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.
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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
