The work of Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon

 

         ישעיהו בן-אהרן      Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

     Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon, born 1955 in Israel, is a spiritual scientist, philosopher, and social activist who founded the anthroposophical kibbutz, Harduf, in Israel. He received his PhD from the University of Haifa. He is co-founder with Nicanor Perlas of the Global Network for Social Threefolding, director of the Global Event College, and contributor to the renewal of the School of Spiritual Science. He teaches, writes and lectures worldwide on the evolution of human consciousness in the sciences, humanities and social and historical events. He is known for his ground breaking research on the apocalyptic spiritual and historical events of our times and as an original researcher in the field of Anthroposophy inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. His father, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon (1906-2006), belonged to the founding generation of the state of Israel.

 ==Publications==

 Ben-Aharon has published a growing number of essential anthroposophical books: 

 ''The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century'' (1993) 

 ''The New Experience of the Supersensible'' (1995) 

 ''America’s Global Responsibility: Individuation, Initiation and Threefolding'' (2004)

 ''The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art'' (2011)

 ''Spiritual Science in the 21st Century: Transforming Evil, Meeting the Other, and Awakening to the  Global Initiation of Humanity'' (2013)

 ''Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality'' (2016) 

 ''Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born'' (2017); 

 ''Jerusalem: The Role of the Hebrew People in the Spiritual Biography of Humanity'' (2019)

 ''The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity'' (2020)

 "The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, & Anthroposophia" (2022) 

"The Time is at Hand! Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality and the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael" (2024) 

"The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (4 volumes)" (2024) 

 ==Main Ideas== 

   The Reversal

   In all of his works, Dr. Ben-Aharon uses a living concept that he created through his own life and experience: the reversal (Umstuelpung = turning totally inside out). He demonstrates how this real spiritual-scientific fact provides the basic pivot of all modern history. Modern human consciousness and life is based on turning the spiritual world into its opposite and storing it as dead mental images in the brain and nervous system. The basic function of modern consciousness and life is therefore to destroy the living truth and turn it into a merely subjective mental picture. The contemporary ego then defends this dead idea with all of its inner psychological tools and external economic, social, political and technological weapons. This is described in The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, The New Experience of the Supersensible, and The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, & Art, especially. The Event in Science, History, Philosophy, & Art pp 80-100 The positive potential in this essential human reality is that it also provides the opportunity for individual spiritual growth. If this basic spiritual scientific fact of reversal and privatization is uncovered in our own life and consciousness, then we can begin to develop into a new kind of human being. The new spark of resurrection forces given by the Etheric Christ Event, and used in spiritual scientific practice and growth, can then lead each person to develop a new kind of spiritual individuality and body beyond the confines of the shell of dead mental images. The counter-reversal or creation of a new etheric body and individuality is therefore possible. The reversal can change direction, to become a complete turning inside out of the personality. All of the wonderful qualities of becoming a personal self can be used by anthroposophical spiritual practice to create a bridge of consciousness to the Spiritual Self. This is described in Cognitive Yoga and elsewhere. Cognitive Yoga, pp. 47-51 In this way the moral failures of modern consciousness can be metamorphosed into moral and spiritual cognition and social practice. A new consciousness is formed that can both consciously die into everyday subjectivity and be awakened again into a World-wide spiritual scientific consciousness - both inside the old body and inside a new spiritual or etheric body.

     The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming

     All of Dr. Ben-Aharon’s work is based on his personal experience in 1975 of the second or 'etheric' coming of Christ which transformed his whole life and being. Through entering into a lifelong study of the spiritual scientific writings of Rudolf Steiner, he was able to develop an advanced understanding and application of how this experience transforms thinking and sense-perception. Our normal experience of “having thoughts” must be changed into pure living thinking by training with Steiner’s earlier philosophical works. Through meeting the Christ spirit, who is now to be perceived working in the ‘etheric world,’ this pure thinking can be elevated into a new kind of clairvoyance, which is wide-awake, scientifically objective and logically rigorous. The modern experience of meeting the highest Spiritual Self of all humans can be understood correctly, only if I can perceive how thinking dies inside the human head in the normal creation of mental images and everyday thinking. On the other hand, our sense perceptions must also be elevated into a spiritual perception of fluid life streams. This unlocks a great new creativity in each human individual. These transformations and elevations of consciousness are life-changing for the whole inner human being, and are therefore filled with continual dramatic elements. Through meeting the Christ with an enlivened Anthroposophy living in our soul, we create a new ‘Act’ in the ‘play’ of our life. Such transformations of thinking and perception are painful and difficult, but they also require work with other people in groups of individuals meeting face to face. Ben-Aharon describes this work in great detail, especially in "The New Experience of the Supersensible", where he writes: “The Christ is then seen through the metamorphosed forces of death, and is experienced through the mystery of man’s evil…[the] being of death becomes the guarantee of steadfast supersensible cognition; his soul is awakened from death into the light of true and free anthroposophical-imaginative self-knowledge. And the being of evil becomes his only guarantee of consciousness-creating and sustaining spirit morality: the dismembered soul is remoulded according to His healing presence in him. In this way the moral sacredness of anthroposophical knowledge and cognition begins to illuminate the modern Christ experience. 

   ''Etheric Singularity''

   The 'etheric' is an anthroposophical concept developed by Rudolf Steiner. It refers to a spiritual realm of pure life, light, and warmth which surrounds us and is part of us. Ben-Aharon teaches that by transforming thinking, sense-perception, self-hood, and social life through meeting with the new appearance of Christ in the nearest spiritual world, we can create a new unified stream of real life. A new living body can be formed which links up to the spiritual source of the whole world. Thus the individual can join the cosmos, and the cosmos can flow together with the Self. We find our true human potential through this. Human thinking can weave together with its Spiritual source, and even our physical body can be transformed through this Spiritual work, guided by the Spirit of our time, Michael. By this new spiritual scientific practice, we can create a spiritual ‘singularity’ - where the old laws of physics disappear and new laws of spiritual creativity and moral human work are unlocked. Ben-Aharon writes, “The old humanism, as truthful and well intentioned as it is, must not stand still. It must greatly intensify its understanding of the human if it is going to be able to compete with the...developments in robotics, genetics, and the latter-day utopias of a scientific-technological “singularity,” in which the human will be wholly merged with AI and in which nano-technological genetics and medicine will have extended human biological life to immortality. Let humanists have no illusions about this fact: the human is about to be wholly virtualized, if not in an ecstatic apocalyptic event, then in due course. Therefore, the question must be: Can the human be virtualized in an essentially humanistic manner?” Ben-Aharon also calls this new etheric element created by working with the new Christ-forces, a spiritual 'virtuality' as in the following quote: “In the present historical moment, the individual is becoming a source of new virtual creation, either through advanced technology or through self-actualization as a free and creative individual. We are talking here about a real singularization (the complete opposite of Kurzweil’s physical-mechanical ideal), the creation of cognitive, moral and spiritual immortality. The individual will become an agent of becoming and will do so in a fully human, non technological, way. It is indeed also the production of a new human, but this new human will be the virtualized essence of the existing human. It is also an immortalization but this one is brought about by purely human forces, that do not simply “retain” but infinitely intensify all human faculties, not only intelligence, but also freedom, love, care and creativity. It virtualizes the human, and makes her cosmic, but in an essentially human way, rather than through AI.”

         Ben-Aharon describes what the experience of this new virtual or free etheric human spirituality is like: “We can now begin to investigate more closely the three stages of the meeting and the three roles of Christ. In the preceding chapter was a description of the inner soul conditions necessary for preparing modern man for the meeting with the 'new' initiator. In order to characterize once again this existential situation, let us use here a term which, beside its common meaning, received a special content in modem physics. As was pointed out above, at the moment of the meeting with the living Christ in the soul world, man is no longer identified with his physical organism; he has actually lost his home in the physical world and become 'homeless'. Unconsciously he has already passed the first threshold, standing, unknowing, in the midst of the still darkened, but strongly felt, soul world. He is, therefore, in his human state of singularity, where all familiar laws of physical space and objectivity have collapsed, and new, unexpected laws begin their reign. But this implies that man has died without dying. He consciously experiences what everyone experiences after ordinary physical death: he dies in, and into, life, from space into living time. So we can now say: at the moment of the meeting, man is in a situation of singularity, in his absolutely unique, individualized space of freed, excarnated, life-time. He is no longer fixed and objectified as a physical point in three-dimensional space. He is already—though still unconsciously before the meeting—livingly flowing back and forth in between the two banks of the river of his life.”

      ==Essential Insights from His Books==

 ''The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century. An Imagination. The Occult Significance of the 12 Years 1933-45 in the Light of Spiritual Science (1993)'' 

    In this book, Ben-Aharon describes the Spiritual Event that took place in the Spiritual World during the years of World War II. The essential nature of this Event is the new interaction between creative human souls, the spiritual beings behind anthroposophy, and the new work brought about by Christ's appearance in the etheric world. In chapter 3, the author outlines the main elements of this timeless Event. For the sake of presentation, it is divided into three stages. The description of the First Stage: the Revelation of this Event begins with the Imaginative experience of the emergence of a new sphere, when one’s spiritual scientific attention is focused on the beginning of the second third of the century, after thorough preparation through identification with the historic events and in particular the Jewish, German and Russian people. At first, this objective spiritual vision is experienced as a self-creating new sphere of existence within the earth, in the centre of which an “embryonic figure takes shape”, which “is woven of the light of its own creation [...] aflame with the fiery tongues of its own unceasing, intensive self-burning." The observer is not separated from this sphere, but actively participating in it. This new etheric or spiritual dimension is the result of 2000 years of Christ’s work in the hearts of humans, now creating his own “new human land”, called by the author the “true shamballah” or the Earthly-Human-Sun." An essential difference to previous times in both the new step of evolution taken here and in the role humans play in it is found in the fact that the substance of this new world is in part of human origin. This new sphere of life is the result of the “whole work of the Christ permeated humanity on earth...Man shapes increasingly the sheaths of the Christ being Himself. Human creation and His life and appearance merge as never before in human evolution.” Penetrating deeper into this experience, which requires overcoming strong spiritual resistance, another aspect is revealed: a bottomless abyss opens up and it is shown that humanity is completely divided. The reason for this is the fact that humanity as a whole crossed the threshold into the supersensible or spiritual world in the middle of the 19th century, but absolutely failed to consciously confront its lower nature and evil tendencies in the first third of the 20th century. It therefore had to confront these elements unconsciously in the second third, since all legitimate initiation experiences require a complete moral reckoning of one's own hidden nature. Supersensibly this is shown as a split that goes through humanity as a whole and through each human being. The author investigates this through entering into the experience of those human souls who partook in the Event, the pupils and community of Michael. While they actively take part in and experience the creation of the new sphere and their union with the Christ, at the same time they experience the split of humanity as their own inner split and as their future karmic responsibility. "For the small Michael community sojourning in the nascent etheric sphere of the newly-born Earthly-Sun, the karma of the world and mankind and personal karma became one. … For them the sublime Revelation showed itself to be the greatest wholeness on the one hand yet on the other a tormenting split of self, mankind and the world. … Revelation is Divided.” This situation leads to the central Second Stage: The great Sacrifice, which is marked by the fact that “there is no existing, naturally given power that will intervene from outside in order to correct for humanity that which was disastrously corrupted through human ignorance, pride and cruelty.” The situation is comparable to a false initiation, resulting in the captivity by the “Lower Guardian of the Threshold” and to a violent rejection of any help from the Higher Guardian (Christ). Furthermore, the humanly created, Christ permeated life-substance which was offered on the altar of the Earth-Sun temple, is depleted and a “moment of silence follows. It seems that everything is paralysed and frozen in the new land of everlasting, burgeoning Earthly-Sun life.”  Now the “human aspect of Anthroposophy … had to find the truly free moral power to take upon itself the karma if humanity.” Millions of people were dying on earth in such a way that they were “passing through the gates of death in a state of great inner disturbance ... [carrying] a burning, desperate question about the nature and future of man and human life… the question about ‘Anthropos - Sophia’” The small human Michael community of souls living in the etheric realm between their death and rebirth now opened “their hearts to the upstreaming pain, anguish and despair … actively imbued their higher Michaelic being with the etherized blood of all races and nations on the bleeding earth.”  Thereby they ignited a “mighty moral flame” and offered themselves on a new altar, becoming a living question of world and human evolution. “This offer of all-embracing human love will abide with humanity and the Earth until the last of its fallen creatures is redeemed.” This human sacrifice then enabled the Christ to join the work of redemption, by descending into the evil being of humanity and uniting himself with it, in a “second Mystery if Golgotha”, answering the “new, future question of human existence: the question concerning the mission and fate of evil.” This great sacrifice results in the Third Stage: Earthly-Human Sun Birth, which “completes the whole Event and makes it into a self-contained living and breathing totality.” It is emphasised that the stages are not to be understood as linear and causally-linked points in time, but rather given in the text to connect certain aspects of the wholeness of the Event with historic events. The author also indicates that only by contrasting this “end-result” with splitting of humanity in the first stage can the second stage be penetrated. The earth is now described as an “Earthly-Sun, a cosmic organism in its own right.” When the Christ merged with the evil being of humanity, “the upper kingdom of the Earthly Human Sun, until now separated from its lower, demonized self, turned inside out and around and embraced its lost half of self. … This deeply fissured self will be borne consciously from the twentieth century onward as its inwardly burning wound of unresolved past cosmic evolution.” Being a sun means, to be able top carry one's lower self, to take full responsibility for it and redeem it and at the same time to have surplus forces to nurture other beings, to be life-giving and radiating out of one's own forces. This became possible for the Earth because a representative group of humans took the karma of humanity onto themselves as a free act and thereby enabled the renewed sacrifice of the Christ, his second Golgotha. “It was the first fully conscious cooperation between a free representative group if humanity … and its all-embracing, descending, higher Self, the Christ. … The Earth and humanity as a whole passed through its first stage of conscious initiation and became a Christ-permeated, holy planet.” (Thanks to Johannes Lauterbach)

 ''The New Experience of the Supersensible: The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of Our Time (1995)'' 

  In this book, Ben-Aharon relates in great detail each stage a human being can go through when meeting with the new appearance and activity of the Christ in the etheric world. He describes how this naturally-given new experience can only be clarified through anthroposophical spiritual scientific study, practice, and meditation. The central element of the text concerns the spiritual battle over the nature of human thinking. In other words, meeting the Christ spirit in this new Event can give each human being a new spark of spiritual vision that, when combined with true anthroposophical practice in spiritualizing thinking and sense-perception, will lead to new forms of scientifically objective clairvoyance or Imagination, as well as new human creativity in all spheres, especially including social life. 

   Chapter 5 – The Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming 

   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. 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. This is the Event of Thinking. 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 temporarily 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.” We learn how to cross pure thinking and the will over and through one another in order to awaken the new supersensible vision of the invisible life that surrounds us. But a deeper and gradual soul and moral transformation must also develop. 

    5.B – Opening the Gate of Sense-Perception 

   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.”  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, 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 idea of 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...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.” 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. “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.”  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. 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. 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.” 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. 

   5C – The Construction of the Bridge 

 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. 

  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. What do we do? Study it, and think it through very carefully and thoroughly with ordinary and absolutely clear consciousness. 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. 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. This can eventually lead to a battle in the human heart between your free Michaelic thinking and the dead Ahrimanic elements. This battle can create a new etheric substance. Ben-Aharon writes: “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!"

 ==External links== 

His Website and Blog

Global Event College and School

Amazon Link to his Books

Paean to the First Goetheanum

 

Paean to the First Goetheanum

Rudolf Steiner wrote: 

“I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learned from life.” (October 10, 1914, GA 287) 

Let us carefully approach the first Goetheanum in Imagination. You can feel the smallest breath of a wave of deep red, far off, as you approach the building from the West. The sunlight and clouds, as living pulsing breaths, pull the reflections of the red window facing West, into the fields, mountains, clouds, grasses. Reflection allows the expansion of the artistic color to fly all around the building. The surrounding environment in Switzerland merges with its appearance on earth. Its solidity connects with the depths of the earth, and it makes your feel that the Spirit is anchored, and that you yourself can stand on solid ground. 

You get closer to the building, and the image of the great Red window shows you the human being, with the great spiritual organ of sixteen petals, the cosmic speech organ, prominently displayed, and beneath the heart battle between Michael and the lower forces. Your blood stirs. The Window merges with your blood. The patterns on one are absorbed in the other. The deep rose petals of your blood expand in warmth in devotion, as a wind, that weaves through the building’s columns, architraves, colors. The curtain is withdrawn and you see the those parts of yourself beneath the earth, down in the basement – Unpleasant creatures. Let us not suppose that entering the spiritual world is comfortable. Take courage and calmly behold the fullness of your nature. 

As you enter the First Goetheanum, you realize in the quiet that every tiny noise runs and flashes and flows instantly through the whole wooden structure. The whisper of awe to your friend, becomes a ripple of airy breath that resonates through the whole membrane of wood, glass, metal. Each motion is registered in its cosmic, universal, membrane. 

And it answers, with its reharmonizing, ordering, rhythmic spirit-speech. Its curves re-orient your one-sided thinking, feeling, speaking, walking, and bounce your breath, your ideas, your feelings through this human, spiritual re-tuning instrument. Its great cupolas make it like two intersecting hollow drums or two resonating, thick, crystal glasses. Each wind gust, each human gesture, each animal wandering through the woods in the surroundings, hears it, feels it. It is playing a quiet music. The fields accept it, because it is created from their language. Nature speaks back to the Goetheanum, the building listens to the old yearning of the elements. 

As you enter the auditorium, you realize that each glance of light from the sun, each cloud moving in the sky outside, is now reflected, coaxed, enticed in a gentle way, into the interior of the building. The external light and shadow become interior light and shadow. A certain gesture of light from heaven, is now visible inside the building – but with wonder you realize that now it is colored! And deeply colored in a different way by each marvelous window! As the clouds move outside, and the sun is hidden and revealed, different deep colors pour onto the seats, like organ tones, like woodwind tones. 

Your religious awe, your artistic feelings, your clarity of thought, and your openness to the spirit’s uplifting piety and youthfulness, also swims out and in with this ocean of tone, color, quiet sound. We tune each other, in the harmony of living ideas, of conversation spread wide through humanity, architecture, nature, ideas. 

As you stand by the Saturn column in the auditorium, you look up at its towering form above. But you see that the carved base of the column has a word, a letter, a creative form on it. But you can feel and imagine that this open gesture begins to beat, and the whole of the forms begin to flap like butterflies wings. You see the forms at the bottom of the column climb up to the top, and then spread through the whole of the edifice – accepted, assimilated, balanced, trimmed, grown, and let free again. The architraves are rippling like vines. All the forms which seemed separate, are now like little mice and butterflies, and streams of life, moving everywhere, on all sides. Colored, tonal, life. 

Plant growth, and planetary growth. Language elements, and star-speech. Repetition of form here, but now upside down, backward, shrinking, doubling over, twisting together. One can feel that the substance can become transparent, and each place I look in the Goetheanum becomes a region of soul and spirit memory, where I can trace the record of universal life. The centaur and angel on the ceiling of the cupola above the stage are an image that we must pass through to find the living archetype, and then the beings themselves, over time, and in the future. But the future is where their spiritual potential comes from. 

Review of 'Cognitive Yoga - How a Book is Born' by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

        

Review of "Cognitive Yoga – How a Book is Born" 

(Now available in German here: https://www.ereignisverlag.de/) 

In this text we get a view into the spiritual creation behind the spiritual scientific research underlying the contents of a book. The insight provided by Dr. Ben-Aharon shows us something that we generally did not receive from Rudolf Steiner himself – that is, the spiritual experiences that one has personally undergone in order to research and craft an understanding of spiritual laws, processes, and beings. Rudolf Steiner gave us his personal human biography until 1907 and also the results of his spiritual scientific research, but almost never talks directly about his own personal experiences as pertaining only to himself (one of the important exceptions is Steiner’s descriptions of the difficulties in finding effective language to encapsulate the experiences of the senses for his unfinished manuscript, Anthroposophy – A fragment).  Ben-Aharon shows us elements of his research method and the organic and moral way in which communications with the spiritual world unfold. These research elements, and the moods and moral insight that lies at their foundation, contribute important new insight into spiritual scientific research (as direct experience rather than speculation or combining quotes as in academic study). Visionary ecstasy as a goal in itself, gossiping about occult powers, symbolic transformations of the physical body, and/or authoritarian commands from spiritual leaders play no part in this story at all. What is more, the psychological dimension with its spectacular, mythological, and heroic elements that have been present in science fiction, religious literature, occult, new age, theosophical, and even some branches of so-called anthroposophical secondary literature is absent from this unique, humble, and straightforward account of how a spiritual riddle and a spiritual baby matures during its seasons of life.  Instead, independent, clear-headed, and creative human research is shown to unfold in sober patience, while one is waiting for the freely given, tiny signal from the spiritual world that an opening and conversation is possible.  Only then can a legitimate entrance into the essence of the matter be attempted. He describes the spring, summer, fall, and winter aspects of the complete research process:  

“The first phase is the youthful part of the spiritual research, motivated by the heart forces, the sense of wonder, devotion and love, that underlie the quest about the human and cosmic riddles of existence...The second phase begins as a phase of intensifying crisis, in which a major problem emerges and ripens, which refuses all efforts of intentional solution for a long time...[the] core is, spiritually speaking, strongly guarded by its own essential spiritual nature…The more I am ready to let go of my personal desire to reach a solution, and the more I give the problem up, the more I begin to feel how a complementary gesture from the spiritual world reveals and offers itself as a gift….It is followed by the third phase...which is more an ‘involutive’ stage of spiritual pregnancy and embryonic soul life, in which the spiritual researcher regains his spiritual activity, but now in the reversed direction from the springtime...the fourth phase is then the actual physical birth, the physical expression, be it through the spoken word, artistic creation, social initiative or as in our case here, in the form of a physically written book.” (pp 10-12) 

    The foundation of his work is in the new freedom-enhancing experience of meeting and working with the Etheric appearance of the Christ in our times, and how spiritual research naturally unfolds in a living Anthroposophical way through freely growing and expanding the three seeds planted by the Etheric Christ in the body, soul, and spirit of a man. These seeds and this path are also now available to each child, woman, and man who seeks for this path and way. Dr. Ben-Aharon shows us how spiritual research must evolve slowly through the course of the years and decades, and in tune with the rhythmic cosmic activity of Michael and Christ, rather than through the tempo desired by the researcher himself. 

    In this book he has given us a ‘Christmas tale’ of the culmination of his research and development of Cognitive Yoga, through an important meeting between the soul and spirit and the creative, hindering, ripening, twisting and expanding growth and development of a spiritual riddle, from the inside and outside, as an inspiring demonstration of how the new Michaelic mediation between the Gods and humans can reveal itself in a coherent, balanced, and human way. Ben-Aharon writes: 

“...The real spiritual development, problematization, fertilization and conception, pregnancy and birth of a concrete spiritual research work in physical life, is the result of a long and complex creative process. Before a book is written down, a problem of research must mature and open to real spiritual fertilization and pure supersensible growth and transformation in the spiritual world itself. Then it goes through a process that can be compared to conception, pregnancy and birth of a human being in the physical world. While on the one hand, the final written book or work of art is a personal creation, whose coming into being is naturally nourished and shaped by the thoughts, feelings and experiences of our individual human soul, on the other hand, it is also an independent spiritual being that has a life of its own. And this continuous creative interaction and the interrelationship between the human soul and spirit and the spiritual worlds, is the living essence of this whole life cycle of creation and creativity.”(p. 13)

        In this text describing the Nativity tale of the spirit of a book, Ben-Aharon shows how very precise methods of intentional and creative development, intensified through minor and major crises and failures, are following by courageous, calm, and creative resignation, while waiting for the true fate of the spiritual being of the book to be born in the soul and brought down into earthly words, in a cooperative and conscious development of the spirit’s own terms and essence. In particular, he describes how the difficult problem of consciously ‘inhaling’ the perceptions of color, smell, sound, and all of the senses into the body during the research and development of the new Michaelic or Cognitive Yoga, continuously unfolded, but was also blocked and hindered through the years, and how, during the Holy Christmas Nights of 2012, the spiritual world finally opened a doorway to the solution of the problem, and he could pass through the lower gateways to ignite the spiritualization of the body. He discusses how one may prepare oneself for the door to the Spirit to be opened, in other words, how one can prepare for the demanding transitional zone of the threshold, where balance, self-consciousness, and moral forces are required in a very high degree. A person must create a fully alert soul vigil in order to wait for the spiritual sign coming from the other side, telling one that the moment of crossing the threshold or unveiling the solution to a problem in its spiritual essence is at hand. Ben-Aharon writes: 

     “This specific state of wakeful awareness and vigil demands that in such moments my feelings of devotion would sustain an inner, wakeful listening, without any specific expectation or desire. I know also that if I can listen deeply enough and sustain the listening uninterruptedly for long enough, soon I will hear the welcoming word or tone, and when I follow its footsteps, I will be able to cross over safely and peacefully, and experience the lucid awakening of supersensible cognition, in tranquility and soul balance and harmony. Then I may safely be summoned to the other side.” (p. 37) 

     The intimate experiences that Ben-Aharon went through in the spiritual world during this Christmas Event are outlined in the text, when he crossed over to learn the first steps of how to contribute in a human way to the creation of a ‘spiritual mountain,’ while in the presence of his main spiritual teacher and their co-workers. Because Ben-Aharon had worked so carefully with his teacher’s works on the earth, he could now hear the spiritual essence of his voice in the spiritual world, ringing out with world-wide love, inspiration, and an infinite creative force.  But for all of that, it was all the more gentle, human, and uplifting for the spiritual student. Through his, Ben-Aharon could understand the universal meaning of the work of Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy and the Foundation Stone and their spiritually creative sources and potentials, as new seeds for the future human being, and the relation of these elements to the Heavenly Star of New Jerusalem. In a sense, this spiritual experience conceived a spiritual child inside Ben-Aharon.  He then describes the process of being ‘pregnant’ with the being of the book (Cognitive or Michaelic Yoga). He writes: 

“...my mothering soul womb is a ‘shared womb’ because the developing spiritual research project is just as much outside my soul, in the external spiritual world, as it is within it...I am aware that this developing being is living, moving and kicking, both in my inner life as well as in the spiritual world, where it is carried and protected by a community of creative beings...The two processes, in my own soul and in the spiritual world, are mutually interactive and supportive. For example, it is apparent that each one of them considers the research project to be his and her own baby as well, and, what is more, they all experience themselves together, as a community, to be the mothering and fathering guardians and benefactors of its earthly becoming.” (p 56) 

He describes how one can nurture the growing baby of the book by creatively returning to the spiritual source of all life, in the spiritual individualized gift of Christ’s I AM, that now lives in the Earth with us and as a future seed in each human being. After nurturing the child through meditations and co-work with his spiritual community, Ben-Aharon begins to feel the condensation of the spiritual forces into the body itself, and follows the persistent urge or ‘birth pangs’ to start to write down sketches and outlines in physical words. He relates that one cannot remember an Imaginative experience in the ordinary sense, but that conscious spiritual scientific research must continuously return back to the source in fresh ways, and along with the community working from the side of the spiritual world. These continuing experiences from the spiritual Event must be therefore consciously despiritualized, condensed, and carefully oriented into ordinary consciousness, words, and ideas. Finally, as the book is actually born into words and paper, the content of Cognitive or Michaelic Yoga unveils its complete being and meaning as follows: 

“This breathing rhythm between the physical and spiritual worlds, the mutual fertilization and cooperative conception of the research, become, in its totality, an expression of the Michael impulse in the present age of Michael. This impulse must find a way to transform the spiritual human being in its entirety, penetrating also into the physical body itself. When one works in the above described way, seeking Michael’s help in overcoming the lower bodily threshold, one may find the strongest support; one knows that the way to the Christ, both in its etheric revelation and in the depth of the human bodies, can be trodden, through truly active spiritual scientific work.” (p. 68) 

I find this book to be a real gem, and a most worthy addition to Anthroposophical, spiritual-scientific literature. Its fabric is alive and healthy. It is of the highest caliber, and offers keys and hints that are not found in other of Dr. Ben-Aharon’s books. This newly born book continues to help me myself as I engage in my own spiritual scientific research in a wide range of fields. The book is truly inspiring, because it shows us that Rudolf Steiner’s impulse continues to live on, growing directly out of him, but also connecting to his loyal, loving, and courageous students, and that each person can craft her own free research process to consciously enter the spiritual world, little by little – on and on into the future of this new Age of Christ’s light, love, and life. 

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

New Anthroposophical Chemistry - Pondering Magnesium

 

Images from Wikipedia

Rudolf Steiner wrote: 

"The forming and fitting of the solid framework in the human organism takes place through continuous interaction between the forces of Magnesium and Fluorine respectively; in this interplay, the forces of Fluorine act plastically, moulding as a sculptor moulds, filling out contours and barring the way to the forces of radiation, while Magnesium acts as a radiating force and organizing the fibres of tissue, etc., into which the Calcium Phosphate and similar substances can arrange themselves. It is not a senseless phrase, but wholly in accord with the course of nature to say that a tooth is formed thus: It is shaped, as far as its outer form, its enamel and its interior substances (such as the cementum) is concerned, by the activity of the sculpting artist “Fluorine,” and Magnesium pours out into it the forces which have to be shaped to a plastic form...

This affords a direct glimpse into the formative process of man. Even in the earliest years of life, there is this interaction between Fluorine and Magnesium, that is an interaction in which the agents are of a decidedly extra-human character in the creation of their substance — for during the first years of life, man is really only a member of the external world. So Fluorine comes from the external world, to counteract the centrifugal radiance of the metal (Magnesium)." (GA 312, lecture 12, April 1, 1920 - translation altered slightly) 

 When one is approaching the concept and percept of Magnesium, the situation is quite complex. I would like to take a few minutes to hash out some of the issues at hand.  First, it is not a matter of supposing that if I could somehow isolate a molecule that was only Magnesium, in a manner in which I could feel the 'atomic' electro-magnetic or even the quarks of this element in a physical way, that this experience would exhaust the reality of the situation of humans and Magnesium co-existing.  We already possess a mental image of a particular configuration of protons, neutrons and electron rings from our education in Natural Science. But if we could touch such a tiny thing, it would not at that moment possess at all the intense qualities, the sensations, I would even say the individualized health-bringing properties of Magnesium in its sense-perceptible form.  Furthermore, we, in our phase as human subjects possess a vast web of representations (which can be mere empty words or specific mental images) of the way in which we have been taught about Magnesium.  The physicians and the engineers possess frozen images, words, and formulas about what effects Magnesium can bring about, what properties it has, how it crosses through cell boundaries, its use in the plant cell, its volatility, color, its low weight for the construction of engines, etc.  We did not even know what Magnesium was until modern chemistry was developed in the 18th century, and indeed for a long time, Manganese and Magnesium were confused.  What we call Magnesium was almost called Manganese.  There were white and black forms produced by various forms of electrolysis. We see its extreme brightness when burned, and for this reason it was used in early flash photography (see the photo of the water skier above). 

But, if we have perceived a piece of Magnesium, and have studied it thoroughly, we find that there is also a non-imagistic, flexible, open concept of its reality that is experienced in human thinking.  Note the upbuilding force present in the form of Magnesium in the picture above. If our everyday mental pictures can be deactualized, so that the thinking activity itself is experienced as primary, and the old dead representations of subjectivity, inner vs. outer, object and subject are dropped away, then we can meet the concept of Magnesium, which is something that flows out of and interpenetrates the sensible components, but is invisible.  In pure thinking, my I meets with the radiating and developing concept of an invisible substance. Of course one could also engage with the neurological and biochemical effects of Magnesium as it works in the body (in the liver, for example, where it seems to have a positive effect on fibromyalgia), or we could, in a spiritual scientific manner, investigate the effects that such a flexible concept has as it destroys the perceptible aspects in the neurological components of the human head. But for the time being, let us not focus on its effects on the body, but let us try to meet the true Being of Magnesium. Let us devote ourselves gently and humbly to the living spirit of Magnesium. Let us try to discover, in a spiritual scientific manner, following the lead of Rudolf Steiner and Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, the gift of mother Magna-SEE-um. 

First of all, Magnesium is everywhere on the earth.  It is part of the flow of the Umwelt, and it also is working in the interior of our bodies.  The skin does not separate us from the workings of Magnesium as a whole. She radiates inside my being, she radiates and weaves and organizes in the environment - but etherically and invisibly. How does Magnesium work in the spaces outside our skin, and in the spaces in our skin?  Let the idea of the skin as a barrier disappear or melt. Rather there are two seas flowing and meeting one another. Magnesium lives in both Seas. 

Furthermore, can we trace quite clearly the virtual aspects of supersensible force of Magnesium as it operates where the sensible qualities of Magnesium can be perceived?  Can we, in contrast, distinguish carefully between the sense quality, where we take the sensible, metallic, reflective hardened form as the essence of Magnesium, while ignoring the active, virtual swarm of Magnesium, which because it is excluded from the frozen form, operates elsewhere?  The light-filled glowing of Mother Magnesium is frozen and trapped in the shiny metallic crust.  She experiences herself dying there. In its wholeness, Magnesium is a virtual-actual stream, a process which flows everywhere, and what is most important, it has different qualities, and different intensities and aspects, depending on whether it is perceived at what phase of its transitions. Can we trace the moment by moment growth in a spiritual scientific fashion - seeing how what is invisible becomes visible and what is visible becomes invisible? Can we see the moment in thinking when we know the interior of the Wisdom light that lives in the knowledge of the essence of Magnesium? It is a metamorphosing stream, partly visible, partly invisible.  It partly lives inside human concepts, as virtual life, but when it lives there, it is destroyed elsewhere. It multiplies itself in fragments in the visible minerals in the stones and crystals beneath the Earth. It is still more alive in the bright crystals of Magnesite, and more dead in the mineral Dolomite. It precisely does its work in plants and human cells, but just in a way that it is actively leading the process in one place, and in other places only present as a waste factor.  Its bright light in the sense world is accompanied by an intense darkness and spiritual warmth in the living Etheric world, which then can lead to another, inner light. Its great explosive flash is the mighty leap of the radiating force of the spiritual mother and her elemental creative offspring jumping out of their temporary prison of grey frozen metal. In addition, it is precisely because the mineral dead form of Magnesium can be spiritualized inside the human body, that the trapped mother can do her work again, to upbuild our teeth and regulate our blood pressure. The mother lives in the seeds of Pumpkins and Almonds. 

If we can think along with the streaming process of Magnesium as a virtual-actual whole (a flexible open, intuitive spiritual and material organism), then in human thinking, feeling, sensation, and willing, we may be so lucky to meet and interweave and also create a unified lineage with the mother - we meet in a field of this elemental reality.  Magnesium builds up the form for materialization - Fluorine annihilates matter (watch a video of the effects of Fluorine gas to see what I mean - it burns through metal like paper).  If we can remain alive and in the middle between its dying and its living invisible nature, we can find the Aristotelian Todi Ti of Magnesium-Spirit. The human melts into Magnesium, the magnesium melts into the human.  Thinking creates there; Magnesium dies there;  Magnesium is reborn there, thinking casts away its old processes. My heart opens to the mother Magnesium, we live firmly in heaven and on earth - a single process unified in the human I AM. 

   Where can the Spirit of Magnesium come alive in real human community?  

   In addition to scientific, calculative reckoning about the hyle-morphic nature of Magnesium, or about how it functions in industry and medicine, we can ask about how it can be awakened in human community?  How can the Mother meet and help us to meet one another as humans? How can we take one step forward in our social work, through the inspiration of the real spirit of virtual Magnesium?  Can we meet this otherness with unbiased thinking, which is still impersonal?  Can we meet the other person and meet the otherness of Magnesium?  Can we remain on fire spiritually, casting our own light outwards, allowing the whole process of meeting with people to burn spiritually, in an active volatile way that cannot be put out by the earthly representations or by the old frozen deposits of our biological organism?  Is it possible that the spirit of Magnesium can awaken in our social life itself, so that the real human other, our living sister, can be elevated and cured? Can her inspiration help us burn through the dross of our Ahrimanic and dead mental pictures?  Can her gentle radiation remain on earth and not fly off into Luciferic realms of selfish use? If anthroposophical medicine has tried to describe the physical-etheric effects of the Hep-10 preparation as shining light into the liver, so that the whole body of virtual forces can be vitalized – is it not also the case that we can be healed by the real human other, shining as a vehicle for the forces of Virgo and the Kyriotetes from Jupiter (who according to Rudolf Steiner, have special relationships to the human liver).  Notice the ease with which Magnesium combines with other chemicals and has the nature of clarity and shining, of purifying the earth, like the Virgo forces.  It can even burn in ice and under water for a certain time.  Let us remember that just because Magnesium acts one way in matter, this does not mean that She behaves the same way in her spiritual life. There is fallen Magnesium and redeemed Magnesium.

 When we say that the Magn-EE-Zium is becoming human, this also indicates that we are meeting the future form of the mineral we call Magnesium when She reaches and manifests her ego stage on the future Vulcan. In the future, there will be a pure spiritual warmth, and the animal form of the spirit of light and fire from Venus, where Magnesium flies in the clouds. She will speak, she will swim down into the darkness, but also later on, light up like a fish in a (spiritual) gas ocean. The Sister of Magna-EE-Zion will unfold new Mysteries of her being. For us in our times, we note that the crystallized form of Magnesium (in Magnesite), is a memory of the separation of the sun from the earth on the Old Moon (where the purified ether was pulled away from the denser 'earthy' moon substance). Now She is slowly becoming a new plant, with a light growing at her center, eventually blooming on New Jupiter in the future. But let this be the end of our current pondering of the mystery of Mg. 

Who or what power ignites the light of inner sight that can see the contents or essences in pure thinking?

 

Matisse, 1905 

    Consider the large number of human beings who can now think precisely, concretely, logically, scientifically, critically, and abstractly. There are billions of people who have this faculty as a common power and they use it every day, at every moment. But why are there so few that can see the concepts or contents of what they are thinking on the thought-plane? Why do these billions still more or less follow the Kantian viewpoint about thinking:  'I can see sense objects, and I can organize sense objects into categories with abstract thinking, but humans do not possess the power to see this thinking activity itself, operating in its own plane.'  ?  

      We need a little self-created inner light to shine into the rotating museum of thoughts. If we do not create this light to see the moment when my condensing, constricting will-power orients my own individual thinking-ray onto the particular room in the 'museum of previous thoughts,' then we only receive reports after the fact in words or dark mental strings. I have described this in my Husserl book quite clearly. At the moment when you see the pure land of concepts, you realize that it is definitely not in your individual head - it lives in the world outside you. But then again, also in this moment, you realize that a part of you also lives outside yourself in the world. Schelling and Goethe felt this intensely in different ways. 

      So, how do we turn on the flashlight which lights up my individual knowledge-window, which looks out into the knowledge-fields outside my house?  I understand the essence of a faucet, a door, an orange, etc. in the moment when the knowledge fields brush up against my individual window-pane. It is the moment when the 'universal' (the idea of a door which can be looked at by any person, from their 'thought-seeing flashlight shining out their own window'), meets the particular. The world meets me. The truth (the giant network of world-thoughts, all linked up in the 'interior' of the earth and the universe) touches me, and I know. A part of me outside of time, swims through the knowledge fields and brings a connection between 1. my flashlight and the window on my thinking-house, and 2. the giant fields of previous thoughts (the great museum of walking, living, essences or world-ideas).  

     Looked at from the spiritual-scientific point of view, we can say that we cannot use our physical eyes to see the thought-world, we must shine the light from our own two-petalled lotus flower into the streams of the etheric body (which is woven together with the soul and the spirit).  But there must be the tiniest flame of morality, of loving the objective truth beyond you, of caring about the real world beyond your personal pleasure. Husserl found this light in his love for the truth of mathematics and logic. How could math, geometry, and logic be a personal inner creation?  

     You might be able to turn on this light with your passion and love for the spirit, for your fellow human being. You might be able to turn on this light by denying your own train of thought and (for a short time), following the beautiful, organic thought-creations of Rudolf Steiner (in the Philosophy of Freedom, Truth and Science, or The Riddles of Philosophy). These show how to surf on the thoughts which are not your own. By thinking his thoughts, you can create your own organic copy of this thinking-geography-organism. This then becomes your organ, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out so many times. Each one of these billion humans can create an individual freedom-thinking-organ. 

    This moment of seeing the interior of a concept in the moment of understanding is called intellectual intuition in the history of philosophy (anschauen in German, and noesis in Greek), but the words mean nothing if you can't talk to your neighbor while both of you are shining the light of inner perception onto the fields of pure essences. In this moment, you and your neighbor are using your thinking-hands to rummage around in the dark closet of the museum of knowledge. You touch the same object in the closet with your thinking-hand and you feel its contours. Now both of you can also, through your love of world-fire, your love for the other, your love of the spirit, your love of Christ, light up the flashlight in the closet. This can create a conceptual garment out of the truly empty pure thinking substance (Geist or Spirit).  

     This intermediate pure thinking-seeing is not just personal mental pictures or memory images. It is not yet Imaginative cognition or etheric clairvoyance. It is not yet seeing spiritual beings. This requires a gentle and intermediate light. It is half dying down and half lighting up. It is in-between the inside of the house and the fields. It is not yet living thinking, but it is no longer totally dead and blind. It is a flashlight that sees the path through the woods of essences and Ideas. And it can light up its own light. A flashlight that sees itself. When this happens the Individual I can be woken up in the field of pure concepts. This happened to Fichte, for example. 

    But if we can light this little light of freedom, a light that was taken from the higher hierarchies by Lucifer and given to man, so that he could build his own closet and house and window, and learn how to lift it up into a greater light, by transforming it in the heart, in co-operation with the spirit of Michael - then we can transform this light into the new spiritual-scientific seeing. This is described ever so clearly by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. This darkness of the closet, and the abstract crystal forms of dead, personal thinking can be seen from the warm exterior. Our will can unite with world-thinking; our personal thinking can unite with world will. In these moments there are wonderful possibilities - to find the true light of the Rose Cross; to cast a light that weaves with the light surrounding the new appearance of the Lord in the world of life, light, tone, and love. And in this moment, we may find a glimpse into a substance that is more than matter, and less than spirit. The gentle light of intuition may turn into the light of the freedom of individual creativity, forming the new substance of a future earth-sun. This is the new earthly-human-sun that Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon discusses - and indeed the philosopher's stone.  This little self-seeing light can be sparked into flame by taking death and evil into our hearts and transforming them into the Good through a stronger, firmer, higher Love - coming from Christ. 

    In these moments the power of light shining from Plato's work in the thought-world dims down and joins with the warm perception (of aisthesis) shining from Aristotle's works in the thought-world. The goodness in the middle burns ever more intensely, and the future shines light down into our heart-head-will thinking-loving activity. 

    Themistius Euphrades (4th century) perceived this issue quite clearly, in his interpretation of the active intellect from Aristotle. In Davidson's book on Avicenna, etc, we read the following: 

    "The analogy of light entailed for Themistius that although rays from the active intellect disperse and enter individual men, they have their origin in an external radiating source, in a single transcendent 'active intellect' existing outside and above man...[adding] that the transcendent active intellect, or transcendent aspect of the active intellect, from which rays radiate and enter individual souls, is the very entity Plato had in mind when he compared the Idea of the Good, the 'cause of science and truth' to the sun, the source of light." (p. 14)

     The difference possible for humans now, is that we may create a spiritual individual center, an I AM, that is able to embody the active intellect, without diminishing its consciousness or sense of self. We can individualize the whole intellect of the cosmos, and become a co-creator with these spiritual-thought-beings. Our I AM can stand freely as an individual in spirit-land, using the terminology and approach of Rudolf Steiner. It can also connect in fully daily consciousness with our everyday personality. This is the possibility demonstrated in the Philosophy of Freedom and at its highest point, the mutual essence exchange described by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon in Cognitive Yoga.  

     Good luck on your journeys! 

Review of Cognitive Yoga (2016) by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

  The founder of the Waldorf educational movement and biodynamic agriculture, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), also gave new directions for architecture, the fine arts, medicine, and socio-economic life. His collected works, dedicated to his spiritual view of the human being, called Anthroposophy, are filled with a wide variety of concrete spiritual scientific exercises and meditations. But he also left small hints and general indications about new kinds of spiritual scientific practice that he did not complete during his lifetime. One of these hints about a future kind of spiritual practice suitable for modern humans concerned a ‘Michaelic Yoga.’ He mentioned this briefly in some lecture courses from 1919/20 (GA 194 and 322). This new rhythmical practice would not focus on the physical breath, like the pranayama exercises of the older yoga, but rather on spiritualizing thinking activity and sense-perception, trading back and forth, one after the other.  

   First, thinking activity can be transformed into a beholding of essences outside of mental pictures and second, sense perceptions like sight, sound, and smell can be ‘vaporized’ and woven together with the body. In a cyclical pulse, we can unite the interior of our concepts with the world of Ideas that we behold in willed thinking (this is like ‘breathing out’), and then we pull in the living forces behind color, sound, scent, touch, and warmth into our expanded body of life and light (this is like ‘breathing in’). This practice, accomplished through penetrating into the unconscious elements of cognition and perception, and also elevating forces of morality by examining our ego, and our subjective projections, needs, and desires with rigorous and objective self-knowledge, gives rise to a new kind of spiritual Self. This seems like a difficult process!  

   However, in the wonderful new book, 'Cognitive Yoga, Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality' (translated into German as 'Michaelic Yoga'), we are thankful to discover that Dr. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has developed Steiner’s hints into a complete practice over several hundred pages. Ben-Aharon is a leading spiritual scientific researcher, who has published 10 books, beginning with 'The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century' in the 90s and most recently, 'The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.' Michaelic Yoga does not merely collect Steiner’s quotes about Michaelic Yoga, but Ben-Aharon develops a new cognitive yogic practice that is a real addition to the richness of Anthroposophy. Nearly every sentence of this book is a step by step direction about how to perform this new art, meditation, and cognitive spiritual practice. It is a robust and deep introductory class on how to change thinking and perception into a new kind of Imaginative or clairvoyant insight. It is based on Anthroposophy alone, and does not mix in other streams or approaches. 

   After giving an overview of Steiner’s indications on the subject matter, Ben-Aharon shows us that the first step to be performed is to clearly separate our sense impressions on the one side, from our mental picturing, remembering, imagining, and reflections, on the other. In other words, we learn how to look at an apple and separate the color and sensation from our ideas about the apple, in the moment by moment flow of consciousness. This is directly related to the real spiritual scientific practice of the substance of Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom, where noticing the difference between percepts and concepts is fundamental. Ben-Aharon compares this first step to separating water into Hydrogen and Oxygen through electrolysis. 

   After we learn how to ‘decompose’ the mental image at the basis of normal consciousness, Ben-Aharon is careful to emphasize that none of this practice should diminish the sense of self-identity. On the contrary, the practice of the Cognitive Michaelic Yoga should only build on the strong sense of self-consciousness, and the modern feeling of being an individual ego or self. The limitations and isolated nature of the modern ego, can develop into a free and creative spiritual individuality with the balancing forces of the new etheric Christ impulse and gifts. We read this astonishing statement, “Even in the higher spiritual worlds, among the highest beings of the spiritual hierarchies, you cannot find self-consciousness or freedom as humans can develop on earth. Nor can it be created there. Subsequently, there is no individually developed capacity for love to be found in the divine worlds, which can only be born out of true freedom…This is what is mean by Spiritual Science when it speaks about the Christ impulse – finding in the earthly ego the true Self, and if we accomplish this, the more we truly transform our egoism…” (pp 47-48) 

   Then the first steps of perceptual transformation begin, with chapters on the ‘etherization’ or the spiritual development of sight and smell. I have never read any other books that have anything in common with these rich practices. This material is absolutely original and I would say, unparalleled in anthroposophical literature. In the practice of ‘color-breathing,’ Ben-Aharon travels far beyond the moral sense of the pure qualities of the colors developed by Goethe. He uses the example of separating the red from a rose, and experiencing the pure intensity of giving oneself over in devotion, shocking moral self-knowledge and humility to the spiritual becoming process of the being of redness. He writes, “Only by means of generating…this selfless motivating force, and surrendering all that we have to the becoming red process, can we let red substitute itself fully for our own ordinary self. World red becomes one’s self and guides one…Precisely at that moment when we have become wholly red, the former experience of the quality of red, which we abstracted from the physical object, disappears. From this moment on...we have not only lost any ability to represent the external color, but we also lost its qualitative soul experience…this colorless color becomes pure intensity, which feels, wills and thinks itself through us.” (p 66)  And this is only an intermediate stage! 

   During the development of the Michael Cognitive Yoga practice of many decades, Ben-Aharon discovered that there is a large blockage or gateway that closes off the purest etheric forces in the lower part of the body. The key to opening this blockage lies in the spiritualization of the senses of smell, taste, and touch. He focuses primarily on smell to give an overview of how it is accomplished with the other middle senses. This requires finding a third stream of the sense of smell behind the nasal cavity and following it down into the etheric body and sentient soul. We discover through this process that the sense of smell actually unconsciously builds a large part of our sense of being embodied and living in a solid physical shell. He writes, “Trying to let go of this self-loving…warm body of smells, tastes and…internally bodily touching and sensations, is like making a volitional choice to die; separating from a beloved and comfortable place of a secure and hidden, private, earthly dwelling. Only when we are ready to face this fear and let it go, will the scent aura and substance really be free to leave us…As an act of thankfulness for this selfless liberation, [the smell] may gracefully allow us to participate in its return to its cosmic source and share its true being and becoming as a real objective world force…” (p 111) 

   The most advanced part of the book then describes the freeing and individualization of the whole etheric body and the creation of a new etheric individuality. He then shows us how we may enter into a new educational garden in the new earthly-human sun sphere that is growing inside the spiritual foundations of our earth right now. The final chapter culminates in a description of how this etherization process gradually can lead to an intimate meeting with the second coming of Christ in the etheric world. I have found that practicing this new art of Michaelic Yoga, even in the first steps, is a difficult but healthy spiritual endeavor. I can only give this book my highest recommendations. What an inspiring treasure! 

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

A Bird is the Dream of a Plant

 A bird is the dream of a plant. 

The Oak's leaves fly free in the Starling's migration. 

Autumn winds blowing the dead to other climes. 

The talons of birds are the stunted growth of vines. 

The invisible flight of the Grape's reverie

is written in its curling climb. 

The Heron's leg has double knees

One forward and one back. 

An echo of the tiny exodus of the Wisteria 

Pulsing around its trellis, following the rotation of 

cosmic bodies, turning round the planet. 

The memory of the fantasy of plants 

Is left behind in the silent warmth of stones. 

And the corpse of the Squirrel's forgotten deeds. 

The tones of the spirit speak in the growth of plants. 

The bells in the dreams of the Chicory ring out in the voice of the Bluebird,  

While the souls of birds migrate around the I AM of the human being. 

The World Word fulfills the secret wishes of the Cardinal and Scarlet Tanager

Through the I of the human being, which is the goal of their yearning to roost. 

Stars are the feathers of the Gods' Wings

Cosmic hair on the foliage of human souls. 

Under which circulate the Possum and Weasel, 

Thistle and Kestrel, 

All turning around Christ's I. 

 

Review of the Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity - the History of the Michaelic Movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner - by Ben-Aharon

 Review of The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, the History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner – an Esoteric Study by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

Temple Lodge, 2020, 338 pages 

Rudolf Steiner said, “As far as Anthroposophy is concerned, the Christmas Conference was either everything or nothing.” (GA 240). The same can be said of this book as a representative product of the whole of Ben-Aharon’s life and work: either this book is everything or it is nothing! 

The text contains 5 lectures that were originally given by Ben-Aharon in 2019 at the annual meeting of the School of Spiritual Science. The center of the book is a powerful call for us to wake up! Can we take off our blinders and see the painful but real spiritual position of humanity right now in the 21st century? The new light and love is now raying forth with growing energy from the Etheric Christ Event that is taking place in the spiritual fields closest to our daily consciousness – but do ‘anthroposophists’ remember, sense, and behold it? 

He writes that without developing this new form of imaginative cognition schooled through pure thinking, and also enlightening such free insight with the spiritual light of the Second Coming, we are no longer really connected as loyal students to the continual rebirth of the spiritual being of Anthroposophy. (p 327) “In order to experience and embody this infinite wisdom, truth, beauty and love and grow with it, each one must recognize, confront, heal and transform his and her lower nature... On this one decisive cliff, on the edge of this abyss, we repeatedly turn backward and therefore fall and lose our humanity...[but] we are eternally responsible for all our deeds and misdeeds.” (p 198)

This new etheric Christ-enlivened, Imaginative capacity, coupled with the basic self-knowledge required to approach the real spiritual world, as demonstrated in Steiner’s basic books, can then be used to penetrate into the dark and unconscious elements in each of our souls. Ben-Aharon humbly describes his own tumultuous biography – the opportunities, limits, and failures he encountered after meeting the etheric Christ at the age of 21 and while trying to bring His work to the earth over 40 years. He shows that these painful life lessons can be understood in their archetypal form through the Grail mysteries of Amfortas and Parsifal. “My two natures, the higher and the lower, became like opposite mirror images, and I was standing in the middle, unable to merge them into harmonious wholeness.” (p 18)  He then describes in detail how he was able to spiritually transform and heal these wounds by opening his whole heart and penetrating with feeling to the depth of his being. Like Parsifal, he had to recognize precisely how he had hurt his family in a soul and spiritual way before he could become whole. (pp 24-25) 

He shows that each one of us also has to walk this path in self-knowledge. Each one of us has to admit the painful reality that any spiritual scientific striving that does not feel the shock of World War 2 and the powers that warped the whole earth and the very nature of every human being, cannot really take one step forward. Yet each one of us must create a spark in order to join the spiritual flame. No passivity is possible any longer, as Ben-Aharon showed in his book The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, because the Gods will no longer just give us the answer or the necessary forces. Here he deepens the description of that Event that took place between Michaelic souls and the Christ Spirit in the Spiritual World from 1933-1945. “It is an important part of our work to connect the three events, the twilight of the gods, the twilight of humanity in the twentieth century and its possible resurrection in the twenty-first century. We must become ourselves the seeds of humanity’s future resurrection.” (p 43) 

In order to contribute to this resurrection, new karmic plans were developed in the spiritual world in a spiritual council from 1945-1955. The reincarnation of a small band of Aristotelian souls who remained loyal to Rudolf Steiner was postponed, and instead a small group of the Platonic souls incarnated in the 2nd half of the 20th century. The task was now shifted into a small pioneering band of Platonic souls to use their high spiritual faculties to consciously develop a spiritual scientific path from human consciousness to the new Christ Event and Rudolf Steiner’s continued work in the Michael School. Only then could some of the Aristotelian souls begin to incarnate. Ben-Aharon’s work on the Christ Event has made this new co-working between reincarnating Aristotelians and Platonists possible in the 21st century. A community must now create a living etheric heart organ to pass down and expand during the whole Michael Age. The Michaelic Spirits are now working in an intensified way to help such honest community building work, such as through the new Reversed Cultus Ben-Aharon is developing. These heart practices are already becoming a reality in the Global Event College and the School of Spiritual Science (established in 2009).  In this book, we get the rare glimpse into the growth of a Michaelic esoteric school in real time. The book is a call for inspired people to join this work. 

Ben-Aharon also shows with uplifting vitality how the Michaelic movement can be resurrected today through the forces of the new work with the spirit of Vidar and the Etheric Christ, “We must take every physical word and deed of Rudolf Steiner and carry them to the presently living and active etheric world, where they can be transformed by the real spiritual events of the last century. Then we must let them be transformed accordingly to activate their spiritual etheric essence in our work with each other here and now.” (p 98)  This book is truly an esoteric study, and there are other important disclosures and hints that cannot be outlined here.

The Afterword describes the world-changing esoteric deeds that were accomplished by the Christ Being from the end of the 19th century, through 1933 and up to 1998, where He not only was spiritually crucified or suffocated, but actually buried and held firm inside His tomb by the evil deeds of humans. Indeed the Angel of the Christ was so wounded, that He needed the second half of the 20th century to be healed by the deeds of human love on the Earth. This intensification and healing of the Christ can also lead to humanity’s resurrection and the growth of a new spiritual consciousness, community, and love in the 21st century. Christ speaks, “The offer of all my love, life and light is constantly streaming into your etheric hearts. Take my offer into your whole being actively, encourage and empower yourself and your fellow humans! Unite with my cosmic deeds of healing and redemption, and join my angelic hosts, to build together the new Earthly-Human Sun!” (p 307) 

Is Ben-Aharon’s work truly connected to the continued work of Rudolf Steiner and the school of Michael in the spiritual world? Yes! This is indeed so, based on my own independent spiritual research and modest experience. The heart-beat of Michael and Christ pulsates through every word of this book, and for me this book is everything!  I mean that this book is a true and clear testimony that the Michaelic movement since the death of Rudolf Steiner is developing further, and that a spiritual scientific path exists to actualize such a new school of Love on the earth in the 21st century. I would recommend that everyone study this book as preparation for the celebration of the centennial of the Christmas Conference and for many years afterwards.

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

A simile to help you become conscious of the various layers and faculties active in thinking and imagining - The Painter and Her Canvas

 

                                                        Painting by Andreea Dumata 

1. Carefully observe a plant or an animal. Make a clear mental image. Make sure you clearly think through the idea of what this plant or animal is. Make all of your normal associations of the ideas and memories that are linked with this plant or animal. 

2. Now let us start to carefully separate the different parts or layers or elements of what you just accomplished while thinking and perceiving in normal consciousness. 

Look at the mental image or memory image of the animal in your mind's eye. Consider these aspects: 

i. The CANVAS - What are the qualities of this substance on which you 'paint' this memory image?  In other words, what is the canvas of memory made of? What are its qualities? 

ii. The BRUSHES - How do you change the colors or size of a mental image or memory picture? How do you change the angle you are viewing it from? What tools do you use to paint on the canvas? 

iii. The PAINT container - Where does the memory image come from? If you change its color or background, how do you dip your cognitive tools or brushes into the paint can? Where are the paint cans stored?  How do the brushes actually work? 

iv. The PAINTER's HANDS - When you rotate or enlarge or change the colors of a mental picture, or a memory image, what 'hands' are you using to turn this image? What are the acts of will that are working with the brushes?

v. The MODEL - How do you know what you are painting on the canvas of memory? How do you know you are still thinking about a duck and not an eagle? How do you compare the memory image on the canvas from the MEANING of the original Model you are using as your reference?  

vi. LOOKING at the MODEL vs. PAINTING - What different activities are taking place when you rotate or enlarge or alter the memory image VS when you understand, see, recognize, and think of the pure content or IMAGELESS concept that controls the meaning of the painting?  (In my Husserl book, I discuss this at length). 

vii. WHY are you PAINTING?  Justify the moral reasons why you are painting this image in the first place? What justifies your right to paint this image or investigate the cognitive apparatus at all? This marks the difference between spiritual-moral research and mere subjective, intellectual, or psychological playing. (I discuss this in my Resurrection of Thinking book). 

viii. The PAINTER - Where is the real painter? Is she inside your body? Where does she take up a vantage point to invite new models to sit? How does he conceive of new paintings? Is the painter being painted?  Are there other painters watching from the corners of the art studio?  How do they affect the painting?  

ix. ERASE the painting and WAIT with devotion. What arises here?  In regard to Dumata's painting above - what is inside the Red light that shines through the Door in the woods? Who paints the painter? (For more, see Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's works). 

Repeat and enjoy! 

Podcast (Against Everything) with Conner Habib: Scott E. Hicks on Thinking as a Path of Spiritual Development

Against Everything Podcast featuring Conner Habib and Scott E. Hicks

I had a great time talking with Conner on a variety of subjects. The topics of his podcasts are quite wide-ranging and he is a unique and interesting guy. Check it out!