"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 11 of 13
Richard C. Cook, Editor, Three Sages: For the past year, Three Sages has included in its publishing agenda articles about German spiritual master Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken 1876-1943), along with excerpts from his works. This included a series of articles on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ that we recently published during Holy Week, leading up to Easter Sunday. We have had a strong and positive reception among English-speaking readers from the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the world, so have been encouraged to continue.
Over the next few weeks, we plan to publish the complete text of one of Bô Yin Râ’s major books; namely “The Book on the Beyond,” the subject of which is the human afterlife. We have selected this book among Bô Yin Râ’s entire body of work because of the intense interest shown by people today who are faced with both calamities and opportunities that challenge us to ponder the fundamental meaning of human existence.
This challenge can be better approached once we admit that:
a) We don’t really know where we came from before entering life on earth through birth into a human body;
b) We don’t really know where, if anywhere, we will be transported or what the nature of our ongoing experience will be like, when death inevitably completes this sojourn on earth;
c) we lack exact knowledge of why we are here or the ends to which we should devote our time and energy during our lifetime; and
d) we are uncertain as to whom, to which, or to what we should turn for guidance, despite the clamor among multitudes of claimants to playing such a role in our lives. Without such guidance, we also run the risk of succumbing to those heinous ideologies which claim that human beings are merely “thinking animals,” without an immortal spirit.
We now suggest to our readers to read and study the following selection from Bô Yin Râ’s writings and see if such an effort offers help. To better understand who Bô Yin Râ was and why his teachings are of critical value to humanity in these uncertain days, please read the Three Sages article published last September and re-posted here: Review of Bô Yin Râ's "The Book on Life Beyond".
Also please take note that Bô Yin Râ’s teachings are viewed by experienced readers as applicable to all religious traditions.
Note: Another excellent translation entitled The Book On Life Beyond is published by The Kober Press. But while reading any translation, readers should also be advised of Bô Yin Râ’s advice to study his works in the original German. Accordingly, any translation must be viewed as transitional, with a second edition of the translation contained herein now being planned by Books to Light.
When reading and studying Bô Yin Râ, it is well to bear in mind this liberating thought:
“If it were not a millennia-old superstition which believed that spiritual reality had to be discovered through the mechanism of proper logical thought, the reality to which I give witness here would have been discovered a long time ago and removed from all doubt!”
The Book on the Beyond—Part 11 of 13
Third book 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.
Contents:
Introduction
The Skill of Dying
On the Temple of Eternity and the World of the Spirit
The One Reality
What Is To Be Done?
The One Reality (Continued from Part 10)
So-called ‘clairvoyance’ is, however, not the ability to perceive spiritual forms.
The ‘clairvoyant’ is only capable of perceiving things found in the physical world which are distant from him in space and time, – on occasions this includes its invisible sphere and the lemuroid beings inhabiting it, which he then takes to be ‘spirits’.
If a ‘clairvoyant’ produces the most astonishing proofs for his ability to perceive events far away, in the past or in the future, he only ever sees things within the recognizable phenomenal world of the physical senses.
Wherever he thinks he sees spiritual things, he is either giving an account of the invisible part of the physical world, or of things his own vivid imagination parades in front of him; although he regards everything he sees, in good faith, as objective testimony to the spiritual world.
His visions will then always clearly display the color of his own prejudices and opinions governing his daily life on earth.
If he is a Christian, he will give an account of the holy figures in the Gospels or of canonized ‘saints’; – if he grew up within the ideas of Indian religious systems he will believe he sees the divinities of Brahmanism, and in Tibet: those of the Mayâhâna school.
Innumerable illusions about the ‘beyond’ have been spread among willing believers by ‘clairvoyants’. They continue to find adherents because people naively conclude, from the confirmation of some reference to the past or future, that the ‘clairvoyant’ also has access to spiritual realms.
The ‘clairvoyant’s’ organ, however, is nothing other than a rudimentary physical sensory organ from the first days of mankind on this earth.
As an example of ‘atavism’, this sensory organ which is functioning to a limited degree can occasionally be found in people of today’s generation.
All ‘clair-voyance’, ‘clair-feeling’ and ‘clair-hearing’ rest on the possibility of being able to use this sensory organ.
Included here are also so-called ‘psychometry’; that is, seeing visions of the past fate of an object merely by touching it, as well as some versions of the ability to ‘soothsay’, even if here a method is used which, intentionally or unwittingly, conceals the actual procedure.
You will have to differentiate between three realms in the cosmos, if you are to learn how to understand the ‘world beyond’.
Firstly, the realm of the physical-sensory way of perception, or the physical world.
Secondly, the realm of spiritual-sensory perception, or the world of the spirit.
Thirdly, however, there is the realm of hidden, cause-creating powers of original being: – the only reality, on whose influence rest all the forms of perception and their phenomenal worlds, both in the spiritual and physical dimensions of the cosmos.
These hidden, causal powers of being work in earthly man as his ‘powers of the soul’.
Once crystallized into a temporal collective form in a human life, they adopt, as it were, the human’s individual ‘coloration’ and become, through the eternal will which manifests itself in him, determined for all future time, so that they must henceforth follow the impulse they now received until he finds fulfillment.
If this fulfillment does not take place in the earthly life of the human who gave the impulse, the ‘powers of the soul’ striving in a particular direction will repeatedly express themselves in new human lives, until they finally achieve fulfillment by merging themselves with the will manifested in a human being and so becoming one with him.
An incorrect interpretation of what they saw of these events seduced peoples of the east into believing in a frequent ‘re-embodiment’ through birth on earth.
The truth is, however, that this re-embodiment, – that is, a regression into the self-hypnosis of a physical-sensory way of perception – is only possible by humans who consciously and deliberately destroy their own bodies (which in no case is a work of eternal will, but always an attempt of the desire to escape! – –); furthermore: it is possible with children who died before the eternal will was able to fulfill its urge to physical-sensory experience; and thirdly: in humans in whom the urge to this experience degenerated, as it were, into hypertrophy, so that even the death of the earthly body could only temporarily interrupt the state of self-hypnosis.
Thus the doctrine of reincarnation can be seen as having as little application to normal events, as suicide or death in infancy can be seen as the normal conclusion of life of man on earth…
If ‘memories’ or faint feelings arise within you which steer you towards the thought that you might once before have lived life on earth, it is possible that you are not deceived in thinking this, and that you are an example of one of the three exceptions which alone would allow reincarnation, – however, you would do better to let the question rest until the day you receive a certain answer in the spiritual realm, after departing from this life on earth.
The feeling that you lived on earth as an individuality different from yourself is always and with all certainty a delusion. For in the three exceptions listed above which allow repeated re-embodiment on earth, the same individuality remains in the new re-embodiment, prepared to experience itself in existence on earth.
On the other hand, one may assume with certainty that everyone whose inner sensitivities are not completely dulled, feels sometimes ‘powers of the soul’ at work within him, which received their impulse from men of an earlier age and now seek to bring it to fulfillment.
It may be the case that the person experiencing these things within himself will see very vivid memories which originate in the lives of those who once gave their impulse to those ‘powers of the soul’ now working in another human life.
The error in believing that you were once the person yourself who experienced the memories can very easily be explained, but only, if need be, by far too superficial experiences.
Every individual human being is a single and unique emanation from the First Will, – proceeded from the eternal ‘unformed sea of the Godhead’ to attain its individual perfected form which differs from all other co-emanations.
Those born on this earth who now must bear the trials, tribulations, and pains inseparably bound to existence in the animal body, have created this destiny themselves. For the sake of living in the world of physical-sensory phenomena they interrupted the path to perfection of their form in the spirit.
Of necessity he must return sooner or later, so that he then may again strive for the perfection of his spiritual form.
The sooner he recognizes, while still alive on earth, the only way in which he can ‘turn around’ his ‘need’, the more assistance he can draw from his earthly life for the further course of his path to perfection, – and the easier it will be, while still here on earth, to remove obstacles which otherwise can become severe restrictions on this spiritual path. –
Yet even if man in this existence on earth does not attain his own, conscious experience with his own spiritual senses, a significant achievement is made if he is orientated towards the true form of the ‘world beyond’ awaiting him after his death, by those of his fellow men who already have this experience.
As in the physically-sensory perceptible world the same way of perception is at work creating phenomena, yet the world of the ant, or of the bird, is essentially different from your own; there are manifold differences in the worlds of beings capable of spiritual-sensory perception.
There are countless spiritual worlds, just as there are countless worlds of physical-sensory phenomena!
Individual, eternal will finds the highest form of its perfection only when it unites its individual will, without a trace of separate striving, with the will of the universe, within the innermost realm of the spirit: – that realm of the cause-initiating, eternal effectual powers of being: – in the light-world of the only reality…
Beyond this there is nothing for the human spirit; for this most sublime of all worlds is unending in time, space, and possibilities of fulfillment.
Insofar as ‘unlimited’ being, that ‘boundless, unfathomable ocean of the Godhead’ determined and thus bounded, – though ‘unending’ – is accessible to consciousness by the influence of the will, it only becomes conscious of itself in this supreme light-world in each eternal will which is united here. – – –
Those things I have sought to explain to you here in these three treatises [referring to the three introductory books of Hortus Conclusus, one of which is reproduced here as The Book on the Beyond] include everything man on earth can comprehend during his life on earth regarding the innermost mystery of his existence, here and in the other world awaiting him after death.
Everything else you may be told about the ‘life beyond’ – whether fantasies dreamt up by feverish faith or speculative thought, – consists of theories and empty notions!
You should not believe in some ‘theory of the world’ just because it has found other believers; for your soul will not be at peace until it has recognized itself again: – as a testimony by itself of the only reality.
The Book on the Beyond--Part 1
The Book on the Beyond--Part 2
The Book on the Beyond--Part 3
The Book on the Beyond--Part 4
The Book on the Beyond--Part 5
The Book on the Beyond--Part 6
The Book on the Beyond--Part 7
The Book on the Beyond--Part 8