Steiner's modern replacement for breath-yoga: consciously ensouling light and sense perception, since the air lost its soul and the soul now rides on light.
The New Yoga Will is Rudolf Steiner's term for the contemporary spiritual path that takes the place of ancient breath-yoga. The Indian yogi reached the spirit through the breathing process. Steiner taught that the air lost its soul at the Mystery of Golgotha, so the modern seeker must instead awaken consciously within sense perception, learning to feel the soul that now lives in light rather than in breath.
The New Yoga Will in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the modern spiritual practice that supersedes ancient breath-yoga. Where the Indian yogi of the third post-Atlantean epoch reached the spirit by becoming conscious of the breathing process, in which inner and outer being met at one crossing point, Steiner taught that this path is now closed. Because the air lost its soul at the Mystery of Golgotha, and the soul now rides on light rather than on breath, the seeker must consciously ensoul sense perception itself. In his lecture of 30 November 1919, gathered in The Mission of the Archangel Michael (GA 194), Steiner points to the dying-down of a light impression in the ether body as the new organ of inner work. The air-soul-process gives way to a light-soul-process, forming a fresh crossing point where cosmic thought meets human will.
In Steiner's Own Words
We as modern human beings cannot attain this by going back to Yoga culture; that has passed. For the breathing process itself has changed. This, of course, you cannot prove clinically; but the breathing process has become a different one since the third post-Atlantean cultural period. Roughly speaking, we might say: In the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch the human being breathed soul; today he breathes air. Not only our thoughts have become materialistic; reality itself has lost its soul. I beg you, my dear friends, not to see something negligible in what I am now saying.
What it Means Today
Steiner pointed to the most ordinary fact of seeing to show where the new yoga begins. Look at a flame, then close your eyes, and watch the after-image gradually fade, what he called, borrowing Goethe's phrase, its dying down. That cycle of reception and fading, Steiner held, is for the modern human being what the breath was for the ancient yogi: a place where an outer process becomes an inner one. The seed of the practice is therefore already in Goethe. In the physiological-colours section that opens Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours, 1810), Goethe treated the after-image not as an error of a tired eye but as a living deed of the seeing organism, the eye supplying the complementary colour out of itself. Steiner extended exactly this observation into a path of schooling, and the work continues at the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, founded 1923, where colour, after-image, and plant observation are still studied as conscious soul-acts rather than passive measurements.
Thalira synthesis: the New Yoga Will asks the seeker to do consciously, in the moment a light impression rises and dies in the ether body, exactly what the lungs once did without thought, so that perception itself becomes the breath of a soul that no longer lives in the air.
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