Cognitive Yoga E-Book

Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

• Herausgeber: Temple Lodge Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Are you ready to begin the process of making yourself a new etheric body and individuality? In the last century, Rudolf Steiner issued a challenge for practitioners of western spiritual science. Would it be possible to develop a new form of cognitive, or Michaelic, yoga? In contrast to the eastern yogis of old – who practiced the spiritualization of inhalation and exhalation – such contemporary yogic practice would involve a spiritualization of thinking as well as a transformation of perceptions and sensations. In Cognitive Yoga, Dr Ben-Aharon responds to that call, developing the entire modern yogic process and describing it in remarkable detail. Through the methods presented, committed practitioners of anthroposophy can create a living framework for spiritual research through a fully spiritualized thinking accompanied by a complete renewal of the experiences of perception and sensation as well as of the human body itself. Included in the contents of this extraordinary book is a comprehensive guide to the spiritualization of the senses and how this leads to a transmutation of the deepest and most unconscious bodily processes and functions. Cognitive Yoga culminates in a pioneering description of a completely individualized meeting with the etheric Christ in the etheric world – the most important spiritual and human experience that people can have in our time and over the millennia to come. This seminal work, built on decades of first-hand research, provides tangible evidence that western spiritual schooling is not only alive and well, but also full of potential for future development. Ben-Aharon offers a fully formulated and practical guide to a knowledge of the present revelations of the spiritual world.

Leseprobe

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 The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, The New Experience of the Supersensible, America's Global Responsibility, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and Spiritual Science in the 21st Century.

COGNITIVE YOGA

Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality

Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon

TEMPLE LODGE

Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd. Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.templelodge.com

First published by Temple Lodge Publishing, 2016

© Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon 2016

The Publishers are grateful to Scott Hicks for his editorial work on the text

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The right of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 906999 96 4

Cover by Morgan Creative Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The life cycle of etheric breathing

2. The composition of ordinary cognition

3. The pearl of greatest price: Individuation

4. Etherization of Sight

5. Etherization of Thinking

6. Etherization of Smell

7. Birth of a new etheric body

8. Birth of an etheric individuality

9. Early childhood of an etheric individuality

10. Essence exchange with the Cosmic Source

Preface

If anyone in our time publishes the results of spiritual scientific research based on his own experience, he naturally expects to encounter many objections. Let me mention only one that comes in two complementary forms. The first kind of objection is prevalent among those followers of anthroposophy who believe that – Rudolf Steiner's individual example notwithstanding – individual supersensible experience should not be the source of spiritual science. On the other side stand those who are satisfied with having spiritual experiences, revelations and visions, and regard spiritual science, well, as demanding too much science, because it requires a serious long-term commitment to develop clear, exact and thoughtful forces of spiritual cognition. Now people that raise the first type of objection sincerely believe that only the loyal interpretation of the master's texts and the preservation of the cultural and practical forms he created are the real tasks of spiritual science. It is not difficult to find the contradiction in this belief: since, if spiritual science is supposed to be an authentic science, it must be founded on fresh empirical research of the real world, given in human experience and not merely on the interpretations of texts.* Nevertheless, I have encountered this objection repeatedly since I published my first book in the middle of the 1990s. It is said that because I have grounded my spiritual research in my own supersensible experience, I cannot be considered a loyal follower of Rudolf Steiner and therefore my research should not be taken as a serious contribution to the development of spiritual science. On the other hand, no one will deny that many spiritual experiences are misused to justify egotistic desires and to foster a similar belief in external authority. Finding a middle path between these two dogmas, the dogma of tradition and the dogma of experience, is certainly difficult and must be repeatedly discovered.

Now, we shouldn’t simply dismiss the first objection out of hand, because its error is based on an important truth which must be fully understood. The loyalty to the authority of traditions, institutions and texts that many people demand is a misrepresentation of the real essence of spiritual loyalty, which should be directed to the spiritual forces that bring about the original, creative impulses themselves and not to the external forms in which they are incarnated and preserved. This loyalty is, as a matter of fact, absolutely necessary. It is a precondition for advancement in all branches of human knowledge and creation. Progress in human life and knowledge must be grounded in the rich soil cultivated by the founders and developers of each branch of our cultural and social life. If someone wants to present individual research in physics, he must study and assimilate the fundamentals of physics, and indeed much more. He will then demonstrate this knowledge in his whole approach to doing and presenting his individual research. Moreover, when we study the life of scientists and artists who are truly creative and independent, we find that loyalty to their predecessors was the source of their original creations, even when they had to struggle to overcome the outmoded, external forms of the past. What the believers in the dogma of experience maintain, namely, that being free and creative means to receive visions and inspirations out of thin air, is amply contradicted by the fact that the most creative and free people are precisely those rooted in the deepest sources of their fields. The truly great revolutionary gladly acknowledges his indubitable debt to his predecessors, while the creative pioneer and the adventurous discoverer is also the most devoted pupil. For the real pioneers it is a matter of fact that to be ‘original’ implies the literal meaning of the term: only to the extent that you derive your creative forces from the spiritual origins of your craft, can you aspire to become truly original.

Rudolf Steiner is the greatest example of this, because he founded spiritual science on the best achievements of natural science. Was he loyal to the truth discovered by the founders of natural science? Most certainly. Was he a free and creative person, who established a wholly new discipline of science? Yes, indeed. Eventually, the freely developed loyalty to the creative founding impulse of your discipline is the same loyalty that you owe to your own true self, since in the spiritual world they both have the same source. However, while in the case of other sciences and arts, the loyalty to the spiritual origins may be conscious in varying degrees, in spiritual science it must become fully conscious. If you want to transform spiritual experience into fully conscious and cognitive supersensible research, you can only find your bearings if you most scrupulously follow the real spiritual steps of your teacher. One can, as a matter of fact, establish, corroborate, and confirm one's individual experiences and insights, only if one grounds each single step in the previously accomplished spiritual work of the masters in this field. (It is important to emphasize that this is not done for external reasons, such as to take pride in one's learning or to gain acceptance in this or that quarter, but purely because of these internal reasons.) One is only honest and conscientious, spiritually speaking, to the extent that one fulfils this requirement. These are the objective laws and conditions in this field of knowledge. And I know full well that it is wholly superfluous to try to convince someone in these matters, as long as that person does not want to experience it for himself. To argue about what spiritual science really is with the believers in the dogmas of tradition and experience is never a productive undertaking. One can only proceed by repeatedly checking one's own inner loyalty and truthfulness in fulfilling the immanent, inherent laws and conditions of spiritual research and then leave it peacefully for the reader to create his or her own individual judgement.

Let me mention briefly in this regard some moments from the formative years of my spiritual work.* My adult spiritual life began in a supersensible experience of the etheric Christ. I immediately started to search for answers and solutions to the innumerable questions and riddles that this experience brought about. This search led me directly to anthroposophy. I first studied Rudolf Steiner's researches concerning the Christ impulse. Next, I moved on to general anthroposophy, and then a year later, I read Rudolf's own starting point for spiritual science The Philosophy of Freedom. This happened precisely 40 years ago, in 1976. Alongside a continual and intensive study of anthroposophy, I began to study with the greatest enthusiasm everything he ever wrote and said about cognition, philosophy, 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 forces. 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 found out that Rudolf Steiner demonstrated, in the most concrete, repeatable and testable details, the practical cognitive art of the creation of a continuous cognitive bridge, made from the most pure and exact thoughts, that lead from contemporary natural science and thinking to spiritual science. 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 transforming through the last decades. This became the source of my published books, lectures and my contributions to the school of spiritual science, and its application in social life became the source for the foundation of the community of 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). I consider the present book 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.*

* We could be reminded in this context of Rudolf Steiner's characterization of the disciples of Aristotle as ‘a plague of knowledge/ since they became fierce enemies of the new natural science because they tried to dismiss Galileo's individual and original observations of the real physical word by quoting texts from Aristotle written some 2000 years before.

* I have described some aspects of my spiritual biography in an interview with Thomas Stockli, published in Das Goetheanum, January 2001, an enlarged version of which is included in the 2007 reprint of my book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, Temple Lodge Publishing.

* Finally, let me remark that due to recent demands on my time, I had to refrain from referring to Rudolf Steiner's books at every step and turn of the present text. With few exceptions, the grounding of my present research in Rudolf Steiner's corpus will be left to the reader. However, the good news is that the detailed and extensive notes, the references and the bibliography in my fundamental book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, can serve you as a useful resource for the present book a well.

Introduction

Rudolf Steiner started from the highest and most recent soul faculties that humanity has developed in the modern age: clear and exact thinking and lucid sense perception. This growing tip of the evolution of human consciousness can be transformed in a twofold way. On the one hand, the clearest and most exact thinking can be spiritualized. This takes place through The Philosophy of Freedom. On the other hand, clear and wide-awake sense perception can be spiritualized. This is done by a spiritualization of Goethe's study of the psychological effects of colours. Both can be transformed into new faculties of supersensible research. In relation to this task of spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner introduced the concept of a ‘new Yoga will’, in the comprehensive context of human and cosmic evolution, in his lecture cycle, The Mission of Michael (GA 194, 1919). He described it as a way to create the ‘future culture of Michael’ and establish the ‘Christ-filled soul relation to nature’. In the lecture of 30 November he describes it as follows:

When our sense processes will become ensouled again, we shall have established a crossing point, and in this crossing point... we shall, at the same time, have the subjective-objective element for which Goethe was longing so very much.... In reality, there takes place a soul process from the outside toward the inside, which is taken hold of by the deeply subconscious, inner soul process, so that the two processes overlap. From outside, cosmic thoughts work into us, from inside, humanity's will works outward. Humanity's will and cosmic thought cross in this crossing point, just as the objective and the subjective element once crossed in the breath. We must learn to feel how our will works through our eyes and how the activity of the senses ... brings about the crossing of cosmic thoughts and humanity's will. We must develop this new Yoga will. Then something will be imparted to us that of like nature to that which was imparted to human beings in the breathing process three millennia ago. Our comprehension must become much more soul-like, much more spiritual.... This will be Michael-culture. (The Ancient Yoga Culture and the New Yoga Will. The Michael Culture of the Future, Lecture from 30 November, 1919, GA 194)

A year later Rudolf Steiner introduced this new yoga practice as a method of spiritual development and spiritual research in the inaugural lecture cycle of the High School of Spiritual Science, entitled The Boundaries of Natural Science (GA 322,1920), given to anthroposophically oriented academics, scientists, artists, physicians and socially engaged people:

What, in fact, is the process of perception? It is nothing but a modified process of inhalation. As we breathe in, the air presses upon our diaphragm and upon the whole of our being. Cerebral fluid is forced up through the spinal column into the brain. In this way a connection is established between breathing and cerebral activity. And the part of the breathing that can be discerned as active within the brain works upon our sense activity as perception. Perception is thus a kind of branch of inhalation. In exhalation, on the other hand, cerebral fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of cerebral fluid is bound up with the activity of the will and also of exhalation. Anybody who really studies The Philosophy of Freedom, however, will discover that when we achieve pure thinking, thinking and willing coincide. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. Thus pure thinking turns out to be related to what the Oriental experienced in the process of exhalation. Pure thinking is related to exhalation just as perception is related to inhalation. We have to go through the same process as the yogi but in a way that is, so to speak, pushed back more into the inner life. Yoga depends upon a regulation of the breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What can Western man do? He can raise into clear soul experiences perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which are otherwise united only abstractly, formally, and passively, so that inwardly, in his soul-spirit, he has the same experience as he has physically in breathing in and out. Inhalation and exhalation are physical experiences: when they are harmonized, one consciously experiences the eternal. In everyday life we experience thinking and perception. By bringing mobility into the life of the soul, one experiences the pendulum, the rhythm, the continual inter-penetrating vibration of perception and thinking. A higher reality evolves for the Oriental in the process of inhalation and exhalation; the Westerner achieves a kind of breathing of the soul-spirit in place of the physical breathing of the yogi. He achieves this by developing within himself the living process of modified inhalation in perception and modified exhalation in pure thinking, by weaving together thinking and perceiving. And gradually, by means of this rhythmic pulse, by means of this rhythmic breathing process in perception and thinking, he struggles to rise up to spiritual reality in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And when I indicated in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, at first only philosophically, that reality arises out of the interpenetration of perception and thinking, I intended, because the book was meant as a schooling for the soul, to show what Western man can do in order to enter the spiritual world itself. The Oriental says: systole, diastole; inhalation, exhalation. In place of these the Westerner must put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking. (GA 322, 3. 10. 1920)

I introduced the goal of the cognitive yoga practice in Chapter 5 of my book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, in a way that is just as relevant to our present study:

Our study of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming will be divided into three major parts:

1. the transformation of thinking, or the opening of the gates of thinking;

2. the transformation of sense-perception, or the opening of the gates of perception;

3. the construction of the bridge of memory and continuation of consciousness over the abyss of spirit-forgetfulness.

When we try to recreate, or recapitulate, the modern Christ experience voluntarily, we are confronted with two major problems, the nature of which is determined by the nature of our daily consciousness, namely, the problem of thinking on the one hand and the problem of sense perception on the other. These two are experienced as the main obstacles, but, at the same time, as the only legitimate gates of entrance into the sought-for land of the Etheric Christ. When a self-conscious bridge is to be built between the normal, wide-awake and rational modern state of consciousness and the inspired and intuited imaginative appearance, speech and acts of the Christ in His Second Coming, so must the consciousness soul itself – which, according to Rudolf Sterner, is the soul of free sense-perception and free Imagination – be our only solid ground of construction. There are, therefore, two closed gates to be opened: the gate of thinking and the gate of sense-perception.

In The New Experience of the Supersensible I used cognitive yoga to research deeper aspects of the creation of the cognitive bridge leading to the Christ experience and of the being of Christ. In the present book I have limited the scope of my research to the narrower etheric field. This focus allows me to describe the following in greater detail:

In Chapter one, ‘The life cycle of etheric breathing’, I use the comparison to the electrolysis of water into two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, to explain the separation and etherization of sense perception and thinking commonly bound together in our representations of the world. This process becomes a life-giving etheric breathing between the human being and the world, and between heaven and earth.

Chapter two, ‘The composition of ordinary cognition’, shows how ordinary cognition is centred in the mental picture or representation, in which all experiences, including sense perception and thinking, are condensed and downgraded. Stopping this composition and freeing perception and thinking to their original etheric state, necessitates a confrontation with the unconscious forces that bind them to the brain.

Chapter three, ‘The pearl of greatest price: Individuation’, describes human individuation and freedom as the most significant goal of human and cosmic evolution. This can only be achieved through a physical incarnation on the earth. Only after the human Ego grounds itself in its separate existence, can it use and spiritualize the formative forces that have separated him from the spiritual worlds in order to unite with them again, in full individual consciousness.

In Chapter four, ‘Etherization of Sight’, I explain, step by step, how colour is detached from the representations of objects, spiritualized and then inhaled directly into the body. This brings about a release of the etheric body from the physical brain. However, the body's resistance increases when we strive to liberate the etheric body from the head downwards, leading us to confront what appears to be an unsurpassable threshold in the lower body.

In Chapter five, ‘Etherization of Thinking’, it is shown how spiritualized thinking penetrates deeper into the death processes that create ordinary cognition. These forces will join the forces extracted from the etherisation of perception and help them cross the lower bodily threshold.

Chapter six, ‘Etherization of Smell’, demonstrates, first of all, how the sense of smell is etherized and used to penetrate deeper into the body. Second, we show how to combine the two streams of perception from etherized sight and smell, supported by the forces of etherized thinking, to liberate the etheric body from the head to the heart.

Chapter seven, ‘Birth of a new etheric body’, describes how the mutual exchange between the etheric world and etheric body liberates the purest and most productive etheric forces preserved and protected since the earliest childhood of humanity. The fructification between the purest etheric forces of the world and the body conceives a new etheric offspring, which becomes the foundation of an independent spiritual life in the etheric world.

In Chapter eight, ‘Birth of an etheric individuality’, I show how the spiritualized extract of the strongest spiritual activity accomplished through cognitive yoga in the physical world, enables us to conceive and give birth to an independent spiritual individuality in the etheric world.

Chapter nine, ‘Early childhood of an etheric individuality’, describes how the etheric individuality, once it is born in the etheric world, undergoes its first formative stages of spiritual childhood and develops the spiritual equivalents of the forces that the child develops in the first three years of earthly life.

In Chapter ten, ‘Essence exchange with the cosmic source’, I describe how the matured spiritual individuality approaches the cosmic source of all creation. It becomes an etheric chalice that receives the forces of the etheric Christ needed for the present and future progress of humanity and the earth.

This progress is endangered from many sides today, and prominent among them is the powerful Ahrimanic vision and practice of the Technological Singularity. In the course of this century countless human bodies and souls will be merged with an infinitely seductive and powerful artificial intelligence and virtual reality. This technology will bind them to a sub-natural and inhuman world, which they will experience more and more not only as a fantastic means of entertainment but also as the magical redemption and healing of all human suffering and mortality. This sub-natural and inhuman world lies, morally speaking, one level below the natural and human physical world. However, through the cognitive yoga practice outlined in what follows, we can consciously rise one level above the physical world to the nearest supersensible world, the etheric. In this etheric world alone can our hearts, minds and deeds be healed and resurrected. And only there, in the deepest forces of our human becoming, can we find the life-giving source of the earth and humanity in the twenty-first century.

1. The life cycle of etheric breathing

We cannot tell from the looks of it that water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Though water is liquid and does not burn, hydrogen is a combustible gas – clearly something quite different from water. We can use this as a metaphor for the spiritual process I am about to explain. People are a combination of soul-spiritual and material-physical elements, just as water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. In ‘spiritual chemistry,’ we must separate the soul-spiritual from the material-physical elements just as water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen. Clearly, just looking at people will tell us little about the nature of the soul-spiritual element.

(26 May 1914, GA 154)

Water is the most common and essential liquid that sustains all the processes of life as well as living beings in the physical world. Like all other physical substances it is not original stuff, but a condensation of etheric and ultimately of spiritual forces. Water is a result of an active process of composition, synthesis and condensation of two very different substances, namely, the gases oxygen and hydrogen.

This can be verified experimentally through electrolysis. The electrolysis decomposes the water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen gas (H2) by passing an electric current through the fluid. When we subject water to an electric current, hydrogen will appear at the cathode (the negatively charged electrode), and oxygen will appear at the anode (the positively charged electrode). Water is thereby decomposed into two gases which are substances with wholly different physical and chemical properties than water.

Now electrolysis is reversible: when we subject oxygen and hydrogen to an electric current, the product will be a wholly new substance, a condensed element, which we call water. But we never could have predicted the properties of the two gases from the properties of water and vice versa. The condensation of water out of oxygen and hydrogen is an actual metamorphosis, creating a real novelty in the world. After all, the fact that two gases produce water when they are put together, should appear as a real wonder, since the properties of water are totally different from its original gaseous components. Similarly we must marvel at the fact that the electrolysis and decomposition of water produces two gases, whose properties are essentially different and even the polar opposite of the properties of water from which they have been separated; for example, hydrogen is actually the most flammable of the gases.

The starting point of cognitive yoga can rightly be compared to an electrolysis process applied to ordinary human cognition, for we let the most energetic cooperation of all of our active soul forces flow into our ordinary cognition to polarize, separate and liberate its basic elements. The soul's electric current is made of a mutually enhancing, reciprocally invigorating synergy of all our soul forces. We must bring our whole human being into activity, by awakening forces that commonly slumber in the deep unconscious will and half-conscious feelings that are covered over by our conscious representations. This synergetic, holistic force is fired by the strongest forces of our innermost will, which is the soul equivalent of electricity in the physical world. It is furthermore charged in the heart by the love of truth, and this love and will stream through the structure and content of our ordinary cognition to break loose its hardening, intellectualized, ‘mental water’. When we succeed in this, we electrolyze, decompose and separate it into many soul and mind forces and elements, out of which we choose two: pure sense perception that emerges on one side and pure thinking on the other.

Conversely, the composition and condensation of water out of pure gases can serve as an exact analogy to the coming into being of ordinary human cognition. Once we succeed in the electrolysis of ordinary cognition and experience pure perception and thinking as free etheric forces, we can consciously follow how they are composed and condensed into a mental unity when we represent our experiences and our world. By decomposition and recomposition through mental electrolysis, cognitive yoga brings the two sides of our cognitive process into full consciousness. We discover that, unconsciously, we constantly transform each experience we have into a mental picture which represents it in our consciousness. We are not usually aware of the fact that all experiences and acts of thinking, before they are joined in order to be represented, are essentially free flowing etheric forces that stream in the open etheric world. We condense them together into a mere mental picture (or ‘representation’) whenever we know something. And in order to know something we must first represent it to ourselves in our conscious minds.

We can use the meaning of the words ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’ to help clarify this. ‘Presentation’ means the full presence of the real thing, while its ‘representation’ is but a shadowy mental image that we form in our consciousness after the real experience. Therefore, for example, while we may experience through our feelings in a half-conscious way, the real presence of the being we encounter, when we bring ‘it’ to full consciousness and represent ‘it’ in our mind, we have created only a faint memory picture of the original, fully saturated experience. And this is what we find in our mind after the experience has ebbed away: its mental shadow, empty of its real presence and substance. And this is what we actually mean when we say that we ‘know’ something when we represent it to ourselves. Paradoxically speaking, we can say that what we experience we don’t know, and what we know we don’t experience.

As we shall demonstrate in greater detail in Chapter 2, on the composition of ordinary cognition, we are naive today in regard to how we know the world. We believe that things exist outside in the world exactly as we represent them in our mind and that their separated and condensed state is their real natural state. This amounts to the belief that water is made of water and not of gas and that it was, is and always will remain water. Now, try to convince someone who hasn’t witnessed electrolysis that water is the dense product of two gases, a combination and condensate of pure gases that stream freely and invisibly in the atmosphere!

In the cognitive yoga practice, we electrolyze and decompose the condensed result of ordinary knowledge: the mental picture. Mental pictures and their various derivatives (memories, reminiscence, associations, mental patterns and habits, etc.) constitute the basic substance and structure of our minds, the stuff that makes up our common ‘mental water’. Their components, once separated from the forces that bind and condense them, become something as different from their properties and appearances in ordinary cognition as the pure gases of oxygen and hydrogen are different from water. This means to extract and liberate the living, light and expansive ‘gaseous’ essences of all experiences and thinking from their representations and to experience them in their pure, original state. And when we actualize the reverse process, transforming the etherized perception and thinking back to ordinary cognition, we realize that the results of their composition and condensation is indeed a synthetic, new substance, wholly different from both in their original state. This ‘mental water’ sustains all aspects of our daily consciousness, cognition and knowledge.

The notion that our representations of things are dense compositions made of rarified etheric forces and substances, sounds as ridiculous to the modern mind as the notion that water is a product of hydrogen and oxygen to someone who has never witnessed electrolysis. However, the moment we begin to observe our own cognition, the naive position begins to shatter, because we discover that we cognize and recognize the world by applying thinking to everything we experience. From the moment we realize that we reflect about our experiences when we recognize them, and that we make representations of everything we see, hear and touch, feel and desire, we realize that the real things may not be similar at all to their representations in our consciousness. And we may begin to doubt and agonize, as do many honest philosophers, about the question: what are things in reality, in themselves, outside our representations of them? We realize that as long as we remain in the confines of our ordinary consciousness, we have no ‘immediate’ or ‘direct’ knowledge of real things, in their true or spiritual essence, as they exist outside our representation of them. Even ordinary thinking is not experienced in itself as pure thinking, but is known to us as we know all things, by means of representing it to ourselves. Then we realize what many thinkers have realized, that as long as we remain inside the limits of ordinary cognition, there is truly no way out of this dilemma, that our cognition is limited to representation and that direct knowledge about the ‘things themselves’ is denied to us, as the followers of Kant still maintain today.

The first great natural scientist and artist who protested most strongly and creatively against these Kantian limits of cognition and knowledge was Goethe. Goethe believed that everything is in change and becoming and couldn’t accept such an absolute limitation of our cognitive capacities. He studied the creative and transformative forces of nature all his life, and found out that the fundamental dynamic that causes metamorphosis in nature is ‘Polarität und Steigerung’ (or polarity and intensification). Rudolf Steiner applied Goethe's method to human cognition to create a far-reaching metamorphosis of this cognition. As he described in The Boundaries of Natural Science, we can separate the inhalation of our sense-perceptions from the exhalation of our thinking, just like the yogi of old separated the physical inhalation and physical exhalation that bound him to his body and experienced the immortal, spiritual essence of the soul. In this way we learn, through the cognitive yoga practice, to polarize and separate our ordinary mental constitution as water is electrolyzed. Then we decompose its basic element, the mental picture, separate thinking and sense perception from each other, purify, extract and etherize each one, and intensify each one in its pure etheric becoming. This is the new cognitive breathing of light-filled etheric forces, liberated from the physical body that binds and hardens them together. This is a timely renewal of the ancient yoga method, which was based on the polarization and intensification of the physical breathing, but which we now apply to the more inward soul forces of modern consciousness.

When perception and thinking have been liberated in this way from ordinary consciousness, they are etherized, taking the first step in a long and dramatic process of spiritualization. The cognitive yoga practice consists in this, that we intensify perception and thinking to such an extent that we learn to breathe them in and out, inhale and exhale them according to the needs of our spiritual scientific research. Thus the new will of yoga, that Rudolf Steiner indicated, becomes creative and productive in an individualized way.

Now beside electrolysis there is also a more organic metaphor for cognitive yoga: the natural water cycle in nature. In this cycle, water shows us that it has retained a potential of its gaseous origin in its condensed state. It has the inner tendency and capacity to partly escape gravity, become light and gaseous, and transform itself as closely as possible to a pure gaseous state: it evaporates into the atmosphere, gathers itself as clouds and recondenses and reincarnates as life-giving rain and snow. This capacity that water has to transform itself creates a cycle on the earth that nourishes and sustains all life. In this cycle, water is naturally vaporized and rarified, becoming gas-like, and partially escaping the pull of gravity to reach a cosmic circumference and height. There it imbues itself with fresh, life giving, and cosmic forces. Then it re-embodies itself, returns to the earth and endows it with new and fresh life forces gathered from the whole universe.

In the same way, but now as self-conscious, individual human beings, we learn through cognitive yoga breathing how to actualize the whole life cycle of the earth as a life-giving cycle of cognition. Through us, life becomes self-conscious as a free rhythmic and creative cognitive activity working through the whole human being, in which all of the soul forces mutually intensify one another. It flows with the currents and streams of life as they ascend and descend, etherize themselves in us and in the cosmos and embody themselves back on the earth. It is life's cyclic breathing, becoming self-conscious in us, that unites our creative cognitive process with the life cycle of planet earth and all vibrant life streams and cycles in the universe. This conscious life cycle of etherization and recondensation, out-breathing and in-breathing, incarnation and excarnation, becomes a source of a new life- and light-breathing that humanity and the earth contribute to the whole universe.

Through the practice of cognitive yoga, we learn how to co-create consciously with the breathing rhythms of all life on earth and in the universe. In the future humans will be able to breathe cosmic life and light in this way as a natural spiritual breathing, as physical breathing of air is common today. In the cognitive yoga practice we begin, therefore, to actualize human capacities from the future that are still potential in most people today. The external sun's light, life and warmth, cause the exhalation and inhalation of the planetary life cycle in the course of its daily and seasonal rhythms. But the spirit of the sun, the Christ being, has now become the spirit of the earth. Therefore, in reality the practice of cognitive yoga produces intensive new sun forces of light, life and warmth through creative cognitive activity. Life becomes self-conscious cognitive creative activity. The forces of spiritual human cognition, streaming from the etherized forces of the will, heart and mind together, unite with the spiritual sun being of the earth itself, to become productive and contribute new and fresh life forces that replace the declining natural earthly resources. This gift of new life intensifies and potentizes the currents and streams of planetary life as they ascend and descend, etherize themselves in the cosmos and condense themselves back on the earth. It adds the contribution of our creative cognition to the life cycle of planet earth and its vibrant new life in the universe. In this way we can speak about the creative, life-giving sun activity of human cognition as a real source of future earthly and cosmic life, light and warmth, not as metaphor but as concrete, actual objective reality.

In this way our new life- and light-breathing also becomes an individualized co-productive activity with the forces of the etheric Christ on the earth. In each moment the Christ embodies, in the earth and in human hearts, the highest spiritual sun forces, the source of all cosmic love, life and light. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, His forces enhance and etherize themselves through all creative human deeds of love, beauty and truth. Rudolf Steiner described the reciprocally circulating etheric life cycle between the Christ, human deeds of love, and the earth like this: