עברית To interpret the signs of the times, let us arrange our lives in accordance with these three mysteries of our time: the mystery of Michael, the mystery of Christ, and the mystery of Sorat.
The Time is at Hand!
Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality and the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael
Temple Lodge, 15 April 2024
To interpret the signs of the times, let us arrange our lives in accordance with these three mysteries of our time: the mystery of Michael, the mystery of Christ, and the mystery of Sorat.
(Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 12 September 1924, GA 346).
From the cover:
The Time is at Hand!
Ahrimanic and Michaelic Immortality and the Apocalypse of the Age of Michael
Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon
Temple Lodge 15 April 2024
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‘The twenty-first century is the second, middle century of the three centuries of the present age of Michael, and it is the most decisive one. If humanity again misses Michael’s goal, it will hardly be possible to recuperate from it, and human evolution will be derailed for a long time. The present age of Michael can therefore rightly be called ‘the Apocalypse of the age of Michael’. – Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon
In five lively, challenging lectures, Dr Ben-Aharon offers encouraging perspectives on the apocalyptic challenges facing humanity. The key Michaelic task for human beings today, he says, is to comprehend fully the new revelation of the etheric Christ. On the success of this depends humanity’s resurrection from the abyss – from the grave of civilization. However, it can still be achieved, and the time is at hand! The author describes the global School of Spiritual Science’s contemporary work to create a path to conscious recognition of the Christ and Michael impulses. Offering numerous fresh viewpoints into the trials of our time, The Time is at Hand! is an essential handbook for any serious student of anthroposophy. The talks (from 2017 and 2022) are titled: ‘Ahrimanic Immortality, the Matrix and the Technological Singularity’; ‘Michaelic Immortality’: ‘The Two Apocalyptic Beasts and the Mystery of the Wound; ‘Follow This Star’; and ‘The Time is at Hand!’
DR YESHAYAHU (JESAIAH) BEN-AHARON – spiritual scientist, philosopher and social activist – is founder of the
anthroposophical community in Harduf, Israel, co-founder of the Global Network for Social Threefolding, director
of Global Event College and contributor to the School of Spiritual Science. He is the author of Cognitive Yoga, The
Three Meetings, Jerusalem, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, Spiritual Science in the Twenty-First
Century, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, The New
Experience of the Supersensible, America’s Global Responsibility and Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born.
From the Fifth Lecture, Überlingen, 5 November 2022
Dear friends, this is what I wanted to say in our last lecture, to prepare our hearts to actualize in the right mood the coming three centenaries of the burning of the first Goetheanum, the Christmas Foundation Conference, and the death of Rudolf Steiner. I also wanted to express my conviction that we can be very enthusiastic, serious and joyful, about the time in which we live today on earth. And we can continue our preparations and our work in the coming 3 years, with the 4 forces that Michael is looking for, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out: holy enthusiasm and energy, perseverance, and festivity, to intensify our growth and become productive inwardly and outwardly. And we may feel that as the work becomes livelier, we become younger and more creative. The sign of this growing younger will be that we become more hopeful, trusting, brother-and sisterly, and more joyful in our community building work. That is how we prepare the sacred marriage of the new Heaven and Earth, with feelings of gratitude and reverence, feeling this absolutely unique Stimmung of devotion to the significant historical time in which we live. And when we truly feel it, we would say: OK, because this festive mood is well prepared, I am allowed to be happy! Michaelic happiness is justified, is allowed, if one worked to attain it for many years and decades, actualizing in this creation all the forces of one’s heart and soul in daily life.
It is earnest, sacred work and it must culminate in a festive mood of celebration, the beginning of the cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity, about which Rudolf Steiner spoke in the almost completed first Goetheanum in Sylvester 1922, while the flames of fire were already burning between its mighty wooden walls. This cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity, spiritualized in the flames and rising as sacred sacrifice to the cosmos, returned as mighty new Michaelic inspiration, that Rudolf Steiner transformed at the end of 1923 into the Foundation Stone of Love in the Christmas Foundation Conference.
But only if we have taken into our hearts the mighty and shattering events that shook heaven and earth during the century that passed since 1923-4, described in my books, we will be able to celebrate this centenary in the right way.
Let us be worthy of this immense sacrifice offered to humanity, the earth, and the spiritual worlds 3x33 years ago and ever since, and let it be resurrected in our etheric hearts as the fiery flames of the new cosmic cultus and spiritual communion of humanity- the future festival in which the guiding Michaelic spiritual beings will actually work together with fully conscious humans on the earth, to complete the bridge of spiritual memory and continuity of consciousness and the brotherhood and sisterhood of the present age of Michaelic.
Then, indeed, we may say a third time: The time is at hand! But what exactly is this time, that is now at hand?
As soon as the words [of the Green Snake] resound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come! The words of the old man, the time has come, point to… the time that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses. [1]
Our time, 3x33 years after the Christmas Foundation Conference, is the beginning of this future time, in which the first mortals answer the call of the gods, uninitiated humans construct the bridge of continuity of consciousness, and lay the foundation stone of the earthly-human Sun temple.
And this is the deeper meaning of our work in the coming 20’ and 30’, dear friends: to be ‘the prepares of the preparers’, as Rudolf Steiner said in the lectures about the apocalypse in Nüremberg in 1908. We must become the first mortals to construct the bridge and let the open temple of humanity, the new mysteries, burned in 1922-3-4, rise again in our hearts, graced by the new revelation of the etheric Christ and the new impulse of Michael. And if our response-ability is honest and creative, it will be taken up by Rudolf Steiner and presented to Michael, as the firstborn fruit of what humans accomplish with his forces in his present age, and Michael will be able to represent humanity in the council of the gods, telling them that ‘during my Age, men have raised their [spiritualized thinking] to the supersensible… and we can therefore accept men again, for they have united their thought with ours’. [2]
[1] Lecture of 16 February 1905 (GA 53).
[2] Lecture of 17 December 1922 (GA 219).