Bô Yin Râ
Occult Phenomena

 

From The Book on the Living God, second edition, chapter 9 “The Hidden Side of Nature,” 2014. Translated from Das Buch vom Lebendigen Gott, second edition, published in German in 1927. 

 

The creatures of the unseen part of nature one attracts in para-psychical” experiments, as well as in sĂ©ances, where in worshipful solemnity participants believe they are communicating with departed souls,” are not by any means devoid of a degree of consciousness, and often they know” more than those who mean to probe their knowledge. Their self-awareness is, however, only dim and dreamlike, so that one cannot properly, by human standards, condemn them as immoral if they pretend to be whatever their interrogators think they are, or wish to find in them.

Above all else, they crave to manifest their own existence, and to that end they will resort to every means within their power; but they will also go beyond their limits, feigning to have powers they do not possess.

They are not bound by moral laws, nor by a sense of conscience.

To destroy you will afford them no less pleasure than to lend you strength, if only they can make their own existence known by means of the effect their power has on you.

Dreadful is the fate of those whom nature’s unseen parasites already have within their grip.

Like leeches they will drain their victim’s energies; for they must feed upon the life-blood of their prey, if mortal humans would have them at their service.

If victims cannot rid themselves by their own strength, these creatures’ ghastly urges will enslave them, until their very soul shall finally have died, because its energies will gradually detach themselves and leave them. And when their mortal form shall one day have been laid to rest, their former consciousness will perish and return to nothing: the only true, because eternal, death” that human mortals have to fear.

Very few can speak from knowledge about the phantomlike, deceitful nature of these beings, which cannot properly be named, since visible reality provides no suitable analogies.

It is the power of these unseen creatures that fakirs use to work their eerie feats; and as the world is unaware of their existence, people marvel at the fakirs’ deeds, if ever there appears a true performer of that demon-ridden craft.

These beings are found capable of many things that human beings cannot ever equal, so long as they rely on merely their own physical capacities.

They see” your thoughts more clearly than even you may know them, and the most secret things you picture in your mind they can make visible before your very eyes.

They can produce material forms and substances that, for a certain time, will be as tangible as any other thing on earth, or any substance that you know; for these invisible intelligences are the hidden weavers shaping every earthly form, and they direct the unseen threads that underlie all visible phenomena in nature.

They can assume the bodily appearances of persons who have long since died; for every form that once existed here on earth continues to be present in their sphere; namely, in a shape that one might—very loosely—speak of as a casting mold or die, from which one may at any time produce another copy.

In reality, this casting mold is an extremely delicate, invisible configuration: a system, as it were, of leaf-like membranes that preserves, in mathematically exact proportions, every inner and external part that once had formed a mortal human body.

As a rule, that die or matrix is compressed into the smallest space within itself, but under suitable conditions it will become inflated, so to speak, with the organic energies that normally sustain the physical activity and body of the medium.

During the time that such a manifestation lasts, the medium must needs be kept in the unconscious state one knows as trance.”

The inflated phantom body, which is of very brief duration even under optimum conditions, functions as the instrument through which the psyche—the physically conditioned creature soul—of the unconscious medium performs its operations. During the sĂ©ance, the medium’s psyche is subjected to a kind of hypnosis by the unseen, physical intelligences which manifest themselves in the reconstituted phantom shape.

That such a phantom wraith can even speak —indeed, will sound exactly like its dead and buried former occupant—is no more surprising than the ability to speak of any normally embodied individual; given that, for the duration of its brief appearance, the phantom body, too, possesses each and every organ that once had physically existed in its deceased original, including even bodily deformities and similar defects.

I trust there is no special need to emphasize that such a phantom shape, preserved in the invisible domain of nature, has nothing more in common with the human individual that once had been attached to it, than does a reptile with the slough it leaves behind.

There is a reason for my dealing here in some detail with facts whose very mention I find utterly repugnant.

I want to see you able objectively to judge phenomena that otherwise might startle and confuse you.

You should not let yourself be duped, for simple lack of knowledge, by things that only seem astounding.

To be sure, the fraud you may encounter in séances does not pose any real threat.

Serious danger is met only in authentic contact with these hidden beings.

My warning here is prompted by informed concern.

For if you ever should experience the effects these beings can produce, they well might sense in you another victim.

All too often do they find their prey among those seekers who, instead of striving to unite their timeless soul and find their God, will search instead for occult powers, without possessing the maturity and insight one must have before a Mediator—a fellow mortal who is conscious in the Spirit—is able to prepare them, in many years of strictest discipline, to master these demonic creatures and their frightening powers.

But even then there will be constant danger for anyone who needlessly attracts and uses them; and none who had to learn to subjugate this unseen realm of physical reality, in order to establish his authority, will ever stay there any longer than absolute necessity demands, in order that he may accomplish a specific task.