"The Book on the Beyond" by Bô Yin Râ--Part 9 of 13

Jun 04, 2025

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 9 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.

The One Reality

Hopefully you will now have begun to get an inkling of the mystery of the world of causes, which eternally begets and gives birth, revealing itself in all realms of perception as the endlessly varying abundance of phenomena…

Or is your inner feeling still too dull, because you have never been accustomed to sharpen it?

Then perhaps you still scarcely feel the mystery which is being revealed to you in my words; or you interpret my words in a way they are not intended to be interpreted? –

I intend you to become capable of ‘seeing’, however, so that you will not enter the realm of the spirit as ‘one blinded’, when that day comes when you must enter it. –

‘Avidyâ’, i.e. ignorance, is called by Eastern wisdom with justification ‘guilt’; for only your own will can block for you the gate to knowledge. – –

You have already heard on several occasions that between your world of physical-sensory perception and the world of the spirit there is only a barrier separating the two different forms of perception from one another.

I have often deliberately repeated myself and will have to continue repeating myself so that that this basic truth enters your consciousness as deeply as possible.

Therefore I need to remind you here that reality remains forever the same oneness and causality, even though it enters the perceptions of the worlds of physical or spiritual phenomena in the most diverse ways.

Philosophical thought has sensed from afar this one ‘reality’, calling it ‘the thing in itself’.

Yet it is absolutely impossible for even the most sophisticated and acute philosophical speculations to reach this reality.

It can only be comprehended in practical experience, and only tried and tested masters of ancient, hidden ways of knowledge are really capable of this practical experience.

They too are the only ones capable of guiding their successors, who were born and chosen for the task, to this practical experience.

In this way I once attained what could be attained here.

Who then, other than ourselves, could show you, by allusions as permitted by the words of a human language, here on earth, the only reality which is the original cause of each and every phenomenon?!

I will try to achieve this; – yet I must plead for the assistance of your innermost feelings at the beginning of this attempt, for only when the spiritual within you is capable of uniting itself with my teaching, can you become aware of the truth.

Your eyes are still now blinded by the dazzle of a transient light that can truly blind the eyes!

You must first learn to ‘see’! –

Your eyes must be free to see what they want to see; no longer must they be forced into having to see only those things most people can see. – –

Your eyes must learn to look inwardly in the same way as hitherto they have only looked outwardly!

Yet we speak here not merely of a different way of ‘seeing’; rather, all your feelings must experience a renewal.

Your own ‘sensation of existence’ must be freed from the shackles which have bound it until now, if you would feel with unerring certainty the only ‘reality’, which is the cause of all appearance.

Magic threads permeate this external physical world of the senses. If you strive with endurance to learn to look inwards, you will soon know how to separate the phenomenal form of this outer world from the causality which reveals itself in it.

You will make the surprising discovery that the only reality in the whole phenomenal world can also be apprehended in the physical-sensory form of phenomena, in the shape of hidden, spiritual primeval powers which in fact have often been experienced by men, yet also denied by many because they had not experienced them…

Those who were permitted to experience those things to which we here refer can no longer be led astray by the doubts of others. His own experience will protect him from equating these powers with powers emanating from the invisible realm of physical nature although in both cases they are commonly referred to as ‘mystical’, ‘supernatural’ or even ‘occult’ powers.

The whole physical world of phenomena surrounding you – including your own body – is constructed on the influence of spiritual powers from the original being hidden to physical senses and all spiritual worlds are in the same way phenomenal forms of these causal powers.

It is the different form of perception which determines experiencing the influence of these powers as ‘physical’ or ‘spiritual’ world.

You will now understand that the ‘world beyond’ is not different [from the] world of causality; rather, it is the result of a new, to you unfamiliar, and different way of perceiving the influence of the same hidden powers of original being whose influence here on earth you learnt to see as ‘this world’. –

It is true that your consciousness is not the creator of reality, for it is itself part of this reality, – it is itself one of the hidden spiritual powers of original being. – However, it is within both ‘this life’ and the ‘life beyond’: the creator of the phenomenal form which builds itself, both here and there, on the influence of the same powers.

As part of the way you perceive ‘this life’ there is one outcome of these powers which is very familiar to you as the functions of your physical senses.

All your perception and recognition of reality on earth is precisely determined by the senses given to you here; and you do not perceive anything other than what they make you perceive.

But since you are a ‘part’ of eternal reality, just as a drop of water in the ocean is a part of the ocean, you therefore potentially carry within you all the possibilities existing within eternal reality, just as the drop in the ocean has all the qualities of the ocean’s water.

Thus you are not only capable of perceiving through the sensory organs of your physical organism, for you are of spiritual nature and the eternal owner of your spiritual organism.

You possess within your spiritual organism other sensory organs which still remain unknown to you. On the spiritual side they correspond completely to your physical and sensory organs here in your earthly body.

Through your spiritual senses you become in the ‘life beyond’ just as much a creator of your spiritual world of phenomena as here on earth you are the creator of the physical world of the phenomena you can perceive without your knowing it...

To help your understanding, consider, for example, someone under hypnosis!

He sees, hears and feels everything that you want to make him see, hear, or feel through the power of your suggestion; for him everything is real.

You are utterly convinced that he is being subjected to a deception you have willed upon him, – yet you are the one who is deceived in this supposition!

You have merely freed the person hypnotized for a short time from the compulsion of having to believe his physical senses alone. Now he sees, hears and feels temporarily, and in those areas where you command him, with his spiritual senses too, and through them he becomes the creator of those things he is instructed to perceive.

It is not you who shows him what he sees; and certainly he does not see any of those things commonly visible in spiritual worlds of phenomena by all those who perceive there.

You are simply guiding his vivid imagination. Since, with the function of his physical senses inhibited, he can simultaneously perceive with his spiritual senses, his will temporarily forms in spiritual matter the equivalents of the imaginary pictures you have caused him to create.

It is not the wooden staff with which you touch his hand – whilst suggesting it is a red hot iron rod – which produces the blister which immediately appears on his hand. – Rather, it is the spiritual-sensory phenomenal form of a red hot iron bar which has produced the blister. Such things can only be brought about because they are based upon the influence of hidden powers which are the only reality within all phenomena. –

The person under hypnosis will not doubt for an instance the objectivity of what he has created himself. If you ordered him to recall his experiences after coming out of the hypnotic trance, he will scarcely be able to understand, when awake, that his perceptions did not occur in the world of physical senses.

He was only able to experience so intensively because his experience was based on the influence of the same reality as the physical world of phenomena familiar to him. – –

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