Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Ben-Aharon, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 – The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (A deep anthroposophical study of the transformation of thinking, sense-perception, and building the bridge of spirit-remembrance through the Moral-Cognitive Aspects of the work with the Etheric Christ)

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. Once again, Dr. Ben-Aharon has carefully consulted and re-experienced what Rudolf Steiner had to say about the main issues in hundreds of texts. One can follow this trail in the robust end notes. The basic process that happens when a human being sees and thinks about objects in the world has been one of the main concerns in Ben-Aharon’s books, such as the lectures in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century, Cognitive Yoga, the Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and to a certain extent, Jerusalem. 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. (pp 65-69)  This is what Ben-Aharon calls the Event of Thinking in other books such as The Colmar Lecture in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century. 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 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.” (p 70).  The potential self coming to us from the future that we always forget (in the act of remembering!), is like a dark brother that is discovered in the pure will that creates thinking’s elements. We therefore have to build a solid ‘stone’ of conscious awareness in this precise area in the act of knowledge, experiencing our modern death, crucifixion, and resurrection in each moment of conscious thinking. We then can make the veil of death in our conscious thinking transparent once again, by pouring our life back into it. “We begin to transform the being of Death into our cross of supersensible perception, which is the gate of vision that thinking has opened with our soul...We see ourselves hovering over the abyss that opens under our mind’s feet in-between the dark and sinking, life-carrying will seed and the birth of the abstract, clear daylight of thinking...dividing ourselves consciously into two selves, viewing both from the two directions.” (pp 71-72)  

We can recognize how the World Self puts its seal on the creative life of the Logos, dismembering but preserving its offspring in the destructive flow of time. The place and time where thinking dies is described by Steiner in the essential passage from Occult Physiology, where he describes how the two etheric streams come together inside the head (one from above and one from below), near the pineal and pituitary glands. The union of the two streams in between these poles can be canceled, and when the two streams are consciously held apart, a new flow of empty time or pure duration arises. This can allow the astral body to free itself from the dying-engraving process of memory-formation. We can then perceive the Christ-consciousness arising from the empty tomb of the head, looking from outside. “In...daily consciousness, we have thinking always ‘in front’ of our eyes, guided by the unseen will at our back. This thinking leads us outward into the external world. But now we have turned around at life’s threshold; we look inward into the dark of spirit night, as we formerly looked out into the external light of day. At noon time, we had thinking’s impetus, the will, behind us: now we have thinking’s memory behind us, guiding us, as Ariadne’s thread, into the inner labyrinth of living will.” (p 77)  

We learn how to cross pure thinking and the will to awaken the new supersensible vision of the invisible life that surrounds us. The Imagination of the reversed thinking awakens as a triumphant being, like Michael holding his conscious-sword. But a deeper and gradual soul and moral transformation must also develop. To practice this, one must focus the will on a single concept, while setting aside the pictorial elements and dynamic elements of thinking and willing in the head. With intense awareness, we let the concept disappear and a negative thought space opens. A sucking vacuum of empty space turns us inside out. The universal wills in us. The infinite circumference and periphery takes me over as I surrender to its openness. Through this experience of the externalized WILL, we begin to feel an invitation to return to our center. An invisible spirit hand leads us to look into the source of our everyday and also Imaginative thinking. We see and dance in the radiant light and pools of ethereal beings of thought. We know that we are now living in the prenatal life of our thought. We find ourselves surrounded by thought-like babies (some loving, some treacherous) who ask us to conceive them in thought. A mocking and warning thought element can arise here, which shocks us back toward our earthly consciousness, and we now follow it back recognizing on the way how thinking sacrifices itself in dying down into the senses. As we approach the solid elements of etheric-physical remembrance that we have consciously built, our soul is completely broken apart. But the conscious anchor we have built between normal consciousness and spiritual Imagination helps to keep our wholeness from disappearing altogether. In this breaking apart of the soul, our thinking and our willing fly away into different dimensions. Our center is lost. I become the human-world abyss. I cannot find my I, until a third being arises in between thinking and willing. Thinking and willing must learn to create a new astral feeling nature out of the abyss.  “It is this recognition of the mysterious nature of ‘feeling’ that now becomes the most unstable and vulnerable, but the only uniting sense of coherent identity… I only exist as an I when my two divided poles recognize in the third my surfacing abyss. I am only when I consciously feel the division in my broken soul centre; when I am not, I am. In constant decay, I am whole...Man hears the inner soul aspect of his participation in the etheric Mystery of Golgotha.” (p 82)  The Christ articulates it as “Out of the opening abyss of your thinking’s grave I arise. I was crucified in your thoughts; now I am resurrected in your self-consciously incurred soul death and dissolution. You are dismembered out of Me; it is your future task to re-member yourself – by means of your own forces – into Me again. Otherwise you would lose your human form entirely, and slide increasingly into the world-abyss of your soul.” (p 82). 

5.B – Opening the Gate of Sense-Perception 

The elements of this section of the chapter are expanded upon in the whole of Ben-Aharon’s book, Cognitive Yoga, which concentrates most of its work on demonstrating how to spiritualize, virtualize, or etherize the elements of sense-perception. Nevertheless, every sentence in The New Experience of the Supersensible, including this section, is absolutely precise, alive, and derived from experience rather than hypothesis. Therefore, 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.” (p. 83)  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, and 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 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.” (p 85) 

 “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.” (p 84)  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. A weakly perceived sense of spiritual equilibrium joined with a strongly perceived color produces the idea of material existence. We need to dive into the region of opaqueness between our inner senses and our outer senses and become conscious of how the sense of sight and hearing are sucked too deeply into the body, while the sense of balance and movement are projected too far outside. These over-extensions block the spiritual perception, so we have to re-balance them. When we gently become aware of the sense of the inner movement of the body and the sense of the outer sounds, and then separate their streams, we can become aware of the whole web of WILL that flows inside and outside through the whole world. We see the outer etheric world and the inner spiritual nature of the body by doing this. (For more on this technique, see Cognitive Yoga). The complete nature of the process of strengthening our lives, souls, and spirits in order to completely open the gates of spiritualized sense-perception is then elaborated. The guiding thread is that we can learn how to consciously bring the autumn processes into the spring processes. [1] By practicing the plant exercises in Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of Higher Worlds (especially the seed and the mature plant elements), we awaken to the pulsing rivers and cliffs of time flowing through the etheric body. We find the “eternal fountains of life within the Christ-permeated part of man’s etheric body.” (p 87)  [2] The dying and blossoming elements of life and time are then moved in and out of each other; the future and past cliffs of time move in and out of each other. “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.” (p 87) 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.  [3]  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. [4] 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.” (p 88)  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. We start with a seed, for example. We note all of its sense perceptual elements, like color and hardness. We then actively think through all of the ideas connected with it. Our goal is to strengthen the elements of normal thinking and perception and then SEPARATE them. 

We have to learn to only think when we are intuiting ideas. We must learn only to perceive when we are sensing sounds and textures. Each must be brought into its own dimension. No overlapping. The gap must be then widened between them. Pure time must flow. One now stops the forming of mental images and memory. I merely perceive the pure flow of color.  When we cancel reflection, as our eyes and senses swim in the light surrounding every ‘object’, eventually we can flow into the World-Imaginations which always surround us and there perceive the Etheric Christ.  In the colored streams of life, we also find that the true Spiritual I is also able to swim there, outside of all concepts and bodies. We can then be taught how to create new life in this living life stream. The world creates a new human as well. When we learn how to consciously control the vitalizaton and devitalization, by repeatedly practicing these transformation of sense-perception and thinking, we can then consciously build the faculty of spiritual remembrance.  This means to control the living sources of space and time, and to perceive how we are woven together in the World Imaginations of our Angel and the Christ. 

5C – The Construction of the Bridge to Remember what Happens and what always Exists in my Spiritual Being and in the Spiritual World – the Development of Continuity of Consciousness 

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. First, Ben-Aharon describes how an echo of the physical sense of a centered ego and the memory of self has to be carried into the supersensible experience. The spiritual researcher must remember who he was on the earth and then also consciously write an extract of the current soul and spiritual experience onto the physical-etheric mirror that exists on the earth, while he or she is still on the other side. I must consciously dim down, devitalize, and condense my etheric, soul, and spiritual experiences and push them back across the gap of forgetfulness. 

First, the pure will force of thinking and meaning as well as the cloud formations of cosmic time must be woven into a single rhythmic force. This is at the heart of the ‘new yoga will’ or Michaelic Yoga that Steiner described and which Ben-Aharon developed in Cognitive Yoga. This centralizing pulse or tool is another stone or cross or zone of remaining awake that can contribute the first step of this process of continuity of memory.  Spiritualizing thinking, although still very difficult, is the easier pole for modern human beings (it is like redeeming the first thief crucified with Christ). To transform sense perception into etheric perception of the cosmic development of meaningful timestreams lies at a higher degree of difficulty.  What are these forces and where is the zone in which we unite them?  One must remain awake at the moment where subjective thinking ends and one is turned inside out and the pure will thinks me (but now I AM also at the source of this will). This is the zone of the first Umstülpung or reversal in thinking. The second zone is brought into clear consciousness at the place where our normal perception of the colors, sounds, smells, and sensations of an ‘object’ meet the “world’s living, streaming time-pictures” (p 96) flowing into the etheric eye-stream. Before these two streams completely merge, we hold on to the zone of their difference. Then we begin to pull in the pure etheric streams of sensation rivers and push out the will-thinking activity.  Living-dying thinking and dying-living perception are then woven together or crossed into a new zone of consciousness with a self-aware I AM. “It is the eternal...soul breathing and spirit pulsating of the ‘I’ at, over and in the mystery of world-man bridge creation – phoenix-like ever vitalizing, devitalizing and revitalizing itself in order to awaken, create and increase cosmic self-consciousness.” (p 97)  This is the cognitive part of the bridge, “standing still at the point of man’s singularity, founding self-consciousness in the zero point of space and the breaking through of living, cyclically self-annihilating and self-resurrecting time.” (p 98)  

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. “The great classical materialists of the 19th century are the best” (p 99), people such as Ludwig Buechner, Jacob Moleschott, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Auguste Comte. Kant is also useful and one can use Hegel for practice, but the Hegelian dialectic is already half alive, so each person doing the practice must choose his or her own materialist ‘enemy’ to struggle with and transform. Indeed, after one becomes proficient, any line of thought and concept can be spiritualized, from any era. What do we do? Study it, and think it through very carefully and thoroughly with ordinary and absolutely clear consciousness. (For example, from Darwin - “Even without any change in the proportional numbers of the animals on which our [swiftest and slimmest] wolf preyed, a cub might be born with an innate tendency to pursue certain kinds of prey. Nor can this be thought very improbable; for we often observe great differences

in the natural tendencies of our domestic animals; one cat, for instance, taking to catch rats, another mice; one cat...bringing home winged game, another...rabbits, and another hunting on marshy ground and almost nightly catching woodcocks or snipes. The tendency to catch rats rather than mice is known to be inherited. Now, if any slight innate change of habit or of structure benefited an individual wolf, it would have the best chance of surviving and of leaving offspring.” - The Origin of Species). 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.  Let us imagine that the line of thought or the content of the materialistic argument from Marx is linked together like movie pictures projected from a boat onto a series of icebergs as ‘screens.’ These different size icebergs and their order on the water are the pure forms. When you stop projecting the movie onto the icebergs, only the crystalline shapes of the iceberg remains, along with their sizes and the particular way that the different icebergs are linked up to one another. Only the inner feeling of having this particular linkage of icebergs in your head remains. The residue from the argument resonates with its own energy, like electrical currents, even though you have forgotten or wiped away the ideas themselves. Focus on just the forces (of course, to be consistent we would have to imagine that in our analogy the icebergs were formed along with the projection of the movie – the meaning of the movie in a sense formed its own screen). 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. 

Ben-Aharon writes: 

“We 1) begin to experience the thought's forms around the larynx region in inner light-shade perception; 2) we begin to feel the thought's warmth and frost formations and emanations as direct inner contact in the heart region; and 3) we can voluntarily enhance this process and condense it to such an extent that, in and through the heart, it radiates its coldness or warmth forces into the whole body, into the hands and then back into the eyes and inner head, until the circle of freed etheric activity, started in the brain, is—through heart and limbs—closed and made thereby etherically, imaginatively visible as a totality. When we are securely grounded in our meditation so far, we can begin the actual 'heart confrontation' with the inner ahrimanic forces dwelling in the force-dynamic of the thought process which we have worked through. This confrontation is brought about through the most intensive condensation of the freezing-cold atmosphere that emanated from the forces released in the meditation described above, extracted from a thoroughly assimilated materialistic thought dynamic. Man gathers and guides all the sub-earthly head forces, which assume in the larynx region a darkening arrow or spear form, and then—being morally and cognitively permeated with the Christ-impulse—condenses its cold spirit like metal further still and thereby also sharpens its cutting astral edge. He thrusts it consciously into his warm, luminous heart centre until it begins to bleed etherically. Imaginatively speaking, the drops of blood freeze in bleeding and are transformed into the shining Quint-Essentia pearls and diamonds on which the bridge is constructed. When this process begins to ray itself in pictures back to the head centre—circulating backwards and upwards in the consciously transformed and thereby closed etheric circuit—it becomes imaginatively visible. 

In the backward radiating inner imaginative pictures we perceive now the etheric bridge of remembrance arched majestically over the abyss of time's annihilation stream, shining with pure spirit light in the ahrimanic night of our age. This imaginative faculty is achieved as the result of the transformation process of the world intelligence that fell into the claws of Ahriman, now returned to its source as fully humanized Michaelic intelligence. This faculty is the Michael sword, and the process described above is the inner work of its conscious spiritual- scientific steeling. As we saw above, its metallic substantiality was won for the Michaelic forces in the inner fight with the materialistic and intellectual ahrimanic forces that control the modern human brain. It was then etherically transfigured and steeled in the fire of the human Christ-permeated heart. This sword is the power that serves both to perceive and to overcome Ahriman's presence in the physical-etheric subterranean world, where he unfolds his mightiest power as the guardian and lord of all elemental intellectuality that is immersed and externalized in objectivity, far from its original source in the macro- cosmic heart centre. 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!’” (pp 99-100) 

Now Ben-Aharon describes the astral or soul side of building the bridge of the continuity of memory, sense of self, and consciousness.  You must return to the complete soul shattering and intense moral pain of self-knowledge standing before the burnt down cross, where Christ is continuously crucified in the etheric world today. You have to begin to consciously control your entire moral breakdown in your heart. You carry a tiny element of the dead forces of the head out into broken soul world. You project a willed aspect of myself over the abyss; but this means you become the void and take in the nothingness. You widen the split in the soul and the world time pictures or living Imaginations are woven into the emptiness of your soul void. Then you see the shocking picture of the lower forces of your soul. You have to slowly and gently learn how to morally move with the soul through astral space. To go backwards in the soul space is “to strive towards the moral soul state that can stand upright under the living-dying, burning-freezing etheric cross; one has an upward, morally self-sustaining force in the soul world only then.” (p 103)  Remember that everything in the astral is the opposite of earthly orientation, shape, and movement.  

You must be able to stand in the face of our moral ugliness without shame, then one can navigate back to the etheric-physical cross to remember what happened in the soul and spirit world.  To move forward in soul space, you must admit that you cannot find the being that can overcome your evil in the astral world. Only weakness and helplessness can paradoxically form the solidity necessary at this stage. One becomes the world-man moral riddle in the helpless abyss, and this is woven into the I feeling. One can only offer one’s wound and pure life question up to the Christ at this moment. “Only when we are grounded in this absolute dualism and fragmentation of our moral being may we be granted the Christ experience at this stage...Then there resounds, as a spoken, cosmically articulated answer, a spirit-filled affirmation from the other, higher spirit side of oneself.” (pp 103-104)  Like Christ lifting Peter above the waters of the ocean, the Higher Self can now unite with the lower self, the memory, and the soul.  It can fill the being of man with its healing creative power. Then the descending and the ascending are woven together. The Christ Spirit gives the power of creation to the earthly human being. A new drama of creativity can begin, filled with new acts, formed out of the first stage of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming.

Summary of 'The New Experience of the Supersensible' by Ben-Aharon, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 – The Creation of the New Earth and Heaven of the Earthly-human Sun (the Human Being learns how to contribute to the creation of a new spiritual world)

The essence of this complex chapter has been expanded upon in Cognitive Yoga, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and also The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.  Ben-Aharon describes how the confluence of 4 different aspects in our time (the Michael age, the end of the KaliYuga, the consciousness-soul epoch, and Christ’s etheric appearance) permit humanity to enter into a creative partnership with the spiritual world for the first time. The potential to weave together the cognitive-scientific and moral-religious elements in a free and self-conscious way has now become available to individual people.  We can help the Gods to create a new Sun-Earth. There are three aspects of this “new earthly-human Sun” (p 107):  [1] Willed-thinking can now become the moral and creative fiery source of a new Earth. Here it merges with Christ’s solar work in the center of the Earth. [2] Perception that has expanded to meet and merge with the formative thoughts of the universe, can now enter the human and stream out again to become a new atmosphere and Heaven. [3] The middle sphere of this new planet is created out of the social spiritual fabric weaving between human beings. The work of humanity can therefore develop a new pulse of communication between heaven and earth. To understand the present stage of solar infancy in the new Earth, we must return to the main Imagination of the Old Sun. If we imagine a sphere, the spirits of Wisdom were offering up their grace that bestows beauty and life from its center, which the Archangels reflected back from the periphery as light. The kernel of this grace and light was concentrated over time in the Christ Spirit who now works from the center of our present Earth, and humans are gathered around Him there. He radiates out “warmth bliss and light beauty...” (p 108) and human beings also reflect this warmth back from the periphery toward Him. This new cooperation between man and Christ contains an aspect of body, soul, and Spirit. “Man stands in regard to the centre (Earth) building process and the periphery (Heaven) building process in the following ways. At the periphery he creates the reflecting etheric-astral atmosphere of Christ’s Holy Spirit of the new Sun, out of his transformed sense perceptions; in the centre he works on the building of Christ’s new planetary bodies with his liberated will-being; and in the middle, man develops his sevenfold microcosmic-macrocosmic soul activity, united with the sevenfold soul nature of the Christ.” (p 109) The small human is woven together with the Cosmic Spirit-Human inside the density, surface, and atmosphere of the whole Earth, which means inside the Christ. 

Will in Thinking and the New Earth 

Ben-Aharon first focuses on the will activity.  When the invisible core of the will that guides thinking becomes visible, it shows itself as a life-giving fountain.  When the human creates the moral bridge across the abyss, the thinking returns as spiritualized love. This living-willed thinking penetrates and merges with the core of every ‘object’ and thus becomes the pulsating center of the real earthly world. When the will of the spiritual-I returns from the edge of cosmic thinking in Spirit with the power of self-conscious living thinking, and joins with the core of the externalized will-substance in the center of every object, these two wills unite. “A new will being is thus created, and this being is the creator of the new Earth. This new will-love-being works cosmically-creatively with the human-cosmic will in the spirit depths of the new Earth.” (p 110) One can follow the progress and elements of this if we return to the pure will meditation outlined in chapter 5. After our concentration merges with the complete void, instead of returning to pre-natal thinking as before, we now penetrate into the depths of pure embryonic warmth. This is the spiritual essence of the will-substance itself. This virgin spark, alive with the future, is not only imagined but can also be acted upon by the spiritualized human being. I can mold the substance of the future earth. We hear it spiritually speaking as an articulated lightning strike, the new Spirit-Word of the pregnant seed of the new Earth. How does this take place? The spiritualized thinking now enters into the darkness of the will like an awakening spark. Cosmic self-consciousness “begins to think inwardly inside this will, and it bores its way into the opaque will-substance of man and Earth in the same way as an electric current moves inside an electric wire.  It feels like being electrified, but now a light shines into the darkness and the head, spinal cord, and limbs become hollow and transparent.” (p 111 - This is described in more detail in Cognitive Yoga). This lightning force of willed thinking merges with certain veins inside the structure of the Earth itself. The soul experiences this as an awakening of the light of consciousness and pure warmth becoming active fire spreading through the whole body. (Note that the whole procedure of this book begins from thinking and descends into heart and body, in a reversed direction from older Yogic, Buddhist, and Taoist practices). 

The interior of the bones become sensitive, perceptive, warm and alive. But the spiritual interior of the bones also means the deep core of planet Earth. The Earth itself, which once appeared to spiritual sight as a human form or a cross, through Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection became a pulsing center of renewed life. This aspect is now intensified through the merging of the spiritualized thinking and will uniting in the cosmic-human heart. “This cosmic speech of the humanized planet Earth shapes a being in the depths: an articulated embryonic will-seed organ of a new world, as an extension of the creative heart of world-man himself.” (p 112)  It is our task as modern and humble humans to become ever more conscious of our capacity to create a new substance, being, and culture out of our Christ permeated sacrificial will. I grow together with my Earthly mother and learn how to create with her.  Through the fact that Christ’s blood flowed down into the Earth from the cross, each human individuality can now become part of the creative love, light and warmth of Christ, shaping the new mysteries of the earth becoming sun. (p 114)  In regard to the spiritual-organic unfolding of human knowledge, we now realize that every intuitive beholding of truth is also a moral unfolding of human creativity which adds to the world whole. Human knowledge adds a living bud to the growth of Truth. Also, every moral deed fertilizes the embryonic seed of the new Earth.  Human knowledge and free action therefore grow the universe. “To experience that every lightening up of pure thought ‘up above’...creates at the same time a fiery, concentrated, Sun-earthly will-seed below, this is the conscious human participation in the creation of the new Earth of the earthly-human Sun – it will form the heart of the Michael-Christ reality of the next century.” (p 116) 

Spiritualized Perception Weaves a New Heaven 

Then Ben-Aharon turns to describing how spiritualized perception contributes to the growth of the heavenly part of the new Sun-earth. As we learn how to extend our consciousness into our etheric bodies, we can preserve and shape the bridge of spiritual memory in time, life and light perception. The new heaven is a global extension of this etheric-sensation organism. As our etheric sight and sensation becomes a living stream and meets and exchanges places with the flowing streams that were once external objects, we learn how to heal the Earth. This process opens up a view into the future, and we can learn how to find and nourish the generation of new mineral, plant, and animal beings there. Through their future kernels, the whole earth is like an embryo becoming a new macrocosm. By holding open the tiny space of time between etheric-astral perception and the registration of events and objects in the brain’s reflection, we can eventually enter into the world where the etheric bodies of the Dead reside. Perception, resurrected by the Christ’s power working especially in the plant world, can now find the etheric planetary ring or humble holy spirit woven by true Christians since the original mystery of Golgotha. This ring of preserved human life-times, created by the higher Hierarchies after their deaths, can now be found and expanded by living incarnated human beings. “It is the Christ force, streaming from the centre of the Earth outwards, raised by man to conscious imaginative sight through the transformation of sense-perception, that lets him work consciously in the building process of the new earth-Sun Heaven, weaving into the etheric ring his own Christ-infilled sense-perceptions and living and sentient world-Imaginations.” (p 118) This means that after the will and thinking are sufficiently transformed, it is then possible for the individual building of the etheric bridge to expand out into the whole edifice of the spiritual earth. Through an impulse given by the work of the Rosicrucians in the past and the ever-active radiation from the preserved etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz, I can now find my way to the etheric body of the earth as a whole. We find the exact place in our time-gap to eventually come to perception of the quintessential and unique spiritual-matter that lies between physical and etheric substance. 

Only a sufficient moral transformation can enable an individual to begin to work with the unique substance from which all other materials and elements are made. We can find this new element in the individual human as well as in the external spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. Thus there are two aspects to this new etheric substance – [1] the etherization of the blood which happens through the transformation of the dead thinking forces in the individual confrontation with the Dragon outlined in chapter 5 (p 99), and [2] now the quintessential element as far as it is enlivened, expanded, and projected into the planetary etheric Heaven through the virtualization of sense perception. [3] The sentient or astral component of this work now arises when we travel through the time-gap and the larger bridge to the place (the zone girding the earth) where the Dead perceive with soul joy how the spiritual parts of their etheric bodies are woven into the Christ-permeated etheric planetary atmosphere (humble holy spirit), while the destructive parts are revealed to the soul with great pain. This happens directly before Kamaloka and the sphere of the moon is fully entered. But now I can experience that the more that I have allowed the spirit of Christ to enter my etheric body the more conscious I will be after death. Furthermore, by entering this soul world while still alive, I now can join the etheric Christ and his angelic and human co-workers in building the Earthly-Human Sun. “Man learns to see and experience the Earth while living, as do those human souls who have already passed through the gates of death and who, from the spiritual world, protect and sustain the mystery of the new Heaven of the earthly-human Sun. He is consciously accepted in their company and takes a self-conscious part in their sacred creative work.” (p 121)  This is connected with beholding the heavenly aspect of Jerusalem in the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth.  Normal humans without special gifts can now, through Christ’s new work  coupled with Anthroposophical self-transformation, begin to weave new garments of light, warmth, and  life into the etheric and astral body of the Earth. “This sphere of the spirit of knowledge and truth, aglow with the human-Christ created flames of spiritualized love in the depths, illuminated outwardly by the astral light pictures of world-thoughts, is opened in and through human eyes. Where objectified old cosmic space dies in our physical sense in-breathing as devitalized living time, and where sprouting sense-life produces in etheric sight majestic world-pictures through the formative forces of conscious human Imagination, man acquires the conscious capacity to imprint them – member them – into the planet’s garments of resurrection.” (pp 121-122)  Humans can awaken to and be present in the creation of the new day. The paths and Life Spirits of Goethe and Steiner are united in this new work. The new middle zone between Heaven and Earth is then to be created through every social encounter, in the most difficult part of the new cosmic-human development.

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. 

  

Anthroposophy Lives! (GA 4) - Chapter 6 - Intuitive Thinking as the Path to the Experience of Freedom (PoF)

Chapter 6 - The Human Individuality:


Key 1 - Experience the continual OSCILLATION in yourself between universal world process and personal feeling.


Quote 1 - "We are certainly not the external things, but together with them we belong to one and the same world. That section of the world which I perceive as my subject is permeated by the stream of the universal world process...All that is contained inside the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole...The forces active within the limit of my body are the same as those which exist outside.  Therefore, in reality, I am the things; not, however, insofar as I am a perceiving subject..." (1st pgh, chapter 6)

Quote 2 - "Our life is a continual oscillation between our living with the universal world process and our own individual existence. The further we ascend into the universal nature of thinking, where what is individual ultimately interests us only as example, as an instance of the concept, the more the character of the quite definite individual personality is lost within us.  The further we descend into the depths of our own soul life and let our feelings resound with the experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from universal life. A true individuality will be one who reaches up with his feelings farthest into the region of the ideal." (5 pghs from end of Chapter 6)

Become this pulse, and feel the real painful transition between world and self. Find the I in-between the whole pulse of thinking and feeling. Weave together dying and living into one continuous swinging back and forth.



via GIPHY



Key 2 - Overcoming of the "Physiological Proofs of the limits of our knowledge" by becoming aware of the true nature of Intuitive Thinking, Pure Perception, and the formation of a representation.


Key quote - "From the fact that an electrical process calls forth light in the eye, those who conclude that outside our organism, what we sense as light is only a mechanical process of motion, forget that they are only passing from one perception to another, and nowhere to something over and above perceptions. Just as we can say that the eye perceives a mechanical process of motion in its surrounding as light, we can also say that the regulated change in an object is perceived by us as a process of motion."

In other words, neither the perception of motion or the perception of light could ever be judged to be primary in importance without the operation of thinking.


We must dig out a certain sickness in our thinking, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out in "Spiritual Science in the 21st Century" and elsewhere. This ill representation that controls much of our life concerns the false belief that if only we could find the correct group of perceptions, they would BY THEMSELVES, show us the real nature of our subjectively limited reality. Thus, the quest to find the 'true nature' of matter, the 'true vibrations of color,' the 'true nature' of evolutionary mutation and so on, all based on observation (supposedly with no thinking involved).


Steiner uses the case of light, cinematography and motion.

Take the example of watching a horse running on the screen. We might say that the limits of our knowledge comes from the fact that I see a horse running, but I do not see the fact that the image of the horse running is actually, 'behind the scenes,' a group of static images that are flashed with speed into one area of vision. So, such people want to say that if only we can observe the hidden 'behind the scenes' nature of matter, light, color, cells, etc. we will find the true world that appears as subjective illusion in our natural life. But the deception that is not recognized here is that no percept is ever connected to any other, no percept is ever understandable at all, no percept is ever categorizable at all, no percept demonstrates any aspect of organized mathematical truth at all. Everything is understandable, arranged in categories and sets, mathematically abstracted, evaluated in terms of illusion and reality, etc. THROUGH THINKING ONLY!  No percept demonstrates its own truth value, only thinking.  Hence, no mechanical or electrical motion behind the scenes is ever observed, because mechanical ideas, electricity, and motion itself are CONCEPTS, that can only be fully recognized and expanded through intuitive thinking. The pure flux of sensations, perceptions, feelings, desires, fragments of light, darkness, color, flicks on a screen, etc. are never organized into knowledge without thinking, and specifically the creation of representations (or particular percept-fragments linked up to concepts).  Therefore, there is no deep layer perception that will unveil the truth of a more surface layer of perception BY ITSELF.  This only happens through thinking and thinking (which can only be intuitively, no perceptually, non-imagistically experienced) adds the fundamental ingredient for all knowledge - it is truly connected with the real essences of the world as they are, not just the perceptible fragments.


Even the laws of nature as expressed mathematically do not enclose the wholeness of reality, since they forget about percepts altogether and they ignore the creative element of world-unveiling in intuitive thinking (which they used UNCONSCIOUSLY to form their equations!).

This is a tough one to wrestle with. Good luck!



via GIPHY


Key 3 - As Alva Noe says, the skin is not a 'magical membrane' that somehow cuts all of our experience inside from the laws of the rest of the world. Therefore intuit, perceive and feel that what is inside your skin is blended together with what is happening outside; and what is happening outside, is melted together with what you experience as inside. Then find and create a middle, moral, spot of self-perception, self-intuition.





via GIPHY

Anthroposophy Lives! GA 5 - Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom by Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner writes in his autobiography: 

"Goethe found the spirit in the reality of nature; Nietzsche lost the spirit-myth in the dream of nature in which he lived.

I stood between these two opposites. The experiences of soul through which I had passed in writing my book "Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age" (1895) could at first make no advance; on the contrary, in the last period of my life in Weimar, Goethe became once more dominant in my reflections. I wished to indicate the road by which the life of humanity had expressed itself in philosophy up to the time of Goethe, in order to conceive the philosophy of Goethe as proceeding out of this life. This endeavour I made in the book "Goethe's World Conception" which was published in 1897. In this book it was my purpose to bring to light how Goethe, wherever he directed his eyes to the understanding of nature, saw shining forth everywhere the spiritual; but I did not touch upon the manner in which Goethe related himself to spirit as such. My purpose was to characterize that part of Goethe's philosophy which expressed itself vitally in a spiritual view of nature.

Nietzsche's ideas of the “eternal repetition” and of “supermen” remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche perceived the evolution of humanity in such a way that whatever happened at any moment has already happened innumerable times in precisely the same form, and will happen again innumerable times in future. The atomistic conception of the cosmos makes the present moment seem a certain definite combination of the smallest entities; this must be followed by another, and this in turn by yet another – until, when all possible combinations have been formed, the first must again appear. A human life with all its individual details has been present innumerable times; it will return with all its details in innumerable times.

The “repeated earth-lives” of humanity shone darkly in Nietzsche's subconsciousness. These lead the individual human life through human evolution to life-stages at which overruling destiny causes men to pass, not to a repetition of the earth-life, but by ways spiritually determined to a traversing in many forms through the course of the world. Nietzsche was fettered by the natural-scientific conception." GA 28 - The Story of My Life (RS) 

Productive Quotes from GA 5 - 

A> "In the words in which he expressed his relationship to Schopenhauer, I would like to describe my relationship to Nietzsche: “I belong to those readers of Nietzsche who, after they have read the first page, know with certainty that they will read all pages, and listen to every word he has said. My confidence in him was there immediately ... I understood him as if he had written just for me, in order to express all that I would say intelligibly but immediately and foolishly.” One can speak thus and yet be far from acknowledging oneself as a “believer” in Nietzsche's world conception. But Nietzsche himself could not be further from wishing to have such “believers.” Did he not put into Zarathustra's mouth these words:

“You say you believe in Zarathustra, but of what account is Zarathustra? You are my believer, but of what account are all believers?

“You have not searched for yourselves as yet; there you found me. Thus do all believers, but, for that reason, there is so little in all believing.

“Now I advise you to forsake me and to find yourselves; and only when all of you have denied me will I return to you." (RS, Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, Part 1.1) 

B> "Truth is to make the world subservient to the spirit, and thereby serve life. It only has value as being necessary for life.  But can one not go further and ask, what is this life worth in itself? Nietzsche considers such a question to be impossible. That everything alive wants to live as powerfully, as meaningfully as possible, he accepts as a fact about which he ponders no further. Life instincts ask no further about the value of life. They ask only what possibilities there are to increase the strength of its bearers. “One must absolutely stretch out one's fingers and try to comprehend the astonishing finesse in the fact that the value of life cannot be measured. It cannot be measured by a living person because he partakes of it; indeed, for him it is even an object of strife: therefore he is no judge; neither can it be appraised by a dead person, for another reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life remains, so to speak, an accusation against him, a question concerning his wisdom and lack of wisdom.” (The Twilight of Idols, the Problem of Socrates.) The question about the value of life exists only for a poorly educated, sick personality. A well-rounded personality lives without asking how much his life is worth.

Because Nietzsche has the point of view described above, he places such little weight upon logical proofs for a judgment. It is of little account to him that a judgment lets itself be proved logically; he is interested in whether one can live well under its influence. Not alone the intellect, but the whole personality of the human being must be satisfied. The best thoughts are those which bring all forces of human nature into an activity adapted to the person. (The paragraphs in the first part of the book are numbered. This is 2) 

C> "Out of suffering and sick longing, the belief in the yonder world is born. Out of the inability to penetrate the real world all acceptances of “things in themselves” have originated.

All who have reason to deny the real life say Yes to an imaginary one. Nietzsche wants to be an affirmer in face of reality. He will explore this world in all directions; he will penetrate into the depths of existence; of another life he wants to know nothing. Even suffering itself cannot provoke him to say No to life, for suffering also is a means to knowledge. “Like a traveler who plans to awaken at a certain hour, and then peacefully succumbs to sleep, we philosophers surrender ourselves to sickness, provided that we have become ill for a time in body and soul; we also close our eyes." (N, Joyful Wisdom)     (4 in RS) 

D>  "When Nietzsche engages in a spiritual battle he doesn't wish to contradict foreign opinions as such, but he does so because these opinions point to instincts harmful and contrary to nature, against which he wishes to fight. In this regard his intention is similar to that of someone who attacks a harmful natural phenomenon or destroys a dangerous creature. He does not count on the “convincing” power of truth, but on the fact that he will conquer his opponent because the latter has unsound, harmful instincts, while he himself has sound, life-furthering instincts. He looks for no further justification for such a battle when his instinct considers his opponent to be harmful. He does not believe that he has to fight as the representative of an idea, but he fights because his instincts compel him to do so. Of course, it is the same with any spiritual battle, but ordinarily the fighters are as little aware of the real motivations as are the philosophers of their “Will to Power,” or the followers of a moral world order of the natural causes of their moral ideals. They believe that only opinions fight opinions, and they disguise their true motives by cloaks of concepts. They also do not mention the instincts of the opponents which are unsympathetic to them; indeed, perhaps these do not enter their consciousness at all. In short, these forces which are really hostile toward each other do not come out into the open at all." (RS, section 9) 

E> "If mankind had only sound instincts and would determine their ideals according to them, then this theoretical error about the origin of these ideals would not be harmful. The idealists, of course, would have false opinions about the origin of their goals, but in themselves these goals would be sound, and life would have to flourish. But there are unsound instincts which are not directed toward strengthening and fostering life, but rather toward weakening and stunting it. These take control of the so-called theoretical confusion and make it into the practical life purpose. They mislead man into saying, A perfect man is not the one who wants to serve himself and his life, but the one who devotes himself to the realization of an ideal. Under the influence of these instincts, the human being does not merely remain at the point where he erroneously ascribes an unnatural or supernatural origin to his ideals, but he actually makes such ideals part of himself, or takes over from others those which do not serve the necessities of life...

Only the single human being, and only the impulses and instincts of this single human being are real. Only when he directs his attention to the needs of his own person, can man experience what is good for his life. The single human being does not become “perfect” when he denies himself and resembles a model, but when he brings to reality that within him which strives toward realization. Human activity does not first acquire meaning because it serves an impersonal, external purpose; it has its meaning in itself....

This it is what he propounds through his Zarathustra. The sovereign individuum which knows that it can live only out of its own nature and which sees its personal goal in a life configuration which fits its own being: for Nietzsche this is the superman, in contrast to the human being who believes that life has been given to him as a gift to serve a purpose lying outside of himself...Zarathustra teaches the superman, that is, the human being who understands how to live according to nature. He teaches those human beings who regard their virtues as their own creations; he tells them to despise those who value their virtues higher than themselves.

Zarathustra has gone into the loneliness to free himself from humility according to which men bow down before their virtues. He reappears among mankind only when he has learned to despise those virtues which fetter life and do not wish to serve life. He moves lightly like a dancer, for he follows only himself and his will." (RS, section 10) 

F> "The idealists have split man into body and soul, have divided all existence into idea and reality. And they have made the soul, the spirit, the idea, into something especially valuable in order that they may despise the reality, the body all the more. But Zarathustra says, There is but one reality, but one body, and the soul is only something in the body, the ideal is only something in reality. Body and soul of man are a unity; body and spirit spring from one root. The spirit is there only because a body is there, which has strength to develop the spirit in itself. As the plant unfolds the blossom from itself, so the body unfolds the spirit from itself." (RS, section 15) 

Anthroposophy Lives! (GA 4) - Chapters 4-5 - Keys to Unlock Living Thinking in the Philosophy of Freedom

MAIN KEY to the WHOLE BOOK -

From Chapter 5 - addition to the revised edition of the Philosophy of Freedom (Spiritual Activity), 1918 -

"The Intuitive insight (Anschauung) [into the construction of the web of representations] I have honed in on here can be regarded as one to which man is led at first, as if by natural instinct, the moment he begins to reflect about his relation to the world. He then finds himself caught in a thought formation which dissolves and dissipates at the same time that he is constructing it in images. This thought formation is such that a purely theoretical refutation of it does not suffice. One has to live through it and experience it in order to have an insight (Einsicht) and a realization of just how far it leads one astray, and then to find the way out."

The MATRIX

In other words, each person must directly see, with the eyes of the mind, how the webs of representations, mental images, or subjective signs and strings of words in their 'heads' enclose and create a darkened closet around the human personality. One can learn to see how the plane or network or canvas on which the representations or mental images (what we normally call 'subjective thinking' that we experience 'inside the head' or just in front of the head) are projected operates. A new painting on this canvas will not allow you to see the intuitive thinking that operates beyond the canvas. This new painting or string of words grafted onto this network or 'Gedankengestaltung' (the whole picture of what has been thought), no matter how clever, will never get you to experience the I-AM-thinker who exists beyond this plane of associations, subjective memories, and projected assumptions about how the physical world operates. Only another kind of move can get you off of this 'game board.' That is intuiting a concept, or thinking before subject and object.  Or if you can start to see the 'hands' that draw on the canvas, this can lead you back to the real I-AM.  Or if you can consciously erase the canvas and wait in the nothing, after you have created the web and its contents, this can also lead you beyond it.

Chapter 4 - The World as Perception

Key 1 - Find your way to the place where your thinking sees the construction and essence of a concept without image.  Swim with the will in your thinking into the pure meaning elements while feeling the wound of subjectivity and moral reversal in the heart.

Quote - "What a concept is cannot be stated in words. Words can do no more than draw your attention to the fact that you have concepts...Concepts combine to form a totality built up according to inherent laws...All concepts that I form of lions, merge into the general concept 'lion'...Concepts and Ideas already presuppose thinking. Therefore, what I have said about the nature of thinking, that it exists through itself, that is is determined by nothing but itself, cannot simply be carried over and applied to concepts." (1st pgh ch 4)

How to use it?  Use the organ of your mind to look into the place where you think fully saturated, meaning-filled concepts.  Find the thinking that creates them. If you can watch how your I-AM (not inside not outside, not subject, not object) creates a concept, you are getting close to cutting the Gordian knot and demonstrating to yourself your own Freedom! Experience the moment by moment moves of the will in thinking on the concept plane as a whole. Use Deleuze's idea of difference differentiating itself or becoming a different meaning, a different will gesture at each moment to find the place of intuition acting in pure thinking.

Key 2 - Wake yourself up to the fact, and find the reality of this:  THINKING is not merely a SUBJECTIVE activity.  This is the hardest reality to accept, because it goes against all of the webs of everyday consciousness.

Quote - "It is only with the help of thinking that we can define ourselves as subject and contrast ourselves with objects. For this reason, thinking MUST NEVER be understood as a merely subjective activity. Thinking is BEYOND subject and object. It forms these two concepts, just as it forms all others...I ought NEVER to say that my individual subject thinks; in fact, my subject exists by the very grace of thinking.  Thinking, therefore, is an element that takes me beyond my personality and unites me with the objects."

Thinking along with other people really helps you along in this search for living thinking. If you can follow another person's thinking, it can help you see that the ocean of thinking is something out there, in which we are all swimming together. It is ultimately the ocean of spirit in which we live at every moment.

Key 3 - Take on the normal viewpoint that everything I can know is just a representation or a copy or a pale reflection of a 'real world' that exists out there. How can I ever know this 'real world' if I can only know it through my personal eyes, my own brain and its bio-chemical-electrical patterns?

Here is the argument Steiner provides which may be just strong enough to break through the fishbowl in which we live subjectively:  If everything is a representation, then all knowledge of my 'eye' and 'my body' and 'my brain' is also a representation. A representation of an eye could never grasp or create the representation of the sun, only a real eye could do that. In another twist, consider this: the perception of a brain tells us nothing in itself, it is only the idea that I create about these groups of perceptions that allow me to take up the intellectual standpoint that the brain is the origin of thinking!  Let that sink in - Spiritual living thinking falls asleep when it creates a representation that the place and the surface upon which it is reflected subjectively (i.e. our inner experience of thinking inside the head, or the outer scientific investigation of the percepts of a brain), is the real origin of thinking. This is the work of the ahrimanic double that works in our etheric body.

Quote - "For only my real eye and my real hand could have the representations 'sun' and 'earth' as their modifications; my representations 'eye' and 'hand' cannot have them. But critical idealism [people like Schopenhauer, Von Hartman, and Kant - although sometimes their positions are called by other names, like transcendental idealism or realism] can speak of representations only...They are insensible to the distinct reality...of what happens to the perception while perceiving takes place and what must be inherent in it BEFORE it is perceived."  (End of Ch. 4)


Video Discussing and Demonstrating This


CHAPTER 5 - The Activity of Knowing the World -

Key 1 - Experiencing the thinking I AM is like waking from a dream. This does not mean your personal experience of mental images in your head.

Key 2 - Experience the difference between a mental image, a word, a subjective memory AND pure perception and sensation moment to moment. A representation is a subjective perception, pure perception is the flow of objective perception.

Key 3 - Thinking is not an ideal reflection of a real physical world 'out there.' It is a creative process of creating conceptual meaning gestures out of weaving together supersensibly with the pure essences of beings in their inner life, soul, and spirit. Plants needs soil to grow. Spirits needs humans in which to grow concepts. Humans are the soil, the light, and the water that the spiritual, soul, and etheric worlds need to grow concepts, and eventually spiritualized love.

Key 4 - The essence of a thing is never given in one moment of time; what is perceived is only one slice; only something that is timeless can grasp the conceptual and living wholeness that produces the slices of percepts in time. Thinking can grasp and create out of the whole spiritual essence of the real beings.

Key 5 - My neighbor and I grasp the same concept of a triangle, but we do it in our individual way.

Key 6 - One can hold the standpoint of naive realism only in regard to intuitive thinking. IF I experience the creation of a concept, it is right there.







via GIPHY

Remembering What I never Experienced in this Life through the Backward Glance from the Heart - Looking out in Front into the Void of the Shoah - Remembering my own Middle Human Nature

                                                                   Painting by Gerard Wagner



In regard to the Michael School in the spiritual world, Rudolf Steiner wrote:

 "… wurde von den Menschenseelen, die prädestiniert waren, Anthroposophen zu werden, im Übersinnlichen etwas erlebt, was früher niemals in den überirdischen Regionen von Menschenseelen zwischen Tod und neuer Geburt erlebt worden ist. …

Da geschah dann etwas, was in den übersinnlichen Regionen damals Ereignis war, etwas, was heute im tiefsten Herzensinneren der meisten Anthroposophen, wenn auch unbewusst, schlafend, träumerisch ruht. Und der Anthroposoph kann recht tun, wenn er, an sein Herz greifend, sich sagt: Da drinnen ist ein mir heute vielleicht unbewusstes Geheimnis, das ein Abglanz ist der Michael-Taten aus dem 16., 17., 18. Jahrhundert in den überirdischen Regionen, wo ich vor meinem jetzigen Abstieg in die Erdenregion unter Michael gearbeitet habe, der etwas Besonderes arbeiten konnte, weil er sozusagen von seinen fortfließenden Aufgaben frei geworden war." (GA 240, 20.07.1924)

 It could be translated something like this -

 "Those human souls predestined to become Anthroposophists experienced something never previously experienced by human souls between death and rebirth in the super-earthly realms...

Something came to pass in the supersensible worlds. It was an Event (Ereignis) that lies implanted deep down in the hearts of the majority of Anthroposophists today, although in the unconscious, resting in sleep or dreamily. And the Anthroposophist can act in the right way, when he takes hold of his heart and says to himself: Within my heart there lies a secret although I may not yet be conscious of it. It is a secret mystery, that is an AFTERGLOW (or REFLECTION = Abglanz) of the deeds of Michael in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century, in realms beyond the Earth when before my present incarnation I was working with him. Michael, being free of his ongoing tasks, so to speak, was able to work in a special way." (GA 240 - 7/20, 1924)


 This actually means the following: A small kernel of etheric light-water is stored in the spiritual part of the heart. The follower of Michael-Christ can reach down gently into this region and look into this small pearl of light, wafting like a reflection on the water. Then one looks back (the Ab-glanz = I glance back and away from), and this tiny kernel of memory, coming from before I was on earth, expands and opens like a panorama. I can look out through my back, so to speak, and weave my own life-light-memory perception with this kernel of light. Stored in myself, I have a memory of something I never experienced in this life. It is a minor fragment of Imagination, which then can be linked up to the Event(s) that took place in the spiritual world before my birth. This little Imagination in me can expand, expand, expand backwards and cosmically - I expand back - and with a memory-look, I merge like a cloud with the cosmic cloud Imagination of the 16th century. Then I can review the knowledge (the essence of Anthroposophy) that was created there. I can remember my task.

But, we must also reach out in front of the heart and connect with the tragedy and devastation of what took place in 1933-1945 - what Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon describes in his Imagination:  the Michael School (now so small) above and the Christ now appearing in the etheric (now suffocated by human materialism and evil deeds done on earth below). In our empty heart, our empty being, we must look into the contemporary abyss. The center of our being must become the abyss.  My soul. life, and spirit then weave together with the Imaginations - which are full of world-sun-substance. 

Then we can look into our own time, 2020, with its humble individual potential. Are we able to connect the fullness of these cosmic Imaginations into our own human nature, to take on the real Michaelic task of today? This means to listen to the same potential in the depths of my neighbor and co-worker: the same cosmic SUN potential; the same potential for reversal, destruction, forgetfulness. If I am able to stand in the fire, with no answer, feeling helpless, and waiting for the Event to bring myself to myself. 

If we can feel the whole pulse, like the whole life cycle of a plant, cracking open, sprouting, expanding, repeating, blossoming, bulging, seeding, hardening, curling, browning, dying, dividing, replanting - then we can face the real situation of the present. Yes - the Christ is Here! But yes, the Titans are also here - working in me!

Let us get to work, with the light of the Spirit-I-AM guiding us - like a lamp from the future. Let us feel Michael's heart guiding us, like warmth from the present.

Anthroposophy Lives! (GA 4) The Philosophy of Freedom - Some Keys to Spiritualize Your Thinking using the Forces in PoF (Chapter 3)

                         

KEYS from the ESSENTIAL CHAPTER 3 -


Key 1 - Listen to a sound. First carefully separate A) the will of attentiveness from B) the intuitive experience of the content of thinking. Awaken the I in the middle. Then weave Observation (Attentiveness to what is Perceived) and Thinking into a Single Pulse with two outer poles, united in the Self-Conscious I.

Quote which can help you to create your own key to get out of the maze of everyday representational (ahrimanic/luciferic) consciousness:

"Observation and Thinking are the two points of departure for all spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving." Chapter 3 pgh 4.

How to you make it alive? Ask yourself - Am I aware of my spiritual working? Where am I spiritually striving? Am I conscious of the spiritual reality at all?  How are observation (the will that moves the receptacle of contents from place to place) and intuitive thinking (without pictures) related to this I (before subject and object) who is developing in the spirit (as opposed to soul, ether, matter)?



Key 2 - Create the EXCEPTIONAL situation! What is it? Observe the moment when you create concepts; observe the moment when your I creates a thought; observe the moment when you create a mental image. What tools does thinking use to create its garments?

"Whereas observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are but ordinary occurrences filling daily life, the observation of thinking itself is a sort of exceptional situation. This fact must be taken into account sufficiently when we come to determine the relation of thinking to all other contents of observation...It is characteristic of thinking that the thinker forgets thinking while doing it. What occupies him is NOT thinking, but the object of thinking which he observes." Chapter 3, pgh 8

Don't just understand it - Do it! This has nothing to do with 'thinking about thinking.'  Observe the creation of thinking before subject and object are set up.


Key 3 - Create the ARCHIMEDEAN POINT in pure observation of thinking activity (this has nothing to do with mental pictures, words, or subjectively controlled representing).

Lock-picking Quote - "When Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought that with its help he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges if only he could find a point upon which he could support his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself...In thinking we have a principle which exists by means of itself...Thinking we can understand through itself." Chapter 3, pgh 29

BUT!!!

"We must first consider thinking quite impartially, WITHOUT REFERENCE to a thinking SUBJECT or a thought object. For in subject and object we already have concepts formed by thinking....Before anything else can be understood, thinking must be intuited."

Klein bottle by Tttrung

                                                      My Video Demonstrating This


Major Hint - To create the Archimedean Lever of the transformation of consciousness, you must directly perceive or dive into the ocean where IT THINKS creates all of the ideas that make you believe you are inside a body, controlling your mental images, inner monologue and memory. Until you do this, you will never get out of the maze of normal consciousness.

Dr. Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon has taught us how to very carefully and strictly read what RS actually says:

"One should not confuse 'having thought images' with the working through of thought by means of thinking. Thought-images can arise in the soul in the same way as dreams or vague intimations. This is NOT thinking...The point is that everything that is willed is, while being willed, surveyed by the I as an activity entirely its own. Indeed it must be said that just because this is the nature of thinking, it appears to the observe as willed through and through." (Addendum to the revised edition of 1918).

Why was the revised edition necessary, and why was this comment necessary to add? BECAUSE NO ONE UNDERSTOOD and PERFORMED the "Philosophy of Freedom" during Steiner's lifetime!


Bonus Key -

In observing thinking, thinking is not changed. Thinking is of the same quality as the observer. Intuiting my own self-created concepts happens in the sphere where by Spiritual I is active and self-conscious. It is on the scene before the representations of inner and outer, subjective and object begin to operate. In this way you can do a temporary aikido flip to the ahrimanic and luciferic basic thought-cages that hold you in normal consciousness.





via GIPHY

Anthroposophy Lives! (GA 4) - The Philosophy of Freedom - Some Keys for Unlocking the Door to Real Moral Intuition - Preface thru Chapter 2

Here are some keys that I have created to transition from our normal consciousness (where my ego merely associates mental images, carries out an inner monologue and flips through subjective ideas) to moral intuition (where I self-create a free space in the spiritual world from which to create and organize moral-concepts). Dr. Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon taught this approach to participants in the Independent School of Spiritual Science beginning in 2009. But he did not create the keys for us. Each one must free herself. You will have to make your own keys (as I have described clearly in my recent books), but these keys below may give you an inspiration to help you find your way through the rich maze of the mighty 'Philosophy of Freedom' by Rudolf Steiner. It is alive and it will always be alive, because it is a spiritual creation. Can you become alive enough to reach it? To blend with it?

Key 1 - Quote - Preface to First Edition (1894, revised 1918) - CONFRONT EVERY IDEA

"One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage."


Two other effective lock-picks:

a. "We do not want any knowledge of the kind that has become frozen once and for all into rigid academic rules, preserved in encyclopedias valid for all time. Each one of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest at hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe."

b. "Philosophy is an Art. All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts."




Key 2 - Quote - Preface to Revised Edition (1918) - INTUITION, which perceives the inner essence of the free human being in active thinking, IS NOT REMEMBERED

"Everything to be discussed in this book is oriented toward two root questions of human soul life. One question is whether a possibility exists of intuiting (anschauen) the essence of the human being in such a way that this intuition proves to be a support for everything else which, through experience and science, approaches him but which he feels cannot support itself and can be driven by doubt and critical judgment into the realm of uncertainty.  The other question is this: is man, as a being who wants and wills, justified in considering himself to be free..."

"The intuition (Anschauung) under discussion here with respect to both these questions presents itself as one which, once gained, can itself become a part of active soul life. A theoretical answer is not given which, once acquired, merely carries with it a conviction preserved by memory...No such fixed and final answer is given, but rather a region of experience of the soul is indicated, in which, through the inner activity of the soul itself, the question is answered anew in a living way at any moment."



Key 3 - I AM CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING.

Advice - Adopt and think through all of the ideas, approaches, contradictory positions, and paradoxes in each Chapter. Take the opponents of Steiner just a seriously as Steiner's statement of his own position. You cannot create the space for your own free experience by merely making a mental picture, and subjective idea out of Steiner's activity (but each person must bitterly experience that this is precisely what you believe 'thinking' actually is). You must transform your consciousness to experience moral intuition; then freedom is self-created. Experiencing Steiner's 'answer' as a mental image is never enough. Such an approach is just replacing what Steiner DID with your own dead mental picture. You have to MEET HIM in the act of creation.

Quote - Spinoza's Letter in Chapter 1 - He 'proves' that we are not free (because only God is free):

"Suppose that during its motion the stone thinks and knows that it is striving to the best of its ability to continue in motion. This stone, which is conscious only of its striving and is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and that it continues in motion for no other eason that its own will to continue. But this is that human freedom which everybody claims to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but do not know the causes by which they are determined.  Thus the child believes that he is free when he desires milk..."



Some thinking strategies to get to intuition of the monist sensible-supersensible wholeness, which demonstrates in the moment the limits of any representation, and also Spinoza's representation:

A. Anything absolutely new does not arise because of the previous linear causes. Intuition is absolutely new. Do you experience thinking which is absolutely new in the moment?

B. The stone is not actually separate from the environment; the human is not separate from the environment, thus I am not separate from the creative source of thinking. Can I experience the way my thinking is linked to the whole world?

C. Spinoza says that only God is free because only He creates all substance (and his own substance). But! Intuitive thinking also creates its own conceptual garment. It is therefore free. But do you experience the creation of concepts in intuition?


Steiner's Keys (but they must be enlivened; they are not true is they are merely grasped with subjective association of mental images, brain thinking and so on, i.e. normal consciousness) -

1. A man consciously forming his motives is free.
2. Knowing the reason for one's action is ultimately intuition; it is both free and moral.


Bonus Key from Chapter 1 - Quote: "Between us and the place where the causes are active there is the skull of the donkey." (Paul Ree)

The Key Itself - You must experience your skull as the real boundary between living thinking and dead mental representations. You must experience the donkey in you which turns all of Steiner's words, whether Anthroposophical or Philosophical, into mere words and forms that are stored in your brain, and merely give your ego greater subjective strength. In other words, you must confront the beast or the donkey in your thinking which is ill. Only then can you find Intuition.

"The way to the heart is through the head." RS, end of Ch 1.

KEY 4 - SEE THE OTHER BEINGS IN YOU; I am Inside Nature and Outside Nature; The human and the World are not 1 and are not 2. Intuit the Pulse.


Chapter 2 - Find the 3 souls in your heart.  One seeks matter (Ahriman), One seeks escape (Lucifer), One meets the essence of nature in intuitive, creative self-world knowing (C...).

Chapter 2 unfolds in a subtle way. Steiner does not lay out things in linear way. Many things are only hinted at. Of course his thought is absolutely penetrating, and the style of his writing is artistically sound. The dramatic unfolding of the text, however, has a different purpose than explicitly showing a way to the door of freedom. He is hiding as much as he is showing. Why? Because he knows that stringing together subjectively grasped mental pictures or words will not get you out of the maze. He is weaving a web of thoughts and positions to see if the astute student can enter into this web, maze, or labyrinth and get out again. He is trying to show the student the landscape of the labyrinth, so that the student can learn how to get out on her own. He is showing us that we can learn much from Ahriman and Lucifer. But we have to self-create our own door to get out. Nobody can become free who merely has the mental image of freedom. And nobody can create the intuition of freedom for someone else. Intuition is individual. Of course, we can help each other to wake up to the universal source of thinking's terrain, in which we all are swimming. And spiritually, our souls, life, love, warmth, and spirits are woven together.


Note Carefully - RS shows us the limits of dualism, monism, Fichte's Intuition of the I, Lange's Spiritual-Materialism, and hinting that Goethe gives us a clue to Reality (Schelling is also present behind the scenes, let us say). Does RS later identify himself as a monist who uses ethical individualism?  If so, why are the failures of monism shown here?  Does a representation that I know that monism is the 'right answer' create the self-intuition of free thinking? Or not?


Quote to Pick Locks With - "We can only understand nature outside us when we have first learned to recognize it within us. What within us is akin to nature must be our guide...We shall not speculate about the interaction of nature and spirit. But we shall penetrate to the depths of our own being, there to find those elements which we took with us in our flight from nature. Investigation of our own being must bring the solution to the riddle. We must reach a point where we can say to ourselves: Here I am no longer merely 'I,' here I encounter something which is more than I." (end of Chapter 2)

15 approaches to Living Thinking - Key 1 - Sensation (Perception) vs Pure Thinking

I have quite a few other videos on Youtube as well. Click here and subscribe.