"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 2

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 2

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)

The realms which may be entered initially by those having inner conscious experience are far from elevated spiritual spheres, and yet, ‘the other shoreline’ has been reached, even if those awakened to consciousness there are still far from capable of penetrating into the ‘interior’ of the discovered ‘territory’, or of climbing its mighty ‘peaks’. –

During life on earth these places are reached only by the very few to whom has been entrusted, here in the physical side of the causal world, the ancient ‘patrimony’ of hidden spiritual experience: – the born ‘high priests’, – the ‘masters’ of the hidden spiritual influence and their legitimate successors, also born to this calling.

Those things which have become our certain knowledge through conscious experience of the ‘beyond’ we now pass on to you here!

Every day, every hour, we see thousands reaching ‘the other shoreline’ forever without being able to help them; for during their lives on this earth they failed to understand the skill of dying and thus they arrive unprepared on that ‘other shoreline’, like survivors of a shipwreck hurled onto land by the sea…

At a loss they wander around in their unfamiliar form of existence; they are incapable of grasping the helping hands reaching out towards them.

They lack every judgment as to whether what encounters them brings danger or assistance, and fearfully they shy away if someone approaches who could give them guidance…

And so they continue roaming on their own, remaining close to the ‘shoreline’ of the sea which – at least to their perception – continues to attach them to the physical side of existence they have left behind. Then, one day they discover, as though attracted ‘magnetically’, one of those small ‘shoreline realms’ – those lower realms belonging to the spiritual side of the cosmos imperceptible to earthly senses, which reflects their ideas, and corresponds to the longings and hopes they cherished during their lives on earth.

They imagine they have now found their ‘heaven’, all the more so since this is what all those they meet here also believe…

Those who have reached this place are bound to their fates for an endless age.

Only extremely rarely, and with the greatest difficulty, do we succeed in raising one of those who has lost his way, out of his self-imposed illusory ‘bliss’. –

But since we would teach you here how to avoid such diversions, and since eternal love bids us act in this way, we shall teach you the skill of dying correctly.

Essential to this skill is that one is always prepared – in the midst of making plans for the future and at times of frenetic activity; in blooming health and at the height of one’s powers – to step in joyful happiness and certain confidence upon the ‘other shoreline’ forever, – without the possibility of returning.

A state of mind is required here.

Even if it does not seem in easy reach of Everyman, no one must forget that this state alone is conditional to the ability to die correctly. –

Those bound so tightly to things belonging to physical life on earth that they consider themselves incapable of renouncing them, – those who can imagine no circumstance in which all the goals of earthly striving become meaningless, – they will find it hard to learn the skill of dying correctly. –

Only that man understands how to live properly and joyfully on earth who can bring about every day and every hour, at random, within himself that state of preparedness to die, – which is free of all fear and sadness. – –

He knows that nothing that he would be required to abandon – even those dearest to him, or those most in need of his care – can ever be separated from him, unless he seeks the actual separation himself and brings it about through an act of will. –

He knows that he remains ‘here’, at the same ‘place’ in the cosmos, – even nearer to those he loves than he could ever be in his physical body. –

He knows that he will upon death surely not be transformed as though into a god; that he will certainly not become ‘omnipotent’ in a physical sense; yet that he will be far more capable of helping those who need his help than ever could have been possible during his physical life on earth. – –

Those who practice the skill of dying in this way will henceforth know that it will be easy for them to die properly and irrevocably, even if death were to come completely unexpectedly…

Examination and observation by medical researchers have long ago established that, although the physical act of dying is on certain occasions painful for the observer, the person dying does not suffer from the act itself but from the pains caused by his suffering until the point of death.

But our concern is only to show how the dying man’s consciousness survives the act of dying.

Even if the dying man is still fully conscious up to the last moment, a form of ‘slumber’ will overcome him at the moment the spiritual organism begins to release itself from the physical creature body to which it has been hitherto attached. Consciousness will only reawaken to itself from this slumber when the ‘act of dying’ has been completed.

At the moment of awakening, which occurs a few seconds or minutes after his externally established ‘death’, man already finds himself in his spiritual organism, which is now the sole source of his experience, on the ‘other side’ of the causal world only perceptible to the spirit: – the eternal ‘reality’ from which emanates every spiritual and physical form of existence, according to the type of perception which arouses it.

The dead man’s faculty of perception, hitherto conditioned by his physical senses, is exchanged for a new way of perception, normally not previously known to him, whereas his form-giving way of looking at things remains unchanged for the time being.

He is far from seeing himself as dead, for he is conscious of himself, of his will and capable of perception, even though he does not yet recognize that only spiritual organs now render him service.

He does not experience himself at all as being ‘amorphous’, for his previous physical body was more or less a complete reproduction of his spiritual organism, formed through his own eternal will, – although his brain ‘knew it not’. His consciousness has now become capable of perceiving this organism, although it does not yet recognize in it anything different from his physical body.

So as physical pain ceases at the moment a painful member of the earthly body has been rendered insensitive to feeling by the appropriate means, so all physical pains experienced by a dying man shortly before his death will have completely vanished when he wakes on the ‘other side’. For the physical body which was the cause of his pain is now permanently separated from the spiritual organism which can only experience itself. –

But a certain ‘fluid’ connection remains through invisible, subtle and tenuous material emanations from the once used physical body, which can be felt by the spiritual organism. This connection causes the one awakened in the beyond to perceive in a spiritual way various events taking place near his corpse, even though they occur in the physical world.

Thus ‘the one now in the beyond’ feels the ‘fluid’ influences reflected by those around his abandoned physical body; he feels the ‘emotional value’ of their touches and words, and, like a blind man, still has a fairly precise picture in his mind of the physical space he has left behind – even though he maybe deceived into thinking that he still perceives the space with his physical senses.

These final connections with the physical and sensory side of the causal world survive for some time, even if all warmth has left the corpse a long time ago. But whatever can be felt diminishes in strength with every passing hour, and the ability to perceive it ceases completely as soon as the first signs of decomposition set in.

To those who object to the act of cremation, or who believe that it could ‘harm’ the dead in the life beyond, let it here be stated that after the period of time observed in civilized countries before the remains are laid to rest, all perceptive connections between the spiritual organism of the departed and his former physical body have come to an end.

But where fire was the cause of death, as with every other cause of death, pain is only felt until the physically bound consciousness is lost, whilst upon ‘awakening’ in the beyond every connection with the previous physical body has been extinguished by the destruction caused by the fire.

This concludes Part 2.

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.