If click on the following link and then scroll down to "Turning Towards the Spirit"

you will find an interview with Dr. Ben-Aharon.  Dr. Ben-Aharon has played a massive role in shaping my understanding and practice of  The Philosophy of Freedom and has served as a personal mentor and inspiration.  So I'm biased, big time.  But I think this interview offers much food for thought. So:

http://www.ybaschool.co.il/eng/index.htm    (See Below)

I'd love to read any comments,

Jeff
p.s. by the way, this interview is now in the paperback edition of Jesiaha's "The New Experience of the Supersensible"

(Modified translation of the original German interview of Dr. Jesaiah Ben-Aharon by Thomas Stöckli at Christmas 2000, published in “Das Goetheanum” no. 7/2001, Dornach, Switzerland.)

Dr. Jesaiah Ben-Aharon,in 1993 and 1995 you came out with two unique publications about supersensible research. As founder of the Harduf Anthroposophical Community in Israel since 1980, you are deeply engaged in social questions. What moves you at present?

In the summer of 2000 I returned from a two-year Sabbatical in the USA. Since returning to Israel I have continued to be active in the main fields of activity in which I have been engaged now for some 30 years. On the one hand, I am working on a constant transformation and updating of the anthroposophical work; on the other, I am trying again and again to deepen and expand my engagement with Israeli and global social reality. As always, I am constantly moving back and forth between the two.

In the anthroposophical work I shape my way of working in such a manner that it allows me to practice and experience what is thought, said, and done in a living way. I do not want to add to the otherwise rather widespread intellectualism or traditionalism, but rather I wish to encourage other people and myself to find and realise our spiritual and human freedom and independence. This means that in meeting one another we strive together to take responsibility for shaping our coming together in a fully human way, be it in spiritual study and practice, in the arts, esoteric work, or above all in any social context. I take seriously the fact that anthroposophy is 100 years old and aging fast. The problem of how to make it young again, without compromising its seriousness and depth, is a very challenging one. People that have joined our work through the years are mostly pioneers seeking fresh ways of renewal, the resurrection and transformation of old to new, and the realisation of wholly new impulses.

This process of becoming young again is based on developing experience, knowledge, and practices that support individual and institutional becoming. This means understanding and practicing the events of initiation in daily, cultural, social, and historical life of the present time. Our task today is to deepen, enlarge, and transform anthroposophy through this human-becoming of initiation, an initiation which is in full swing in contemporary daily human life. The events and processes of everyday life are already an unconscious initiation, and anthroposophy can become a worthy part of this stream of becoming. Of course, you can only offer your living experience of this initiation if you dare consciously to undertake it in your own daily life.

I am truly enthusiastic about shaping each meeting as an experiment and experience in which it is possible to enter fully into what I call “the event.” Any fixed and dead situation can be opened up and can become a place of resurrection and transformation of the individual, group, and institution. In the other person I want to experience the real “other”- the really unknown - and I want to enjoy what is fresh and unrecognised in her, the untraditional and unintellectualised meeting with the real world, its beings, and events.

How do you experience the current situation in Israel?

The current situation here is the same as the general human situation, only more visible than in Europe. While Middle Europe is only slowly beginning to awaken from the post-traumatic coma of the Second World War, here everything is very awake and alive. Here too, if we want to live a truly human, social, and spiritual life, we must consciously practice the awakening experience of meeting the other in yourself and discovering yourself through the other person. Confrontation with the other provokes deeper and more truthful self-knowledge of ourselves, and thus brings to light the highest and the lowest in us. This can work miracles. To ever again and again only reflect yourself and what you already know is not only the most boring and uncreative thing in the world, it also blocks the way to meeting the living present as an event, recognising the future potential in the event, and actualising it. The future flows from the yet unknown world. Only in my “wholly other” that becomes through me can I become anew, be resurrected, and redeemed from my sleepiness, forgetfulness, and - socially speaking - irresponsibility.

What I do not yet know, let alone love, is my only salvation! Here too it is necessary, at least as a first step, to plunge courageously into real life. As long as the Israelis cannot bring themselves to meet the Palestinians as their real Others, as long as they want to continue to play the modern Western, highly unsocial and tragic game, they are destroying, and will continue to destroy, Israel and Palestine. They will meet only their doubles in endless conflict, because this is what happens if you avoid meeting your true self through the true other: you see only your double and you fight him, believing you are fighting “the enemy.” Truly you are fighting only your lower, unrecognised self. This is called suicide, and this is what Europe committed itself to in the 20^th century. Can Israel avoid this fate? Can the Palestinians avoid it? Both will certainly not avoid it if they continue to meet in the way they have done to this day, through mutual destruction and suffering. In the end, after all the bloodshed, the other will still be there, waiting for acceptance, integration, and appreciation.

Can you say something about yourself and your activities in Israel?

In 1980 I founded the anthroposophical community of Kibbutz Harduf as an integrated part of the Kibbutz movement. This was done because I wanted anthroposophy to become a living stream inside Israeli society, not an exported, foreign element. The Kibbutz movement was then the best portal of entry, because it has been - and still is, though in a different way - an important social and spiritual movement in Israel since the beginning of the 20^th century. In Harduf we have prepared fertile human and spiritual soil that harbours all anthroposophical initiatives and institutions. It has become a true microcosm of all the various achievements of the anthroposophical movements in the course of the 20^th century.

It was, however, also clear to me in the 1980’s and 1990’s that both movements were getting old and tired: the Kibbutz movement socially and anthroposophy spiritually. Both have to a certain extent at least lost much of their original significance for Israel and the world, because they neglected to update themselves socially and spiritually, and haven’t sufficiently transformed themselves in the course of the last hundred years. I realised early on that we lack both an updated social as well as spiritual vision and strategy to offer the 21^st century.

The most important social task for me today is to engage anthroposophy, not as a separated fraction or sector, but rather as part of our general society as a whole, in living dialogue with everything else that is of real value. Therefore today, I strive to develop what we call “tri-sector” relationships and cooperation, as a new societal strategy. This means, for example, to try to engage the so-called third social sector in such tri-sector processes. This third sector is the cultural-spiritual sector, and it is the one in which anthroposophy and its various institutions are rooted. I believe that a new anthroposophical movement will come to life in this manner, renewing itself in the process, while also renewing society as a whole. Anthroposophy can become socially relevant only if it is participating in such threefold social processes as part of a new global and local “trialogue” between the economic, political, and cultural-spiritual sectors. I am convinced that this is the only way through which new Michaelic impulses can flow into society in the 21^st century.

Alongside my other duties I constantly work to support these initiatives by helping to create an effective network both globally and in Israel itself.

Could you say something about your family?

My parents immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. My father, Yitzhak, was born near Chernivtsi, Bukovina (part of Romania between the World Wars, now in the Ukraine) and my mother, Miriam, came from Russia. Both were pioneers in the Israeli Kibbutz, Workers’, and Labour movements. They co-founded Kibbutz Giva’t H’aim (meaning “Hill of Life”) in 1933. I was born there in 1955 and so I grew up in this idealistically motivated socialist-humanistic-Zionistic community of immigrants and refugees from almost all countries of the world, a true microcosm of the Israeli society then and today. Its social, cultural, and educational life was based on an atheist and socialist ideology. My mother was a teacher of art and literature, working all her life with youth and adult education. Both of my parents lived lives committed to the survival of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. My father’s biography is an exemplary individual picture of the Jewish and human history of Europe and Israel in the course of the 20^th century as a whole. (He lived from 1906 until 2006). He was the leader of the “Histadrut,” the Israeli head organisation of the workers’ movement and unions, the Minister of Transportation in Ben-Gurion’s last government, and a life-long member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. He was well known and appreciated in Israel, including people with very different political and ideological views. Through my upbringing, therefore, I was always strongly connected to Israel’s social and political life, to the destiny and vocation of this land and this country. Though he was far from being (in his conscious mind!) even close to anthroposophy, my father was always eager to hear as many lectures of mine as he could attend, and he supported the founding and development of Harduf and my engagement in Israeli social life with all his heart forces and energy!

How did it happen that you put the experience of the Higher Self of Humanity (called Christ in Christian traditions) at the centre of your spiritual path, as you presented in your book The New Experience of the Supersensible?

Can you describe how you experienced these spiritual experiences?

At the beginning of my twenty-first year of life I had a supersensible experience that transformed my entire life. In the years before, especially between seventeen and twenty, I was struggling to find meaning in life. I was, on the one hand, half-consciously certain that there must be a different dimension to life, but on the other hand, nothing in my surroundings seemed to suggest such a possibility. Though as a child I had been an eager and fast learning boy, I left school during the tenth grade because I had lost all interest in conventional, high school learning. In the course of these rather rich and adventurous years, I was gradually experiencing an existential youth crisis. At a certain point I actually remember telling myself: if there’s no other meaning to life than this conventional and meaningless routine, I would rather die than grow up to be like that!

Can you describe this experience in some detail?

After some remarkable but unconscious preparatory soul- and life-experiences and processes, I felt one early evening of spring 1975 that the inner and outer walls surrounding and blocking my soul were beginning to crumble down. I felt that my entire soul was opening up and that a stream of unknown life of great beauty and intensity was flowing in and through me. It was a true revelation that continued off and on for a whole week. Even if I were to write dozens of books, I would not be able to describe what went on in and through me at this time. So I decided to write only one book… But the central and continuous event can be described rather abstractly thus: I found myself living together in the company of a spiritual being and presence through which I was actually becoming my true Self. I was at one and the same time becoming myself, witnessing my becoming, and participating consciously - though in a wholly different state of consciousness - in my own supersensible, spiritual becoming process. I became increasingly aware that this being was actually “teaching” me something, a kind of special way of self-transformation and becoming. This becoming was at the same time cosmic, human, historical, and part of an infinite stream of life. He/She showed me what life was all about in this sense. It was the birth process of an identity as a Spiritual Self.

Many years of study and research were required in order to understand this mystery. He/She demonstrated it by taking my normal Self into its living stream of infinite becoming. I experienced how my Self was being born out of supersensible, spiritual reality, how it is constantly transforming itself in this reality, and how it grows and changes in this stream of becoming.

It was my most real “birthday” (actually “birthweek”) ever, because my real I was born there. During this birth and becoming process I learned that the “I” is a being of becoming, of transformation, of the mystery of “die and become.” In this regard I feel myself today, as then, a newborn beginner, ever ready to start again to experience and research this mystery. And I know this will always be so, as long as I don’t forget “myself.”

And how would you characterise this Higher Self being?

It is a being of becoming and transformation. It can transform, resurrect, redeem everything and “make everything new”: death into life, evil into good. The experience inspires the direct evidence and conviction that there is absolutely nothing outside of this becoming, healing, transforming stream and that if human life is indeed part of it - as in reality it is - it is able to transform human, social, and even political reality. This transformation process must, however, also be understood as operating within time and history, maturing in us only gradually and through many difficulties, because it is such a new and unknown process.

And why did you later call this supersensible experience "the knowledge drama of the second coming”?

Kindly consider that I experienced what I have just described without any previous concepts. I had no pre-conceived mental images to think in the normal way what I went through. The only texts that supported me during this week was a first time reading from the Old and the New Testaments, especially certain passages from the Prophets and Chapters 13-17 from the Gospel of St. John. I was led to read these passages by the Being referred to in them. I could recognise the same Presence coming to meet me out of them as the One I experienced. This gave me the only mental hold and grounding that I had in order to grasp the otherwise purely supersensible experiences. The Biblical passages and the purely spiritual experiences supported and complemented each other. Kindly consider also that before this event I never got to know these passages at all, because as I told you, I had been raised in a secular Israeli Kibbutz where all Jewish religious (as well as Christian) traditions had been omitted.

After the spiritual I-birth described above, I lived in two separate realities: in the physical and in the spiritual. It was like living in one house on both of its two storeys at the same time, between which self-conscious bridges were not yet built. While being on the one floor, the memory of my identity on the other was indistinct. I had to build “stairs” or a “bridge” of consciousness and cognition in order to link my “two Selves” together.

This bridge-building process was and is for me the knowledge drama as such, of anthroposophy as such. And anthroposophy is alive today if it also becomes a path of knowledge that creates real spiritual-scientific foundations for understanding the becoming process and deepening identification of humanity with its Higher Self. This is the true reality behind the often misunderstood and misused concept of the “Second Coming” among Christians, the “Messiah” among Jews, and the “Imam Mahadi” among Muslims.

The actual knowledge drama process in my life began a year later, when, as part of my anthroposophical studies, I read Rudolf Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Freedom for the first time. This was the second decisive life-transforming event for me. What was so striking was the fact that, for the first time, I could experience the same spiritual light, until then known to me only as the spirit light illuminating my spiritual experience, as part and parcel of my thinking activity. Then I knew what my spiritual task would be from that point on: to create a bridge from this thinking spiritual activity to the supersensible Higher Self experience. Obviously at that time I did not know that this would require more than fifteen years of daily anthroposophical labour, research, obstacles, struggles, and hard trials on so many levels of my life.

Through the intuitive activity of my thoughts that lit up in my soul I could for the first time in normal, daily consciousness develop, by means of my own spiritual activity, the same spiritual light that up to that point I had known only as supersensible light in another, supersensible state of consciousness. Now I was able to kindle it through my self-conscious activity in the physical world. From that point on, I could work alternatively from each floor to the other, from both sides of the “tunnel” towards each other, until I could bring the two ever closer. Finally, when I was thirty-five or thirty-six, the supersensible bridge or tunnel construction work “met in the middle” and the working parties from both sides could meet and celebrate the completion of the bridge. Only then could I think it through to the end and begin to write it down in physical words on physical paper.

This “bridge-building work” is described in this book.This spiritual-scientific work enabled me to enter the supersensible realm independently and “recapitulate” consciously what I experienced as a young man. This research work led me also to investigate some central supersensible problems of the history of the 20^th century that enabled me to show the power of transformation within the history of humanity as a whole. This is what I put down in my first little published book, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century (Temple Lodge, London, 1993, second printing 1997).

Can you characterise the method of your spiritual research?

It is important to abolish positivistic and materialistic notions of spiritual experience and spiritual research. One can never “possess” them. A true spiritual experience is only present in its full actuality: in its living process of incarnating, becoming realized spirit presence in the living present, excarnating, and disappearing. Otherwise, it is merely a shadowy and dead concept, an empty shell, a corpse of its true being. Also, one cannot wilfully “command” the comings and goings of such experiences. It is always a grace and a gift, offered by the supersensible being that one meets. Such a being comes to meet one if this being so wishes, if this is part of the will of the spiritual worlds. The earthly-human participant can only strive to prepare a suitable, potential meeting place, to which he or she can humbly and joyfully invite the other, and then await the advent of the real spirit event.

I developed in the course of my research various ways to do this, differentiated according to the specific needs of my investigation or practical social work. For the moment it will suffice to indicate that only in the purity of actively created nothingness and in the purposefully established state of “un-knowing” could I expect a renewal and recapitulation of true supersensible experience. I have to be very active and precise in order to create the “immaculate” virginity that is the uncontaminated, non-intellectual place, to which I may humbly invite the supersensible other. This is a strict scientific requirement if we are to be able to approach the spiritual.

Supersensible beings cannot be grasped by our brain-bound intellect because it is simply too coarse, too hardened, too proud and loveless. Of course we should strive to learn, to think, and to understand the world as deeply as we can. For the purpose of conducting spiritual research, however, we must, in freedom, free ourselves from this acquired knowledge. What is essential in learning is not the remembered sum of concepts preserved in memory, but rather the creative soul forces and faculties developed through the activity of study. The creative faculties developed through study cannot be retained in memory, but can be reactivated if memory is intentionally suppressed. No true supersensible event, process, or being would come to meet me as long as I block its way by means of my already existing concepts and mental pictures, habits, and routines.

If we develop our thinking in a living, creative way, giving-up and forgetting its results, thinking will come back to us from our spirit outside. Because we freed it from our possession, because we have demonstrated our loyalty and love to its true being, selflessly releasing its from its bondage- in us- to Ahriman, the spirit begin of thinking shows its thankfulness in a remarkable manner. While we lose it intentionally, it comes back from the world and finds us! That is, if we learn to hold back the finished, formed results contained in the intellect, we discover that we are richly rewarded: the supersensible may reappear fresh and alive, and at the same time fully irradiated and transparent with an inner light of cosmic thinking. This thinking that shines through our imaginations is “our” cosmic thinking, or better, the revelation of the thinking of the Higher Self. That is to say, the giving up of intellectualism allows true thinking to be resurrected as a supersensible cosmic-human, human-cosmic process. Truly modern and spiritually-scientific imaginative perceptions and pictures are always “thoughtful.” We don’t have to supply them with external interpretation in order to understand them in the actual event. They explain themselves much better then we would ever be able to do, and yet, the light of thinking that irradiates them is our own freed and redeemed thinking. We feel our true Self active therein; it is a living immanence free from any transcendental residues of external spiritual or metaphysical elements.

For me this method became the foundation of developing research and creativity in spiritual science and art and in social life, as I pointed out above. Anthroposophy may become in this manner a path and a method, in order to actualise the spiritual. No actualisation of a real event is possible unless we learn to practice spirit-remembering, spirit-faithfulness (called spirit-awareness in the second verse of the Foundation Stone Meditation), and spirit-beholding, as stages of actualising the etheric meeting with the Higher Self of humanity.

Can you elaborate further on the “die and become” process that you describe at length in your book?

In the short space of this interview it is hardly possible to give more than a couple of characteristic indications. First, I have to bring my soul-condition into a kind of “threshold-condition.” This happens through the transformation of thinking indicated above. I have to start at that point at which I actively experience how thinking dies in my everyday cognition. I actively seek and actualise the place and time where thinking dies. This sought-after “cross” and “tomb” of thought is a pictorial expression for this process of bringing to consciousness the sacrificial death process that the living being of thinking undergoes in order to become available for our daily, normal, modern cognition. Any so-called “living thinking” that does not originate in this stage is but a Luciferic self-enjoyment of sorts. For me, this is a sacred place of the knowledge drama of true spiritual science. I really have to learn how to “put myself in this grave,” in order to become inwardly identified with thinking's passion. In so doing, I gradually learn to love death as I would love a good teacher and helpful friend of the path - as paradoxically as this may sound. Death is my helper and teacher because it teaches me how to free myself from the unconscious - and hence given - thinking, feeling and willing. For only out of death comes the resurrection of the spiritual soul, cognition, higher consciousness and new social capacities. Therefore not only do I avoid “overcoming” death by any wilful act on my part, but I actually invite its presence and action. I experience death within the region of my own soul and life forces and learn to actualize it within myself and on myself. I learn to be active there, at the grave of cognition, wide awake, alert, and poised; I gratefully acknowledge and accept the death process of my soul and the tired, old, used, habitual self that it harbours. Death then is my helping master teacher and it shows me a way to the threshold that only it knows. Only there does the true, lucid, supersensible life begin to emerge.

And now one has to imagine that one awakens gradually at dusk, into the twilight between worlds, and increasingly draws near to one’s “night-being.” This being is indeed a being that dwells in another dimension of reality. This reality, in comparison with ours, is “super real,” so intense and full of life and substance that our daily consciousness immediately fades away, sinking into deep unconscious sleep, when we encounter it. (This happens, after all, each night). The living being of death is the only power that can transform the power of cognition and can awaken far deeper forces of awareness than we possess in ordinary consciousness. Now, because one has befriended death, one can intensify one’s powers of wakefulness, while at the same time lowering somewhat the intensity of this “super-reality” of the spiritual, and thereby consciously wake up within the abysmal depth of supersensible reality. There one experiences a birth of one’s Spiritual Self that, as Steiner put it, “comes to meet you from the grey abyss of the spirit.” Yes, this place is indeed grey-black to begin with, if thought, discovered, and explored consciously. Later it lights up and the great celebrations can begin. But the way there is difficult and somewhat hazardous.

Obviously, like in the earthly world, a newborn spirit baby needs grownups to tend for it, feed it, and serve as living examples of the faculties it has to develop as its matures. This is also the case in the supersensible realm. Thus, in the spiritual world we find the Higher Self, in its etheric (living, radiant) garment, as mother-father-midwife and teacher. As the “firstborn” of all humans to achieve the ultimate goal of earthly evolution, this Higher Self being is the one who can best teach us what we are going to become. He/She is the great teacher of future becoming, and an expert master of the mysteries of the “die and become” processes. In and through him/her, our newborn baby Spirit Self can safely learn to stand up and walk, talk, think, and learn to experience and gradually come to regard itself as an independent “I” in the midst of supersensible reality.

Now it will be our no less difficult task to learn how to bring together and bridge both sides of our two selves - the “day-self” and the “night-self” - to coordinate and link them into relations of mutual recognition, help, and co-operation, because we want to realise a new cultural life, new communities, and a tri-sector social order on the earth as humans in the age of the consciousness soul. The Higher Self is the model of all true future community, and the centre around which already in the course of this age, human beings will learn to come together in the spirit of true cooperation, love, and freedom.

How can spiritual experiences and results of spiritual research be adequately communicated?

You touch here on one of the most painful wounds of a spiritual scientist! Spiritual research is a living, most dynamic, initiatory process. But then it must be communicated… If communication is done via living talk - dialogue – in a suitable soul atmosphere of true love and trust between humans, it is still possible to convey something of the true experience and reality involved. When it comes to the written text, however, things become difficult indeed. Texts, as Paul and Steiner said, kill the spirit. This is, of course, necessary as I indicated above, because transforming death in our age is a prerequisite of wide-awake spiritual cognition. And, of course, writing is still necessary as a means of keeping records in memory. However, the written, dead word must be constantly resurrected, and this can occur only if social life becomes actualised as living event, in the intimate, dialogic sharing of life experiences. That which is most important can only be communicated from one human heart to another, and what is written should only function as a reminder: “there, see, there’s a new possibility for experience, dialogue, event. Now forget the book and begin to live the true life…”

We are ripe enough today to be able to experience how inter-human dialogue in itself is already a spiritual reality. But we are still afraid to go to the place of uncovering our true voice, because we know that if this develops, we may enter into true initiation processes and events. Many still fear this, although they may write or speak a great deal about it! I am actively engaged in the problem of how dialogue can become an essential life-giving element of spiritual research and the various applications of anthroposophy in social and cultural life. In particular, my endeavours in the field of creating appropriate forms for the School of Spiritual Science have showed me again and again how far we are from the true community-building practices of the near future.

With what hopes are you looking to the future?

It became clear to me that since the beginning of the 21^st century the new impulse of Michael relies on our being able consciously to unite the earthly form of anthroposophy, as inherited physically from the last century, with the supersensible stream of Michael, which has gone through great transformations in the course of history since Steiner’s death in early 1925. First of all, anthroposophy will only become relevant for this wholly new century if and only if we learn to actualise living human and spiritual experience and research of the truly living event of becoming. Secondly, the new work can only spring to life via the periphery. Centralised organisation is today absolutely Ahrimanic. In smaller and greater connections, the updated, currently developing Michaelic spirituality of the time spirit Michael has sown the seeds of the future on the whole planet during the course of the 20^th century. As long as the “centre”- all centres, starting from my small dictatorial ego - dominates social and spiritual life, Ahriman will continue to be satisfied with us, as he was so tragically during the course of the 20^th century. Resurrection forces, the harvest of the 21^st, will grow and mature only through self-less, decentralised, global, “peripheral,” cosmopolitan, and all-encompassing human capacities and institutions. This will be worthy of the second century of the Michaelic age.

This means, therefore, that many important ideas and many personalities from all corners of the earth and from unexpected cultural, social, national, and economic peripheries will become “central” bearers of true future impulses, and that we, the western-centrists, will have to listen to our own decentred selves, if the calamity of Western, Euro-American civilisation of the 20^th century would not be repeated on a global scale in the 21^st.

Let us be open, quick, humble, networked, very flexible, and prompt with our esoteric faculties and our social and cultural institutions, because “He comes as a thief in the night,” and we are still fast asleep. Then we will have our hands full to integrate the re-enlivened anthroposophy with the many strong, new social and spiritual forces that we can already meet in ourselves everywhere.

Dr. Jesaiah Ben-Aharon is married to Adira and has a daughter and a son. Founder, since 1980, of the anthroposophical Kibbutz Harduf, where he and his family reside. Doctoral studies 1995-1998 at Haifa University, obtaining a Ph.D. in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Co-founder of Global Network for Threefolding (GN3: www.globenet3.org), Activists for Israeli Civil Society (ICS: www.civilsociety.co.il), and of a School for Spiritual Science (www.ybaschool.co.il).