Bô Yin Râ: "The Specter of Freedom"--Part 5 of 12: "The Urge to Associate"

A Three Sages Special

Introduction

One of the most universally recognized formulations in modern human history is the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” stated as a principle by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Indeed, we all have at least a vague awareness that these three elements are good, if not essential, for fulfillment of our life on this planet. Also, most of us, especially those in authority, adhere to our own perceived privilege, under a variety of circumstances, to deny these elements to one or more of our fellow human beings. Of course such denial also has limits, as expressed, for instance, in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Which brings us to the question: What really is freedom?

While we wrestle with that question, we may recall the saying of Jesus, “The truth shall make you free.” (John 8:23)

What then, is truth? And how does that truth function in life to work its wonders and produce the stated freedom?

Bô Yin Râ

As readers of Three Sages are aware, for almost a year we have been publishing selections of Bô Yin Râ’s spiritual writings, along with background and commentary. See additional selections of recent articles HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Bô Yin Râ was the spiritual name of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken (1876-1943), born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, educated as a landscape painter, by spiritual pedigree a Luminary of Primordial Light, and, through his writings, the creator of perhaps the most important compendium of original spiritual writings in modern Western history. His master work is the 32-volume Hortus Conclusus (“The Enclosed Garden”).

“The Specter of Freedom”

While most of the material carried by Three Sages by and about Bô Yin Râ has pertained to the spiritual pursuits of the human individual, his book “The Specter of Freedom” focuses on the life of society as a whole. It’s a relatively long work, one that will be carried here in twelve installments. Within this book, Bô Yin Râ, explains two different perspectives on “freedom.” One path is that of freedom as a “specter”—a “ghost” or “illusion” that people follow believing it will lead them to happiness while instead it deceives them into falling into a pit of despair and, ultimately, destruction. The other path is real freedom that comes only when the price for it has been paid.

But what is that price? What are the practices and conditions that must be followed to create something really worth having? One of the conditions clearly is to study the teachings of spiritual masters who know what they are talking about. In our experience, Bô Yin Râ stands in the forefront of those individuals. Another is certainly Jesus, whose advice includes, for instance, the practices spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount.

The group of people involved in presenting material by Bô Yin Râ on Three Sages have provided these definitions of “The Specter of Freedom”:

1. The idiotic idea that we should be “allowed” to do just about anything we desire (as long as we don’t get caught?).

2. That enticing notion we conjure up thinking how being free from various earthly restrictions will allow us to fulfill our dreams but which ultimately disappoints because we did not take into account spiritual law and our spiritual inheritance.

3. In Polish, “Specter of Freedom” is “Upior Wolnosci,” which is a great translation as it would mean a “negative, lingering ghostly presence/entity.”

4. What can “freedom” possibly mean for a person who has not achieved complete control of thoughts, speech, and actions?

“The Specter of Freedom”—Part 5 of 12

Contents:

1. Mirage

2. Necessity

3. Communality

4. Authority

5. The Urge to Associate

6. The Failed Economy

7. Competition

8. The Craze for Catchwords

9. Self-Realization

10. Religion

11. Science

12. Consciousness of Reality

Part 5: The Urge to Associate

Deeply rooted within human nature is the collective striving among those aiming for the same goal, to form associations.

What the will of an individual could never bring about, often becomes reality through the aggregation of many wills, and individual conviction gains its own pleasure upon meeting the same conviction in others also.

Yet the same object can be viewed from different perspectives, and very different yearned for goals seem worth striving for to people.

Thus it stands to reason that all sorts of associations come into existence, each one striving for a different goal, and a prosperous life can emerge from this diversity if again it seeks to encompass in union the separate bodies: directed towards a goal transcending the particular goals of the separate associations.

It is not difficult to find such a goal if it is only sought where the welfare of all teaches us to find what must be achieved ahead of all particular goals; once achieved it will also make secure its achievement.

Just as so much that can be achieved through the association of many remains out of the individual’s reach, so too is there much that remains unfulfilled by every individual association which can be brought to fulfilment by a controlling ‘association of associations’.

Such a gathering is rare, though it should be the rule!

Still far too rare are those individuals who have overcome that blind urge of the animal to fall upon the food of their own species even though in doing so they wildly trample all over the nourishment available to them…

Still too rare is respect for the opinion of others, – too rare the recognition that those who err can only be helped when they realize their error within themselves. –

Everyone believes that he alone has the best of knowledge; he regards as his enemy anyone else who believes himself to be just as well informed. –

This causes dissolution and disintegration where the continuous aggregation of individual opinions alone could promote genuine value. – –

Often one associates with like-minded people just to hear one’s own individual voice a thousand times over, like an echo, – as one is not so certain of his knowledge as one often thinks and would very soon hear doubts gnawing at one’s certainty if the choir of the many who seek in an identical way to maintain their self-confidence does not succeed in drowning out those doubts…

Every other association is then despised and attacked, since their adherents have thought up a different text to the same ‘melody’ which for them is no less rich in content and well founded.

Since everyone has one’s own opinion, which in many ways still differs from that of apparently completely like-minded people, every association disintegrates, unless compulsion keeps it artificially together, into smaller and smaller splinter groups, until in the end the individual is only capable of “associating” with oneself.

Only through the rule of necessity, from which no sphere of life can escape, is such ultimate disintegration prevented.

However, it is unavoidable that the urge to separation causes serious damage within already separated associations by blinding the associated to the extent that they can no longer recognize what association can achieve if it remains true to its given natural foundation which requires integration. – –

Whatever the articles of belief binding the associations may say – whatever solutions like-minded people conceive where solutions are urgently needed, – the total value of united action is always conditional on the vital proof that the chosen means have the power to create permanency. Only the continual testing of preconceived opinion can separate the wheat from the chaff. –

Yet this very testing of preconceived opinion becomes impossible where the urge to splinter seeks its own satisfaction in evermore novel theories!

And where one should only whisper, one shouts out loud; where one should carefully sift, one heaps rubble onto the vital seeds to be found in all human opinion which has been carefully ploughed by proper thinking!

It has been forgotten that all human association only has an inherent right to exist where it seeks to gather together. – –

If ever true communality is to come about, only the Spirit-born sense of gathering together will be able to produce it in true freedom determined by necessity!

In the ancient sacred account the most divine of the men of the earth says:

“He that gathers not with me: he scatters!”

If ever a word of a man was: the ‘Word of God’, here it has been uttered! – –

Not gathering together – not to seek to gather – is in itself already: scattering! –

The exalted Spirit having influence on Earth and comprehensible to people in their souls continually seeks to ‘gather what has been lost’, – and if, what others recognize as exalted, because it comes to them so close to experience as does experience of themselves, – you believe in your narrow view is justified only when rooted purely in the earthly, you must nevertheless admit that the inclination to gather together is of a higher kind than that dark instinct which always seeks to scatter again and dissolve what has been gathered organically within itself. –

You would recognize madness at work were someone to try to dissolve in strong acid one of those sublime marble statues created in ancient times by a great sculptor, with the justification that a new work would surely arise from the dissolved stone and quickly wipe away the pain of having lost the statue destroyed in this way…

What has once been formed through the power of expression matured by the Spirit in order to preserve the best of earthly mankind, is far too valuable – to be surrendered to hasty destruction.

The things exalted human spirits gathered through the millennia are too valuable to be offered up to be scattered without terrible guilt towards all future generations! – –

Just as your fingers are attached to your hand though they can move individually, so too are we earthly people of a certain era attached invisibly.

Though you might flee into the desert or find a deserted island never inhabited by humans across the distant oceans, you will never be able to escape this invisible attachment connecting the whole of life!

If you destroy all the evidence of other human life simultaneously living around you , life in general will always be able to reach you through the rhythm of the most subtle vibrations which co-condition it, and whatever you think and feel, you will never lose the mark of your times!

You cannot escape your own times even by ‘immersing’ yourself deeply in the feelings and thoughts of a long past era, – and you will not be able to live the life of a ‘Stone Age human’ even if you try to withdraw from all forms of culture! –

Yet you can indeed choose between value and illusion, for every age allows the simultaneous growth of what furthers humanity or ruins it.

You must not fall prey to cosmic dissonances, even if here on Earth in your own age human brains now perceive the most remote final tones of such an occurrence…

Similar things do not take place for the first time here on Earth, but there have always been individuals who have known how to protect themselves from mad cravings which can sometimes be aroused in the blood of earthly people by the circling of matter in cosmic space, …

Be like those with insight and maintain in the face of the urge to associate which surrounds you – your right to self-determination! – –

You alone will one day have to give an account of yourself to yourself about all your actions during this earthly life, – it will be of no use to you to finally realize the utter folly of throwing away your own ‘present’ for the sake of a ‘future’ which flies on with every passing day! –

If you are not to negate yourself, you must with self-determination ‘will’ the existence of others in forms foreign to you, just as decisively as your own existence. For every individual is defined in his time by others – though they might seem incomprehensibly ‘foreign’ –, and he is forever attached to them. –

If you ‘hate’, however, what is different from you, you are unconsciously your own enemy, for only from what you are not yourself can you preserve yourself in time and Eternity…

This ends Part 5 of 12, “The Urge to Associate”

Comments

Part 5 — Bô Yin Râ characterizes the “Urge to Associate” as one of the fundamental building blocks of human happiness, even though people with differing viewpoints create their own constructs of association that oppose each other. Despite these competing perspectives, true wisdom always seeks common grounds of understanding and cooperation. Unfortunately, we are living in a time when mutual hatred, combined with misguided egotism, is constantly breaking up the natural urge to associate, even to the point of destroying time-honored customs and institutions.. Bô Yin Râ cites the saying of Jesus: “He that gathers not with me: he scatters,” adding that “If ever a word of a man was: the ‘Word of God’, here it has been uttered! – – Not gathering together—not to seek to gather - is in itself already: scattering! -” This saying is closely related to what Jesus said in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The message of this chapter is that only by positively affirming our “urge to associate” through bringing people together can we overcome the problems of division and hatred that threaten to shatter humanity.

Previous Installments

Part 1 of 12: “Mirage”

Part 2 of 12: “Necessity”

Part 3 of 12: “Communality”

Part 4 of 12: "Authority"

Copyright Information

“The Specter of Freedom” is Book 13 of the Hortus Conclusus: the standard-translation© of the Hortus Conclusus (The Enclosed Garden), encompassing the spiritual teachings in thirty-two books by Bô Yin Râ. (Bô Yin Râ is the spiritual name of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken 1876-1943.)

All rights, copyrights included, reserved by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Posthumus Projects Amsterdam is responsible for this standard-translation©. Posthumus Projects Amsterdam has provided general permission for reprinting and transmission of its publications with attribution. Edited for Three Sages.