One of the most universally recognized formulations in modern human history is the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” stated as a principle by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Indeed, we all have at least a vague awareness that these three elements are good, if not essential, for fulfillment of our life on this planet. Also, most of us, especially those in authority, adhere to our own perceived privilege, under a variety of circumstances, to deny these elements to one or more of our fellow human beings. Of course such denial also has limits, as expressed, for instance, in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Which brings us to the question: What, really, is freedom?

While we wrestle with that question, we may recall the saying of Jesus, “The truth shall make you free.” (John 8:23)

What then, is truth? And how does that truth function in life to work its wonders and produce the stated freedom?

As readers of Three Sages are aware, for the past year we have been publishing selections of Bô Yin Râ’s spiritual writings, along with background and commentary. See additional selections of recent articles HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Bô Yin Râ was the spiritual name of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken (1876-1943), born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, educated as a landscape painter, by spiritual pedigree a Luminary of Primordial Light, and, through his writings, the creator of perhaps the most important compendium of original spiritual writings in modern Western history. His master work is the 32-volume Hortus Conclusus (“The Enclosed Garden”), which he completed in 1936, having relocated from Germany to Lugano, Switzerland in the early 1920s.

While most of the material carried by Three Sages by and about Bô Yin Râ has pertained to the spiritual destiny of the human individual, his book “The Specter of Freedom” focuses on the life of society as a whole. It’s a relatively long work, one that is being carried here in twelve installments. Within this book, Bô Yin Râ, explains two different perspectives on “freedom.” One path is that of freedom as a “specter”—a “ghost” or “illusion” that people follow, believing it will lead them to happiness while instead it deceives them into falling into a pit of despair and, ultimately, destruction. The other path is real freedom that comes only when the price for it has been paid.

But what is that price? What are the practices and conditions that must be followed to create something truly worth having? One of the conditions clearly is to study the teachings of spiritual masters who know what they are talking about. In our experience, Bô Yin Râ stands in the forefront of those individuals. Another is certainly Jesus, whose advice includes, for instance, the time-honored practices spelled out in the Beatitudes, advice that is as relevant today as when they were uttered: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” etc.

The group of people involved in presenting material by Bô Yin Râ here on Three Sages have provided these definitions of “The Specter of Freedom”:

1. The idea that we should be “allowed” to do just about anything we desire (as long as we don’t get caught?).

2. That enticing notion we conjure up thinking how being free from various earthly restrictions will allow us to fulfill our dreams but which ultimately disappoints because we did not take into account spiritual law and our spiritual inheritance.

3. In Polish, “Specter of Freedom” is “Upior Wolnosci,” which is a great translation as it would mean a “negative, lingering ghostly presence/entity.”

4. What can “freedom” possibly mean for a person who has not achieved complete control of thoughts, speech, and actions?

Readings from “Above the Everyday” by Bô Yin Râ

Books to Light website for ordering books by Bô Yin Râ

1. Mirage

2. Necessity

3. Communality

4. Authority

5. The Urge to Associate

6. The Failed Economy

7. Competition

8. The Craze for Catchwords

9. Self-Realization

10. Religion

11. Science

12. Consciousness of Reality

The worldly-wise mother of all knowledge is language!

Yet the path has been long leading from the babbling and yapping sounds which were once the means of communication of our animal forbears with their meager intellect to the first Spirit-begotten word!

Mere sounds produced by the human voice could not become ‘language’ until the brain of the primitive animal man had become impressionable to the degree that it could transform the scintilla of physical light spraying upon it from everywhere, into powers of apprehension which could also encompass the intangible.

It is not just a linguistic analogy when we speak of the ‘light’ of reason, of rationality, of thought, and of the ‘light’ of the Spirit! –

What is perceptible to us through the physical eye as the physical light of the sun and stars, – what the moon reflects as weakened rays of the sun, – is at the same time also spiritual substance, which is imperceptible to the undeveloped brains of other animals, but is absorbed by the long-sensitive brain of the earthly human animal and transformed into a power from which the soul creates its inner realm of understanding. – –

In our outer lives we would ourselves scarcely be able to apprehend much more than the most developed among the mere animals of this earth, were the soul not able to create conceivable images of all external things from pure, transformed light energy. –

Only with the help of these ‘images’ of outer forms can we make ‘understandable’ to ourselves the things our fellow animals, – even those who have reached the highest level of animal development, – can never understand due to sensually unknowable connections.

‘Thinking’, however, whose objects are no longer reflections of external forms but rather our own inner creation, would be impossible, if we did not have available in abundance the transformed substance of physical light in our brains.

Every ‘concept’ which is formed in an earthly human’s inner life, – every thought a human being can apprehend, – is simply an image made of transformed physical light-substance, and only within such a generated ‘precipitate’ can the reality of the soul and substantial spiritual reality become tangible to us here on Earth.

The conveyance through sounds of these inner images is language, whose particular characteristics are determined by the rhythm of life imprinted on each individual people.

From this light-substance, transformed in the brain, – which constantly penetrates all that is physical on Earth in waves of incomprehensibly small scintilla of physical light energy, – can now be formed the most diverse structures which do not have to correspond in any way to ‘something real’, be it merely ‘something real’ in the outer world , as defined in common usage, or the absolute reality in its vast existence in forms of the soul and in substantial spiritual forms. –

Already in ancient times the thoughtful people of the Earth became aware through experience that the inner power of creating images had to be closely controlled so that it might bring what was genuinely real into the reach of understanding.

False conclusions or false judgments have always been the result of careless inner shaping.

But there was a need for self-control on the part of countless individuals through very many generations in order to attain in the end certainty about which inner methods of creating forms were to be permanently excluded, if the results of thinking and inference were to lead to assured knowledge of occurrences in the field of attesting to reality.

Thus arose what is correctly described as the art of ‘knowledge’, as ‘science’.

But since this strict self-discipline, found to be rooted here within necessity, destroyed many a favored illusion, the self-deluded who had no intention of abandoning their uninhibited way of creating images, would not be lacking, and so, everywhere one can come across the hollow delusion which believes it is superior to all strictly defined scientific standards…

They feel that the ‘freedom’ of their thinking is threatened by science and do not notice that they are following the specter of freedom in seeking to evade necessity, which must also order all inner creation of form, if it is to produce a picture of reality…

To be sure, many servants of ‘exact’ science are only poor ‘carters’ incapable of looking beyond the load of their small cart!

To be sure, ostensible ‘science’ must also cover up for arrogance!

If a tool is used badly, this does not prove that it is useless for the work intended!

It is mere folly to believe that true religious feeling is threatened by the rules of scientific thought, – and only folly imagines that true science blocks the path to highest spiritual knowledge simply because prudence prevents the scientific thinker today from daring to enter areas which can only be penetrated ‘scientifically’, once they have been opened up through experience. – –

It would be unscientific to conclude that those who work in the scientific field could never decide to seek spiritual experience within themselves simply because today most think that everything which cannot be discovered by thought, wanting instead to be experienced, has the whiff of arcane superstition about it…

Those who conduct science in a way which is serving thought exclusively and thereby estrange themselves from the awakened life, are just as much fools of their dreams as any who are obsessed by the figments of confused delusions!

Every human endeavor must serve life, must seek to enrich earthly existence, lest humans themselves become enslaved where they seek to establish dominion!

Since all science is nourished by language, which in turn is only the representation in sound of the inner structure of transformed physical light energy, scientific development also depends to a considerable degree on the appropriate questioning of language. –

This ‘questioning’ is carried out far too rarely in places where it should long have been recognized as the most reliable means of gaining new intuitions…

Not all knowledge is exposed by the behavior of substances under investigation in test tubes and jars; nor does it only reveal itself to continual observation!

Important things have been discovered because a word has awoken a thought which then knew where knowledge sought by many was hiding itself! –

In this way many more things can be found where language will show the paths to those who can ‘question’ in the right way!

In this life on Earth there is, to all intents and purposes, no kind of knowledge to which proper access could not be experienced through language!

Even if we think we are dealing with things themselves, it is only the inner images recreated from transformed light energy which are available to us as objects for observation, and in language we possess their accurate representation in sound.

Do you think your outer eye sees things and you are aware of the most subtle particles of their surfaces?! –

Your ‘seeing’ is but a concentrated transformation of the scintilla of light energy into the forming substance from which your whole ‘inner world’ is constructed – in it alone you really live, even if you think you are living only in the outer world.

The ‘lens’ of your eye continually gathers from the mass of irradiating light scintillae surrounding you, an indescribable multitude of what would still reach the receptive membranes of your brain without it. – Yet it transmits what it has gathered immediately in a concentrated form to the ‘retina’, a system of ‘grids’, and transfers, as it were automatically, each of those physical scintillae of light, transformed in an instant into form-creating substance, to where the inner image of outer form has need of them. – –

And so you live in an incomprehensibly abundant, changing world of inner ‘images’, and only as a consequence of this continually enlivened inner world do you receive all your feelings, thoughts and sensations! – –

‘Science’ then is nothing other than being receptive to the structure of internally created images, determined by necessity, while at the same time refusing the reception of images which have been produced arbitrarily.

All those for whom the search for knowledge is not just a game, engage in ‘science’ for themselves, though the knowledge they may have acquired is slight and not the fruit of academic schooling.

To turn away from rigorous scientific thinking as regards to recognizing external connections, means deceiving oneself deliberately and the self-inflicted betrayal of one’s own will to know!

But where we are talking of the results of knowledge which can only be gained through experience, then the rigorous scientific process of rational examination, which those who have experienced what is beyond the earthly know how to master, will only ever provide a welcome check on the certainty of one’s own experience.

What ultimately cannot stand the test of rigorous thinking, as is required by science of its servants, is certainly not rooted in experience. As a phantom image of true knowledge it will only be capable of deceiving temporarily those who would rather let themselves be deceived than grant the ‘science’ they find uncomfortable, its elevated position in the search for knowledge by earthly humanity, which undoubtedly deserves such hard-earned discipline of thinking here.

It is not a pleasant task to have solemnly to testify to this truism, though it is bitterly required for the sake of the many who are led a merry dance by crazed zealots to whom all ‘academic wisdom’ seems highly suspicious as it is based on rational premises which do not tolerate self-deception.

One can certainly not maintain that science has always been free of error, yet every false conclusion reached by scientists has, sooner or later, been shown to be inadmissible by the very same science.

Like all earthly human knowledge, science too is subject to the possibility of error.

Yet where truly pure science is practiced, – and not only idolatry for the sake of its servants, – far more guarantees are given for gaining certain knowledge than ever will be offered by those wild deserts into which uncritical idiosyncrasy is all too easily tempted by the specter of freedom.

This ends Part 11 of 12 — “Science”

Part 11 — This chapter contains one of the most succinct and cogent accounts of the philosophy of science ever written. The chapter makes clear the distinction between a) real science founded on observation of actual facts, how those facts are perceived, and how they are expressed through language (including mathematical language) and b) the chimeras of imagination dreamt up by people enslaved by the “Specter of Freedom.” This does not deny that “Like all earthly human knowledge, science too is subject to the possibility of error.” But it does invite us to be able to identify assertions made by those “who are obsessed by the figments of confused delusions!” The chapter also depicts as science the activities of observation and reason by ordinary people without academic accomplishments whose common sense may exceed the nonsense sometimes put forth by self-defined “experts.” Further, the practice of real science, while a vitally important part of earthly existence, in no way precludes authentic spiritual perception.

Part 1 of 12: “Mirage”

Part 2 of 12: “Necessity”

Part 3 of 12: “Communality”

Part 4 of 12: “Authority”

Part 5 of 12: “The Urge to Associate”

Part 6 of 12: “The Failed Economy”

Part 7 of 12: “Competition”

Part 8 of 12: “The Craze for Catchwords”

Part 9 of 12: “Self-Realization”

Part 10 of 12: "Religion"

“The Specter of Freedom” is Book 13 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. Edited for Three Sages.