Part I
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 cannot be approached unless 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!”
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The Book on the Beyond—Part 1
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?
Introduction
The[se] treatises set out to give you an idea – inasmuch as can be communicated in words – of what awaits you when the life you have lived in an earthly body is extinguished and you are released from this physically sensed world of appearance.
As a travel guide speaks to you of regions of the earth which you have never seen, so you shall find described here all you need to know about the unknown ‘land’ where you will one day, after death, find yourself able to experience, – regardless of whether you believe in the possibility of such experience or not.
At the same time this book sets out to free you from so many errors which in the past took hold of you, whenever you thought of those loved ones who have left this earth.
Fearful belief and an excess of superstition in ancient and modern times have piled up so many figments of imagination about the ‘life beyond’ that we need to sift through this mess to stop it from further confusing your mind.
The only ones with anything really genuine to say about life after the death of the physical earthly body are those few men of this earth who know from their own certain experience this life which has no need of the physical body, but at the same time tastes the sorrows and joys of this life in an earthly appearance like yourself.
As one of the few who are aware of the life beyond, I impart to you in this book those things which can be communicated through words. We feel the yearning of the age which justifiably expects that those things appertaining to spiritual experience, which have only reached the consciousness of a few at certain times and places, are no longer guarded as ‘secret knowledge’.
May what I have to tell you be of benefit to you!
May my words succeed in awakening your own innermost feeling of yourself, so that you may attain that certainty from within yourself which can protect you from sterile skepticism, as well as from uncritical subservience to all manner of fantasies conceived by deluded or over-stimulated brains!
You should find the yardstick within yourself by which you may henceforth test how much truth and illusion is contained in the ideas conceived by men since time immemorial so that they could bear the gloom of the unfathomable mystery appearing before them whenever they stood before a corpse.
It matters not whether it is believable to you what I say; for the things of which I speak are beyond your agreement or disagreement. Moreover, I do not teach a religious doctrine, but show you a manifestation of reality which currently you are incapable of knowing other than by concepts communicated through the words of human language.
Soon enough you too will get to know, through your own experience, your allotted place within this sphere of reality…
In all ages those who are conscious in the beyond have borne witness to its reality, but their witness has fallen prey to the incompetent and those who irresponsibly corrupt their words. As a result, you are needful of help, if you are to learn to unravel those things which must be unraveled if the tidings of those with genuine knowledge will not fall into disrepute among men with pure and mindful feeling, together with the monstrosities created by deluded fantasists.
If you would truly know those things imparted to you here, then cast aside all prejudice and listen within your innermost being. There, if you are open to them, you will receive the answers to all those questions my words leave unanswered because you must learn to answer them yourself. – –
Our intention here is not to recruit supporters for some theological or philosophical hypothesis and definitely not to create a new form of religion, – instead, it brings you testimony of the original spiritual (not ‘cerebral’) experience which stood at the cradle of all the great, ancient religions born from the spirit of God…
Therefore the living experience of the words offered to you here does not require you in any way to turn your back on the traditional religion you hold sacred. Rather they seek to deepen and consolidate belief, as well as help the ability to believe, where ancient and revered religious forms and creeds are still real necessities of life.
For those, however, who long ago shook off all confessional attachments, my words will once again open up access to spiritual realms. Reaching them remains the supreme longing of man on earth even if the creeds of his forefathers did not bring him to the ardently desired fulfillment of that longing in a way in line with his comprehension.
The Skill of Dying
Doubtlessly you will believe there is no ‘skill’ of dying, – rather it is a necessary evil, learnt as a matter of course. –
Countless are those who think like you, and every day countless abandon their physical bodies in death, without ever having learnt the skill of dying.
For some, death comes unexpectedly, like ‘a thief in the night’, – for others, he comes like a ghost they fear, – some experience him as a long-awaited redeemer of their suffering, – and still others summon him themselves, for they expect him to liberate them from the cares and woes of body and soul.
Death rarely encounters someone who understands the art of dying. – –
In order to understand this skill, you must have learnt the meaning of ‘death’ and ‘dying’ in the fullness of life!
You must, as it were, ‘rehearse’ dying whilst at the height of your powers, so that you might understand how to die when death surprises you. – –
Dying is not as easy as many think; yet it is also not all that difficult, if you have already learnt it in the fullness of life…
All skills must be practiced; without practice you will not learn how to die.
In any event, you have to undergo it, whether you understand it or not. –
Most men fear death because they do not really know what happens when it comes.
Yet those who say they have no fear are like children who set out on the high seas in a boat without knowing the dangers the sea holds for them. – –
But you shall be like a helmsman who knows the winds and tides; he knows the lands awaiting him on the distant shoreline.
You shall learn to chart the course of your well equipped vessel. – –
‘Dying’ is the term used for the state of having to relinquish the physical body and its sensory organs, when this relinquishment must follow for good and irrevocably, because the body is no longer physically capable of sustaining itself.
A very similar process occurs every time you lie down to rest and relinquish yourself to sleep, – only in this case you only partially lose control of your body and senses, whereas in death they are completely and irretrievably lost to you.
You see how nature teaches you by analogy how to die!
Similarly, you can gain a presentiment of death when you faint, or when your body is artificially deprived of consciousness.
But in all these cases you only ever experience the very beginning of the process, – unless your inner spiritual ‘senses’ were already so awakened in you that you can become conscious ‘on the other side’ of existence and discover yourself, to your astonishment, alive without the body of the earth…
If you have not yet had this experience, the dreams you have during your nocturnal sleep can help convey to you at least an understanding of conscious life without a physical body; although life ‘beyond’ is certainly different from mere ‘dreams’. –
I am only obliged here to remind you of life in dreams to help you understand.
Just as you find yourself in your dreams conscious, capable of feeling, thinking and acting, – just as in a dream you live in a ‘body’ and use it freely, though your physical body lies peacefully on its bed in a deep sleep, – so too you will find yourself in a physical form, conscious, feeling, thinking and acting, if you can use your spiritual ‘sense’ in the beyond and thereby become conscious, whether temporarily or – in the case of the death of the physical body – permanently.
One essential difference consists in the fact that in your dreams you merely see the continually dissolving patterns produced by your vivid imagination; they seem to take on a life of their own through thousands of mental and physical stimuli. In contrast, you have to leave the realm of dreams if you are to awaken in the real spiritual world – regardless of which of its spheres this may occur –, in the same way as you have to leave it to awaken in the world of physical and sensory phenomena. –
Only when you have ‘transcended’ the realm of dreams can you enter the realm of the spirit. It will not be difficult to differentiate it from your most vivid and ‘natural’ dreams, for there you will be, thanks to your spiritual senses, in such a state of consciousness that even the most vivid moments of your daily life on this earth will seem to you like you were sleepwalking. –
You see, hear and feel the same causal ‘world’ that you perceive as the physical world of phenomena in the wakeful consciousness of your physical existence – only you experience it ‘from the other side.’– –
You have suddenly become aware of that form of the causal essential world which was imperceptible to you in your physical earthly body. Those things which were only perceived through the body and its senses – which hitherto you have called the ‘real’ world, will become as: – ‘thin air’ to you. –
Although there have been relatively few people alive in a physical body who have experienced these things in the past, or experience them in the present, there are nevertheless more than one suspects. For most of those with such experiences instinctively conceal them from others, whether fearful of the incredulity of others and the ‘curse of ridicule’ they will encounter, or else from a concern that the spiritual experience, which they feel to have received as a special gift of grace, might be withdrawn if they failed to observe silence.
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!
[This concludes Part 1.]
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Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
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