A review of "The New Experience of the Supersensible: The Anthroposophical Knowledge Drama of Our Time".
Jesaiah (Yeshayahu) Ben-Aharon is an Israeli
Anthroposophist who has authored a string of books on varied subjects. This one
is a very in-house treatise, dealing with the Second Coming of Christ from an
Anthroposophical perspective. I admit that I didn't fully grasp it myself. I
*did* notice, however, that Ben-Aharon isn't a fully orthodox follower of
Rudolf Steiner, but constantly amends (and perhaps changes?) Steiner's message,
but mostly in ways relevant only to committed Anthroposophists. The author even
claims that his reference notes, containing Steiner proof-texts, is supposed to
be taken ironically! But sure, I may have misunderstood something, not being
versed in “irony in Goethe's sense”…
Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, believed that humanity was slowly and steadfastly evolving in a cosmic-spiritual sense towards higher and higher forms. Jesus, or rather the Christ-being, played a central part in this evolution. The Mystery of Golgotha rejuvenated the Earth and its etheric aura, while the Second Coming of Christ (taking place invisibly in the etheric) will give humanity a further push forward. The Second Coming has already taken place (around 1933). Our present goal, according to Ben-Aharon, is therefore to experience “The Knowledge-Drama of the Second Coming”, by which he means an advanced meditation technique known as Michaelic Yoga, only described once in the entire book. By this technique, we can somehow build a spiritual bridge of light across Ahriman's abyss (Ahriman is the “devil” of Steiner's system) and unite the material and spiritual to one unity within ourselves. Or maybe not, since the author also suggests that we have to decouple our etheric bodies from the physical ones!
Steiner believed that Christ would return “in the etheric” (here a reference to a subtle energy field), but Ben-Aharon suggests that he never really left – the second coming being an event during which *humans* learn to perceive Christ in the etheric. Today, we should go even further, and try to see how the etheric Christ is born in the more advanced astral sphere. Michaelic Yoga was supposedly a new technique developed by Steiner during the last years of his life (it's named after the archangel Michael, the supposed ruler of our age), and in some ways transcends the more traditional approaches delineated by Steiner in his books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Outline of Esoteric Science”. Steiner strikes me as a person who constantly emphasized that humans don't lose their personality during occult work, and some of his approaches were almost intellectual, while Ben-Aharon seems to suggest the exact opposite. There is a lot of disturbing talk about “living Death” in this book, and it seems that your consciousness has to be extinguished in order for the bridge of light to appear, a process often compared to actual dying.
In the end, it's not clear what the point of these exercises really is, except to create intentional communities and rejuvenate the Anthroposophical Society. In another book, Ben-Aharon calls for alter-globalization and three-folding, a kind of decentralized political system proposed by Rudolf Steiner. As for the process of spiritual evolution, it's extremely long and won't culminate until a distant eon into the future…
What struck me most when reading this book is that Steiner's system (or Ben-Aharon's creative reworking of the same) is extremely complex, to the point of being unwieldy, and also feels scholastic in a bad sense of that term. Instead of trying to understand Goethean epistemology (or irony) as reworked by Dr Steiner, or the overlapping world-periods proposed by the same man, I get the feeling that these people should just get out and do some bhakti yoga! Who knows, maybe that will get them in touch faster with the Christ…
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