In 1975, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon had a life-changing spiritual experience in which he encountered Christ face to face. He is not the only one to have had this encounter in the 20th century, but what is extraordinary and original about his life and writing is that he did not stop there. Instead, he worked with this gracious event for decades, expanding his understanding and self-awareness through anthroposophical studies to explore what exactly happened, how it happened, and how one can return to this omnipresent spiritual event. He transformed the living tools found behind the pages of Rudolf Steiner's books into abilities to work with this ethereal return, this new manifestation of Christ, again and again as his own daily, individual, conscious achievement. Dr. Ben-Aharon expresses this in The three encounters It reads: “When the given encounter is transformed into the intentional encounter, we notice that the copy of Christ’s ‘I’ that we consciously receive and individualize was already contained in the essence of Christ that we experienced in the first encounter. … Then, in the light of the spiritual knowledge emanating from the Holy Grail, we understand that Christ himself is the source of the copies of his ‘I.’” (Introduction, p. 15) In his incomparable philosophical and spiritual-scientific writings, Steiner established a vast laboratory of tools, including his understanding of the nature of the Second Coming from direct experience as an initiate of the highest caliber. Steiner died in 1925, but his books remain the most relevant, powerful, and youthful on earth. The seeds and abilities that Christ gave Ben-Aharon in their first encounter were combined with the new abilities developed through Anthroposophy, allowing a new form of human and spiritual cooperation to emerge: a new imaginative-spiritual-scientific knowledge, or a marriage of Anthroposophy and Christ. Starting from nothing other than the spiritualization of thought, Dr. Ben-Aharon developed the blueprint for these novel abilities, which can now be attained by all people sooner or later if they undertake the difficult task of anthroposophical self-development ("This means that in our time, through the etheric return, it is becoming increasingly possible for more and more people to prepare themselves to receive the 'I' copy of Christ," Introduction, p. 17). A new, rigorously scientific etheric clairvoyance, developed under the guidance of Christ as a friend, has now arisen. Ben-Aharon published the first results of his detailed methods and research in two books in the 1990s: The spiritual event of the 20th century (1993) and The new experience of the supernatural (1995).

The content of his latest book, The Three Encounters (2022, Ereignis Verlag), began as an expansion and revision of the introduction (approximately the first 20 pages) by Dr. Ben-Aharons The New Experience of the SupernaturalBen-Aharon is currently finishing his four-volume expansion of this masterpiece, and The three encounters It opens a door and sheds light on what is soon to come. Although this new text represents a preface to this larger work in a greatly expanded form (The three encounters (comprises approximately 260 pages) and provides an overview of Ben-Aharon's entire life's work regarding the connection between anthroposophy and the new Christ event, can The three encounters It also stands on its own. It is independent because it is also connected to the living spiritual substance that lies behind the words of the text and into which the attentive reader can enter when studying the text with their whole soul. In this sense, this book is an extremely precious and rare gift to the world, filled with sparks of life that can change the entire approach to modern spiritual development. Moreover, such a profound reading can allow the student to begin their own path to freely experiencing, examining, and verifying the spiritual content. This may take many years, but patient study and reflection will be rewarded. At its spiritual core, the book is filled with the spiritual impulse of freedom and the development of a modern and clear self-awareness, and the strengthening of the sense of I AM.

The text describes how an encounter with Christ can lead to an encounter with the leading spirit of our time, Michael, and also to the living essence of Anthroposophy as a person. It is not primarily about outlining visionary experiences, speculative assessments, or abstract intellectual judgments. Rather, spiritual-scientific concepts and clear thinking become windows through the world, which, in conjunction with the cognitive abilities awakening in the spiritual heart and the intuitive knowledge of the etheric self, lead to all-encompassing, imaginative spiritual images beyond the conception of the physical body. This knowledge has unfolded primarily through painful self-knowledge and moral development, and through interaction with the spiritual world itself. The book is, in its deepest sense, a dialogue and an unfolding of Anthroposophy 2.0, and one could also say, of Christianity 2.0.

The book is divided into eight chapters, dealing with the Pauline method, the development of the new cognitive yoga, crossing the threshold, and encountering the three great spirits mentioned in the title. It also addresses how one must wrestle with and transform one's capacity for knowledge when encountering the spiritual world and the Second Coming, and how an anthroposophical bridge to and from the spiritual world and the etheric Christ can be built. The book is full of spiritual research never before encountered (neither in the original summary from the 1990s nor in his other books), but it is firmly grounded in Rudolf Steiner's research. Indeed, in this modestly sized book, Ben-Aharon explicitly quotes and refers to some 60 different volumes in Steiner's collected works. He knows Rudolf Steiner's work better than anyone I have ever studied or met, but this is not merely academic knowledge. Rather, the living seeds in Steiner's work have grown and developed in Ben-Aharon's own life and have germinated in a new way, since these seeds were nourished by the world-changing impulses emanating from the Christ event in the world of formative forces. For example, he took a small passage from Steiner's Truth and Science (GA 3) taken and developed into a complete exercise to prepare for entry into the spiritual world. What is stated in the introduction to The new experience of the supernatural What was only hinted at before now becomes a carefully explained exercise for recognizing and differentiating the influence of the four bodies (physical, etheric, astral, and ego) on our experience of the world. It is still a challenging exercise! But we now have further guidance to help us develop the new abilities of the Michaelic Age, based on spiritualized thinking and perception, rather than reverting to older and simpler practices.

Let us now turn to some details in this book. In Chapter 1, we find that Paul's supersensible encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus contains the essence of what we can experience today in our encounter with the etheric Christ. One such Pauline method is to see and experience the life of Christ as an imaginative whole, while simultaneously perceiving how the forces of death within oneself are transformed by the spiritual life of Christ. "The overcoming of the death forces inherent in our modern Ahrimanic intellect is, in fact, the starting point for the epistemological drama of the Second Coming… And the source of the resurrection forces… is found in the appearance, in the words and deeds of the etheric Christ" (p. 25, Chapter 1). Rudolf Steiner showed that Krishna, the sublime being who gave the original impulses for ancient yoga, was also present in the incarnation of Jesus, and that through his incarnation, yoga and the essence of the Bhagavad Gita were raised to a higher development and given to all humanity. Krishna's light shone upon Paul, and Krishna's light shines today from the ethereal Christ. Ben-Aharon's Cognitive or Michaelic Yoga (See his 2016 book, published in German in 2021) was developed through the union of anthroposophy with the etheric Christ event. "This means that the source of the modern form of yoga in its anthroposophical-Michaelic form, as described by Rudolf Steiner in 1919-20, is the etheric Christ manifestation, for in this experience one becomes part of this new etheric breath with one's etheric body through the etherization of thought and sensory perception, as described in Cognitive Yoga." From this luminous pulse of knowledge arose the esoteric teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of Paul, in ancient Athens, in which the "inhaling" and "exhaling" of life and death, of being and nothingness, led to a living experience at their intersection. This new yoga impulse was the source of both negative theology and the ancient Greek dialectic of its greatest philosophers.

Therefore, one of the main tasks for the end of the 20th century, to which Ben-Aharon primarily contributed, was to revive and transform what had died in modern intellectual processes and in anthroposophy, and to fuse it with a renewed and revitalized dialectical or yogic process connected with the ancient Greek philosophical worldviews or currents. “But both currents could only be spiritualized through the encounter with the etheric Christ, for only this source of entirely new spiritual forces could bring both to imaginative consciousness. Building upon this, this united spiritual force could be used to create the epistemological drama of the Second Coming and to establish the foundations for the new Michael School in the 21st century.” Just as Aristotle had to kill Plato's divine method and transform it into earthly logical thinking, so it was Rudolf Steiner's karmic task to resurrect this dead dialectic and develop a modern spiritual science from it. In the way he grasps the living essence of dialectic, we can find the seed of its resurrection through the etheric Christ impulse and Michaelic Yoga. (p. 40/31, Chapter 1) Here we can see the true potential, in the deepest esoteric sense, for the further development of anthroposophy and for human evolution. Although this light shines from the spiritual world closest to us, the etheric Christ and living anthroposophy are unfortunately almost entirely ignored today, even by those who claim to be interested in the spiritual path and Steiner's contributions. But Michael's rhythmic pulse is active everywhere.

Chapter 2 describes the essence of this new cognitive or Michaelic yoga, in which thinking is guided by the paths of Philosophy of Freedom spiritualized, and all our outer senses are spiritualized through an anthroposophical deepening of Goethe's scientific powers of observation and perception. Through the new impulses of Christ, flowing into the center of their intersection, one can develop such a new dialectical, yogic, or rhythmic spiritual-scientific practice of mutual exchange of essence with the spiritual world. "Only through this practice can we find the truly modern path to the most important event in the evolution of humanity and the earth in our age: the new appearance of Christ in the etheric world. Only in this way can we illuminate His etheric appearance with the resurrected light of Michael's intelligence and Michael's thinking." (p. 55, end of chapter 2)

In Chapter 3 we find an inspiring description of a new kind of spiritual development and the outline of a new process of knowledge acquisition that is completely unique in anthroposophical literature: how Dr. Ben-Aharon transformed his first encounter into a voluntary encounter with the Christ impulse through a combination of the forces behind Rudolf Steiner's works The Philosophy of Freedom on the one hand, and on the other, the riddles of the soul. It's about what it means, on the one hand, to build a bridge from everyday consciousness up into the spiritual world, and on the other hand, to consciously suppress spiritual experiences outside the body in order to build a bridge from the etheric world back down to the brain and body. The chapter "The Platonic-Aristotelian Exchange of Essences at the End of the 20th Century" is situated within the context of a mutual enrichment of worldviews and spiritual influences that essentially originated with Aristotle and Plato. What in Ben-Aharon's Twilight of Mankind and Resurrection of Mankind (2020, Ereignis Verlag) described in the sense of the new Michaelic Plan, is condensed here into a single human experience. He describes his struggles in the mid-30s (after a decade of anthroposophical work with the experience given in 1975, in which he focused mainly on the pole of the Philosophy of Freedom (concentrated): “The spiritualized thinking I used to bring my imaginative perception to fully conscious supersensible knowledge did not flow from the etheric to the physical world and back to the etheric world; it remained active in the etheric body within the etheric world; and I could not cause my imaginative faculties to penetrate the physical brain and transform its intellectual powers from within. … This must be distinguished from the ability to work from above into the etheric body, for in this way one only goes so far as to imprint the etheric correlates of the mental experiences one is investigating onto the etheric body; …The problem … was therefore … how I could bring down the imaginative powers and condense them to such an extent that they became a cognitive power within the physical body.” (pp. 78/79, Chapter 3, middle) At this point, he came to study On Riddles of the Soul, which gave him the impetus to finally condense these imaginative experiences into the physical body itself in an Aristotelian manner. “I found that, paradoxically, this Ahrimanic power, which causes the killing of spiritual perception and its paralysis … has the opposite effect when it is spiritualized. It saturated the original imaginative perception with inspired and intuitive powers, from which the bridge could obtain its necessary solid etheric forces and substances. The result was an increased imaginative capacity …” (pp. 102/103, Chapter 3, later middle section). This process is described in great detail in the text.

In chapter 4 he writes about the constantly changing process of encountering Christ in the etheric world:

"In this stream of perpetual becoming, there is absolutely no fixed and separate being."

And if this is true for every single being and every single process, then we must recognize the extent to which this also applies to the appearance, words, and deeds of the etheric Christ. He appears as the cosmic heart center and the life-source of the world of etheric becoming; He is the essence of infinite becoming; His etheric appearance, His etheric words and deeds consist of the perpetual realization of metamorphosis, transformation, change, and growth. And this is the spiritual essence of the 'I' that He gives us. Therefore, if we wish to explore and willfully repeat this experience, we must consciously become His becoming. The threefold spiritual encounter with Christ—His imaginative appearance, His inspiring words, and His intuitive deeds—not only demonstrates the objective process of becoming of humanity and the Earth, but His 'I' demonstrates it through our 'I' and in our 'I'. He is therefore the supreme teacher of the reciprocal becoming-of-humans-worlds in our universe. This means that our spiritualized cognitive activity does not take place outside of the being we know, but within this being, and our cognition is spiritualized by the power of spiritual becoming that emanates from this being, the etheric Christ. (pp. 126/127, Chapter 4, end)

In Chapter 5, "The Abyss and the Threshold Event," we learn how to become aware of the elements of our everyday experience, detach them, and voluntarily erase them in order to approach the gap between sensory experience and the true spiritual world in a prepared, balanced, and thoroughly modern way. If we can then hold fast to our belief and trust in the goodness of the spiritual world, it can, if it so wills, resurrect us into true spiritual consciousness. This systematic and moral approach was, as mentioned above, derived from Rudolf Steiner's Truth and Science developed. Ben-Aharon writes: “And now we must intensely feel the reality of the corpse of thought. We must sense how our personal identity crystallizes around this remembered, habitual, dead content of the soul. … We begin to experience that, through the sum of the ideas imprinted on the soul during earthly life, man becomes a free being on earth, yet at the same time has died to the spiritual world.” (p. 143, Chapter 5, middle) … “Then man can have the modern Pauline Christ experience: Not ‘I’ (insofar as this ‘I’ is embodied in the contents of earthly consciousness), but my Self is effective, that is, I AM. This becomes our new situational and event meditation.” This encounter and exchange of essence between the Christ-›I‹ and the human ›I‹ thus becomes the living center of the epistemological drama of the Second Coming.

This experience forms a new foundation for the bottomless, selfless, self-aware spiritual becoming at the threshold. But only through the repeated practice of the living annihilation of all soul contents and habits does a person develop the power that gradually breaks open the hardened shell of their enclosing mental egg. And from this hardened casing, in due time, the 'wings of transition' are released, carrying them across the gray and dark abyss into the luminous spirit land where the ethereal Christ appears.

When we practice this spiritual activity, we feel how the dead forces of the intellectual or emotional soul die away and the youthful and vibrant forces of the consciousness soul emerge and blossom. (pp. 144/145)

In Chapter 5, we see that in this middle or twilight zone, night consciousness and day consciousness can unite into a single, spiritually awakened consciousness when our Michaelic Yoga practice is sufficiently developed, the spiritualized pole of thought penetrates to the origin of imaginative perception, and perception connects with the essence of spiritual thinking. Furthermore, Dr. Ben-Aharon gives us a clear indication of how J.G. Fichte's true spiritual experience of I AM can also be our center for entering pure thought and spiritual-scientific imagination.

The later chapters of *The Three Encounters* describe profound esoteric details of encounters with Christ, Michael, and Anthroposophy based on direct experience. The words written in the text are life-changing, but must also be treated with the utmost responsibility, as they come from the direct source of the mysteries. For this reason, these elements will not be discussed in a public book review.

But what a book! We can truly celebrate with the greatest joy that a bridge-builder is incarnated on Earth today, maintaining a clear connection to the living essence of Anthroposophy, Michael and Christ. Dr. Ben-Aharon helps us, through his books and his path of training, to develop in the clearest and most relevant way. The Three Encounters They do not resort to symbolic language, mere emotional enthusiasm, or sermons. Instead, he grapples intensely with the most difficult elements of knowledge and spiritual science, unraveling the shockingly turbulent spiritual and psychological encounters—but in such a precise way that the 21st-century anthroposophical student can do their best to study and progress, no matter how difficult or intense the true spiritual essence may be in reality. His works, though drawn from his own life, are not solely about him personally. Ben-Aharon is a human being who is learning to grow with us all. His books convey to the reader a universal human spark, not just a personal myth. Steiner and Ben-Aharon taught us that we must grapple with the deepest forces of knowledge as we approach the door to the spirit. I know this very well from my own work in this field. From my own modest spiritual-scientific development, as expressed in my recently published books, I can confirm that what Ben-Aharon writes stems from a legitimate spiritual development in the anthroposophical sense and is directly connected to the continuing work of Rudolf Steiner and the living activity of the spiritual beings mentioned in the title of this work. May every person calmly unearth their hidden serpents of criticism, as described in "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Their Attainment," and instead find the open door! Let the truth be heard by those who have opened the ears of their hearts! Let people carefully gather around the light when it appears, and let this spiritual light be magnified through study and faith! The Second Coming of Christ is a present reality, and Rudolf Steiner's continuing work is a present reality—let each of us now seize the opportunity and allow our tasks to also become a present and living spiritual reality, united with the true light and the true gift of Christ. Humanity can and must do this TOGETHER.

By Scott Elliot Hicks

Translation by Johannes Lauterbach

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