Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon - Chapter 7

Chapter 7 – Christ’s Appearance Between ‘I’ and Thou 

We need a radically new social life. The abyss created by the fact that I forget the Spirit in every moment of daily consciousness, means that there is also a huge chasm between every two humans.  I turn the other into my own projection. Before the Michael Age can really flourish, we must consciously experience these social reversals and transform them. This is the reason that the Independent School of Spiritual Science founded by Dr. Ben-Aharon is based on a new ‘social yoga.’ The tragedies of the 20th century (including the social failures of the Anthroposophical Society) have created an imaginative ‘dark sunspot’ in the heart and lung zone of the Earthly-human Sun. “The etheric crucifixion, resurrection, teaching and initiatory acts of the etheric Christ are nowhere more readily perceived – and, because of that, also ignored – than here [in the social encounter]...The more we turn away from its cruel...reality...we can acquire no conscious Imagination...in order to make the new Earthly-human Sun a truly productive and life-giving cosmic being.” (p 125)  Meeting the other person can now happen at a deeper level than ever before. I can and must become conscious that every person in front of me is “my initiator, bearing and suffering my cross, awakening me from my death of soul, profoundly teaching me my mysteries of evil, and gracefully blessing me with the mutual penetration and creative reversal of karmic responsibility.” (p 126) 

The other is my higher self. Rudolf Steiner’s work on the social question after World War I reveals how in each encounter with another person there is a rhythmic pulse of lightning fast sleeping and waking, conquering and releasing, attacking and defending, become sympathetic and antipathetic. There is an unbalanced pulse of too deep incarnation and too high excarnation in each moment of the meeting. Ben-Aharons describes it like this: “We actually strive to achieve unlimited space-infilling omnipotence by extending our physical soul might in order to conquer, by spiritually-spatially densifying ourselves, the body of another, sending him to sleep – and vice versa. In the one case, sleeping, we become too social; we efface our presence altogether...In the other case, we become fearfully awakened and antisocial, suppressing the other’s independent self-consciousness.” (pp 126127)  We owe this alternation to the rhythmic activity of the natural sense we possess of the other’s ego, which gains knowledge of the other in a state of sleeping will, and then returns it into the nervous system in wakefulness. The process of sensing the other person therefore contains a strong element of crossing the threshold (unconsciously and in the blink of an eye) in a metamorphosis of the will in sleeping and waking poles. “Imaginatively...a real...life drama reveals itself here...motivating, moulding and destroying our social life. And into this drama the appearance, words, and acts of the Etheric Christ are most intimately woven.” (p 127)  

We forget and deny our brothers and sisters; we forget our common spiritual origin; we deny our past bonds of spiritual loyalty. The necessary creation of our strong egos has left this wreckage in its wake and it continues in each moment of meeting: “When I am strongly impressed...by another person, I am immediately put to sleep. My abyss then surfaces in the twinkling of an eye.  At that very moment, if I am quick enough and can remain conscious in the experience of excarnation...I can see and hear my shadow, or double, articulating itself right behind me.  And out of him emerges a twofold picture. The first one is the physiognomical seed of my true moral form in the cosmos, which always surfaces out of the empty abyss of the Guardian [of the Threshold]’s centre of being.  And within this picture I see, secondly...a future picture of my moral form in relation to the other person, related to this aspect of our shared destiny. This creates a burning desire to know why and how this future is what it is, and this desire pushes me towards the other...In that moment I am shaken out of my sleep. I find myself awakened in the other...and perceive my lower karmic past. It appears as the answer.” (pp 128129)  A moral conscience can then awake, but also the powerful evil temptation to deny my sister in the face of the true future moral debt to her.  The moment of choosing whether or not to be my sister’s keeper and to truly love her arises in the astral world.  The reality of our recent history tragically shows us how we usually act in reality – we deny the other, and this means we deny the Christ at the same time.  He writes, “Christ, who continuously approaches our maladjusted karmic chaos in order to transform and heal our unresolved karmic situations, is not at all recognized, nay, is even feared and pushed away from one’s being, and – this must be simply stated as a fact of our century – is crucified again and again...in man’s totally irresponsible moral excarnation and continuous sleeping far beyond the threshold.” (p 130) This burning riddle of moral responsibility and shocking moral betrayal can paradoxically serve as a wound or fire in our souls which is always lit up. Its ever-present pain can therefore establish a part of the power of spiritual memory. It can be condensed and woven into the etheric body as well and therefore serve to solidify a point of moral steel or a stone on which a future community can be erected. If a group of people wake up to this social-karmic reality, they can learn how to cultivate a totally new social breathing or social yoga. 

 This social dance built through work with the Etheric Christ has three aspects:  1] Imaginative - the first awakening from the death of soul in social forgetfulness (already described), [2] Inspirative - He teaches us to morally create a self-conscious bridge over the karmic transgressions and mutual denial that separate us, and [3] Intuitive - He provides the model to show us how to offer and exchange ourselves in new creative responsibility. This is also described in another way in the chapter of Mutual Essence Exchange from Cognitive Yoga. The Global Event College has spent years working on the beginning of these new exchanges with one another, under the direction of Dr. Ben-Aharon. We all can learn how to form a new common destiny out of our karmic relationships. 

“When another person puts me to sleep, I awake, intuitively, with my will being in his higher being; I see in his Ego, our future. And at the same time, he...awakens imaginatively in my etheric body, seeing our past from my ‘point of view’...Through changing perspective, we gradually acquire the possibility to work consciously on the moral destiny form of our united karma.” (p 132)  Slowly, the whole community can learn how to bear the karma of each one in himself. 

  

A Review of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's 'The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art.'

Glancing at this book, someone might suppose that it offers a survey of new ideas that have arisen in these four broad fields over the course of the last forty years or so. This is true, but only if we look at the text quite superficially. Since Ben-Aharon discusses such a large number of scientists, philosophers, and artists, from Prigogine to Derrida to Andrew Wyeth, some might imagine that this book is only secondary literature, which is either trying to offer interpretations of the content and value of the ideas of the second scientific revolution, deconstruction, and post-modern art work, or trying to adopt or critique their ideas to suit some political, religious, or social aim. Not really. 

The inner core of the book is deeply penetrating, radically insightful, original research by Dr. Ben-Aharon himself. He has actually used the concepts, problems, and paradoxes of modern thought to build something. He has built a living formation in a dimension of real life that can be used to become a new type of human being altogether. He has built a tool, and has showed us how to begin building our own tools. Someone who has read his earlier books, might suspect that he has abandoned his earlier worldview altogether, since he no longer uses anthroposophical terminology. This would also be an error. The book stands in a class by itself, as does the author. He stands and moves and fights in between many different worldviews, many different concepts, and many different forces, without merely taking up with any one of them in a one-sided manner. He has become a singular middle man, who penetrates fully into a tremendous variety of ideas, but does not take them personally. He has tried to build an open living concept that is clearly able to be cognized in everyday consciousness, an organ that is no longer merely personal or egoistic, that has the capacity to be open to the new and real Event of our times – an un-thought Event that makes everything new. 

What is this book? This book is a call to the reader to act! But this action is a new science, the ability to create your own concepts in full consciousness, so that these real ideas can become a body without organs in which to become a new kind of human: a person that is not a subjective personality, nor some grandiose imaginary demi-god or revolutionary that wants to conquer or “save” the whole world with one simple idea. The concepts in this book should be worked on in meetings with real other people, our neighbors and colleagues – since one of its primary purposes is to show that the time of the hermetically sealed personality is done for. This book shows how the new scientific concepts themselves are overturning older simplistic views about nature, genetics, and matter – but this book is not Idealism. Ben-Aharon critiques both Communism and Capitalism as being reversals of their true, unrecognized source, never itself visible in history. 

He shows that our modern world is built on the very fact that we personalize, condense, and turn reality on its head in order to live our ‘life’ as free individuals. He then shows us how to de-personalize, expand, and propel our thinking to a middle spot that is able to watch this ever present cognitive process of destruction. A process of free becoming, encountering the real shock of the Other, allows ‘us’ to create anew out of this destruction. This book concentrates on drawing the reader’s attention to the reality of the field of life, sensations, meanings and concepts in themselves, but it is not phenomenology or mysticism. Furthermore, Ben-Aharon follows Deleuze in the creating of a virtual science, but in contrast to the French post-structuralists insists that the human can meet and create a real, consistent, self. Yet, this self cannot be captured by any of our mental pictures. The whole course of the book functions as an education and an impetus to develop free new concepts of the world and ourselves that can be used as gear to transform our consciousness in totally healthy ways.  


This is, hands down, the most important book to be written in the 21st century. Why? Because Ben-Aharon understands exactly where we are at this moment, and just what needs to be accomplished by human consciousness in order to take full advantage of the new possibilities of human culture which are just emerging now. The centerpiece of this text is a demonstration of how we can extract a virtual and living essence out of events in our biographies, artistic experience, and thinking, and develop creative concepts as real seeds for the development of humanity. We can then use these seeds to truly meet other people in a new community, through which we can work with a new impetus of real creativity.