The New Experience of the Supersensible

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity: The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner: An Esoteric Study by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon; Temple Lodge Publishing, 2020; 338 pp.

review by John Beck

Spiritual investigation, when earnestly pursued, is not a matter of juggling with ideas or words, but works its way into the actual sphere where the spiritual world becomes perceptible. —Rudolf Steiner, Zurich, 9 October 1918, GA 182

Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon (originally introduced by his publisher as Jesaiah Ben-Aharon) has been a pathfinder and a door-opener for the anthroposophical movement for thirty years now. His unique place has been evident in three areas of work: his accounts of spiritual developments since the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1925, his broad penetration of contemporary culture beyond the anthroposophical movement, and his demonstration of paths of advanced personal development.

David Adams reviewed his 2016 book Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality in the spring 2018 being human, calling it “a most extraordinary book—probably the most extraordinary book that has been written within anthroposophy since the original work of Rudolf Steiner.” Now The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity brings into focus two more elements: further spiritual timelines of the 21st century, and community development as a necessary support for individual progress.

Two paths in spiritual research

There have been a number of anthroposophists of outstanding capacities since the founding generation around Rudolf Steiner. It is valuable to stop and make a list of personal encounters sometimes: so many bright spirits for whom we can be grateful! They bring their own gifts and karma, of course. There was already a divide between Rudolf Steiner’s two closest advisors, Marie Steiner with the trusted judgment, and Ita Wegman with strength of initiative.

On the path of cautious judgment we have had decades of valuable work on what Rudolf Steiner had been able to bring, punctuated recently by his 150th birthday and centenary years of mystery dramas, eurythmy, threefolding, Waldorf education, anthroposophic medicine. Now in 2023-2025 we reach the last centenary observations of Steiner’s work, when something new must be made of the original impulse. We’re not still waiting for the teacher to return, are we? Will we be able to make really new beginnings?

The devoted initiative into the future seems essential now, and Ben-Aharon follows that road which was generally not taken by the Anthroposophical Society, following the simple line of Dr. Wegman, “I am for going forward.”

Evolution: the essential question

Steiner’s research unfolded in many directions, and was an extension of modern science, not the creation of another new religion. His research into questions for which there are religious revelations and traditions was immensely clarifying, bringing religions into a new complementary relationship across time and space. In the book Christianity as Mystical Fact and scores of lectures he presented his view that the cosmic spiritual being called “the Christ” is the ultimate source of human individuality, and that His incarnation brought a renewed impulse for future human evolution.

The Christian Bible tells of the return of Christ, a “second coming” out of the clouds. Steiner reported that this would be a return in our time and not in a physical body. It would be in the realm of formative life forces which he called “the etheric,” for which the clouds’ fluent formations are a highly suitable image.

Ben-Aharon’s debut in the early 1990s involved Rudolf Steiner’s prediction that this “reappearance of Christ in the etheric” would begin to be apparent from the year 1933—nineteen centuries after the resurrection. Anthroposophists have acknowledged the central importance of this statement. 1

1 For the 2010 centenary of Steiner’s announcement, there was a very special conference in Austin, Texas, “bathed in the art of eurythmy and brought to life through scenes from Rudolf Steiner’s first mystery drama, The Portal of Initiation, lectures by US General Secretary MariJo Rogers, Judith Brockway, and Stephen Usher, [and] a projective geometry lesson with David Booth.”

This reappearance presents many challenges to anthroposophy. First, who understands who the Christ is? The name “Christ” invokes two thousand years of traditional religion with all its human and sectarian failings; the essential evolutionary role of the Christ for humanity becomes clear only via anthroposophy. Steiner even reported a second “astral” crucifixion of the Christ—in the realm of sympathies and antipathies—in the late 19th century. That was when Nietzsche stated that “God is dead and we have killed him.” Photo of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon by Torbjørn Eftestøl Since that time many Christians have sought only the historical man Jesus, along with grandiose fantasies of a physical “rapture” to restore humans’ relationships to the divine. But it is “the dying of Christ’s consciousness in the angelic sphere in the nineteenth century [that] will lead to the resurrection of direct Christ consciousness in the earthly sphere.” 2

2 Rudolf Steiner, GA 152, 2.5.1913, quoted in Ben-Aharon, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity (p. 299).

Ben-Aharon is able to follow this line of cosmic sacrifice. “The problem is that the concepts and representations of a ‘second crucifixion’ and ‘death by suffocation’ that Rudolf Steiner applies to the understanding of the second Mystery of Golgotha, no longer suffice when we continue to follow the Christ into the 30s and 40s. We need to find a way to describe how the expected resurrection of Christ’s consciousness among humanity was suppressed and reversed to its very opposite. It’s not another crucifixion or death by suffocation, but something entirely new. (p. 302)

A second problem of the reappearance is the “etheric” location: the realm of life, imperceptible to physical senses and so to most human beings even today. As Wegman and Steiner noted in Fundamentals of Therapy, “The phenomena of life have an altogether different orientation from those that run their course within the lifeless realm…” And “the etheric crucifixion and death of suffocation of the second Mystery of Golgotha took place in the etheric world; out of this etheric death the new resurrected direct Christ consciousness should have emerged from 1933 onward. But instead of this, the etherically resurrected Christ took into His heart the evil deeds inspired by the Beast that was individualized in those human souls who created the Gulags, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (p. 303).

And third, it is these evil deeds that are all too perceptible from 1933 onward, not the redemptive return we would expect from Rudolf Steiner’s research of “the Christ being” Who is the cosmic “I am,” the source of humanity, of human individuality, of our potential for freedom and loving creativity. Instead of new experiences of this reality, however, anthroposophists experienced in 1933 and beyond, along with the rest of humanity, the blossoming of seductive powers that deny humanity’s higher potential and seek violence and destruction. It may be relevant to note, however, that the work of Ita Wegman during this dreadful time included curative medicine and homes for children with “special needs” which blossomed in Scotland into the Camphill movement’s amazing community building. Wegman also, in 1934, after a severe illness, visited Palestine.

So Ben-Aharon’s first books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century and The New Experience of the Supersensible, gave anthroposophists in the 1990s their first and still unique account of how, behind the visible stage of history, the “reappearance of Christ in the etheric” had actually taken place. Discarnate human beings had been able to assist the Christ in creating a new sphere around the Earth, but incarnated individuals had not been able to take part...

Ben-Aharon then lectured and conversed with anthroposophists extensively in the US and Europe. He spent more than a year living with his family in upstate New York, and wrote America’s Global Responsibility, illuminating the spiritual struggle and potential of the USA.

In the late 1990s he began to collaborate with Nicanor Perlas of the Philippines and others in an internation- al civil society activist group called GlobeNet3. There were meetings in Manila, in Sweden at the end of 1999, in New York City around the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, where Perlas’ Shaping Globalization was distributed. In 2003 a freak airline strike in Israel prevented him from coming to give a keynote lecture at a conference in New York called “American Spirit, Values, and Power,” in the days just after the Iraq invasion. Other conferences were co-sponsored in Stuttgart by the cultural center Forum3, and in Tel-Aviv by the Jewish Agency, the civil society organization that had helped found Israel.

A 2007 lecture in Colmar, in Alsace, France, was published in the fall 2011 issue of being human as “Anthroposophy & Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue,” showing how philosophers like Gilles Deleuze had come prepared to engage anthroposophists, former Franciscans meeting former Dominicans, in the late 20th century,—but they had not been met. This was part of a broad cultural engagement which he elaborated in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art. It revealed new consciousness breaking out widely. Again, this was little noted in the anthroposophical movement at large, where we labor to take in Steiner’s work, full of awareness of his contemporary developments that ended in 1925.

What next? Plan B?

Ben-Aharon, who had a "Damascus experience" at age 21, went to the Goetheanum to absorb Steiner’s work. Ever since he has been shouldering, in a uniquely direct manner, the great question of anthroposophy: “What next?” Depending only on what Rudolf Steiner was able to bring before his death, we are left to argue whether the Christmas Foundation meeting succeeded or failed, whether the “culmination at the end of the century” happened or not, and whether the reappearance of the Christ took place—or perhaps not.

Behind the actuality of the return of Christ in the etheric Ben-Aharon found a necessary “plan B,” developed after 1945 out of that comprehensive spiritual movement for humanity which supported Rudolf Steiner in bringing anthroposophy. This is the school and initiatives of the Archangel Michaël, serving the Christ, the cosmic “I am.” It includes the special dynamic, revealed by Steiner only in 1924, between “Platonists” and “Aristotelians,” who since the 12th century have not been together in incarnation. Platonists were to join in earthly work in the late 20th century, when a culmination was to have happened.

After the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, new approaches were required. “After a thorough overview of the catastrophic situation of humanity and the earth was completed, the participants in the consultations had to say to themselves: Humans did not hear it! We must therefore prepare a new beginning on the earth, that will start where Rudolf Steiner had to end his mission much too soon in his previous earthly life, when the Christmas Foundation Conference impulse—which is all about the new Michaelic community building—was not accepted by his pupils.” (pp. 87-88)

For ten or twelve years now Ben-Aharon has been working with others in Israel, Germany, Scandinavia, and North America to develop the training and foster the kind of community which can inspire and support the striving of human beings, incarnated and discarnate. The new book speaks of working with the great “folk souls” of those four regions, and with the complementary gifts of Platonists and Aristotelians. To what end? To achieve a new individual consciousness that can persist in the “etheric”—and thereby to recognize the creation of the next-stage human future that is taking place there.

The anthroposophy given by Rudolf Steiner up to 1925 is already vast and challenging. Ben-Aharon might appear to be piling us up a second mountain atop this first one! But can there be any question that events, earthly and spiritual, and culture, and consciousness— have been evolving rapidly, and that radical challenges face us? Nicanor Perlas recently offered Humanity’s Last Stand out of his years of attention to advanced technology and artificial intelligence. His hope is that humanity, anthroposophists in particular, will pull together to prevent what I would call a “soft extinction”—where human control of events and decision-making and creativity is ceded more and more to advancing technology. In this “post-human” future the tech superstar Elon Musk, who thinks about big questions, has said that humans would be “like house cats.”

Ben-Aharon’s Cognitive Yoga confronts these challenges by illuminating the disciplines for “making yourself a new etheric body and individuality,” in that elevated region where Steiner placed the Foundation Stone of Christmas 1923. Now Twilight and Resurrection points to a community-building process that could sustain us as we go forward against heavy resistance.

The specific content of Twilight comes from five lectures in Sweden, February 12-17, 2019:

The Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healing: Personal Impersonal Observations of Biography

The Twilight of Humanity and Its Resurrection

The Universal Language of Michael and the Being of Rudolf Steiner

The Anthroposophical Movement in the Present

The Etheric Form is Alive

Afterword: The Resurrection of the Etheric Christ in the Twenty-first Century

There is much rich content, of course, but the call being sounded is for enthusiasm, even in its proper sense of “being filled with a god.” We are at a decisive moment in human becoming; can we be passive about that?

The usual idea is that feelings just come, and we select and prize the best ones. Feelings can be summoned, however, like those on the philosophers’ path Steiner mentions (implicit also in Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U”): summon wonder, summon reverence, envision the great cosmic harmony, and then with enthusiasm make the commitment to learn life-long from the fullness of reality.

Steiner had said that bringing spiritual experience into words is painfully difficult, and Ben-Aharon must face the same challenge; his reader may have to work harder than when reading Steiner. For instance, I find his occasional rhythmical strings of superlatives literally stunning, but does this echo the exalted experience of a thinking freed from the brain’s tireless grasping?

YBA often has supported his research by a vast body of footnotes linking to relevant statements of Steiner. Indeed, what he showed in Cognitive Yoga was exactly in a line with what runs from Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 through its 1918 republishing and onward, surfacing briefly all the way like a golden thread. Still, this is new stuff, and as with Steiner you may have the question, “Can anyone know such things?” Steiner noted that you cannot prove anthroposophy by material means, but asked us to notice how better and better it hangs together.

I recommend using the notes with their reassuring links to Steiner. And you could well just begin with the Afterword. Above all, to profit most from this book, overcome post-modern passivity and summon enthusiasm!

Personal-impersonal observations

There are also important biographical notes. One explains the author’s heavy work to overcome obstacles to a full spiritualization of his own physiology. This is in the first section, “The Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healing.” This goes far beyond the bounds of Steiner’s day—making clear that liberating our thought life, and then our feeling life—freeing the etheric body from the constraints of the physical head and heart—is not the whole task. Physiological liberation below the diaphragm will also be required; hence, Amfortas and Parsifal.

Another biographical note informs us about YBA's encounter with Sergei Prokofieff, leader of the Anthroposophical Society in post-Soviet Russia, a member of the Goetheanum leadership from 2001 until his untimely death at age sixty in 2014, and an author and speaker who clearly could “see” and research further in the fields Steiner had illuminated. (See Stephen Usher’s review in this issue.) After initial warmth, Ben-Aharon reports that Prokofieff concluded that YBA was sharing his own experience, which would be a wrong approach.

He said that I had put my spiritual experience in the center and used Anthroposophy to explain it. But one should, he added, humbly let Rudolf Steiner’s texts speak for themselves and keep one’s own experiences in the background. I was somewhat taken aback when I heard this. For me the center of my work was not at all my personal ‘I’ or ego, but the experience of the etheric Christ, which was for me an objective, supersensible experience, the perception and cognition of which took me 15 years of intense spiritual labor, to spiritualize and transform through the knowledge practice of spiritual science.

Therefore, I could only reply to his objection by saying that for me Anthroposophy comes about by means of the actual practice of spiritual science, whatever its subject matter is; therefore, from the beginning, it must be a result of our independent, fully individualized and free, empirical spiritual experience and research. Rudolf Steiner investigated his experiences of the real spiritual world, as a natural scientist investigates his or her experiences in the sense perceptible physical world.

I said that the experience of the etheric Christ, to which my research was dedicated, is an object of empirical spiritual experience, exactly as a plant, bird or star is for natural science. And this alone stood in the center of my research, my ‘I’ was not the center, but Christ’s etheric being was—and always is—the center, to the limited extent, naturally, that I can perceive and comprehend it through my individual spiritual activity. Moreover, Anthroposophy, when it is brought to bear on the new etheric appearance of the Christ—as Rudolf Steiner hoped for and expected from our time—is not put down when used to illuminate and explain Christ’s sublime mysteries, but is rather elevated and appears in this way in its true light and glory!

But it was clear that he had already made up his mind about the question, and that no further discussion about it was going to happen. And so indeed we departed, and I never met him again in physical life. This meeting was an important event because it determined the fate of my future involvement in the Anthroposophical Society and movement. —Twilight and Resurrection, p. 57-58

Ben-Aharon relates strongly to Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, and his approach seems justified by what Steiner himself wrote in a letter, 4th November, 1894, from Weimar, to Rosa Mayreder:

I know exactly where my book belongs within the stream of contemporary culture; I can show precisely where it joins on to Nietzsche’s line of thought; I can say with confidence that I have expressed the ideas that are lacking in Nietzsche. I may admit to my friends—but only to them—that I feel very sad that Nietzsche was never able to read my book. He would have taken it as what it is; in every line a personal experience. (emphasis added)

You tell me the book is too short, and that a whole book could have been made out of each chapter. I cannot contradict this remark in as far as it is objectively meant. The explanation lies in my own subjectivity. I don’t teach; I relate what I have inwardly experienced. I relate it as I have experienced it. Everything in my book is personally thought out. Also the form of the thoughts. Anyone with a teaching disposition could extend it. Perhaps I could, too, at the right time. For the time being I want to describe the biography of a soul wrestling its way up to freedom.

One cannot do anything for those who want to accompany one over cliffs and abysses. One must get oneself over. Too great a yearning for the goal burns within one for it to be possible to stop and explain to others how they can get across most easily. I believe that if I had simultaneously tried to find a suitable way for others, I should have fallen. I went my way as well as I could; it was this way that I described. After that I could perhaps find a hundred ways which others might take, but I did not want to put down any of them on paper immediately.

Haphazardly and quite individually, I have jumped over many cliffs, and have worked my way through thickets in my own fashion. It is only when one reaches the goal that one knows that one is there. Perhaps the time for teaching in these matters is over. Philosophy interests me now almost exclusively as the experience of the individual. 3

3 Quoted and presumably translated by Owen Barfield, in a review in The Golden Blade of Briefe von Rudolf Steiner. Volume II.

Like a number of early leaders of our movement after Steiner’s death, most notably Ita Wegman herself, BenAharon has proceeded not in competition with the institutional center but in the necessary freedom of a spiritual researcher who can see her or his own way. So there are references to the “School of Spiritual Science” which is the school started by Rudolf Steiner, but is not flowing in the channels set up decades ago from the Goetheanum.

Toward 2023

We now approach the hundredth anniversary of the Christmas Foundation Conference, often referring to our plans as a “celebration.” Most of our 2023, however, might recall the walk down the hill on January 1, 1923, from the embers of the first Goetheanum, and the year of struggle that followed to help young and old members understand each other. There is also the purported poisoning of Steiner at the end of the conference; the extraordinary blaze of inspirations afterward, and the sharing up to mid-September 1924; then six-month convalescence at the foot of the statue of the “representative of humanity” and the opposing powers; and the departure of Rudolf Steiner in early 1925, twelve years earlier, he said, than his karma would have allowed. Twelve years that would have taken him to the “reappearance” in 1933, and beyond.

To properly celebrate Steiner’s last twenty-seven months we should have some sense of where anthroposophy has to go in this next hundred years. Extraordinary good work has been done in so many particular areas, but Ben-Aharon remains the only researcher I know who has a view both comprehensive and prospective.

Steiner advised us that when we form a picture, even if we are unsure of its correctness, our etheric body will work to perfect it. The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity would be good food for any healthy etheric body!

John Beck is editor of being human and director of communications for the Anthroposophical Society in America.