spiritual Logic: from Husserl's Phenomenology to Steiner's Anthroposophy." (Amazon.com) It is slightly revised, since I am updating some elements as I translate the book into German. 

Husserl did not recognize the deeper reality of the cosmic organology of logic. But we can look at precisely what he did accomplish. For him, the transition from logical thinking to phenomenological insight takes place when the meaning elements come to awareness in a fully saturated intuition or viewing of the sense of concepts in the thinking-terrain. However, this particulate substance on which the mental images and logical eidetic structures are projected seems to extend to infinity if it is not bypassed through moral development and heart thinking. When it is bypassed through the power of love dissolving its frozen power, we enter into another world, as our soul expands. In this moment we look back to find that the etheric grid is located fairly close to the physical body (in a spatial sense). In this moment we also recognize that every thought picture is a projection onto the dying light grid around the physical body, but that truly soul experiences and spiritual Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition take place beyond this fabric of receptivity of light-forms used in personal thinking. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has carefully taken this insight into deeper territory in his books, such as volume 2 of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming, but showing how one can enter directly into this dead etheric skeleton, and through the new etheric Christ forces, resurrect its very substance into new life. In this way, we do not fly away from the body and the earth in a luciferic manner. 

It is important to also note that for Husserl part of the powers of human judgment concern the capacity to repeat the viewing of the identical essential concept or judgment again and again. For logical truth to consist, it is necessary for Husserl that the essential elements remain identical. But this quest for secure identity is problematic as has been shown by Derrida and Deleuze, among others. Can logic function, if the content of P is different every time I think it, even in a single syllogism? Is my father the same, every time I think of him? Is what was true of my sister yesterday, still true of her? 

       Let us look at an example. I am wondering whether I will receive a significant return on my investment on a particular stock on the stock market.  First, in analyzing this question, what is the value of the phenomenological turn?  What is the value of intuiting the meaning of the concepts with a direct and full saturation in the Husserlian sense?  First, it is important to distinguish between pure perception and thinking. I learn nothing from the white papers of businesses from merely staring at the computer screen and seeing black lines on white paper. I can only synthesize the various lines into something meaningful in the first place through thinking. Seeing random faces of the ‘development team’ means nothing until thinking combines the ideas of their accomplishments together into the concept of a company or a business, and their successful cooperation.  A green piece of paper means nothing if I do not consciously understand the meaning of the concept of currency. As Heraclitus rightly pointed out, a donkey will choose hay over gold. The donkey obviously perceives the gold, but does not think the significance of the value of gold in the economic processes of humans. 

       Now, if I analyze and dive into the meaning structures and experiences themselves inside the phenomenological reduction, if I look into the direct evidence of flowing in the experience of thinking the concept of currency, stocks, and profit, this is different from making a decision about the value of a particular investment. The externally perceptible elements are gone, and in the Husserlian sense, I can intuit the concept of currency, profit and loss. When I look into the noematic appearance of the concept of currency, I find that if I can set aside the specific memory images or received ideas about currency, I can find an element that is activated in pure thinking. I can note that there is a meaning-material and a quality associated with the viewing or intentional analysis of the concept of currency. In the thinking act, I can differentiate the meaning of currency as a medium or a representation of value that can be exchanged in a local economy from the concept of a nut, for example. I find that there is a noetic act or a thinking act which can move from observing the concept of a nut as the intended reality or intentional ‘matter’ or content and can go back to the meaning-limits of a currency.  The will is working as I focus my intuitional gaze on the meaning structures of one content vs. another. I want to keep the two circles of the Venn diagram from overlapping, but I am a witness to the causal meaning scope of each concept in full saturation. For example, I can trace and locate the precise boundary in the viewing of concepts between green paper and real US dollars. We might be fooled by a counterfeit dollar in our perception, but we can always differentiate between the concept of a real dollar and the concept of a counterfeit dollar. There is a meaning-boundary between the two.  What power in me is able to think the difference between the two?  How do I return to or, in Husserlian terminology, ‘intend’ [toward] the same concept?  Who thinks and how does the thinker weave through time and memories while retaining an identity? These are Husserlian questions.  

       Steiner would go further and suggest that when the thinker or the I AM wakes up and observes the very activity of creating, combining, differentiating, and linking up concepts in the non-imagistic, non-subjective thinking sphere, another realm opens up that is beyond the physical (and the dying etheric grid of representations) altogether. This can happen if we are able to both hold the two currents in the head apart, and also activate the middle zone with devotion, morality, spiritual scientific fundamental exercises, and self-knowledge. We can experience the spiritual I or thinker outside the body, thinking in the midst of a world of flowing concepts, moods, and Imaginative folds and world-large Imaginative pictures that are supersensible. The whole ‘body’ is involved in this process, not just the head. Thinking is then recognized as an activity that precedes all experience of concepts, and creates concepts by which it orders reality in terms of inner, outer, space, time, quantity, body, etc. The observation of self-thinking activity surfs on top of the observation of the concepts created through thinking, and the emotion and will clouds. We can also become aware of the warm, will-walker, and the spirit-heart gestures, which constitute the soul and spiritual logical actor. The complete logic farmer is present, able to morally walk and plant in his fields, with the sun shining down, supersensibly. And at the far end of this activity, I can give my own personal thinking to be carried by the essential loving cosmic thinking of the angelic hierachies. I am thought as a human persona inside the concept of living cosmic currency. 

       But the investor might argue that neither the Husserlian nor the further Anthroposophical dimension improve her capacity to make a winning trade.  She might look on the phenomenological move as perhaps opening up a new realm of experience but as a useless addition which adds nothing to her clarity of judgment, like someone who creates a glass dishwasher that is visible on all sides to watch the moment by moment workings of the spraying water, dispensing of soap and rotating arms. Does this really help the dishes get any cleaner? A person thinking in the same vein would argue that I can drive a car without knowing how internal combustion works or how rubber is made. Phenomenological viewing and the further spiritualization of thinking do not provide any ‘real world’ advantage, they might say.  One type of investor might go so far as to suggest that if you really believed in spirits, you should command them to show you the future prices of the cryptocurrency or stock markets. 

       On the other side, the visionary would try to tell the investor that the amazing landscapes and the blissful feelings that one experiences as you learn to see intense and vast images in the mind’s eye are far more valuable than making money in the external world.  Once a person has seen the incredible architecture and the impossibly beautiful lands that are within our inward vision, they can never turn back to the ‘dark and dirty earth, with its greedy people.’ This might lead to a new age conversion, where one could become a dharma bum. Husserl does not go this far, but his phenomenology could be distorted into connections with the mystic visionary.  Steiner goes in an entirely different direction, but his ideas can also be distorted into a support for personal, subjective soul development. 

       But if we can truly penetrate into the middle zone between these two extremes, we can find that the spiritualized thinking, which experiences the freedom of the I who thinks both inside the body and outside the body without leaving the earth behind, can experience the most valuable element in the truly moral dimension. Through the spiritualization of thinking, which passes beyond the eidos in Husserl’s works, we come to see out the back of the flexible and open concepts of currency. We find an element in the concept of currency that we never noted before, because we never recognized how our own subjective greed, love of personal comfort, and our hatred of other people were wrapped in the experience of investment in the first place. We can now look back at our whole constitution of soul, feelings, desires, and body as a stranger and can see how that aspect of inwardness distorted all of the meanings of all of the concepts.  The reversal was inside every meaning, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century.

     Now the spiritual event of the I waking up and being woken up inside the spiritual world of thinking as living beings co-working, wrestling, and producing world consecration, is recognized for the first time. We note that currency is primarily a spiritual living idea of humans giving and taking in a community of soul and spiritual exchange. I become something else by receiving your karmic treasure. The will acts that undergird the economic processes are always already spiritual processes, woven with the whole cosmos. It is not true that I meditate and then bring back subjective inspirations that I then apply to a pre-existing physical world, to transform it economically. Rather, every economic transaction is already woven into all spiritual beings. Only when I begin to perceive this with pure intuitive thinking or with Imagination, can I carry out a free moral technique in the real sense. Thinking with mere representations has also limited anthroposphical endeavors toward threefolding in just this way. 

This free intuition of the meaning content and spiritual inspiration behind money, of course, is a different idea than accumulating material wealth or buying material objects to support my ego being. But this doesn’t mean we have to suddenly give away all of our money or possessions. All the potential of trying to pass on spiritual treasure and the most intimate gift to one another rises across the threshold. We hold a gift in our spirit-self which allows the other to find his or her way into a higher grasp of his own self.  The spiritual currency is the exchange of transformed consciousness arising through meeting the other.  I may even take on the debt of the other as we enter into a spiritual community in spiritual and soul wakefulness. This insight into the spiritual concept of money can then totally change our relationship to investment and the notion of earthly money.  Can I invest my own spiritual quest in your spiritual awakening and growth? How can our spiritual wills truly work karmically together, which must transform our whole world? 

None of these moral elements are really recognized by Husserl.  Yes, he is not concerned with getting rich, but on the other hand, he does not recognize the cosmic supersensible and moral struggle through which Michael and his co-workers are trying to lift up and transform the merely earthly picture-reasoning through memory images inside and around a body into something else:  a co-working with the true spirit of humanity and the angelic hierarchies, to transform the evil in ourselves and the world. We need to get real with one another. The deeper meanings and a truer insight into the whole of life is only found through spiritual scientific consciousness. This has nothing to do with following a particular guru or losing my own independence. The spiritual scientist can understand and utilize the ideas of the earthly investor or mechanic as well as the phenomenological researcher, but not vice versa. Multiple new currencies can arise, with the highest beauty of art and utility. I give part of myself to the other, when I give her supersensible ‘currency,’ and she gives part of herself to me. We need the gift of the Other to find the deepest answer to ‘making a living.’ 

Link to the book on Amazon

Etherization of Thinking - The Complete Stages from Ben-Aharon's Modern Christ Experience Vol. 2

 

Etherization of Thinking – the complete stages from Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's 'The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming', Volume 2, summarized by Scott Elliot Hicks 

1. Start from absolutely clear and awake, logical and rational modern scientific thinking. 

2. Perceive and understand through objective self-knowledge that this normal everyday thinking is constructed out of the forces of death; our normal thoughts are never living, no matter what the content of our ideas are, whether materalistic, mathematical, mystic, or anthroposophical. The form of these thoughts must die in our heads to become conscious in our modern age. This suppression and paralysis and freezing of the real streams of supersensible life in our normal consciousness produces a split between self and world. This was necessary for modern freedom and individuality to arise. Now we must look at the process clearly in order to self-consciously transform it.

3. Our job is to find a hole out of these dead forces, and then to use the new Christ forces that are pouring into the etheric world, to transform the dead form of the content of our mental images, memories, and representations into a wide awake pure thinking, or clairvoyant thinking. The concepts themselves change into Imaginations. But first we must taste the painful and bitter reality that all of our inner experience of being a personality, all of our inner personal thoughts, all of the content of our consciousness and ideas, no matter how spiritual or mystical or materialistic or anthroposophical are only dead, small mirror images. They are nothing. We must cross the abyss through Michael and Christ’s real forces, seeing and knowing the real threshold between sense-experience and true spiritual clairvoyant thinking (Imagination) that is carried across the abyss. 

4. We must not run away from the painful self-knowledge that sees that every single thought we have ever had has been made by killing the spiritual world, but we must look, know, penetrate, and courageously dive into the forces of death themselves. Christ’s key of death is just the magical power of using his resurrection forces to transform the condensing, freezing, paralyzing inward flow of destroying life in our heads through ahriman’s power, INTO new spiritual thinking that lies outside and beyond the head (and beyond representations of inside and outside). Through this Hegelian tarrying with death and dismemberment, we can convert it spiritually into being.

5. Etherized or spiritualized perception (see Chapter 3 in Volume 2 and Cognitive Yoga) can be consciously brought in and merged with this dead thinking to help to resurrect it. This is the Michaelic and Goethean way of resurrecting and spiritualizing thinking. In other words, some of the riddles of spiritualizing thinking can be essentially helped through the other pole: spiritualizing the sense perceptions. 

6. Find the point and time where thinking dies in the point above and behind the eyes. Feel the burning anguish and suffocation when you watch the spiritual streams coming into this point, to become little mirror images that then are grasped inwardly by our devouring intellectual being in the head. This riddle must become a drama of life and death in your feeling and will; no further addition of the content of ideas can help with seeing and stopping this stream.

7. We perceive the dead part of the etheric body (the dead etheric thought skeleton paralleled to a certain extent visibly in the nervous system) that supports our everyday consciousness. This will eventually be recognized as woven together with the dead part of the etheric body of Christ, through which we will begin to clairvoyantly think and imagine first (with the colorless head clairvoyance or modern Imagination). He appears through the dead part of His etheric body first, where He (or more precisely the angel in which he appears in the etheric world) is cast out of the etheric world and killed in our ahrimanic thinking. Out of this gloomy abyss, He will first appear.

8. “The true Michaelic spirit rejoices in a pure thinking, which is born in death and owes death its light-filled precision. But also, by overcoming death, such pure thinking can become the new crystal clear eye of the spirit. Therefore, without entering with our whole soul force into this abyss, and feeling it personally as our own absolute crisis of knowledge, the age of Michael cannot be actualized…” p. 57 volume 2 

9. Split your consciousness into two parts, one creating the spiritual source of thinking in your archimedean point (the true source of free thinking active before and outside concepts of space and time), and the other part watching the living thinking as it dies into the subjective experiences of the head. Because I can now watch how the living spirit dies in the third eye point and behind it in the head, we can also consciously learn how to: both form this dead thinking, but also how to resurrect it. This forms a stable and firm foundational process, immensely helped and created from The Philosophy of Freedom. I can now watch how I create the etheric dead skeleton of inner personal modern thought. I see how I am the annihilator of life to become a modern thinker. But this is the way to go toward and through Christly resurrection. I must follow the way of Christ’s cross. Here also the spiritualized perceptions through Chapter 3 of volume 2 of The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming and Cognitive Yoga work can help the process. They bring invigorated and freed etheric forces to the moment. 

10. We must clearly see the dead corpse of thinking dwelling in the center of our heads. We don’t run away from it, but since it secures our modern consciousness, this dead pile, this tomb, this thorn bush, this infernal factory, this machine must be the very thing we enliven through Christ’s new forces. We can combine the perception of the spiritual source of thinking, arising from my own I activity with this dead pile, this corpse in our heads. This combination and resurrection overcomes ahriman in the head.

11. We resolutely stand over the abyss, and then plunge with all our feeling and will into the momentary living source of free pure thinking beyond the supports of our brain, the past, and our personal self built out of thoughts. We dive into the self-creative free thinking in the archimedean that happens not outside, not inside our heads and bodies, but in a spiritual activity that can be perceived through and through – a living concept that acts before these representations take over.

This stage may often be accompanied by pain, bitterness, nausea, anxiety, the taste of ashes in the mouth, as it is described in The Cucumber Law lecture from Spiritual Science in the 21st Century (chapter 7). 

12. Stop the unconscious freezing and hardening of the inner mental skeleton and corpse. “Those parts of the nerve-sense system, and the higher functions of the brain that serve this killing process, are the first in which the undermining of the mental grounds takes place; and in this grave of thinking, the first germination of the supersensible cognition appears.” p. 62. This is also outlined quite clearly in Cognitive Yoga pp. 30-37. We begin with a clear mental image based on an external perception, of a leaf, an animal, a red patch, and then we suppress the image, holding the two parts of its composition apart: keeping its perceptible qualities flowing in, and the connection with the concept or idea of what the thing is, at bay. We don’t let the memory picture, representation, inner mental picture (Vorstellung) to be formed out of the combination of these two parts; instead, in the grave, we hold the two hands apart and wait patiently for what arises in the middle.

Scott’s addition – Push the incoming thinking stream back out through the third eye, out into the etheric world; this reverses the streams or deactualizes them.  

13. There is the temptation at this stage to return to old forms of pure Being and Truth, but let us hold fast to the free modern self-conscious I power, formed through working on finding the creator of all pure thinking in The Philosophy of Freedom (the best way to work through this careful liberating process is to study the text slowly in a group). This is expressed in Cognitive Yoga chapter 4 as not throwing out the pearl of great price, our free modern sense of I am. This idea is also expressed in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art as virtual actualization (chapter 3). We search to find how the true spiritual power of thought is awakened through the Imaginative Christ impulse, and how this new power of thought is ‘resurrected in Christ’s stream of living time.’ (Rudolf Steiner, quote in Volume 2, p. 67) 

14. Uncover, perceive clearly and think through how ordinary consciousness of I perceive and I think (the dead inward personal head thinking) arises out of the living supersensible consciousness in the etheric brain. See the two archimedian points that are now constructed: the dead grave inside the head, and the new mirror formed in the etheric brain that reflects what is happening as pure thinking is created in the present, beyond the head.

A. “In each moment and place in which the etheric brain penetrates the physical brain, an act of freezing and killing of living time takes the place of living time.”

B. “The killed piece of time is preserved in the dead part of the etheric brain, as an en-gravement of memory.” 

C. “It preserves the difference of time that has elapsed from when the etheric penetrated the physical brain, between the pre-conscious spiritual act of thinking AND perceiving its coming to conscious reflection in ordinary consciousness.”

This is a “temporal immortalization of the killed time.” p. 69 volume 2. See also The Three Meetings, Chapter 5. 

15. Throughout this process, we always ennoble and grow in our moral development, our devotion, and our love of goodness. We must learn how to die into the life of Christ. We must also “strengthen and consolidate our ability to stand consciously poised in between birth and death, day and night, conscious and unconscious life, in the living middle of the divided halves of our life, in the presently burning fiery core of life’s annihilation and resurrection.” p. 75, volume 2. This power of life and death is found to be directed all throughout our life by our higher self. At this center point, we are building a bridge from one side to the other. “Here we begin to practice and experience our own, always present, event of etheric crucifixion, death and resurrection as the mystery drama of modern cognition.” p. 76 volume 2. This begins in the two petalled lotus flower with its two arms. Then eventually this center of the drama and consciousness descends to the larynx, heart, and then deeper into the body.

16. Here we must recognize that we have taken in death to become annihilators of spiritual life. We befriend death, in order to enter into it and let it be resurrected through Christ’s resurrection forces. The forces of death itself are transformed into life, my self-conscious spiritual activity. This is the first realization that comes in the first meeting with the etheric Christ, and is the first stage in the self-conscious recreation of the meeting.

________________________

Toward the Second Stage – the Will 

1. “Between the thinking and the will power that creates and directs it, are found the etheric life forces. Therefore, before we can grasp the will for itself, as a purely spiritual being, we must first grasp the forces of life as they die and arise anew through thinking.” p. 79 volume 2