Posted on 12 April 2025, 11:30

What are the best ways to find out what happens after death? The best way, of course, is to die. But what about before we die? One is by looking at what astral travelers report. These are living persons who break through the veil separating us from the world we enter at death and report back what they find. The German Jurgen Ziewe is one of these, to my mind the most trustworthy. As you might know, I’ve been asking him questions by email about what he has seen. Here is his latest.

Q: Are all humans on earth reincarnated?

A: Entering time and space moves us forward to accumulate experiences which widen as we identify with other forms of manifestation. So our history is determined by gathering information from a variety of lives. There are quite different humanoid civilizations, much more advanced as well as much less. These are open to us.

Q: If we have experienced many physical lives before it seems inefficient that we’ve had to learn the ABCs over and over all those times.

A: I’ve experienced many lives; some I’ve relived and re-experienced in here/now awareness while simultaneously observing them in detail from higher awareness. Every incarnation requires a new adjustment period and alignment. It’s only our human value system that considers it “inefficient”. That value system is neither here nor there from the greater consciousness context.

Q:  Is prayer directed toward our beloved ancestors a waste of time, or are they listening? If they are, can they be of any help? Or are they so engrossed in their new world that they lose interest in ours?

A: It’s funny how we are conditioned to believe that there is a temporal or spatial separation between the “dead” and the so-called “living”. There is no “afterlife”, there is only life. We will need to forget about this misconception of life and afterlife. In reality prayer is simply chatting with people who are in the same room as we are. It is pointless “directing” prayer to somebody as if they are far away. It’s a bit like talking to somebody sitting next to you on the sofa and pretending they are not there. It’s an offensive illusion to the person sitting next to you. With regard to people losing interest in you, it’s the same as it is here. We lose friends because we move on, are no longer on the same page, have different interests and so on. It’s no different than it is here. “Are they listening?” Can they help? Sure, what are friends for?

Q: Do the “deceased” welcome our prayers and other ways of remembering them, like bringing flowers to their gravesite? Do they miss us, are they sometimes nostalgic, even lonely?

A:  Again, do you welcome somebody who is kindly disposed towards you? Putting flowers on their grave is like handing a bunch of flowers over to somebody personally. How do you feel if somebody gives you flowers? You feel loved. Do they miss us? They only miss us if we are no longer interested in them. They may feel lonely if we have left them and are emotionally detached from them like we are here after a divorce. No difference.

Q: Earthbound and even demonic spirits are referred to in spirit literature. How much suffering do they bring to our world? In particular, are they the dark voices that schizophrenics hear in their head?

A: Schizophrenics can no longer control their state of mind and are therefore susceptible to all kinds of controls and influences, which negative entities love to take advantage of. Our material-based clinical approach is totally ignorant of what is actually taking place. Until we accept that reality, all we have is drugs.

Q: You speak of the astral and beyond as existing in another dimension. Many spirits speaking through mediums speak as if the astral world is close to ours—as if our planet is the nucleus of a system of worlds that grow less materially dense the farther out you go. Is there any truth to this?

A: Yes, the astral world is right here and now around us. As for higher dimensions, we can’t enter them because they are inaccessible to our physical toolsets. People use different metaphors to create a picture for our materialistic understanding. By “closest to earth” I mean closest to our habitual way of sensory life. It’s more related to states of minds than physical locality.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
All the best, Jürgen

***

I want to make it clear that Ziewe’s form of gathering information about the afterlife is only one of five reliable ways of going about this. The others are the near-death experience (NDE), instrumental transcommunication (ITC), reincarnational memories of little children (Stevenson’s work), and mediumistic communication. The most helpful and best overall is the last. All my books, and especially my fiction, are indebted to the comprehensive and fascinating data that our spirit friends bring us.
As you can tell, I have a high regard for Jurgen Ziewe. His experiences work for me as an important codicil to the huge volume of information from more standard sources. His work is comparable to a deft remake of a classic movie. It makes the classic better. But for my own purposes as a writer, I owe more to the original classic than the redo. This applies to all my work, including the book I’m writing now, a novel that explores the impact of dark spirits upon each other and upon us.

Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?  and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His latest novel, Guardians of the Afterworld is published by White Crow Books.
Stafford can be found at http://www.staffordbetty.com.

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Dear Stafford,

Apologies for the delay of this reply. Of course, I have no idea if there are particular individuals in any particular moment who are present in one’s life. I think one would have to be a sensitive or a medium to really have a particularized insight into such matters. The dead lead busy lives and, even for very close passed loved ones, most of the time they’re getting on with their own things, even if they might drop by one’s couch from time to time.

As for the question of acceptance, belief or – as you term it – an ‘act of faith’, I can only speak from my own experience, as I’m sure people come to conviction in various ways. In the case of investigation into survival, this can take a variety of paths, including active investigation of mediums and the like, as was undertaken by the early members of the SPR. In my own case, and I expect this has been very much the case for yourself as well, it was primarily an extensive review of the associated literature over the course of many years that bore gradual and then firm conviction.

Perhaps you know the passage from Colin Wilson’s ‘Afterlife’?:

“And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the ‘Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research’ (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further skepticism is a waste of time. Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume. It is easy to understand the irritation of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in ‘Life After Death’:
‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.’”

Read enough, ponder enough and unless one is psychologically disposed to rejection regarding the subject – which certainly happens – conviction will first dawn and then solidify, just as day follows night. There’s nothing particularly special or remarkable about it.

Of course, Jurgen has a major advantage insofar as he can claim first-hand experience through his extensive OBE explorations. At the same time, as precious and significant as this is, there is a very different and no doubt complementary kind of advantage in cross-correlative investigation of sources. Direct exploration, for all its potential richness, may have certain blind spots if carried out on an individual basis. I expect that Jurgen himself is sensitive to this, given his ongoing discussions with fellow OBE explorer Mike Marable, and his close study of the writings of other OBE explorers.

In this regard, let me mention one point of possible interest that I have been thinking about recently. I had mentioned my interest in my prior question to you regarding reincarnation vis-a-vis the repeatedly encountered discarnate teaching regarding the group soul. If one had experiences – whether in OBEs or perhaps through hypnotic regression – of other lives, one might naturally associate them with past lives of one’s own in some sort of conventional reincarnational framework, particularly if one had never been exposed to any teaching regarding the group soul. But in the context of this teaching, it is perfectly clear that what one might take to be an experience of a past life of one’s own might well in fact be an experience of the life of another soul of one’s group.  Without any knowledge of this teaching, one would have stumbled quite naturally into a false assumption of association that would in fact have been an error delivered by a particular blind spot of limited experience and perspective.

Best,

Paul

P.S. As you mention her, I really do need to spend some proper time with Cora Richmond!

Paul, the points you make are consistent with my understanding of Jurgen and others similarly gifted, like Cora Richmond. Thanks for the quotations from Mattson and White. Now if only less gifted people like me could more securely and confidently feel the presence of loved ones sitting on my couch! For me it takes an act of faith despite all the evidence pouring in. But I’m working on it. How about you?
Stafford

Dear Stafford,

Two additional points: First, I think it makes little sense to consider the topic of reincarnation without considering it in light of the group soul. I would be curious to know what Jurgen had to say, if anything, regarding the group soul generally. Second, your questions about prayer are a little bit strange, at least in a Western context, as, unless one is Confucian, Shinto, tribal African or something similar, one is unlikely to be praying to – or, more properly speaking, venerating – one’s ‘beloved ancestors’. Rather, one would pray to God, however one conceived that Divinity that shapes our ends. One might certainly pray to God on behalf of one’s beloved ancestors, but that is quite a different matter.  I would be curious to know what Jurgen thought about prayers directed to God – possibly on behalf of one’s beloved ancestors – but this might well be ‘above his pay grade’.

Best,

Paul

Dear Stafford,

With respect to the opening query of your blog post, “How close to us are the ‘dead’?”, let me share with you a couple of pertinent passages addressing that very question. As you can see, they were perfectly in accord with Jurgen’s statements here. The first is from the discarnate Lutheran theologian, A.D. Mattson, as received by his daughter Ruth Mattson Taylor in ‘Evidence from Beyond’:

“The world beyond is not ‘up there’ somewhere. It’s here, a change of condition. All the different frequencies of vibration are in one space. It’s rather like a big sponge that contains the different densities of water—soapy water, salt water, clear water. You can compare that to the different densities or vibrations I have here. I can be soapy water, and I can come down and see you. I can be salt water, and I can stop on the mind level. Or I can be clear water, and I can zoom through the mental plane, which is a plane of finer vibration than the astral plane, without any trouble at all.” (p.58)

The second is from Betty White, the discarnate wife of Stewart Edward White, as received by him in ‘The Unobstructed Universe’:

“A: What is your idea of where I am now, anyway?
Q: Why—I just think of you as suspended, somehow, in space.
A: I am right here. There is only one universe. There is no other ‘heaven.’ It is only that you can’t see me. Your eyes are not attuned to the color, your ears to the sound. I am in an unobstructed phase of the one and only universe, that is all. It is only that my I-Am is separated from the obstruction that was my body. My world is your world plus.
Q: Your world vibrates at a higher frequency than mine?
A: Yes, it does. Just think that it is only that you can’t see me; can’t hear me, unless the talent of someone like Joan [a medium] lets me express myself through it.
Q: I have thought of you as a higher octave. Are you always near us?
A: Where else would I be? Space is not what you think it is. …” (Ch.24)

With that said, the matter is somewhat more complex than captured either in Jurgen’s statement or the statements above, at least insofar as I presently understand matters. In some sense, one can consider the subtle, astral, or discarnate regions or domains as sharing the same space both with respect to physicality as well as with respect to one another, but being distinct by degree of vibration. This degree of vibration is not a matter of dimensionality, as with space, but can be considered in some rough sense as kind of additional dimension, just as physicists speak of time as being an additional dimension. In that sense, two individuals can be spatially co-located, yet separated by vibrational distinction, such that they make no contact. There is clearly spatial extension in our physical experience, and by all reports, both discarnate and OBE as well as others, in nonphysical experience as well.

A very clear example of the interplay of spatial displacement in combination with vibrational displacement comes from OBE accounts such as those of Jurgen’s. Particularly when one is very close in vibration to physicality, and in one’s familiar surroundings such as one’s house or one’s neighborhood, the OBE explorer can encounter both spatial displacement, as in moving from one room to another or moving down one’s street, as well as vibrational displacement, as with subtle changes to one’s familiar environment, such as a change to the wallpaper or the carpeting, which is not present in physicality. Similarly, Jurgen specifically mentions, as I recall from his books, visiting his mother’s house in Germany after his relocation to England, which clearly involved spatial displacement and very often vibrational displacement as well. He also mentions visiting an analogue of Hamburg in another vibrational level or layer, which was presumably spatially co-located with the physical Hamburg, but vibrationally displaced.

From these various considerations, it follows that a discarnate individual can be both physically and vibrationally displaced from a physically embodied individual – say, if you are living in physical London and your dead aunt Matilda is living it up discarnately in a vibrationally displaced analogue of Paris. This might suggest quite naturally a greater degree of separation, rather than the nearness implied in Jurgen’s replies and in the quotes above. But this isn’t the case and Jurgen provides the basic point as to why: “It’s more related to states of minds than physical locality.” I think what comes into play here is the general principle or law spoken of throughout the discarnate literature, that of affiliation. Two individuals who are in intimate accord, and thus in affiliation, have a link or bond that may overcome both spatial and vibrational displacement. Ultimately, what drives this is that our sense and experience of both spatiality and vibrational distinction are ultimately conditions of mind. Mind is primary; appearance, such as of spatial unfoldment or displacement, is an experience within mind. As is consistently reported in the discarnate literature, thought and affiliation may overcome both spatial and vibrational separation. This is a statement that requires a certain degree of hedging, as it does not apply to all cases and should not be taken as a fully general statement. Let me leave it there.

Best,

Paul

Stafford, thank you for the additional information on Jurgen’s book.  I read it a few years back and was very impressed by it.  You’ve prompted me to reread it.
Mike