Where do we human beings come from, why are we here, and where are we going?....”Karma” according to Bô Yin Râ

By Richard C. Cook

Introduction

One of the most difficult concepts for us to comprehend, especially those with some acquaintanceship with the Christian religion, is the idea of “Original Sin.”

There is massive pressure in our culture to believe in the idea of “I’m OK, you’re OK.” That basically we are just fine as we are at present and don’t need to “get down on ourselves” for any reason, whether shortcomings or misdeeds or character flaws or mistakes we feel we have made, or whatever. Or we are “OK” because we belong to some external grouping such as profession, race, nationality, religion, wealth status, length of resume, etc.

Then why do we very often feel unhappy? Where does the idea of self-improvement come in? Or, going further, how about the idea of forgiveness or even redemption? Of paying our debts to society? Of making amends for times we have hurt another person? What does it mean to feel guilty? What does it mean to strive for self-fulfillment or self-perfection? What does it mean to love others as ourselves? What does it mean to hear the voice of our conscience and act according to its counsels?

These are all important questions. We look for answers, but we are often not satisfied with the answers we receive from parents, teachers, mentors, psychologists, clergy, or others we sometimes view as authorities.

Often we turn to distractions to escape from our pain which may turn into addictions.

We must also face the obvious fact that there is evil in the world, that all is not as it should be, materially, metaphysically, or spiritually. We sometimes realize that we ourselves have done evil.

Religion, philosophy, and ancient legend have all tried to answer these questions. For instance, there is the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible which attempts to explain the human condition as the result of acts of disobedience in a Garden of Eden. Such a story is clearly symbolic, but our intuition tells us it contains some truth. But rarely do we hear an interpretation of this or similar legends that is completely satisfying.

So where do we turn?

One place to look may be the idea of “Karma.” A way to put this idea is the saying that “We reap as we sow.” This implies that certain hardships or frustrations we encounter in life are our own fault. It points to a wrong we may have committed or a failure to act or think properly. We are inclined to view the idea of Karma as coming from Indian religion, but the same concept applies in every culture, whether part of its religion, its system of law, its training of youth, or some other manifestation. We may also see that our perceptions of hardships or frustrations change with alterations in our attitudes toward them. This may motivate us to seek help from within or outside ourselves. It may convince us of a need to change our behavior, even our way of life.

One of the Westerners who has written convincingly on the idea of Karma is German spiritual master Bô Yin Râ, whose birth name was Joseph Anton Schneider, later modified to Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, denoting his origin in the Franconia region of Germany. He lived from 1876 to 1943 and was a landscape artist by profession. He was also the author of a series of spiritual books that he called “Hortus Conclusus,” or, “The Gated Garden.”

Schneiderfranken grew up near Frankfurt, Germany, studied art beginning as a teenager, was mentored by several notable German artists, and set up studios in Munich and other locations. He made early travels to Italy and Greece, met his spiritual master, received his spiritual name of Bô Yin Râ and began to write, first publishing just before World War One with German publisher Kurt Wolff.

During World War I, he served as a records clerk and translator. Continuing to publish, he moved with his family to Switzerland during the 1920s and resided in Lugano in southern Switzerland for the rest of his life.

It’s said that Bô Yin Râ reached over a million readers in the German-speaking world during his lifetime. Today his works are widely translated, with English-language translations starting to appear in the 1970s. In Germany, a foundation called the Bô Yin Râ Stiftung promotes his work and may be contacted through the internet.

The Three Sages Substack has begun to publish short reviews of some of the books and now presents Bô Yin Râ’s chapter on Karma from “The Book on the Living God.” The translation is by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam. A translation of “The Book on the Living God” in its entirety is available from Kober Press here.

Comments and questions are welcome. Readers are advised to take their time and have an open mind. The concepts that appear in the chapter have an innate familiarity to them. The basic idea is one that is fairly common these days, which is that we humans originate in our spirits in a very high place and that our difficult journey through this life is a learning experience. But we can return to our exalted origins. The spiritual world is alive with help that is available if we search it out. So here is the chapter in its entirety.

Text of the chapter on “Karma” from The Book on the Living God

In both realms of this physical world: – the visible and invisible – every deed has its visible and invisible consequences. – – 

Every impulse of the will, every thought and every word are here to be considered as ‘deed’…

 You remain bound to the consequences of your deed until you have unified the powers of your soul and have together with them, yourself united with God. – –

 Only then will you be able to expunge the consequences of your deeds, in as far you want to expunge them.

Unimaginable ages ago you were once united with your God as a purely spiritual ‘man’ in spiritual form, integrated into the total-life of essential and substantial ‘spirit’.

 All the vast realms of the invisible part of the physical world, – an unfathomable area of the universe, – were then accessible to your active will, and you were their ruler…

 A field of influence was open to you which reached from the purest spirit into ever denser forms.

 So it was that you reached the frontier where what is invisible and physical assumes the denseness of matter perceived by earthly senses.

 You have seen the frightening powers of eternal chaos at work, – the repelling powers of absolute, rigid ‘nothingness’ as dense as lava, – and you succumbed to its animosity towards all that ‘is’…

 But you never would have had to succumb to those powers if, – giddy with your own power, you had not fallen away from your God. – –

 And so you became helpless and lost your supreme power.

 Now you had to become prey to baser powers which – continually under the influence of the resilient effects of absolute ‘nothingness’ – seek to destroy everything in their constant hostility, turning into ‘nothingness’ everything which penetrates them from the spheres of eternally pure being: – everything which ‘falls’ into their dark zone of influence. – – –

 Even the powers you previously mastered, and with which you could have easily subjugated those powers now ‘hostile’ towards you and transformed them into obedient servants of your will, had become too mighty for you, too powerful…

 And so you grew afraid of your own once mastered powers. From this fear came the urge to find a new and different life in the realms of material tangibility, the realms of this universe that can be apprehended with physical senses, a universe which conceals those frightening powers from those who do not break through the barriers erected here. – – –

 Your will had fallen from that sublime illumination and now wanted to enter the world of physical matter along with you…

 You were at home in the ‘world of causes’, – yet your fear drove you out into the ‘world of effects’. – –

This is the truth found in legends of a ‘paradise’ and of the ‘fall’ of man by committing of ‘sin’! – – –

 Before this fall you had already created your ‘karma,’ as the Orient calls the line of causes of the fate of every man on earth – by the ‘degree’ of your ‘turning away’ from your God, – by the ‘degree’ of your frenzied madness trying to teach you to see a ‘God’ in yourself. – –

 “Eritis sicut Deus….” [“You will be like God.”]

 You decided on the time when you were to be born into this earthly world, your ancestral lineage, and the ways your fate on earth would follow, when you turned from being a ruler in the spiritual world through the power of your God to a slave of baser powers in a world where every deed has, and must have, its ‘consequence’, since it is but a reflection of  effect and powerless in willing to end the chain of occurrence within its sphere.

 The fact that you were born on this planet results from the nature of your first deed in the sphere of compulsive consequence, – for truly, there are countless planets in immeasurable space inhabited by ‘men,’ beings also resembling outwardly the human animal on earth, and you might have found your animal body on one of these other planets.

 All the human beings inhabiting planets in other solar systems once ‘fell’ like you from the blaze of light!

 There are those who are vastly happier and those who are far unhappier amongst your distant, materially embodied companions…

 You must not imagine that they have monstrous forms. For man’s earthly body has not been produced by some arbitrary act just on our small solar satellite; rather it is determined by given laws which apply to the whole, immeasurable, physical-material universe having ultimately their origin in the spirit…

 The ‘fall’ of the human spirit from the world of pure substantial spirit into the sphere of influence of absolute ‘nothingness’ took place, as it were, not in a far off primeval time, but occurs eternally and throughout eternity, just as the physical and material cosmos, continually becoming and dying, exists and will continue to exist eternally together with  the realm of eternal spirit, as its – ‘outermost counter-effect’…

 Yet there will always be those few spiritual beings which do not succumb to the ‘fall’ and do not ‘lose’ their God within them.

 I have already spoken of them as of the ‘eldest’ or the exalted ‘Fathers’ of the Luminaries of the First Light, and now you shall know here the things your own intuition might already have told you – namely, that the spiritual toils of those who did not fall, like that of the ‘sons’ and ‘brothers’ they nurtured for the redemption of those fallen from the light of the spiritual world and entangled in animal nature, are by no means limited to our mankind on earth…

 These helpers can be found on all the inhabited planets of the immeasurable universe; they have maintained their conscious life within the substantial spirit. And for each of these worlds they nurture from among those who have fallen their spiritual ‘sons’ and ‘brothers.’ Through them they now seek to reach you here on this earth and pull you away from your misery.

 It is not your goal in any sense to become one of their ‘sons’ and ‘brothers,’ for it would already be too late for such an occurrence, since suitability for this happens only immediately after the fall, through the free impulse of the individual will; thereafter it requires ‘nurturing’ for millennia, while for the same period of time, incarnation into the physical-material body of a human animal is delayed…

 Nothing else is expected of you than that today, during your days on earth, you might discover whence you departed and whither you can return. – –

 They seek to show you the ‘path’ of this return.

 They seek to guide you back to your God, with whom you shall be reunited. – –

 However deeply you have fallen, those powers from which the Godhead unceasingly creates itself, – from their chaotic form to their most sublime manifestation, – are at work in you in a most elevated active form…

 A ‘spark’ of spiritual consciousness still remains, though not yet merged with the consciousness of your brain and hidden within you, as an exalted guide for these powers, – and: – as your ‘conscience’…

 You can never lose this ‘spark,’ however deeply you might still sink in your earthly life!

 Even if you have ‘died’ to it in your soul, it must still continue to exist within you, until you breathe your last breath…

 It is this spark, and only this spark, which knows your ‘karma’…

 You can make this ‘karma’ better or worse, – only – you cannot extinguish it before you have brought together the many wills within you which still work concurrently in a chaotic way in you. – –

When they all unite in the radiant light of spiritual consciousness which is the true, substantial, eternal ‘human spirit’ within you, then your God will be ‘born’ in you from spirit and you will finally be freed from your ‘karma’, from the chain of consequences following your original act, – as a newly returned man of eternity. – –

Blessed are you, if you achieve this during your life on earth!

 If you do not achieve it, you will not reach your own ‘peace,’ even after casting aside this earthly body, until you have found your peace in your God, conscious of the united powers of the soul and having become their all-united will…

 Yet it can take a long time for you to reach that moment ‘there,’ for then you can no longer change or improve your ‘karma,’ – and definitely not until the last consequence of your original act has been exhausted will you experience eternal light within you. – – –

 Indian wisdom warns men not to create ‘new karma’, – and truly, this warning is the fruit of true knowledge!

 You should only know that this warning applies only to evil karma! –

 You will not find your redemption in the realm of the substantial spirit until the last earth-bound impulse once emanating from you has been exhausted. – –

 Seek then, with all your powers, to unite with your God during your life on this earth, so that from his power you might break the chain of your ‘karma’ and prevent it from shackling you through aeons…

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