"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 7
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 7
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?
On the Temple of Eternity and the World of the Spirit (continued)
Just as the physical world of the senses cannot be changed or destroyed, so too the spiritual world, collectively willed by all those who have partaken of the experience described here – and therefore the result of a collective spiritual sensory form of perception – cannot be changed or destroyed.
But there are other worlds of spiritual sensory perception: – worlds of clouded knowledge and misled will.
These are the worlds of those who enter the spiritual without being able to release themselves from the tight shackles of earthly fantasies and chains of thought.
Incapable of raising themselves in full consciousness to the heights of lucid knowledge of the creative spirit, each one of those thus shackled creates for himself a lower spiritual sensory world of appearance corresponding to the imaginings he had whilst still bound to the earth, – however, what his will produces does not endure.
As each one wants something different from the other, one will always destroy the work of another.
Nonetheless, these illusory worlds can continue throughout the millennia, provided they owe their existence to common ideas which have been nurtured and nourished on earth for a long period through a mighty exertion of faith. –
The unconscious creators of these worlds are nevertheless in a continual struggle with their opponents: – against all those will-powers striving after a different goal.
You have no idea how much religious intolerance, how much discord between nations, and other conflicts on earth are simply repercussions caused by the fury of defensive battles fought in those illusory worlds created by man from time immemorial in the lower regions of spiritual sensory perception. – –
Everything earnestly believed or willed on earth creates in the lower regions of spiritual sensory perception a ‘world’ which reflects the same beliefs and intentions. This world will stand as long as this belief or intention exists on earth, sending those agents of belief or will into those realms.
Everything that does battle here on earth is also the enemy in the world of apparent fulfillment which it unwittingly creates in these spiritual sensory regions. And this spiritual raging effects, with its hostile powers, humanity on earth. –
Reciprocal effect feeds hostility and hatred on both sides.
Yet all these special worlds, – these spiritual ‘shoreline realms’, – will one day perish, even if their existence seems assured for aeons!
Only that expression of the spiritual world endures eternally in the spiritual realm which emanates from a collective will, eternally united and permeated with the light of knowledge. Nothing can alter this, since the will to self-affirmation of all individuals is identical with eternal love as the original source of intransient being…
We, who are alive in the eternal life, certain of our eternity, – we show no hostility towards any direction of the will, nor to any belief, however absurd or contemptible they might appear to us.
We have no need to protect our spiritual world from any enemies; for those who might be our enemies are incapable of reaching the world in which we spiritually live.
Whatever you have heard about us, – however your opinions and fancies might judge us, – you have no knowledge of the things to which we bear witness, nor will you be able to experience them as long as your spiritual blindness endures…
Those whose hostile will is directed at us would only be targeting an image they had created themselves, – never would they target ourselves and our spiritual world. –
But we see, far, far below the heights of mountain summits which are our spiritual homeland, those transient spiritual worlds that earth-enslaved will created, from which we are always prepared to liberate those who would be free.
We can redeem no man who does not demand of himself the highest and the purest with a pure will and true to his innermost being, and who does not have an unshakeable faith in the help of eternal love!
Rare enough is the will which expresses itself in this way, – rare enough the insight that only the exhaustion of one’s own strength justifies a right to call upon help…
And yet such will and such insight do exist.
Even if we receive many a call for help which subsequently betrays itself as cowardly self-pitying by those fleeing their own responsibilities, nevertheless we also hear others who call upon us who indeed have fulfilled everything they were required to fulfill with their own powers.
They alone we can free from the spheres of temporal illusion!
This work of relief is more sacred to us than everything else we are able spiritually to bring about!
We know no greater joy than to help one of those who seek to transcend themselves from darkness upwards to light…
The others must follow a path of which we shall not speak here.
They too will sooner or later realize that their spiritual, self-created world of illusion is not the world of permanent fulfillment.
This realization will then be bitter and hard; thorny is the path which alone promises to attain light one day.
Aeons may follow upon aeons before the seeker reaches the first of the rungs which lead upwards to eternal light, – to the permanent fulfillment of his yearning, – to the origin of his being. – – –
Everything of which I tell here could well be regarded as the eccentric daydreams of a ‘mystic’ overwhelmed by his own fantasies. I do not hold it against any one in this century who seeks to ward off my words in this way.
But I advise you, in your own interest, to try to understand these tidings rather as the report of a man who tells you about distant countries you have not yet had a chance to discover.
Some of you may perhaps be offended when they hear things which differ from what they have heard before from those who claimed, besotted and deceived, that they had traveled in regions of the spiritual worlds with awakened inner senses.
It is important to consider here that some people can, if they have the particular disposition and have been schooled in a certain way, enter the lowest and most outlying regions belonging to the immeasurable realm of spiritual sensory perception. However, none can enter the light-filled innermost realm of essential spirit who does not belong to the appointed guardians keeping watch over the hidden spiritual ‘patrimony’ of earthly man.
Even the few to whom this patrimony is entrusted and who are born to this vocation had, in every age, to acquire substantial spiritual knowledge and practical ability under guidance from on high, before they, having been put to the test for years, were eventually found to have really been ‘proven’…
Those ‘seers’, however, who have the impudence to believe they are permitted to tell you about their ‘results from higher level research’, as though they were talking of open fields for scientific examination, are – without exception – people who have, at best, gained access to one or other of those lower regions which I have described as the ‘shoreline realms’ of the spiritual sensory form of perception.
Many of these besotted ones may indeed tell in good faith of certain things they have really seen in one of these ‘shoreline realms’. They may even recount what one of those who has reached the beyond, appearing to him as a ‘master’, took upon himself to show him in the uninhibited delusion of the ‘certainty’ of narcotic deception. –
Authentic accounts from our world in the spiritual universe are rarer than you think!
Those who on occasion received such accounts, kept them secret for the most part; they feared that they would profane the holy if they exposed what they had heard to the masses.
Authentic accounts always came from the few of us, as the only ones who could give them.
Revelations were given, however, only in secret, and only to those individuals who were striving day and night to attain enlightenment.
But this way of sowing the seed meant that the harvested fruit remained all too meager. Now the whole world is to be given our knowledge by experience, inasmuch as human language is capable of communicating it.
I do not appear before you as a teacher so that I can lay claim to a greater measure of trust than is usual among honest people.
The tidings I bring you here in my words, I impart from my eternal spiritual nature. I give witness to a spiritual world in which I live with my brothers in the spirit, while I am at the same time sharing with you life on this earth, bound in duty to all that is of this earth and far from desiring to flee from it.
I do not just give witness to my own knowledge; on the contrary, each of the words I write is in continual spiritual harmony with the knowledge of my brothers in the spirit, united with me as priests in the temple of eternity.
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