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

Jun 13, 2025

This is the last installment of The Book on the Beyond by Bô Yin Râ. Thank you for reading along with us. All 13 installments will remain up on Three Sages and available for continued reference. In a couple of weeks we will begin serializing Bô Yin Râ’s The Book on Happiness. Thanks also to globalresearch.ca for posting each installment of The Book on the Beyond. For a website like globalresearch.ca to carry this important material is a great contribution to human understanding and progress. We are grateful.

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 13 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.

What Is To Be Done? (Continued from Part 12)

Once the seeker has come into sufficient contact with his spiritual helpers, a sort of test of his powers will take place; depending on its outcome, a ‘tuning’ will be made regarding further spiritual influence upon him.

The scale of possible spiritual irradiations begins with simply increasing the seeker’s own powers, and extends to personal spiritual guidance.

The very few who are already under this guidance before their birth, since they are to reach perfection as ‘masters’ working in the spirit on earth, eventually undergo a complete spiritual merger with the guide, although he may live in a remote part of the world. This means that the pupil no longer receives conceptual teaching, but shares in the spiritual experience (not that of the ‘brain’s consciousness’!) of his teacher.

The intention of the ‘master’ to open up certain spiritual experiences within him to his pupil is sufficient for the pupil to perceive these experiences as though they were occurring within himself, although he knows beyond doubt how he has come to share these experiences.

As the ‘master’ has already attained for his individuality the union with the ‘First Light’, so the pupil experiences this union initially through merger with the radiant soul of his teacher.

Gradually the pupil becomes mature enough to achieve union with the First Light independently.

Having reached this goal he is not only conscious of his own spiritual and eternally indestructible individuality, but he experiences within himself at the same time also the consciousness of all individualities in the spirit which ever came to be revealed in a human consciousness…

Those perfected in this way are aware of themselves, together with all those who have arrived at perfection in the same way, as having merged into a new communal consciousness, with which nothing known on earth compares.

His own individual consciousness rests embedded in this communal consciousness.

However, the individual consciousness of those perfected can never be ‘dissolved’ in the communal consciousness.

The separate individual lives in this merger for all eternity the life of the whole, penetrating all other individualities within this whole and being penetrated himself by them; and not one of the united individualities of the spirit could lose the self-determined existence of himself.

Absolute certainty regarding the continuation of human consciousness beyond the death of the earthly body, experiencing itself eternally in a spiritual form of perception, naturally exists only for the few who have already achieved this goal during their life on earth.

All other men rely solely on speculation or the reassurance of some religious belief, – unless they prefer to trust the tidings brought by the few among their fellow men who already know about ‘life after death’ from their own experience during their lives on earth.

The genuine reports of those who have truly reached this goal, not just in an ecstatic intoxication or spellbound in some form of hypnosis, can be easily separated by a critical, unprejudiced assessment from the fanciful constructions of crazy zealots or poetically talented fantasists.

It is possible to find real accounts of those who consciously know the life beyond among all peoples. In all ages there have lived individuals who were able to bring genuine accounts of life in the spirit.

The way these accounts were clothed may have been determined by the fashion of the age and may reveal the color of the only recognized faith, – but if you are not simply satisfied with the appearance, you will apprehend in all these forms of dress, man and man’s most profound experience: – oneness with the original source of all being within eternity, and all existence throughout all spheres of space and time.

Once you have understood the demand made upon you by the exalted path my writings show you, and the goal that even those who are ill suited to the task can reach during their lives of earth, you will henceforth no longer ask of me what you should ‘do’, expecting as an answer the announcement of some eccentric ‘practice’.

You might have recognized that we are talking about things immeasurably more exalted than wondrous ‘fakir powers’, – immeasurably more exalted than the most amazing ‘wonders of the occult’, – and immeasurably more exalted than the ‘occult teachings’ of brain-shackled sects scurrilously dressed up with scraps of scientific knowledge…

I am forced – at least so that I might be understood by those most at risk – to have recourse to things already familiar, and occasionally to the terminology of the East which has become common knowledge through ‘theosophical’ writings. However, he who delves deeper will soon discover that I speak of things which hitherto have only been imparted in very distorted pictures.

Even the academic Orientalist, familiar with all the texts from the East available to us today, will only come across veiled hints about those hidden things. For the ancient, revered scriptures were without exception written for people who had already obtained the secret teaching by word of mouth.

The authors of the ancient religious books deliberately mingled sober accounts, chronicles, or narratives, all of which contained no hint of hidden teaching, in among writings that were only meant to be understood by those prepared for them; whereas the mere literal sense often stated the opposite of what the initiated were able to understand from the same passage of the text.

Moreover, the teachings upon which I have expounded here have only, even in cryptic form, been written down very rarely, and always only as fragments.

The manuscripts, however, in which these fragments can be found collected together, will never be accessible to those who have not been called, neither today nor in the future. By ‘not called’ is meant anyone who has not yet experienced in a spiritual way within himself what is tersely presented, not unlike a ‘canon’, in these manuscripts as possible to experience.

Until recently these ancient rules, forbidding under any circumstances the public dissemination of even lesser hints than I am now charged with giving, were strictly adhered to by those few who live these teachings and therefore can also ‘teach’ them.

Only with a moderation of the rigorous interpretation of those rules could the public exposition of these teachings in this context be made possible. This took place after the sublime rulers of the spiritual hierarchy, the lowest level of which is made up by its few members on our planet, had arranged a more moderate interpretation appropriate to the times.

He who would apprehend the things I now publicly teach, must abandon the opinion that this is a new offshoot of some religious doctrine or other, or even recruitment for one of the systems of eastern philosophy.

He who seeks traces of the knowledge I serve in human history, will certainly be able to find them.

At its purest this knowledge was alive in people at the beginning of ancient mystic cults.

To practiced ears the voices of all centuries speak in clear language, and it will not take too much effort to establish that the place of issue of this witness to knowledge continues to be influential up to the present day on earth as the inspirational source for all human associations whose sublime goal was, or is today, the attainment of the greatest human dignity. –

There is much that could be said here which currently cannot be discussed, for it must be found by those who concern themselves with what is withheld.

Whoever would harvest the fruits growing in the garden of the teachings expounded in this book must make his whole life into a permanent ‘exercise’!

The new life he would find is already contained within his daily life, – only he cannot yet recognize what is new to him. –

He has no need to seek instruction in detrimental ‘practices’ from ‘teachers of the occult’, for his daily life is itself the most effective, genuinely spiritual ‘exercise’, given him to work on every day anew by the eternal First Light. –

In time he will find in daily life, – in its simplest form and without any mysterious gestures, – the perfection available to him here on earth; – but never in ‘esoteric schools’ and in the arrogant circles of supposed initiates whose impudence allows them to assume the role of ‘spiritual’ teachers; for them one can only ask for forgiveness for they know not what they do…

Spiritual perfection requires the whole man!

‘Body’ and ‘soul’ are never to be experienced as separate in striving for this perfection!

There is nothing ‘of the body’ which would not be at the same time ‘of the soul’, and we are not talking of ‘spiritualization’ of the body, but rather of an earthly possible and an earthly attainable embodiment of the eternal spirit through the powers of the soul. – –

Those who despise the body and yet hope to enter the realm of the essential eternal spirit will find instead only a new realm of illusion!

But what is required of the body is that it learns to ‘believe’ in the eternal, supra-personal ‘I’ concealed within it, for whom it is to become expression.

The eternal ‘I’, propagated by the spirit, is the pure source of spiritual powers in earthly man; but the body is the vessel with which he draws upon these powers and brings them into earthly life.

We find in this eternal ‘I’ ourselves, just as we are eternal within the eternal!

Only within this innermost ‘I’ do we find the all-encompassing, eternal, substantial spirit!

Only in your, yourself self-propagating ‘I’ do you find your ‘living’ God! –

“Not through reason and abundance of learning” is the ultimate attained which men can attain!

Spiritual perfection is an outcome of life, – not the achievement of incisive thought!

Truly, there is something which can only be attained through reason.

One should seek to attain it through thought in order to ‘know’ it!

But then the wise man rises above knowledge until he learns to think as children think! –

You should not learn to think in a ‘childish’ way; rather you should arrive anew at the unity of the thinker and the thought.

Once, when you were a child, you thought your first thoughts in this state of unity; only in the same unity can ultimate and supreme thoughts be thought.

As your earliest thinking did not ‘think up’ its material, but found it in your first experiences on earth, so your spiritual experience must eventually deliver the stone with which you should crown the exalted cathedral of your knowledge…

Then you will not have lived your life on earth in vain; you will not have suffered its sufferings for nothing!

Secure and safe in your ‘life on earth’, you will be able to await your ‘life beyond’ in comfort, – certain even today of your eternal life in the divine light!

The End

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

The Book on the Beyond--Part 9

The Book on the Beyond--Part 10

The Book on the Beyond--Part 11