Light of all Life: Thoughts towards a philosophy of life is the last book written by Raynor C. Johnson. Originally published in 1984, just three years before his death, the work is based on a series of lectures Johnson delivered in America and London. In his gentle style he draws upon more than eighty years of life experience, during half of which his thinking bridged both science and philosophy. Theosophical at its heart, the book includes subjects such as reincarnation, karma, life after death, mysticism, and the nature of time.

Johnson had spent most of his life looking for the truth about God and the nature of life and death—even traveling to India in the sixties in an effort to experience the mystical having concluded intellectual pursuit alone wasn’t enough. It seems he found it and in the closing chapter of this book he writes,

This quest for true and permanent happiness lures us on. It is the call of the soul to be recognised as the true self and known. But men do not know this and they look outside and plunge into the world of the opposites to find it. Craving and desire are expressions of the egos search for happiness, where it can never be found.

What then is the truth about this troubled, storm-tossed world into which we have been born and have to live our lives? It has some beauty as all the poets and artists have felt, but it is nevertheless the lowest and darkest of all the levels of partial reality. Compared with it, the astral levels to which we shall pass at death are idyllic, peaceful and secure.

Mystics who have lifted their consciousness even to the mind levels have told us of things in marked contrast with their ordinary view, and they were convinced of the truth they perceived.

“Love pervades everything, sustains it and undergirds it. All conflict and suffering are like surface waves upon the quiet ocean depths.”

Raynor Carey Johnson was born on 5th April 1901 in Leeds, England. He earned a BA and MA at Oxford University and a PhD in physics at the University of London. He later taught physics at Queens University Belfast and the University of London where his specialist subject was spectroscopy; the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. He authored and co-authored a number of scientific papers, and published three scientific books, Spectra, Atomic Spectra, and Introduction to Molecular Spectra. In his field he was considered a leading research scientist of the time.

In 1934 Johnson, his wife Mary, and their children, moved to Australia where he had been invited to take up the post of Master of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. It was there that he became friends with the author Ambrose Pratt who introduced him to psychical research, mysticism, and the Society of Psychical Research.

After many years of studying eastern religion and the paranormal Johnson abandoned his Methodist beliefs and particularly the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. In Johnson’s mind Jesus was one of the greatest spiritual beings to grace this earth but not the source of all creation.

In the space of ten years, Johnson authored four books on mysticism, The Imprisoned Splendour, Nurslings of Immortality, Watcher on the Hills, and The Light and the Gate. 

In 1964 he retired from academia and spent the rest of his life devoted to mysticism and God, traveling to India to a bid to experience enlightenment rather that just the intellectual pursuit of it. In 1984, his final book, Light of All Life: Thoughts towards a philosophy of life was published. He died on 16th May 1987.