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?

In introducing today’s topic, “The Failed Economy,” we cover one of the central questions of modern times, which is how society should organize itself to provide for the physical needs of its population. Perhaps no other question has provoked as many wars, revolutions, and scandals, or as much hysteria and frustration as this one. Let’s read on and see what a true spiritual master has to say.

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

It is essentially the same law which determines whether the tiniest of economic units – the small household of a young couple – or the largest association of people – a large nation – prospers well!

If problems are to be avoided in both cases, calculations will have to be made regarding the funds available for spending, for those funds will have to be earned simultaneously, – and in both situations it will be necessary to secure subsidies in advance for times of extraordinary demand which cannot be covered by income over the same period of time…

This is no easier to achieve in the smallest association than it is in the largest, even if in each association the complexity of balancing required by necessity will grow according to its size.

In both cases true freedom can only be attained when any decrease in current assets is painstakingly compensated for by an increase in assets, and in both cases the specter of freedom continually tempts us to spend funds that cannot be replaced in the budget through regular income!

Whereas generally in well-defined human associations only a few come to harm when those responsible allow themselves to be tempted into a pursuit of the specter of freedom, the national budget will in the same situation harm thousands or millions who believed the security of their outward existence was protected by the state.

This betrayal of trust, which not only robs the individual of his economic self-confidence, will be catastrophic because its consequence is endless and it paralyzes the energy of all those who rely on their wages as the only means to secure a balanced budget. –

At the same time it produces the delusion that the ‘state’ is simply that impersonal entity which can clumsily practice statecraft by using whatever ostensible form it takes, – forgetting that the ‘state’ – in reality – is nothing other than the sum of all those bound to it as citizens of the state…

This leads many people who, within their own small everyday circle are completely assured of the conscientious and just way of their behavior, to suddenly allow themselves to be guided by other maxims when faced by ‘the state’ – instead of by a fellow citizen of the state!

People who surely could not be pushed into making unjust profits were it to be to the detriment of an individual, are sometimes too readily prepared to take all that can be acquired once the ‘state’ appears to be their contractual party, or if the opportunity arises to procure some unjust advantage from the property of the state.

They think they are easily excused for their behavior by implying that their unjust profits have accrued only at ‘the state’s’ expense, and they do not think it necessary to ask: – where does ‘the state’ gets the funds it administers which they so casually expropriate?? –

Thoughtlessly and without any particular pangs of conscience, they allow themselves be misled – especially by the compact majesty of the concept of the state itself – into enriching themselves unjustly to the detriment of their fellow citizens…

They do not know, or do not want to know, that they are only stealing from every individual when they take from the state what has not been earned by making one’s own contribution to others in return! –

Yet they will quickly recognize injustice when they see others behaving in the same way; for instinctively one feels that as a citizen of the state one is also damaged by every damage inflicted upon ‘the state’.

Of course, there are some, believing they see this kind of ‘injustice’ at work, who are tormented by envy at the prospect of others shearing the wool from the sheep of the state which the observer of such wrong-doing might have had, if he had only got his hands on it…

If it had any practical value to list them all, we could testify to all the many forms of reckless damage committed against fellow citizens through thoughtless behavior towards everything ‘the state’ administers.

I always seek in my books to give my readers new advice on matters they would profit from heeding. It is far from me to win a reputation for an ‘exhaustive treatment’ of matters under consideration which already is found collected within the souls and thoughts of men!

Those will find it difficult to read what I write if they do not read what is deliberately ‘implied’ in every turn of phrase, so that those readers who have not forgotten how to think while reading in the rush of daily life may find it themselves…

Thus all who read what is presented here with their minds fully alert will not need a list of examples in order to know what I am speaking about.

Every day presents us with far too many egregious examples, and we do not need to look too far to be confronted with them against our wishes…

Yet where it is not noticed nor perhaps even understood that everything the ‘state’ administers and dispenses is offered by those who constitute it, there will soon be a confusion of ideas which will stifle all the clarity of the soul.

Everything which those who are maintained by the state alone do to secure the continual flow of their source of nourishment, is then considered as ‘maintaining the state’, without regard to those citizens who are initially responsible for bringing together what sustains the state. – –

Others then describe as a ‘claim’ upon the state that demand which no one, who still heeds one’s conscience, would dare make of all those individuals who, along with oneself, constitute the ‘state’ in the first place. – –

What is declared as ‘duty to the state’ is something which no earthly law based on rational thought, and spiritual law to an even lesser extent, could ever demand from a corporation of individuals. – –

And all this results from the sense that the ‘wealth of the state’ is felt separated from all those individuals who have always constituted it through the individual contribution they have agreed to make as citizens for the sake of the whole!

Deluded misjudgment sees those citizens who administer the state’s wealth as the unrestricted masters of this wealth, and turns misguided anger against them when they are incapable of arbitrarily filling every desire which could only be satisfied, were this Earth: – a ‘land of milk and honey’ and no longer subject to the structure of necessity…

A failed economy must necessarily ensue if citizens entrusted with the administration of the ‘state’s wealth’, which they and other citizens have contributed – often with difficulty, – dare to offer this wealth to every strident demand, even though fresh contributions to replace what has been spent can only be won through the counter-productive draining of the supply channels which alone protect the source of all contributions from ultimately drying up. – –

Likewise, a failed economy must come about if the bodies of the state take as administrative assistants large numbers away from a productive activity which they are more than capable of performing.

At the same time deep demoralization occurs if the individual is brought up to believe that one has a greater right than others to be fed by the state because one is attached to it, – whether by serving it as an easily dispensable administrative assistant or simply because one can force the state to buy off someone who has an irresponsible will to destroy…

It is degrading to continue to demand a position only for the sake of remuneration if it is obvious that the intensive work of a far lower number of administrators could still keep the state’s budget in the best of order, – and it degrades everyone for one person to rely on one’s power to prevent the state from prospering by forcing one’s fellow citizens to buy off one’s non-use of the excessive power achieved only through widespread surplus, at the price of the ever-increasing devastation of all job opportunities, which would offer to those utterly deluded by one’s lust for power, bread and a decent level of prosperity by virtue of their own contributions had these opportunities to work not been destroyed by one’s own doing…

Everywhere the slippery specter of freedom confuses the human brain, and one can easily believe one is averting the crisis – truly not insignificant – because one believes the laws of necessity can be ignored with impunity, laws which also cannot be ignored in economic life without bringing about an even greater crisis! – –

This same temptation, replete with the illusory reflection of confused hope and yearning, has greatly contaminated the economic life of all the nations for a long time.

Economic hardship has taken root everywhere to such an extent that those who are almost suffocating in it are too easily prepared to trust in every fallacy generated by deluded brains and to give up in great haste their last ability to think rationally if the salvation they ardently seek seems near at hand…

In a feverish fear of ever-increasing oppression through the burden of existence, they fail to see that what over-confident leaders praise as the long sought after oasis, easing all distress, is but a mirage…

The economic hardship which darkens everything around us has long since paralyzed all discernment, and so people have willingly deluded themselves, even though the last stirrings of correct instincts continue to knock at the door of the soul in order to awaken slumbering insight, that it might avoid what still can be avoided!

Only very few recognize that they too are partly to blame for such hardship…

To seek to blame others entirely for the evil one has generated oneself corresponds all too well with the artificially produced urge to criticize!

Is it the impersonal concept of the ‘state’ that people want to burden with the consequences of their own folly, or is it, in internal economic life, the smaller entities comprising individuals which are considered in the same way as the root cause of all evil, and, since fallacy loves to go round in circles, – one believes the tide will turn quickly if only the state administration were charged with doing that, though needing the security the state can undoubtedly guarantee, but which can only be attained in line with its particulars and size, if it – within the external parameters of state laws – develops in line with its own law founded on necessity…

In the same way as the ‘wealth of the state’ is therefore also regarded as property which belongs to no man, so one is tempted to consider the goods of each individual made productive in economic life as detached from human connection.

Believing oneself to be completely justified, when securing enrichment and improper advantage ‘at the state’s expense’ without making an equivalent contribution, one believes likewise that one is entitled to loot the property of others as soon as the individual steps behind an economic organism to which one freely entrusts the control of things which would remain sterile and without productive power if one kept them for oneself.

There are very many who owe their nourishment and upkeep to the property derived from the wealth of productive individuals. Certainly they would never be capable of appropriating illegally the particular property of the individual, – yet they pay scant attention to their conscience, deeming it necessary to diminish the property of others which had become a tool within an economic organization to maintain its owner as well as many others at the same time…

The ‘firm’ or the ‘company’ is seen as something rather impersonal, and what has been constructed from the free property of individuals appears to many of those employed within such structures to be free goods they unhesitatingly consider to be available for their own use, unless prevented by the law of the state.

In this process the narrow-minded refusal to acknowledge the real worth of their own contribution leads those lacking in it to appease their own consciences with the apparent justification of a ‘right’ to ‘be paid’ where agreed remuneration for the activity required does not seem sufficient recompense to the worker.

Rarely will anyone ask whether one’s work brings in value for the economic organism, which alone makes it into a productive factor, needed for its continuation at the level that can offer one’s agreed remuneration over the long term, although the future of the enterprise and those for whom it creates income depend on the answer given to this question…

Private economic life also turns into a failed economy when there is no balance between ‘what goes out’ and ‘what comes in’!

Here too it is degrading for anyone to try to hold onto the position one holds simply for the sake of income, although one can see that one is not needed, and that the economic organism which nourishes oneself will be harmed by the overabundance of workers with respect to the work which needs doing.

It is certainly hard for those concerned to recognize, particularly if they have wives and children to feed and have to maintain economically their own households without there seeming to be any other source of income available.

Yet: where there is an indubitable will to work, there is always a way to guarantee an income through new, more dignified work, even if it is necessary to change the type of activity one does.

If in the past many could only find an income in foreign lands far across the seas because they learnt to carry out work which was needed, despite it not corresponding to traditional forms of labor, the time is now not so far away when one will not find any ‘shame’ in making the same effort in one’s own homeland!

A genuine will to work nowadays creates new possibilities of work everywhere!

Work deserves its wages; even in these difficult times the genuine will to work will secure an appropriate recompense if it can only be freed from the outmoded constraints of convention which still binds so many in the ‘old’ world of Europe and seeks to keep them trapped on the same trodden path! – –

If work is ‘badly paid’, this is always only a sign that there is too great a supply of willing workers available for it; everyone who continues to be set on carrying out this type of work alone, despite the fact that heads and hands have long since been found for it, will only become a nuisance to those already employed, without gaining the slightest profit and only obstructing one’s own path! –

It is necessary to seek work where it can be found!

Even if it is a type of work which seems little ‘suited’ to you and which you previously despised, it can bring you eventually to a goal which would not seem insignificant to you at all, were you to reach it today – without any transition! –

There is never a shortage of opportunities for work on this Earth; – however, there is all too often a shortage of people who are prepared to adapt to every opportunity to work! – –

Economic life can only be ‘healthy’ if all sham activity became henceforth impossible, – and also the budget of all states will only be recovered in the same way!

Wherever today there is still talk, uttered with platitudinous intoxication and worn-out pathos, of the ‘right to work’, one needs to ask: – whether work is really meant, or simply the supposed right to receive welfare simply by making a gesture of apparent willingness to work, welfare which could only be realized through the contributions made by the work of others…

The right to work must not be degraded into a ‘demand’, for no one born on earth can be excused from his duty to work! – –

But very many think they already satisfy this duty when they merely go through the motions…

A genuine will to work looks down justifiably with regret upon the sham employee who seeks to offer outer gestures instead of the spiritual self-realization of the soul as is expressed in all work, even the most menial!

That work is also a means to create income is no less rooted in the spiritual nature of earthly humans as lust is innate in the animal nature in order to ensure the continuation of all animal species. – –

Those able to work who do not love work as a means of self-expression of their souls, are still far from sensing their supernaturally conditioned being within themselves, – even if they are the most zealous supporters of an habitual belief in the soul! – –

Even the economic life of this earthly existence is strictly determined in its every expression by necessity!

Whatever fails to comply with the ordering structure of necessity must decline and fall, even though science and the boldest technology may seek to help it establish another foundation! –

All life is a continual taking and a continual giving!

Eternally valid law alone can here determine whether the proper balance has been achieved.

But whatever human folly can devise to evade the law will only produce illusions as fleeting as the ever-changing shapes of clouds.

Something lasting, which, only after it taught generations about prosperity, gradually and scarcely perceptible to mankind generates a new form from itself – can only arise where an eternal balance is established in which each individual knows himself to be included.

Only when the individual recognizes that he harms himself when he disadvantages others for his own advantage, will every failed economy which today threatens to enfeeble whole nations, disappear!

Cleverly conceived theories can offer no help in this area, even if they appear inherently well grounded.

Only practical testing can here lead to knowledge, and experience teaches then most assuredly, both in matters large and small, how to avoid the things which are bound to lead to a failed economy…

This ends Part 6 of 12, “The Failed Economy”

Part 6 — Bô Yin Râ begins by observing that the first and most important principle of responsible economics is one that most nations, especially the US, have completely abandoned: that of balancing the national budget. Instead, the concept of “deficit spending” has been elevated into a principle whereby whenever the government runs out of money to hand out to various claimants, both citizens and creditors, it may in good conscience run to those willing to lend—always at interest—to keep the state from falling into bankruptcy. Increasingly, if such lenders are not to be found, the central bank itself lends money to the government to stave off catastrophe. The underlying problem, however, is not the need for the government to find ever new sources of revenue or borrowing but for individuals themselves to find or create the productive enterprise by which they may survive or prosper. The key is in the work ethic; people who have it and act upon will always find ways to earn what they need. For this, those tempted to freeload should be encouraged to trust themselves and each other to create a successful economy. As Bô Yin Râ says, “A genuine will to work nowadays creates new possibilities of work everywhere!” Of course this is a hard saying for collectivists everywhere to swallow. In the U.S., the last time the federal government paid off its debt and balanced the budget was during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. In our own day, the $38 trillion federal deficit has created out-of-control inflation that threatens to destroy the currency altogether. But it was the 20th century that brought the disastrous development of endless wars financed by central bank borrowing that threw the economies of nations most out of whack. This was done by way of the “specter of freedom,” with politicians always promising the moon free of charge. The way back to sanity is bound to be a difficult road.

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"

“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.