Read Parts I-V:

“The Book on the Life Beyond” and the Human Afterlife by German Spiritual Author Bô Yin Râ. Richard C. Cook

By Richard C. Cook and Bô Yin Râ, May 21, 2025

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“The Book on the Life Beyond” and the Human Afterlife by German Spiritual Author Bô Yin Râ. Part II

By Richard C. Cook and Bô Yin Râ, May 24, 2025

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“The Book on the Life Beyond” and the Human Afterlife by German Spiritual Author Bô Yin Râ. Part III

By Richard C. Cook and Bô Yin Râ, May 24, 2025

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“The Book on the Life Beyond” and the Human Afterlife by German Spiritual Author Bô Yin Râ. Part IV

By Richard C. Cook and Bô Yin Râ, May 26, 2025

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LINK TO PART V

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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.

• Introduction
• The Skill of Dying
• On the Temple of Eternity and the World of the Spirit
• The One Reality
• What Is To Be Done?

On the Temple of Eternity and the World of the Spirit 

We who share this physical life with you here on earth and yet at the same time come to bring you tidings from the spirit, – we truly live in a different world from you, although our feet are planted firmly on this earth.

It may seem to you that we are far removed from you; yet no one could be nearer to you than we are.

It is true we do not live just in your world, but also in the eternal world of pure, essential spirit. But your world is also permeated by the eternal world of the spirit, – like a sponge growing in the sea is permeated by the water of that sea…

To be sure, you cannot comprehend with earthly senses the pure essential spirit world in which we spiritually live.

You must first be capable of spiritual perception, if you would experience the spiritual!

And even then you will have to have surmounted all the lower spiritual worlds before reaching the inner realm; this is the provenance of the tidings which reach you here…

Many among you seek us; they think they could immediately be spiritually united with us if they could only find our human dwellings on earth… Yet even if they really find us there, they would not be any the ‘nearer’ to us. –

They see only our physical bodies, hear our earthly voices, and at best perceive only the extremities of our outward life on earth.

But they could never enter our ‘temple’, for it lies in the spiritual dimension of the causal world and not, for example, ‘on the slopes of the Himalayas’.

In the hidden wilderness of the highest mountains on earth have always lived since time immemorial some of our brothers from every generation: – men who have surpassed all possible nobility on earth and now remain in complete seclusion in order to keep clear of obstructions the path which must remain accessible to the rest of us, working here in the life of the world if we are to carry out the task assigned to us…

For thousands of years we have been building our spiritual temple; we always go on building, without ever completing it.

Every century allows us to add new chapels and altars, columns and buttresses, – in accordance with the spiritually determined rhythm and its preordained, wise design, sunk in the temple’s foundations.

All your temples and altars on earth are but reflections of this temple, constructed by the spirit.

With more or less clarity, – more or less distortion, – all its earthly reflections display what the ancient architects felt intuitively; and if they were true artists they had, as a result of sublime intuition, a vision of the proportionality and grace of our sacred temple of eternity. –

Yet this temple is not merely a work of thought, nor am I speaking here only in a symbolic way!

Rather it exists as an edifice of spiritual substance which is always perceptible to the spiritual senses; it is also recognized by spiritually perceptive beings as a structure which is just as solid as the temples of this earth are to you, along with the cathedrals which tower in the skies…

In the spiritual world everything is experienced as ‘tangible’ and ‘real’ in the same way as in your world of physical senses. You are subject to a great error in thinking that you would only find vague dreamlike shapes here! –

We are not talking here about visions, hallucinations, or any other kind of self-created imaginings, nor of the images from the bulk of experiences, appearing from subconscious regions! –

Those things perceived by the spiritual senses are to the same degree ‘objectively’ present as those things which the body’s physical senses can perceive. For this reason what is perceived by the spiritual senses even at the highest levels of spiritual self-manifestation, completely corresponds ‘objectively’ with the forms within the physical world of perception, albeit modified by the spirit.

In the spiritual world too, there are ‘lands and seas’, deep gorges and high mountains, summits covered in eternal snow, and extensive, quiet valleys full of charm and peacefulness…

Let those to whom this seems ‘far too earthly’ be clear that their physical-sensory perceptions here on earth also only arise from certain impressions produced by external means. Let them also consider that only physical-sensory perceptible effects of certain energies come into question here, so that all the descriptions we give to things, strictly speaking, are always fixed only on certain complexes of individual impressions which are perceived according to stereotypes. – Thus the eye has the impression of white; the hand feels the cold and a certain consistency in the mass it touches; the ear receives the impression of a crunching sound as soon as the same mass is set foot on, where upon we describe the complex of these perceptions (to which we could add others, such as, for example, the observation that the mass will easily melt or the crystalline form of the individual ‘flakes’) as ‘snow’.

Required to bring about the physical observation of this complex of impressions are certain physical stimuli. However, the same complex of impressions can only be perceived by spiritual senses, if spiritual energies unite with the aforementioned stimuli. – –

‘Space and time’ and ‘cause and effect’ also exist in the spiritual dimension of the causal world, though we have an essentially different relationship to all these phenomena than we are accustomed to on earth and in the life of the physical senses. –

Everything experienced in the spiritual world has the same reality as the things of the world perceptible to physical senses, but can only enter consciousness spiritually.

Things which are perceived in this way are in no sense spatially removed from the physical world, but they are no longer subject to the laws which take effect in the physical world of appearances. –

Active will causes to grow in the spiritual realm all those things which are of use to us in our spiritual bodies; the same will causes the ripened fruit to be harvested without effort.

No animals are known in the realm of the spiritual world we speak of here, although the specific forms of animal appearance are in no way missing.

Yet everything that is ‘of the animal’ in earthly man has lost its hold over us, just as have all hostile things confronting us on earth in the appearance of the animal.

Things revealed to us in the spiritual realm in forms corresponding to the animals on earth in supreme beauty have not the slightest relationship to animal’s nature as shown to us on earth in animal forms…

On earth man may enjoy the flesh of animals to nourish himself or avoid it, – but here, within the experience of the spiritual senses, there is no other ‘food’ than the spiritual equivalents of the fruits of earthly plants, and of the earthly forms of wine and bread.

(It hardly seems necessary to mention that we speak here of ‘bread’ which was not baked, and of ‘wine’ which certainly does not ‘intoxicate’…)

But ‘food’ and ‘drink’ is in the spiritual dimension of the causal world also the spiritual-sensory form renewing energy, as in the same way, there is a state of refreshment in spiritual experience which can be compared with the sound sleep of the weary on earth.

As ‘food’ and ‘drink’ in the spiritual realm are products of willpower, their effect is merely the transformation of the same power into elements of the spiritual body; there is for the spiritual body therefore, no disposal of waste as in the animal condition on earth.

All this may appear to many of you, as far too ‘sense-oriented’, far too similar to life on earth to meet with your ready understanding.

In this you forget that all events on earth which can be comprehended by the senses are always ‘symbolic’ of a process which is incomprehensible to the senses. –

All life in the physical and sensory, as in the spiritual cosmos expresses itself as movement.

All movement, however, produces form.

Since all life is always the same one life, so also all form is the corresponding symbol of the same movement in all regions of perception in the universe. –

Nowhere does there exist a realm of the spirit of the sort you have dreamt up and been taught for millennia to dream up: – as a realm without forms, without symbols; – that is unless you were to content yourself with the hollow fantasy worlds which some minds regard as ‘reality’.

The ‘formless sea of unformed Godhead’ of which the mystics speak transcends all existence; once lost in this sea you would never find yourselves again.

You proceeded from it to become the form and expression of your will; but that which once handed you over to become an individual form would eternally be forced to reject each one of you and hurl you again into the universe, in case one among you could return to the limitless primeval waters. – –

Far removed from these primeval waters are those wretched dreamers who in their subconscious found hidden the patrimony of experience belonging to their remotest ancestors whose inability to individual self-experience they endured anew as supposed ‘experience of the Godhead’…

The innermost light-world of spiritual perception whence we bring you tidings is indeed as far as its form is concerned, the work of all those who can experience this spiritual world; nevertheless, every individual remains the creator of his own experience.

Within the communality of the effect of the will, every individual will strives for the same formation.

Yet the individual will creates for itself its own experience within our communality; this experience in turn does not disturb any other individual will, since it could not be experienced by any other individual will unless through mutual penetration.

But if now the whole spiritual world formation is experienced as the ‘real’ world in the same way as the world of physical and sensory perception, none of those resistances which limit and restrict the will on earth are met by our will within the spiritual world.

If we will something to be, our will is sufficient to bring it into being…

It will come into being – according to the power of our will, sooner or later – but it will come into being in the way we will it.

In the spiritual world the creative powers of the will alone bring into being what is willed; on the other hand, what has hitherto been willed disappears without trace as soon as the will negates it, so that, in truth, the power of the will borders on the idea of ‘omnipotence’…

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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.

Featured image: Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, Bô Yin Râ (1920) (Public Domain)

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