Ben-Aharon

Reprinted below (from Facebook) are notes from a lecture by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon with Tobjorn Elftestol. Utilizing listening as the impetus, they explore the transformation of pure perception into cosmic experiencing.

Sunday morning lecture by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon and conversation with Torbjorn Elftestol, in which they reflects back on last evenings concert

Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman

We will go back to some of the things we said yesterday about the experience of music . This is, like eurythmy, a good example, demonstrating what we are trying to grasp and to experience consciously here. The experience itself and the expression of this change of consciousness, the transition from ordinary consciousness, from representation to pure becoming. This is, when you express it in words and thoughts, a bit difficult to grasp. You have to be very active with what you hear, together with your whole soul. RS said that you have to be fully awake, fully conscious, as alert and conscious as you can, and at the same time not grasp what you hear or see with representations. Don’t re-present it. Let what comes stream into your body, into your unconscious directly. This is a terrible paradox for ordinary people. It is not a day dreaming state, not a dreaming into perceptions. No, you intensify and enhance the same clear state of sense perception that you have in ordinary consciousness. You don’t go below the level of ordinary consciousness, you increase it. You increase the clarity and alertness and ‘aufmerksamkeit’ and you hear and see and think but you should not form representations of all those experiences. We are asked to experience the real world with open senses yet not think about our experiences. Thinking about is instinctive, automatic. We do not decide whether we want to make representations. The moment we see something we make a representation. We know what we see. In daily life, we don’t see something which we don’t know and then think about it and come to a conclusion. We see and re-cognize. We know everything when we wake up in the morning. It is automatic, we remember, we re-cognize as we re-member.

We should be able to see, hear, feel, experience and stop all thinking and reflecting and analyzing about it. Let the experience itself by pass all thinking, all representing, remembering, recognizing, and flow directly into the unconscious and then let it flow back from the unconscious into our consciousness. But when it streams in this way it changes our daily consciousness. You can say that it is waking our thinking in our feeling, in our will, in and through our sense perceptions. But this is a different thinking all together; its not representational thinking, but creative thinking. It does not reflect on and about experience but become an experience of the real cosmic life that animates all our experiences. If we can make this into a conscious experience and do it again and again and experiment and explore this space or place between experience and thinking, separating them from one another, then we begin to bring to consciousness the threshold with its questions,problems, difficulties, paradoxes and contradictions. Then we begin to understand what spiritual science is in the making of spiritual science. Spiritual science becomes something that we do and accomplish. An art of new consciousness, a new art of life itself is becoming possible.

There is a big difference in the two ways of approaching spiritual science. Both ways are justified but we have to understand the difference between the two approaches. The one, the normal one, is to accept the results of someone else’s research and take it into one’s ordinary consciousness to nourish and feed one’s soul. This is justified but one should know that this is what one does and have no illusions about it. One is on the receiving end of the results of the experience of the spiritual scientist. He is creative and one is receptive. We need this to the same extent as we need physical nourishment which someone else has grown and cooked. But you can also say: “I want to be a gardener myself and become active and productive. I want to grow the spirit, to produce something spiritual myself. I do not want nor can I really produce all my spiritual food, but I want to become productive myself. I do not only want to be on the receiving end but want also to be creative. I want to do the work, be a partner in the work. I want to follow the spiritual becoming process in order to do what I’m capable of doing myself in this field, becoming active and creative”. If one wants to do this then the first thing one needs to do is to experience- this cannot be a mere theoretical idea- that one is imprisoned in one’s ordinary consciousness and cannot get out. One can meditate for ever in one’s ordinary consciousness but these meditations and other spiritual practices will only harden our ordinary consciousness in itself, will make it stronger. We will meditate and do the same as we do in ordinary consciousness. We don’t go out as we would like to believe we do, but we actually go deeper into our normal selves.

Yeshayahu asks Torbjørn to describe his experience of sound, the tone which he described when he demonstrated that he could follow the tone as it fades out and what happens at the edge of the tone.

Torbjørn: Yes, I think this music of Feldman that I was referring to can help us into this process because there is so much space for the sounds. They die away. Then you get to the point where you are not certain any more whether you can hear any sound or not. This was something which I discovered while practicing this piece. It suddenly occurred to my as an existential riddle. I was experiencing a very concentrated listening, it was like feeling as if touching something. It was like a finger. At this point, when I experience this, I also experienced my listening and my attention. This was one and the same thing, not different aspects. It was experienced as a will in the echo of the tone. But because I had completely forgotten to will something in relation to listening, I had become this will. A “listening-attention-will” was occurring in me, and this felt like a continuation after the “tone” I was listening to had vanished.

Yeshayahu: This means in other words, that in ordinary listening as in all other sense perceptions, the sound, the tone, is the represented tone.

I hear the tone, I hear the tone so or so, I grasp it consciously and represent it to my consciousness. It is content, a representation. Now lets follow the experience Torbjorn describes and see how it leads out of ordinary consciousness into a new one. The more I let the sound linger, naturally it becomes weaker and weaker until the representation disappears, as content from my consciousness. Consciousness of the sound as content, as representation disappears with the content itself, and then, in the periphery it vanishes but I remain fully awake, I don’t fall asleep. Usually in the night we fall asleep because we have no sense perceptible content that we can represent so we lose consciousness and fall asleep. We cannot have empty consciousness and keep awake. But Torbjørn says that here, at the very periphery, when he does not have any representation any more of the sound but he remains fully awake, something else is happening.

Another example of the same process can be the homeopathic dilution process. We put a substance into water and dilute the substance repeatedly. We potentise it by mixing it with more and more water. Eventually we come to the point where there is no more traceable amount of physical substance in the liquid. It is said that the less substance there is the stronger the forces become that exist as a potential in this substance. Diluting the substance releases the forces, the life- and spiritual forces of the substance. Less substance, more free life force. These forces are of course always there but they are bound and repressed by the condensed state of the substance. They are released when the substance is reduced to nothing, to zeros and below zero of density. Now we can say that in spiritual-sciectific research ww do the same process of potentisation with every representation, any sense perception and any thought activity.

Torbjørn: I have had a very touching experience. Sometimes it is as if at this point [at the periphery], it holds me, holds my consciousness. There is a kind of reversal taking place at this point, very subtle, but that helps me to sustain the concentration and stay awake. It becomes like a pulse stretching outward from me and then something which is coming the other way towards me. The ordinary will that we use, where we push very hard disappears more and more and a more subtle will that is deeper in the listening experience come to the fore. It is very hard to put this into words.

The whole problem of how to play now also comes into this. Many pianists today play with enormous gestures. I used to have a lot more gesture myself. They helped med to really form the music and infuse it with energy. But if I want to play from out of this place, I feel the need to silence my body and be quiet because as soon as I do anything, I cover over it. I see the same problem with what we did in eurythmy yesterday, I mean, it put me in touch with the same problem. You know, when you start moving your own body, then how do you keep contact with this experience? It is very subtle.

Yeshayahu:I will represent this again in a schematic way [drawing on the blackboard]. We start in a middle or central point from a strong centralized thing, a representation, full of content, invested with a strong feeling and will. We let it ebb away gradually, we let it spread, we let it go, but we keep our awareness and consciousness alive and alert and open. We let the content and the intentionality weaken and weaken more and more. So here [in the centre] where the intentionality is strong, I experience this “I will”, “I feel”, “I think”, and this means that here [in the centre] the cosmic forces are the weakest because I am here incarnated and embodied fully in my physical body and ordinary, physically centered, soul consciousness.The cosmic forces of the subject matter are really out there [at the periphery]. I represent here [in the centre] the color red, I have my representation of color, my feeling about it. The real force of red, the cosmic red is out there in the periphery. Now I want to experience it, I want to find my way to the real force of red through and behind red, through and behind the tone, through and behind the concept. So I have to move, to make my way from here [centre] to there [periphery] as real active movement of my whole soul, consciousness and cognition. And there is a place somewhere in-between [it was drawn] the center and periphery, in a relative, changeable, middle, where my soul intentionality and content become so diluted, until they come to their 0 point, and then, if I don’t lose consciousness, if I can stay wide awake and continue beyond 0, it is becoming really minus, minus red, minus or negative, reversed no/n-presentation, minus intentional thinking, feeling and will. At this point the cosmic forces are flowing in, touching me from outside, rushing into and through the vacuum of (what was used to be) my self-centered-self … through 0 to minus substance, matter, representation, feeling, volition, there is an experience that can be expressed somewhat like this: “I have no more self-willed-will, and therefore currents of cosmic will are streaming through me; I have no more self-centered-feelings, cosmic feeling is weaving in and out of me; I cannot think anymore my-own-thoughts, cosmic thinking is thinking through me, inspiring surprising new ideas, connections, relationships”. This is the threshold experience on this level.

When and where I go through O into minus – but remain intensively awake yet empty-then I experience how the cosmic forces are streaming though me and gently touching me. Then this reversal takes place. The “I” is really out there- but the “out there”, the real etheric world, is “worlding” in and through here. What was locked and hidden inside the sound- the purely spiritual tone, or better said on this (still preliminary) level, the life forces invested in the tone, comes from outside. This is what Torbjørn described before.

Now we come to the great problem of conscious spiritual expression. After all I went out there not because I wanted to play and enjoy myself only (though the creative joy is essentially part of this process), but I wanted to go there in order to bring something unique back to the physical world, in order to enrich and transform physical life. I want to express the forces from the cosmos and allow them to stream back through me to physical expression. To dance it, paint it, to think it, to speak it. I want to let the life forces from the other side, as reversed etheric stream, flow back through me, finding in me now an opening through which they can be more or less expressed right here and now and become visible, audible, doable, to ordinary consciousness. This is possible because I went out this way, I can go back in this way of re-actualization, re-incarnation, leading to a new, artistic, imaginative, vibrant and flowing expression, leading to a new movement, a soul and bodily movement from the other side. This is how the new is created in all spheres of life! usually, the artist and thinker that produce the new aren’t aware of the whole process described here. Much of it remains unconscious to them. But this is how in operates in any case in which creativity takes place and something qualitatively, spiritually new is produced. But if I accomplish the whole process consciously I I can actualize it out there, bringing a creative echo from the other side into my physical activity, so that it will have the feeling, the aura of this cosmic experience.

If this is the line, the limit [it was drawn on the blackboard], I will breath-out, exhale, or excarnate from the centre through the line, through the experience of the threshold, letting my central “ego consciousness” dilute itself until it reaches zerow and goes into “minus”, or self-center reversed inside out; then I experience the influx of cosmic peripheral life forces, flowing in from all directions of he other side. Therefore, when I breath back in, incarnate, my movement cannot be from within outside but is felt as though cosmic forces are leading my moves from behind, as it were, from and through my back. There the cosmic wind gives you her wings! spiritual expression, if it is authentic, cannot simply be a continuation of the ordinary ego-centric “I move, I feel, I experience”, but it should be felt that IT moves me, IT moves through me, IT (or the I AM, SHE, or HE, or THEY/THEM) is/are flowing through me and I am just an instrument tuned to expressing IT. This is the unique mystery of the human being as a whole, the mystery of the “I”, that the same “I” can experience both: “I think”, “I feel”, “I will”, but then, excarnating and reincarnating, the same “I” can also say: “yes it is “I”, but, nevertheless, not “I” but IT flows, works, weaves, through me”. This is the Pauline formula, which is the real essence of the modern spiritual path, “not I but … the world in and through me..”. The real forces behind red, not my representation of red, not “my red” but the world’s red (which is not at all similar to my red) is/ are flowing through “my” red. The cosmic experience of tone, of red is working through me.

This process is what spiritual science is all about. It is not difficult to understand. It can be expressed in clear concepts and represented in many ways. It is not a complicated issue in terms of intellectual understanding. But to do it on all levels of the soul, in thinking, feeling and will, in consciousness, in art, in education, in social life, in a meeting with the other, to really do it, is not as simple as understanding it through someone’s else experience. We must first realize how we are always reversing everything that enters into our ordinary consciousness. How we individualize and privatize all our experiences and transform them into private personal experiences and representations. We forget, we fall back into our ordinary consciousness.

This is the real work of spiritual science, the doing of spiritual science, doing it oneself, individualizing it, until the whole body and soul are practicing this. Oneself and together with others. We can take to help us all the best of modern science, thinking and art as I described it in my recent book, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art. Otherwise we may fall back onto our own ordinary representations.

We can help ourselves with contemporary sciences, arts and philosophy, where this is happening more or less unconsciously through the Time Spirit, and we can use spiritual science to lift this to fuller and fuller consciousness.

Many people speak about RS. Many people do many things with RS’s work. Many think he will come back to save them, that he is already reincarnated. But strangely enough, only very few people do the most basic thing which is to ask him, what does he thinks about what we are doing now in his name. Not quote what he said more then 100 years ago but what he thinks right now! If you honor yourself as a free creative person, and if you honor him as your spiritual teacher, you could also ask what he thinks about what you are doing right now. And then you will hear that RS says, be free as I was free. Be yourself as I was myself, and do your thing with everything that you find good and fruitful in the world and individualize it in the freest spirit as I was striving to do, and then you will work with me in my stream because this is my stream, our stream, humanity’s stream, the stream of creative freedom and love.

This is what we have tried to experience in this time together, as we tried last year and I hope we can continue this in different ways and different forms here and in other places. That this approach shall begin to resound more, that it will be perceived more, that people will become more aware that there is a way to do spiritual science that is right for our time.

Notes taken by Hester Renouf

Note: The piece referred to is Palais de Mari which was
performed the evening before this lecture.