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Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon was born in 1955 in Israel and grew up in a socialist kibbutz, founded by his parents in 1933. His father, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon (1906-2006), was a leader of the Israeli labor party and movement.

He is a philosopher and spiritual scientist who focuses on the evolution of consciousness and the implications and applications this may have for social, political, and artistic life. He is educated from Haifa University where he studied biology and philosophy and earned his PhD on Edmund Husserl’s concept of ‘the I’.

In 1982 Ben-Aharon founded an anthroposophical Israeli kibbutz in Harduf.[1] In 2001 he also co-founded with Nicanor Perlas the Global Network for Social Threefolding and published in 2003 the book America’s Social Responsibility in response to the anti-globalist movement that emerged in Seattle in 1999 during the World Trade Organization meeting.[2] [3] Since 2008 Ben-Aharon has increasingly focused on developing a free spiritual community which has led to the formation of a free school and college for spiritual science. Alongside this he has published numerous books that seek to develop Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science (anthroposophy). The central and open concept of the ‘Event’ is used by Ben-Aharon as signifying a great cosmic and spiritual process as well as the turn towards the ‘evental’ nature of the world and social life in much modern culture.

In several of his books Ben-Aharon describes how in his early twenties he experienced a spiritual awakening which became the source and motivation for his subsequent work and which eventually led him to the works of Rudolf Steiner.[4] In the book The Three Meetings Ben-Aharon describes how the study of Rudolf Steiner’s work led him to re-experience the spiritual Event, now no longer purely by grace but as part of a self-consciously created bridge of consciousness-continuity.[5] This led to the writing of his two major early works, The New Experience of the Supersensible and The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century. In these works, Steiner’s understanding and prophecy of a Second Coming of Christ as a universal ‘etheric’ event belonging to all of humanity and the earth as a whole is explored on the basis of Ben-Aharon’s own spiritual experience and research. The development and expansion of the philosophical and epistemological works of Steiner into a scientific exploration of the spiritual is a central occupation of Ben-Aharon’s work, something he terms the ‘knowledge drama of the Second Coming’.[6] His work aspires to create a detailed and systematic presentation of the process whereby the cognitive and moral forces constitutive of ordinary consciousness are said to be enhanced and metamorphosed into spiritual perception and life. His work on developing and expanding the methodology of spiritual science is presented most developed in The New Experience of the Supersensible and in more recent Cognitive Yoga. The latter book has been described as ‘a most extraordinary book—probably the most extraordinary book that has been written within anthroposophy since the original work of Rudolf Steiner.’[7]

In The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art Ben-Aharon seeks to show how new concepts and creations in the various fields of life can be understood as symptoms of an evolutionary process whereby humanity can acquire a new relation to life and to itself. Works by scientists such as Mandelbrot, Prigogine, J. J. Gibson, Katzir-Katchalsky, Bateson and the Santiago theory of cognition and others are discussed extensively in relation to a new spiritual conception of life and the universe. Philosophical developments in the twentieth century are presented as conceptual constellations that can make the process and experience of thinking itself into an ‘event’. Ben-Aharon focuses on the six French thinkers Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Levinas. Rather than following their philosophical positioning, Ben-Aharon employs their conceptual creations as energetic material for the construction of a virtual subjectivity,[8] a self-consciousness no longer tied to embodied egotistical consciousness but ethically obliged to the Other. This spiritual formation of a new self-consciousness is pursued also in his discussion of art. In this chapter Ben-Aharon creates seven concepts that describe a deepening of the artistic process with regard to the assimilation and incorporation of intensive etheric life-forces. The chapter on history outlines Ben-Aharon’s understanding on individuation and its modern form as a ‘reversal’ of spiritual-moral forces and ideals into subjective projections and representations.[9] Ben-Aharon considers this reversal as a major force of potential evil today and in the future, and outlines the National-Socialist, Bolshevik-Communist and the present Capitalist ‘revolutions’ as three system fueled by this reversal of spirit into materialism, expressing distortions of the three ideals of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood. Following this, any attempt to engage positively in changing the world today will inevitably lead to reversals as long as it takes place from the same configuration of force and consciousness that underly modern individuation. Ben-Aharon therefore considers the first and unavoidable step to reverse this reversal, which means to discover a self-conscious and substantial continuity with the spiritual reality. The book has been characterized as offering ‘a time-picture of the 20th century, as well as tools for transformation that emerge from such a broad overview.’ [10]

Publications:

The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century Temple Lodge, 1993.

The New Experience of the Supersensible, Temple Lodge, 1995.

America’s Global Responsibility: Individuation, Initiation and Threefolding, Lindisfarne Press, 2004.

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, Temple Lodge, 2011.

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

Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality, Temple Lodge, 2016

‘Israel von innen gesehen’ in Die Drei (August\September, 2016)

Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born, Temple Lodge, 2017

‘Zum gemeinsamen Karma von Deutschland und Israel’ in Die Drei (Januar/Februar, 2017)

Jerusalem: The Role of the Hebrew People in the Spiritual Biography of Humanity, Temple Lodge, 2019.

‘Der Lebenszyklus der ätherischen Atmung’, in Die Drei (März, 2019)

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, Temple Lodge, 2020.

The Three Meetings: Christ, Michael, & Anthroposophia, Temple Lodge, 2022.

Ben-Aharon’s website in English and Hebrew [1] According to Isaac Lubelsky, Ben-Aharon has been central in the development of anthroposophical activity in Israel. Starting in the 1920´s and 1930´s, ‘immigrants began to spread Steiner’s ideas, but their activity was limited in numbers until the late 1970s, when a younger generation of anthroposophists, mostly people who grew up in the Kibbutz system—and particularly in Givat Haim Kibbutz—decided to strengthen Anthroposophical activity in the country. The most prominent figure among those was Dr. Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon (b. 1955), who in the early 1980s was the living spirit behind the foundation of the Harduf Kibbutz, which is perhaps the most prominent Anthroposophical center in Israel.’ Isaac Lubelsky, ‘Theosophy and Anthroposophy in Israel: An Historical Survey’ in Shai Feraro & James R. Lewis (Ed.), Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities in Israel, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2017.

[2] Dan McKanan, Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism, University of California Press, 2017, page 108.

[3] See Bo Dahlin’s research report ‘Education, History, and Be(com)ing Human’ published at Karlstad University for a situation of Ben-Aharon’s notion of threefolding in relation to other philosophical and historical conceptions of civil society. [https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:6687/FULLTEXT01.pdf Dahlin, B. (2006). ''Education, History, and Be(com)ing Human. Two Essays in Philosophy and Education.'' Research Report 2006:11. Karlstad University Studies], page 40 ff.

[4] See for example the interview published as preface to the second edition of his book The New Experience of the Supersensible.

[5] The Three Meetings, Introduction.

[6] The Three Meetings, page 5

[7] David Adams, ‘Making Yourself New’, review of ‘Cognitive Yoga’ in Being Human, spring 2018, page 30-42

[8] The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, page 117.

[9] The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, page 79.

[10] Aksel Hugo and Torbjørn Eftestøl, ‘Review of ‘The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art’’, in RoSE - Research on Steiner Education Vol.4 No.1 2013, p. 208-210