"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 3

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 3

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.)

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 Skill of Dying (continued)

Consciousness of one’s own presence, now felt by the spiritual organism, is not extinguished, nor is the clear ability to see and recognize all people who are physically present in their spiritual forms as these completely reflect – apart from physical limitations of their earthly manifestation, – their earthly forms.

The dead whose consciousness during their life on earth only slightly extended beyond the sphere of physical-animal existence are often so deceived by this condition that they still do not realize, for some time after their physical death, that they no longer are in a physical body.

They think they have ‘recovered’, since the earlier cause of their sufferings has vanished.

For the time being they are enchanted by a dreamlike picture of earthly life. Their perception of the spiritual form of their nearest and dearest is confused with self-created figures from their dream world; the dead cannot understand why they are grieving for them.

They then make every possible attempt to convince those who grieve in physical existence that there is no reason to mourn, – only these efforts are not registered by those in the throes of grief left behind in the physical world.

Only when he sees his own powerlessness in the face of what he perceives to be the folly of his nearest and dearest does he then discover that he has been unburdened of his physical body, and awakes from the dream of his own making.

Only then does he really begin to ‘learn to see’; his spiritual eyes are opened to the new spiritual side of the causal world, whose domain of the physical and sensory approach he has abandoned without changing his ‘place’ in the cosmos.

At this point spiritual wandering begins for those who did not practice the ‘skill of dying’ during their days on earth. For the spiritual organism of a man will not be clarified in any way by death beyond the certainty of recognition he has already attained.

Certainly there are immediately helpers at hand, but they are not recognized as such.

Instead of this they are rejected decisively and consciously by the dead who are still stuck in their physical and earthly opinions, with the consequence that all attempts to help are obstructed.

The certain knowledge to have indeed reached the life ‘beyond’ does not uncommonly awaken boundless arrogance, which only confirms the susceptible in their follies.

Those completely shackled to the earth, or too attached in their cares to things and people to whom they can no longer physically return, are seized, on realizing the impossibility of such a return, by a tormenting despair. This despair must be overcome before they can recognize their new possibilities of influence, now purely spiritual in kind, for acting in the physical world. –

Those, on the other hand, who were completely committed during their physical lives to striving for the earthly realization of an ‘idea’ and to the concepts generated by this striving, will quite quickly lose almost all interest in the physical world they have left behind.

They seek only the opportunity to be able to realize their ‘idea’ within their new sphere of life, and are blind to all new possibilities of experience.

Others again seek the promised ‘bliss’ which they await in faith. They are astounded not to have found it immediately in the ‘beyond’, and well in those beautiful forms they had dreamt up while on earth.

All those who are preoccupied with themselves and the imaginings the have taken with them will in the end attain a sort of fulfillment of their wishes when they reach one of those lower spiritual realms which unconsciously they helped create while on earth…

This transition also does not entail a ‘change of place’; for all spiritual worlds – of which there are countless, ascending to the highest and purest world of God-bearing spirit – permeate each other and exist at the same cosmic ‘place’. –

Conscious experience of spiritual worlds, and the transition from one to another, always depends on a certain transformation in perception which renders spiritual consciousness as it were ‘blind’ to certain phenomena, whilst allowing it to ‘see’ others.

However, this transformation in perception cannot arbitrarily be summoned, except by the masters of the eternal manifestation of man in the supreme spiritual realm, or those who have been appointed by them: their chosen pupils, if their psychological and physical disposition is suitable therefor.

All men, however, even if they do not belong to the aforementioned few, can at least strive to familiarize themselves in imagination with the feelings, perceptions and states of consciousness awaiting them after the death of the physical body, once they have read the revelations given here.

With an easy mind I concede to the objection that by such deliberate stimulation of the imagination mere ‘pictures’ might be produced, which cannot in any sense lead to an experience of the real existence of the hereafter.

For that very reason I require everybody to adhere most strictly to the descriptions given in this book when fashioning the necessary images. For only very few can consciously become aware of the sphere of existence in the hereafter during their lives on earth; while all men can in advance as it were, go through all feelings, experiences and states of consciousness awaiting them after their earthly death by arousing imaginary pictures which reflect reality.

This regular anticipatory experience is necessary if one is to be certain, after consciousness abandons the physical nature of experiencing, of knowing immediately how to cope and, above all, one can recognize what must be sought and what is to be avoided!

Only he who has attained this certainty during his existence on earth will immediately find, on crossing into the new, purely spiritual form of perception, those helping hands reaching out towards him, and will be able to seize them in confidence…

Him we can help!

He was able to ‘learn’ the skill of dying while still alive on earth; his confidence in our teaching has helped ripen the capacity to recognize within him what he is now in need of.

He will now be safe from all deception and disappointment!

We shall guide him – past those various ‘shoreline realms’ which earthly dreams and imaginings constructed through the powers of misguided will – straightaway into the ‘interior’ of the ‘land’ he now enters where loving guidance will take him ever nearer to his perfection.

In no sense has he become ‘someone else’ by discarding his physical body!

He cannot suddenly be granted what he still lacks. –

As possessions he can only bring with him those things he was able to attain on earth.

The things he was able to bind on earth will remain ‘bound’ in the life of the spiritual senses; those things he dissolved during his life on earth will remain for him ‘dissolved’…

Only gradually can he be led upwards, until one day he is capable of entering the most sublime of all spiritual realms: – the pure light-world of most blessed and absolute fulfillment. – –

The ‘times’ needed for this ascent will be determined by the degree of relative spiritual perfection already achieved on earth; and by the serenity of the eternal will resulting from such perfection, within the experience of his consciousness.

The process of ‘dying’ from the physical way of experience into the way of perception of the spiritual senses will in truth occur without your intention; and whatever awaits you on the ‘other side’ will be there, even if you do not believe in the ‘life beyond’.

But your eternal will has been granted a mighty power which enables you, through preparation here in the physical perceivable side of the world, to largely determine your further destiny.

Naturally, a prerequisite for this is a responsible way of life, so that it is continually directed to the high spiritual goal which can only be attained through a selfless love for all living things.

On the ‘other side’ of the world, – where you can only perceive with spiritual senses, – there will not only be ‘delight for the blessed’. –

Truly, there will also be realms of torment and despair, of consuming regret and the desire for self-annihilation, though this desire can never be granted…

Without exception all those must pass through these realms who have not fulfilled on earth the law that demands from each man on earth love of oneself and all fellow creatures.

This ‘love’ is very far removed from any kind of sentimental enthusiasm or emotional exuberance!

The love required by spiritual law meant here is rather the highest and most powerful affirmation of the self and the universe; so that he who is thoroughly imbued with it feels only the positive, that which is willed by the spirit, both in himself and in everything in existence; even if he feels obliged to vehemently defend himself against negative powers working simultaneously within the same manifestation. – –

All those who for whatever reason take their own lives in order to flee cowardly this existence on earth and its demands, commit the gravest violation of the spiritual law we are discussing here.

In any case, such a deed is pointless and counter-productive. For instead of finding the freedom he seeks, he, who lost his earthly body through his own hand, will be shackled a thousand times more painfully by states of consciousness he would not have wished for, and from which he will not be able to escape for aeons to come.

There is a measure of consolation for those left behind in the fact that most suicides are committed by people whose consciousness is in a state of pathological confusion at the decisive moment. The dreadful act of negation takes place in a state which may be described as a spontaneous intrusion of madness, even though this state has taken a long time to prepare through irresponsible ‘playing’ with the idea of possible physical destruction.

Although the murderer and the victim of murder are one person ‘in appearance’ the murder is the work of an overpowering thought which the victim has fed for so long with his own vitality, until it eventually consumes him.

In such an event someone who has destroyed his physical body does not bear responsibility for the act of murder. However, spiritual law requires from him compensation for every misguided thought and action from which the deed eventually sprang forth in madness. –

This compensation can generally only be attained by taking on the body of the human creature for a second time on this earth.

We are dealing here with one of those exceptions where so-called ‘reincarnation’ can be considered as a possibility; whereas at the regular end of earthly life, precisely because of this completed end, this becomes totally impossible.

This concludes Part 3.

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.