עברית Cognitive Yoga came into being because I felt the need, 40 years after my original spiritual experience and the first reading of The Philosophy of Freedom, to start from the very beginning again.
Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality
To start afresh 40 years from the most elementary soul forces...
Cognitive Yoga came into being because I felt the need, 40 years after my original spiritual experience and the first reading of The Philosophy of Freedom, to start from the very beginning again.
Rudolf Steiner emphasised repeatedly that the spiritualisation of cognition must start from the spiritualisation of clear, self-controlled and directed thinking and perception, and that there, in the head, we must form the first spiritual center in the etheric body. This center can then be transferred to the larynx and later to the heart, in orderly, systematic deepening and expansion of the clarity of thinking and perception achieved in the head. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds Rudolf Steiner write that, "If we were to develop the center near the heart immediately, we would certainly still gain a glimpse into the higher worlds at the early stages of clairvoyance, but we would have no true insight into the connection between these higher worlds and the material world of the senses. It is absolutely essential, however that human beings at the present stage of world evolution understand this connection. As seers, we must not become dreamers: we must always keep both feet firmly on the ground".
My way to Cogntive Yoga
It was in the week before Easter 1975 that I felt that the inner and outer walls surrounding my soul were beginning to open up. I felt that a stream of unknown life of great beauty and intensity was flowing in and through me. I found myself living together in the company of a sublime spiritual being and presence, through which I was actually becoming my new, and 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 humanity’s spiritual becoming process. I became increasingly aware that this being was actually “teaching” me something, demonstrating a birth event of a spiritual Self, and its further becoming and transformation. This becoming was experienced, simultaneously, as cosmic, human, and historical, and part of an infinite stream of life.
Many years of study and research were required in order to understand and recapitulate voluntarily this event. In this way, I realized that this sublime, yet so human, Being, is essentially a being of life, becoming and transformation. It can transform, resurrect, redeem everything and “make everything new”: death into new life and evil into higher good. The experience inspires a direct evidence and conviction that this impulse is part of the real spiritual world, and constitutes humanity’s deepest creative and transformative resource. It was, however, also wholly clear that this being depends entirely on us, as far as human evolution is concerned, and that this transformation process must be understood as working in human beings, in time and history, maturing in us only gradually and through many difficulties, because it is so new and is still largely unrecognized by modern humanity.
It must be emphasized - even if this may seem implausible to some - that without having any recourse to external documents or spiritual and religious traditions, I experienced this Being, also as an individual appearance of the universal, Higher Self of the whole of Humanity and the Earth; and that this Higher Self of humanity does exist as a real being, and that He is the same being that overcame death through the Mystery of Golgotha, some 2000 years ago, and has been living ever since as humanity’s and the earth’s ever transforming and healing spiritual and creative potential.
Now, concerning the state of my consciousness after this experience, I found myself in a rather unaccustomed and challenging situation. An analogy may make this clearer. It was like living on both floors of a house without a fully conscious connection between them. Imagine a situation in which, while being on one floor, the perception and memory of your identity on the other is less distinct. I actually lived in two separated realities at the same time: in the physical world and in the spiritual world, and I felt that I must learn how to build fully conscious “stairs” or a “bridge” of cognition, in order to connect my two identities and worlds together. Therefore, I immediately started to search for answers and solutions to the innumerable questions and riddles that this experience brought about. This search soon led me to Rudolf Steiner’s work. I first studied his researches about the Christ impulse, past, present and future. Then I continued to study general anthroposophy as a whole, and a year later, I came for the first-time to know Rudolf Steiner's starting point of spiritual science, his founding book, The Philosophy of Freedom. What I experienced while reading this book, was my second most profound and formative spiritual experience. I felt that now I could experience in my fully conscious and voluntary activity of thinking, a spark of the same light that until then I knew only as a revelation from the spiritual world in a higher state of consciousness. That is, by means of my own spiritual activity, I could bring forth, in my normal, wide awake daily consciousness, 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.
Therefore, I immediately began to study with the greatest enthusiasm everything he ever wrote and said about cognition, epistemology, Goetheanism, natural science and their transformation into spiritual science. I still remember with the innermost warmth of soul those short years in my early 20s that I could devote to assimilating the basics of modern natural science and biology in Oranim college (a branch of Haifa university where some 20 years later I received my doctorate in philosophy with my dissertation on The Cognition of the ‘I’ in Husserl's Phenomenology, finely supervised by Prof. Michael Strauss). I spent mornings and afternoons in the classes and labs where one could experience firsthand the great achievements of present-day physics, chemistry, biology, physiology and anatomy with all the devotion and enthusiasm of the youthful student. Then I worked long evenings and nights in my little apartment to combine every line of the natural scientific knowledge with the natural and spiritual scientific works of Goethe and Steiner. I felt that, through the Christ experience, I found my earthly home in the spiritual world closest to the earth, and through Rudolf Steiner's spiritualized science, thinking and cognition, I could find my spiritual home on the earth. And the building of a fully conscious spiritual bridge between the two worlds soon became my daily spiritual breathing. It became a vital element in my inner life and my spiritual research that I have been developing and deepening in the last decades. From that time on, I could work alternatively from each floor towards the other, from both sides of the divide, building a “bridge” from each one to the other, bringing the two sides ever closer. Finally, after 15 years of continuously intensive work, when I reached my thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth years, the supersensible bridge construction, so to speak, was complete. The work done from below upward, the spiritualization of common cognition, and the work done from above downward, grounding the supersensible experience, could meet in the middle, and my cognitive forces working from below and above could fully unite together. Only then could I think it through to the end and begin to express it in ordinary language, write it down in physical words and publish it in my books.
This cognitive practice became the source of my books, lectures and contributions to the free school of spiritual science, and its application in social life resulted in the founding of the community of Kibbutz Harduf. I have published the results of this research in my books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century (1993), The New Experience of the Supersensible (1995), America's Global Responsibility (2002), The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art (2011), and Spiritual Science in the 21st Century (2013) and the present book, Cognitive Yoga, that I consider to be an organic continuation and development of the essential thread that unites my spiritual research throughout the years, based on my main book, The New Experience of the Supersensible.
The present book, Cognitive Yoga, came into being because I felt the need, 40 years after my original spiritual experience and the first reading of The Philosophy of Freedom, to start from the very beginning again. For me this meant to show in detail how spiritual science is created, in real spiritual practice, from the very first elements and forces of our daily consciousness, in which also the best achievements of contemporary sciences, arts, and social innovation originate. I said to myself that in order to fulfil this goal, my starting point must be grounded solely in the clear and precise cognitive faculties of the modern mind, trained and applied in natural science. For me, in this cognition alone the free “I” can light up in the brightest perception of itself and of the external physical as well as spiritual worlds. I wanted to take no previous knowledge for granted, so I eliminated from my consciousness not only my learned and accumulated spiritual knowledge - which is difficult enough - but what is more, I was striving to erase all my previously developed spiritual faculties - which was indeed an exacting task. I wanted to start from ordinary sense perception and the representations that we create in order to know the given, sense-perceptible world, and raise this perception and thinking, step by step, to the living spiritual forces that work in and through the physical world.
To show, step by step, starting from the most common cognitive ground up, how to make spiritual science from the etherisation and spiritualisation of our ordinary, common, thinking and sense perception: this is what I have tried to realize in Cognitive Yoga. I had to show that the otherwise sublime supersensible meeting and essence exchange with the Etheric Christ, can be actualized in wide awake, self-conscious Imaginative cognition, if we follow the spiritual path created by Rudolf Steiner a century ago.
Cognitive Yoga: Making yourself a new etheric body and individuality