Publications

Mrs. Park was a mystic with a gift for narrative, keeping a careful record of her visions and inner experiences throughout her life. In her later years, she undertook to record both her story and her most central visionary experiences. Her core mystical writings, which may be downloaded below, include:

Between Time and Eternity
Man, the Temple of God
An Open Door, and
The Book of Admonitions and Poetry

Much of her work remains unpublished in the form of notes, diaries, Bible studies, booklets, and poetry. These are in the process of being archived at the University of British Columbia, Rare Books & Special Collections.

Printed copies of Man,The Temple of God and An Open Door are available free of charge while supplies last, but a contribution to shipping costs would be appreciated depending on the destination. Please contact us to order.

Between Time & Eternity

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An autobiographical account of her spiritual awakening, Between Time and Eternity describes how unsolicited psychic experiences in early life opened Mrs. Park to the reality of a life beyond death and set her on a spiritual path she could not have previously imagined, given her fairly conservative upbringing. Of all her works, this one best introduces the author and describes her formative spiritual experiences.

This book had a long period of gestation, as it was mostly written in 1946 but not published until 1960. Mrs. Park could not publish it earlier due to a lack of financial resources. After her husband’s death, she was able to use some of the money from his pension to defray the considerable costs of self-publication. The book was reviewed favourably in the journal “Spiritual Frontiers” in the January-February issue 1961, and in several other publications, but she generally promoted it herself by leaving it on consignment in bookstores and giving it to interested parties.

Man, The Temple of God

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Man, the Temple of God is based on the author’s mystical experiences between 1940 and 1968. Here Mrs. Park describes being shown a large bas-relief map of the Mediterranean containing the signs and symbols of the astrological ages. The main theme of this work is that the evolutionary purpose of God is to develop the hearing of the inner or “silent voice.” Through the emergence of this divine speaking from within, humanity is destined to become “the Temple of God.”

This is a radical notion, for its implies, as do the teachings of Meister Eckhart, that the ground of the self and the ground of being in God intersect; that humans in their essence and origin are part of the divine unity. As the Apostle Paul argued, people are not called ultimately to worship God in “temples made with hands,” but to become one with God in the innermost sanctuary of their hearts. She tied the idea of the human being as a temple of God directly to Jesus’ teaching that “the kingdom of heaven is within.”

Mrs. Park moves through a symbolic interpretation of the Genesis myth, a study of the symbolism of the ancient Jewish Temple, to the meaning of the life of the Christ as a forerunner of “God-filled, God-directed” humanity. In her interpretation of biblical symbolism, Mrs. Park is not literalistic. She sees the Genesis story as a symbolic account of mankind’s coming to an “evolutionary fork” and choosing to follow the lower discursive reason and feeling rather than the guidance of the higher or eternal consciousness that unifies these faculties from above. In her reading, Adam and Eve symbolize part of a single consciousness, Eve representing the psyche (unregulated feeling) and Adam the reason (lower rational mind).

Like William Blake in his prophetic books, she sees the story as a parable of a dynamic within humans. She does not assume from this analogy that women are necessarily more emotional than men or men more rational than women, and that the psycho-mental poles of thought and feeling coexist in each person, but need to be brought into balance through the power of spirit. She does not interpret the “Fall” as a fall into sexuality, or blame it on the woman, but looks at it as humanity’s choice to learn through trial and error (“knowledge of good and evil”) rather than through divine guidance and direct perception of the divine. In some ways, she suggests “the Fall” is a necessary stage in human evolution.

Unlike conservative Victorians such as Bishop Usher, with whose ideas she was familiar as a Wesleyan in England, she is a modernist who accepts the geological age of the earth, and embraces the notion of a slow evolutionary development over the ages. Unlike Darwin, however, she describes a God-directed process of evolution. In her worldview, God is not an object, acting on the process of creation from outside, separate from creation, but represents the ontological ground of spiritual consciousness both within and beyond the process itself. Though not a scientist, anthropologist, or theologian, Mrs. Park has much in common with writers like Pierre Teillard de Chardin or philosopher Henri Bergson who see evidence of a higher purpose working through the processes of time and history. In her view, the highest evolutionary purpose is to serve the good of the larger whole; therefore values like humility, love and compassion are primary in the evolution of consciousness.

In a sense, her Christology is an effort to reclaim the visionary or cosmic Christ. Though she was interested in the historical Jesus and his legacy and studied the gospels continually, her vision of Christ is based on her experiences of the mystical “Christ within.”

An Open Door

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Olga Park self-published An Open Door in 1974 when she was living in a cottage in Port Moody, British Columbia. It is compiled from records she kept meticulously from the years 1914 to 1972 and represents the most significant of her manifestations. This compilation provides a detailed account of her central visions and is certainly the most mystical of her writings. Though there is some overlap between a few sections of this book and Between Time and Eternity, the overlapping portions appear in a slightly different context.

The visions include her astonishing visit to the “Church of the Future,” and various visitations by the Master Jesus. Here she explains the role of the figures of the Teacher, Rector, and Christ-servers in her mission, as well as how she was given a communion service and authorized to teach it to others. The book concludes with her moving “A Lamentation,” a poem in which the Christ speaks from the cross to the current age. In the Foreward to the book she states her purpose:

To each his particular job. Mine is to instruct in contemplative devotion all such as desire to hear the voice of Jesus speaking through their own within as did the Founders of the Christian faith, and to know of a surety that His plan for the rescue of man from his self-destructiveness still goes forward.

Book of Admonitions & Poetry

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and Poetry

The Book of Admonitions and Poetry, written in 1969, is a shorter compilation than An Open Door. The “admonitions,” short teachings given in the “Silent Voice,” extend from February 1941 to April 1962. The second section consists of “Five Songs of Blessing,” “Eleven Songs of Encouragement,” and “Four Songs of Exhortation.” Most are short poems written in a biblical style using biblical parallelism and prayer-like repetition.