"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 5
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 5
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 Art of Dying (continued)
True ‘communication’ – that is, the only sure form of communication with those who have preceded us into the ‘beyond’ – can only take place internally, within the ‘soul’; it is purely spiritual in kind.
Your own spiritual ‘body’ is the organ through which you can perceive ‘the departed’! –
Every thought profoundly felt, every feeling which utterly penetrates you, is perceived ‘on the other side’ just as the spoken word is perceived here in the physical-sensory world.
In the same way you can also perceive – when you are ‘at peace’ and sufficiently sensible – the utterances of those already experiencing themselves in the spiritual dimension of the world in the form of quiet thoughts and feelings penetrating you, as though from without. With some practice in differentiation, they can be separated with a high degree of certainty from your ‘own’ thoughts and feelings. –
Yet even leaving aside those things you may become conscious of, there is a continual, subconscious influence at work. You are in this way often the ‘medium’ of one who has died in a much more accurate way than ever a ‘spiritualist medium’ could be, even if ‘those in the beyond’ might want to make use of him…
If you were accustomed to observing the daily events of your life with a sober disposition, whilst nevertheless attentive to the mysterious, you would often see yourself acting in the spirit of a loved ‘lost one’, even if you never had the slightest intention to act in the way the departed one would have wished, were he still alive in his physical form. –
On the other hand, it is certainly cause for thought how very often a complete stranger will do something which can be seen as the ultimate fulfillment of a wish fervently held by a departed one during his life on earth, which remained unfulfilled. – –
Of course, all this is far less impressive than a dancing or swaying table whose legs tap out ‘messages’, or even the ‘materialized’ shape in which you, in a hypnotic trance without realizing it, recognize ‘in all certainty’ a dearly departed one and hear him speak. What you have in front of you, however, is nothing other than a sort of ‘astral’ waxwork figure.
The external features are indeed borrowed from the former physical manifestation of the departed; even dresses and suits celebrate his or her apparent resurrection, – but through this puppet speaks a being which would fill you with horror, were you to suddenly see it standing next to you in its true, completely unmasked appearance. – –
People who have never experienced any genuine and really noteworthy spiritualist phenomena will scarcely be able to comprehend that such things ought to be taken seriously, – but that does not stop so-called ‘spiritualism’ from having millions of secret and open adherents, and from bringing more and more ‘converts’ under its spell.
The literature on spiritualist theory and practice, part fantasy, part pseudo-scientific in nature, continues to attract a frenzied readership. And as far as the faithful are concerned, no level of academic importance acquired in other fields can protect from the grossest deceptions – particularly when death awakens the burning desire to get into contact in some way or other with the dearly departed…
A doctorate offers insufficient insulation from hypnotic influences from the realm of the invisible. Professorial gowns are as thin as gossamer for the suckers of invisible physical molluscs.
Given all these reasons, my words of warning would hardly be superfluous.
The whole physical and spiritual cosmos is a homogeneous entirety, even if this entirety offers very differing aspects of itself.
The actual reality behind these aspects was, and is, always open to only very few men on earth.
It withdraws from both experimentation and speculative thinking.
There are the most varied modifications in forms of perception in both the dimension of the physical senses and the spiritual dimension of the universe; and all these forms entering consciousness lay the same claim to – ‘reality’…
Almost all beings which experience themselves within the universe see only parts of reality, and these parts only in an unconscious refashioning of their own creation.
So too, life after the ‘death’ of the physical body is determined by a change in the form of perception.
The same reality is felt and experienced, – only through a spiritual form of perception – since physical senses cease existing as useful organs for conveying experience when the body’s integrated functions are extinguished.
Yet life can be perceived through the senses in all its regions, even though the nature of the sensory organs differs entirely. –
‘Dying’ for earthly man is merely an event which compels him to learn to use consciously senses which have hitherto been hidden in the subconscious.
These spiritual senses have already existed during his life on earth, – indeed, they alone cause man to be capable of receiving from the sensory perception belonging to his animal body, impressions which animals are incapable of experiencing, even at the highest level, however much the acuteness of their physical senses may exceed that of man. – –
Only in relatively rare exceptions is it possible for the senses belonging to the spiritual ‘body’ in man to be disclosed during his life on earth. This never takes place as a sudden emerging ability of making use of spiritual sensory organs, but always takes the form of successive stages of ‘awakening’, which may be gently promoted, but in no way forced by arbitrary means.
Those who awaken in this life of the physical senses to the use of their spiritual senses will see the various lower ‘worlds’ already open to his experience, belonging to the one and only causal world of reality, as though they are ‘interlaced’, so that he may often find it difficult to differentiate immediately between what belongs to the physical regions, and what to the spiritual realms of the world of senses.
Only those very few, to whom the world of the first cause: – the ‘thing in itself’, has revealed itself from within, experience at the same time the one, ultimate reality through which every spiritual as well as physically perceptible world is ‘effected’.
This ultimate reality is the original ground of all life, whether it comes to experiencing by the senses or to awareness of the self in a spiritual or in a physical way! –
‘Man’, however, – whether he experiences himself in his spiritual manifestation or in the body of the animal on earth, is, seen from the perspective of eternal reality:
Eternal life in the form of individual, conscious ability to experience.
Admittedly, determined by the physical-sensory form of perception here on earth it is very difficult for eternal life depending solely on the animal form, to feel individually formed, and as such the focal point of an immeasurable totality: – a totality which knows in itself no gaps or divisions, although it comprehends itself in an endless variety. –
All too often conceptual thought, which is rooted in the earth, relies on the appearance of things which only knows the individual as something separated from something else.
However, from the spiritual point of view individuality is the function of eternal manifestation within the inseparable totality: – not division in itself, but manifestation of its own unity in plurality.
It is always the whole, indivisible life which experiences itself as a particular, unique aspect in each of its innumerable individual self-manifestations…
The Book on the Beyond--Part 1
The Book on the Beyond--Part 2