Hans Wilhelm Interview

Summary: 

• Interview Overview: Rick Archer interviews Hans Wilhelm, a spiritual author and illustrator, on his show “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” 
• Hans Wilhelm’s Work: Wilhelm has published over 200 books, created 70+ YouTube videos on spiritual laws, and does not monetize his content. 
• Discussion Topics: They discuss various spiritual concepts such as karma, reincarnation, guardian angels, and spirit possession. 
• Philosophical Inquiry: The conversation delves into the validity of spiritual ideas found in many traditions and the personal experiential basis for spiritual knowledge. 

Full transcript: 

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. As of this fall, I will have been doing this for 10 years, and there are over 500 interviews online. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and you’ll find them organized there under the past interviews menu. This whole production is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and then there’s a page of other ways to donate if you’re not fond of PayPal. My guest today is Hans Wilhelm. Hans is the author and illustrator of over 200 books for all ages, including some created with Byron Katie. His books have sold over 40 million copies and are translated into 30 languages. That’s a lot. Hans has created over 70 short YouTube videos in which he explores the dynamics of universal spiritual laws. He says that his mission is to offer these videos to inspire viewers to question and explore spirituality and their own relationship to the universe. During these videos, Hans skillfully illustrates his points on a whiteboard as he speaks. This back-of-the-napkin approach has been so appealing that his YouTube channel has more than 110,000 subscribers. I’ll be linking from Hans’ BatGap page to his website, lifeexplained.com, and also to his YouTube channel and some of his books. Hans does not use his videos to sell books, nor does he ask for donations. He finances the videos out of his own earnings as an author and illustrator. Hans lives in Connecticut, not far from where I grew up, and just around the corner from where my band used to practice when I was 19 and 20 years old. So, welcome Hans.

Hans: Well, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you, Rick. This is a great honor, and I’m delighted to be here.

Rick: Good to have you. Today we’re going to be discussing topics such as karma and reincarnation and guardian angels and spirit possession and all sorts of things. And I think it’s worth asking in the beginning, well, firstly, as I listen to a lot of your videos, I find that I agree with you on just about everything. I share a similar philosophy. And there are some things that you say that I’m not so sure about, but I don’t rule them out, they’re just more hypothetical to me, but most of this stuff I’ve been feeling comfortable with for many, many years. One guy sent in a question which I think is somewhat relevant to this. His question was kind of snarky, but I reworded it. He was complaining that most of your ideas are originally found in Hindu teachings, and yet you provide no attribution for these sources. But I would say that most of these ideas are found in the perennial philosophies of many traditions, not just Hindu. But the bigger question is, do these traditions, or you and I for that matter, have any way of knowing these things for sure to be true? Or do they just sort of resonate with us, or make us feel comfortable or something? I’ve interviewed some people, even people who claim to have had a profound awakening, that reject a lot of the things that you and I are going to be talking about today as sort of religious mumbo-jumbo that just was devised to make people feel good, but there’s no way of proving it. So, how do you deal with that issue, that question?

Hans: I think there’s no way how anybody can prove God or the existence of God or even the spiritual life. If you don’t want to believe it, that’s fine. It is something which comes from my experience only through the application of the laws, of exercises which really made a change in my own life. So, it has come from a belief. It starts with a belief. I’m ready to believe whatever it is, and then apply that knowledge in my life. And when I see actual changes in my life, then my belief turns into a knowing. And that knowing is my own knowing. I cannot share that knowing with anybody. I cannot make you know what I know. You can only do this yourself. It’s the same with logic, for instance. We say one in one is two. But only once you add one and one is two, up in your own mind and you see the two things together, then it becomes logical and true to you. You have to make this process in yourself. And that’s why the spiritual path, as I know it, I have tried to live for much of my life like you have, and I found so much truth in it. And it has helped me in so many instances, and I began to see things differently. Just by the experience and by the positive results which I have in my own life over the years, I know that this is all true to me. But I have no possibility to make that known to anybody else, neither have I the desire. I have no desire to convince anybody. If what I share works for anybody, great. If it doesn’t work, that’s great too. I have no interest to convince anybody with anything that I share in my videos.

Rick: Well, that’s a good answer. And I think it’s kind of a scientific answer actually, because it’s based on experience. The way science works is you hypothesize something and then you test it to see whether it can be confirmed experientially. If it can, that doesn’t prove it, it just adds sort of gravity or weight to the truth of it. But scientists would never say that anything is absolutely true and could never be disproven, because, like you say, all crows are black. If somebody shows up with a white crow, then boom, that hypothesis has been disproven. But there are a lot of things we rely upon that have been scientifically established because they’ve been established so many times that we don’t see a lot of anomalies or violations of them.

Hans: It’s true, yeah. We often remind ourselves of something. We’re always thinking, every time we say the sun is rising and the sun is setting, we know intellectually it’s not true that Earth is turning, but we sort of see always the opposite and so on. So, we are constantly, continuously have to readjust our beliefs with reality.

Rick: Yeah, and when I mentioned the perennial philosophy, you know, a lot of different traditions, which had no way of communicating with each other, came up with the same stuff, you know, like reincarnation and various other points that we’ll be talking about today. So, perhaps, seers in all those different traditions had some deep cognitive insight into the way the universe works, into the way life works, and that’s why they came up with the same notions, unbeknownst to one another. And so, that brings up a point, which is that, we don’t just accept these things because we’ve read a lot of books about them, but there’s a sort of an experiential evidence that is accumulated over time, and another one of the scientific principles is repeatability. If somebody does an experiment, somebody else can do the experiment and see if he can repeat it, and if he can, that adds credibility to it.

Hans: It’s true, but still you have to walk the walk yourself. There’s just no way, nobody can do that for you. A lot of people collect this information, a lot of spiritual information, intellectually, more and more and more. They binge watch and so on, and they continuously take it intellectually and are not willing to really apply it. And that’s where the problem is, so they become very frustrated with it, and they’ve already become critical about it. But I think it’s a tremendous burden to accumulate spiritual knowledge without applying it. It really, karmically, I think, has an effect on our life. There’s a quote which I heard, and I really don’t know the exact words, but it says, “It is far more severe for a saint to step on an ant than for a caveman to kill a mammoth.” Because a saint should know what to do and not to do. So once we accumulate knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and don’t use it in our life, like doing the right and wrong things, we are creating karma even more severely because we know what is right and wrong and what we should do. While somebody who has never heard about it is rather ignorant, and his karma will be judged by himself in a different way.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of saying too. Another way of saying it is that the judge gets a more serious sentence than the common man who doesn’t understand the law if the judge breaks that same law.

Hans: Yes.

Rick: So how do you recommend that people do apply it? You say, we can study all this stuff, but if we don’t apply it, then that’s not good. How do we apply it?

Hans: Well, I don’t present anything new. The lessons that are given to us in the spiritual world, are in all cultures. It is basically the golden rule. Apply the golden rule seriously in our life, or I even would simplify it today a little bit more, I would say, love and nothing else. So we have the golden rule here in the West, we have the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount. So these are very clear directions for us to go, not to lie, not to cheat, not to hurt anybody, help those who are less fortunate. It is so simple. But if we don’t do that and only think of our ego and ego satisfaction and step on other people and et cetera, et cetera, and cheat and lie, et cetera, then we create a world as we have created now, which is really dimming. The light is dimming here with all the ecology dying and everything. That is the result of our ego because over the time we have created so much harm to the world and too much to ourselves as well. So we have not lived by the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, whatever it is. So I would say start with the most obvious ones, start with the Golden Rule. It’s not — what I find having studied for so long time, God is ingenious simplicity. It’s a very simple path to God. And the Golden Rule is very simple. It’s not simple to live, but it’s a very simple rule. Do unto others what you want to them or the other way around. Do not do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.

Rick: Yeah, some people give a nice interpretation to that, which is that, if your awareness is deep enough or enlightened enough, then when you look at others, you see yourself because you see the unity of everything. So then it comes naturally to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, just as you would not, punish your hand if it got dirty or something. You would just clean it because it’s part of you. If everything in the universe, everything in the world is seen as part of you, as you, essentially, then you’re going to tread very lightly and compassionately, not harm people or anything.

Hans: Precisely, and if the word, you, is too difficult for people to see and to accept, if they can maybe see divinity in everything, how they see God or whatever it is, but everything is divinity. It is down crystallized, a light ether, and so whatever we look, whatever we feel, whatever we see is basically, it’s in a way, divinity. So if we see divinity around us or everywhere where we look and see that part of us, it’s easy for you and me to sit here comfortably and talk that way, but in our day-to-day challenges, when we have to pay the bill, et cetera, or fight somebody in traffic, et cetera, we so quickly forget. The day-to-day life is really a challenge, and everybody, as you see in my video, the Earth Life, the School of Earth, we get everyday guts, we get our own little lessons where we have to really apply these vigorously, these simple laws of not hurting anybody and loving anybody and everything.

Rick: Yeah, well, we’re going to explore a lot of angles during this conversation, and personally I think that the whole philosophy of Sketch Out, if people could really take it to heart, it makes life a lot easier to live. You know, not understanding these things, life must seem very cruel and confusing. Yeah, unfair and accidental, you know, and just meaningless and all those kinds of words. But understanding these things and really understanding them deeply and experientially, to whatever extent we can, life flows completely differently.

Hans: That’s exactly the experience I had when I was in my early 20s and the first time I had an encounter with the teachings of Edgar Cayce. And Edgar Casey’s teaching, which includes the reincarnation, and suddenly everything was suddenly overnight clear to me. Every question I had about why is there bad people and good people and rich people, poor people, sick people, healthy people, suddenly, for the first time, I was exposed to the teaching of reincarnation. I suddenly could put everything basically together, and I just said continue it. And that’s why a lot of people, as you said earlier, some think I took it from the Hindu belief. No, it’s not Hindu. It’s Christian teaching, reincarnation. I must also, I can be very honest, I have never studied Hinduism or anything, but I must say that 30 to 40% of my emails come from India, of my listeners. And for some reason, I must be saying the same thing, which is in their ancient teachings. But it is the moment you understand reincarnation, everything does make sense, and everything in your life changes very drastically. And it is so sad that in our Western world, the Catholic, or the church as such, not only the Catholic or the churches, have suppressed the teachings which Christ taught, Christ taught reincarnation. And that was suppressed, and unfortunately, we have the result. I know a very selfish world where we only think this is the only lifetime I have, this is a life only, and I just do everything just to, so I get my share of the cake.

Rick: Yeah, it’s definitely not big picture thinking. And since you said earlier, you know, well, we can’t really prove any of these things to anybody, prove God, prove reincarnation, actually, to a certain extent, we can. The word “proof” is too strong, but we can provide evidence. For instance, there is a university in Virginia, I forget the name of it, do you know about that, where they have been doing studies on reincarnation. They have thousands of accounts of young children who remember details of past lives, which are confirmable. You know, they go to the kid who describes this, that, and the other thing, they go and check it out, and sure enough, that happened. There was no way the kid could have known that. Even the notion of God, I mean, if you study physics or if you study nature very deeply, you see an intelligence and an orderliness operant in all aspects of nature, which at least indicates that life is not accidental or random. There’s some kind of deep intelligence of some sort orchestrating things. So, it doesn’t prove God, but at least it certainly doesn’t prove the old guy in the sky with the beard God, but a more all-pervading, omnipresent organizing power of nature, something along those lines, it certainly indicates.

Hans: When you open yourself up to that possibility, you see it. Sometimes I always say to somebody, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” If we say, “I am willing to look into it, I am willing to consider the existence of God,” that moment you open yourself up. But many people say, “I don’t believe in God, I don’t see it,” or whatever it is. Then we close ourselves, but when we open ourselves up just with the word, “I am willing to do that,” then the thing can happen, and we can suddenly recognize and come into contact of teachings of people where suddenly we see the world very differently. So, it’s very much up to us how much we open ourselves to new perspectives instead of continuously protecting that which we already know or think we know.

Rick: Yeah, good point. Again, that’s the scientific attitude. I mean, a scientist can be an agnostic, but I don’t think he can really be an atheist and call himself a scientist because scientists, by definition, have to be open to evidence as it presents itself.

Hans: Yes, I would agree, yes.

Rick: Yeah, so let’s take some of these topics more deeply. Here’s a good one to start with. We’ll come back to reincarnation, but you have a video entitled, “Why Are We Here?” And part of the description of it is, “What is my purpose here on earth?” What do you have to say about that?

Hans: Well, I usually can draw it better than explain it, but I give it my try. That’s why I made the video. The video is because I like to see these things, and in my video I show that it is not, again, I just say to me again, I have no intention to convince anybody. It is my understanding from over 50 years study and experiencing and applying these laws that definitely we are or have been perfect spiritual beings at one time, a long, long time ago. And through what is generally called, and the Bible has called, “the fall,” we have left that pure spiritual heaven and have fallen down into lower spheres of existence right down to the bottom, what we call the material universe, in which we are right now. Our goal is to return back to the light, back home. This is the story, the famous story of the prodigal son, which Christ talked about. The father let us go. We wanted to explore physicality, et cetera, the pleasures of whatever it is, and we found out this is not all there is, and this is not really the best there is. So eventually, many of us have fallen so deep and are so lost and so sad and depressed that this is a moment when we return back home and say, “There must be more to life.” And suddenly, many people are then opened up to this, and we find this a lot in AA where people really have to hit rock bottom before they say, “This is enough,” and turn around so we go back to the light. And all the teachings, the spiritual teachings that I refer to and I study, confirm this, and they say this is the path. You have to really undo your what we call “karma,” which is all the negative thinking, thoughts, and actions of the past to become pure and clean again and come into a higher vibration because the whole universe works on like attracts like. So the highest vibration being love, and we are now at a very low one. To reach our self, we have to become the same high vibration again as love and to return this. This is our struggle. This is our goal, and every day we have been given challenges to purify ourselves, to let go of everything what we call ego, what we can call selfishness, and self-centeredness, and all these kind of things which have really isolated us, made us colder and harder and unhappier and sadder and more depressed. And we have to let that go and move back into the light, so to speak. That is really the reason why we are here, to undo our karma. And every day we are given many, many opportunities where we are reminded of things which we might have done in the past, which we now can rectify through repentance and forgiveness and asking for forgiveness.

Rick: What you said reminds me of that T.S. Eliot quote which I just looked up, which is, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Hans: Yes.

Rick: Remember that one?

Hans: Yes, I don’t know, but I don’t know whether I know it for the first time. I think we will be jubilated to see it again because we have known that home all the time in us, and we will be absolutely, we will be so excited to be back home again.

Rick: So, let me play a couple of devil’s advocate points on that. So, if we used to be in a very high state and we fell from that and we’re working our way back to it, when we get back to it, do we have more than we had before we left because of this whole journey we took?

Hans: We do have the experience. Yes, we do have the experience. And all these so-called spiritual beings who have stayed back in the Pure Heaven, who have not joined the Fall of Angels, are in a way quite amazed how much we have taken on ourselves because we became stronger in a way through this whole path. And when we return, we have the memories, but only the memories, no longer the attraction, which is very important. All the sensuality, all the pleasures, and everything about the worldly lifestyle we had will no longer attract us anymore, but the memory will be there. From this, we will be richer.

Rick: Okay. Now, some would say, well, actually, I can counteract this point myself. I was going to say, some would say, that if the universe has an evolutionary agenda or trajectory, (it’s always hard to say that word) then how does this cyclical thing serve that, where we’re in a high state, we lose it, and then we have to regain it. But if what you just said is true, that we come back to that state having been enriched by the whole travail that we went through, then that’s evolutionary.

Hans: It is evolutionary, but that was not our purpose. This detour which we have taken is not what was planned. The reason behind the detour was very different. It was really to undo creation. That was a Luciferian fall, a Lucifer fall, because he wanted to undo the whole pure creation. We were the ones who followed them, him or her, whatever you want to say, Lucifer, and came to undo the creation. That was the purpose why we do this whole thing. Now, realizing that this can’t be done, slowly, one after the other, the so-called fallen angels return back to the light, and when they return home to the open arms of the Father, we are back home again. So, this whole thing had nothing to do with evolution. It was actually the desire was to devolution. That was the original desire of why we left. So, the spiritual evolution of the universe continued all the time, was continuously, perpetually expanding and growing. The pure heavens were continuously creating new planets, new stars, and so on. That continues, but we made this little loop where there were a small group of people who just sort of left and just came back again.

Rick: Okay, a couple points. First of all, where did that whole understanding come from? Was that from esoteric Christianity or a particular philosopher or what?

Hans: I would say this is predominantly, in the Western world, it’s in the Christianity, which we know about the fall, the fall of the angels. I mean, that was in the Bible already, that mention, and we find this, let me think about, it’s predominantly in the Christian teachings, yes. We find it most clearly mentioned. Christ speaks about it in great detail, even with a new revelation. So, I would say, yes, it is a Christian teaching in a way, but I believe it applies to everyone. And Christ came not just only for so-called Christian. He came for everyone, and he gave us the energy so that we actually could return back to home. Because there was a time when our chakras, our general energy centers were slowing down so much because we devolved so much that eventually they would turn backwards. That means that our soul would devolve, and that moment was the Christ intervention when that was stopped. So, no soul can anymore devolve or go back into animal bodies or whatever, so everybody can move on. So, the deed, the redeemer deed of Christ was for all, not only the soul on earth, but in the four levels of the lower purification spheres.

Rick: Okay.

Hans: It’s very easy if I show you in drawings.

Rick: Well, I’ve seen some of the drawings, yeah. People can actually go, and all these points we’re talking about in this interview, people can go to your YouTube channel and see drawings about them.

Hans: It sounds so abstract when I speak about it, but when you see it, it becomes very clear to me.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Now, you know, these days astronomers estimate that there are maybe 10 trillion galaxies in our universe, and by some theories the universe is infinite and therefore there are an infinite number of galaxies. And each galaxy has maybe 300 billion stars, and with the, not the Hubble, what was it? I forget, one of the telescopes, they’re finding that most stars have planets around them, and probably a good percentage of those have planets that could support life. So, when we talk about a cosmology like you just sketched out, you know, are we talking about the entire universe, or are we talking about our planet, which is a teeny, tiny, little speck of dust by comparison with the whole universe?

Hans: Good point, yeah. No, it applies to everything, to all the entire universe, the material universe, which is a tiny universe. You’re talking about a trillion galaxies, it’s tiny compared to the real existence of the pure heavens. So, we are talking about a very small material universe, but there are also semi-material universes above it, and fully spiritual material universes above it. So, the giganticness of the cosmos is enormous, it’s beyond our comprehension. But most of these planets, etc., in all these spheres, or many of them, are inhabited by souls who are fallen through the fall of the angels. These are in the lowest purification spheres, and these are outside of the pure heaven. So, our universe seems to be gigantic, but it’s only from our human mind. In truth, a trillion galaxies means nothing compared to the enormity of all of creation.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, no matter how large something is, you can always add infinity to it, and all of a sudden it got a whole lot larger. And so, when you mention Christ coming to do this or that, most people think of Christ as this guy who came to Earth 2,000 years ago, but again, Earth is just a little speck of dust by comparison with the whole galaxy, and that is a speck of dust by comparison with the rest of the universe. So, does Christ have some kind of universal role, or is he a being that mainly concerns himself with our planet?

Hans: It is what I would call the love energy in the God energy. The God energy consists of mainly of seven aspects, which are order, will, wisdom, earnestness, patience, love, and mercy. And the love angle is the one from Christ, and this Christ energy, which I talk about, came through the being of Christ on planet Earth, but the energy which he gave to all souls, fallen souls, went through all the trillions of cosmoses, etc. Again, it’s an amount which is difficult for us to comprehend, but all the souls in the lower four spheres were touched by this, so that they could no longer degenerate.

Rick: So, you could say that the Christ energy is a universal thing, the way gravity is universal, or electromagnetism, and that various beings could come to various planets to channel that Christ energy for the benefit of the inhabitants of those planets.

Hans: I think the possibility is.

Rick: Jesus of Nazareth happened to come here, but there could be Zorg of such and such on that planet.

Hans: I only can speak about this one. Yeah, it’s possible. Anything is possible.

Rick: Okay, good. So, we’ve used the word “karma,” and I’ve had people come up to me and say, “There’s no such thing as karma. How could there be karma?” How do you explain, and I think everybody has a rough idea of what karma is supposed to be, but let’s talk about it a little bit and try to explain the mechanics of how it would work, or how it does work, if we accept that it does.

Hans: Well, karma, my definition of karma, is any unloving sensation, emotion, thoughts, words, and action in our body. Anything which is against our true nature, which is love. We are 100% love. Every time we acted against who we are, through our thinking, feeling, speaking, acting, we are creating a shadow. We can call it, if our soul is burdening itself with a shadow, we can call it karma. So, we’re creating something negative, which eventually we will have to face again to realize our mistakes. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know what we are doing. So, karma is just the loving lessons coming back to us. It is never a punishment. It is only a consequence of what we are doing, thinking, and saying. So, it is only a mirroring of what we have been doing to other people or to ourselves, and it just shows us to please don’t do this. Love yourself,love everyone,love everything. That is a message of karma. And whenever we do something negative, it is stored, this action, let’s say, in many ways. It is stored, of course, firstly in our soul, which is like a computer recording. Then it is in our body. Then it is also stored in the Akashic Records, which surround our planet Earth, where everything is recorded, all our actions and emotions, whatever happens here on Earth. And then it is stored also, most importantly, in the repository planets of the material and semi-material universe. And here, these planets of same vibration are uploading continuously, like the cloud program, all these so-called negative karma. And eventually, they have to unload it again, or through constellation. Then the karma comes, when they change a certain kind of constellation or situation, then the karma comes back to the sender. So, the karma is stored mainly in these planets. And right now, we are reaching here in planet Earth a time when a lot of these planets and stars are ready to upload a lot of stuff, because we are really getting a rather tough time for many people here on Earth. This is created by ourselves. Nobody did this to us. We created it ourselves. And if anybody wants to point on past presidents or governments, we must not forget, we have been here many, many times before. We personally have co-created the situation we are facing in the planet right now. So, this uploading may come down in many difficult times, but it is not punishment, again. It is for us to undo what we have created. We can either experience the karma, like if I rob you, I might get robbed again from someone else or from your future being, or we can also do the other, the most sensible thing. We can go and ask for forgiveness and forgive and repent our action and no longer do it. That is the real healing things. So, then the karma eliminates and this disappears and is gone.

Rick: I should add that the word karma comes from a Sanskrit word, it is a Sanskrit word and it basically means action. And so, it is not necessarily negative. There is also positive action and good karma generated through positive action. Just to sort of complete that point.

Hans: May I interrupt?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Hans: This is the point I respect. This is the one thing where I disagree, because there is no need for good karma. When you do something loving, this is your natural being, there is no karma. Love is love. And if I love, I don’t create karma. I’m just my natural being. The sun shines with the sunrise. It doesn’t create karma by shining. We are like a sun. We are sun, we are love. And when we love, we are just ourselves. We don’t create anything, any karma or anything. But if we are against our true nature, then, only then. So, I know a lot of people say there is good karma. But good karma is something which they often say is something good that comes back to us. But once we are loving, the world comes automatically lovingly back to us. It’s not that I’ve sent something loving out that comes back to me, but the love that I send out responds to other people’s love. So, automatically, I am in a much more loving atmosphere. By me being loving, it’s not good karma coming back. It’s just the other love from around me coming back to me. But negative karma is something which I have to face. So, I accept your viewpoint. It’s just that I share that particular viewpoint.

Rick: Well, some actions are more binding than others. And generally, actions that violate, we can say, natural law or violate the spiritual laws, they bind us more tightly. And other actions can be more liberating. And so, traditionally, it’s understood that everything has a ripple effect. We’re like transmitters and we’re transmitting various kinds of vibrations or influences, positive or negative. And they influence everything and the influence is reciprocal, it does come back. But usually, karma has a negative connotation because it refers to bad stuff that happens to us. But anyway, that’s the traditional understanding. I don’t need to argue for it. That’s just the way it’s generally understood. And it can’t be that we could do anything which wouldn’t have an effect because everything is interconnected. So, every flap of a butterfly wing, every blink of an eye has some kind of influence which interacts with everything. And the universe is infinitely correlated. Let’s shift the question a little bit. You mentioned the planets. I just wanted to say that the influence of planets on people couldn’t possibly be gravitation or the light that reflects off them because those forces are too weak. But I interviewed a guy named Prasannan who’s a Jyotishi, a Vedic astrologer. And in that interview, if people care to check it, there’s a really good explanation of mechanics of how the planets, as understood through Jyotish, could be so inextricably aligned with what happens to us in life. If anybody really wants to explore that. And maybe Hans, you’d like to elaborate on it yourself.

Hans: Yeah, I think this is where the original idea of astrology came. Astrology as such, it was, today I think nobody knows any more real good astrology. But I think the planets do have a very — we know the planets have an effect on us. We know it about the planets which we can see. Astrology speaks about it. I don’t know if many people can interpret it. But, yes, the planets have a tremendous influence. But the reason why they have an influence is karmic reasons. And not because they’re suddenly located in this house and that house, whatever, in the astrology chart. They are there for a purpose because we now have to learn that lesson. When we incarnate and we have a certain chart of our planets, et cetera, that is our sort of message. That is our task here. Maybe our task, what we have to do in our life. But as I said, I do not believe in today’s understanding of astrology. But originally, I’m sure that people, when they were more in tune with nature and with life, definitely could really read the planets much more than we can do today.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a whole explanation of Jyotish versus Western astrology and the mechanics of each and how they work. And we won’t really get into that here. But some people are actually pretty good at it, at least this fellow I mentioned that I interviewed. We’ve had our chart done by him a number of times and it’s quite accurate. In any case, let’s get back a little bit to the notion of reincarnation. Just one more, a question came in from someone named Leslie in Florida who wants to know, “Can one of your soul groups refuse to return and reincarnate with the group?” And so, that introduces the concept of soul groups, which we haven’t really talked about. Go ahead.

Hans: I’m not totally sure whether I understand her question.

Rick: Well, I guess she says, you know, there are soul groups. Sometimes people say, well, you know, these people are like my friends and my family and this and that. They’re all part of one group. I guess she’s saying, can an individual who’s part of the soul group say, “Heck no, I’m not going with you guys. “I’m staying here and refuse to reincarnate with the group”?

Hans: I think the answer is very simple. I think it depends on what kind of love level they are. If they’re on a low love level, on a lower level in the astral field, and of course, every egoistic or selfish thought has its own. Once they are higher, they will really think for everybody and not just for themselves. So, I think it depends on what kind of frequency the soul is. But I think this brings up a very important point. It is true. We incarnate usually in groups of souls with whom we have got some karma to undo or achieve something. It does not necessarily be only karma. So, our parents, our brothers and sisters, and even we plan who will be our children to come through us once we incarnate. So, yes, there’s a big planning going ahead before we incarnate, and that we do as a group. And this is where the trouble sometimes comes, which people forget. We, as human beings, can interfere with whether or not one of these souls can come here, and that interference is called abortion. And we kill that person’s opportunity to join those with whom he or she has made a contract to experience this life together.

Rick: I was going to ask you about abortion because, you know, you talk a lot about death and dying and birth and what happens to the soul before birth and all that. And I guess there’s a question of, and I think you talk about that in your video entitled “The Soul of a Baby,” and your commentary on that, your description is, “Who is the soul that enters the body of a baby at birth?” Which implies that the soul doesn’t enter until birth. And so I think abortion is very big in the news these days. The Supreme Court is going to be considering it soon. A lot of states are making it very difficult in the U.S. And I think a real key question is, well, when does the soul actually enter the body? And until the soul has entered, is abortion really that big a deal? Afterwards, it would seem to be much more, you know, egregious an action. What do you think?

Hans: Well, I think I gave part of the answer already. It’s not really important when the soul enters the body, which is right at birth, when the first breath takes place. The question is, how much damage or how much, yeah, how much harm do we do for a soul which has now spent eons and eons to prepare the special arrival and interact with souls which knows will be my future wife, my future children, and so on, et cetera. And suddenly somebody says, no, you can’t do it anymore. So that is, I think, the real dilemma we are having here. And I’m very careful to speak about abortion too much because I’m a man, and I don’t know what situation I would be if I find myself in an awful difficult situation. So I’m very hesitant on this one, but I just like to let people think about the situation that the soul which came or wants to come comes with a full, not only a full-on agenda, but also with a desire and wish to meet all the other people. And not only the other people, the other people also waiting for the soul to incarnate so that they can also clear up their own garbage from the past. So you’re not only affecting the soul, you’re also affecting everybody in the, as this lady called, “the soul group” before, who will now no longer be able to interact accordingly as originally planned. So it is a very, very complex thing, abortion. And the soul, it is true, it immediately connects with the embryo when the egg starts to develop, and it tries it out many, many times during the pregnancy to see whether it fits. It may change the genes so that it gets just right, but the real connection is at death.

Rick: At birth.

Hans: Sorry, at birth. But the other thing, so in a way, the scripture says abortion is in a way death, I would say, is killing in a way, but it’s not because of the soul’s connection. It is because one soul’s life has been really, really screwed up. It’s very different now when a baby is born, breathes, lives maybe for a week or two, and then dies. That is a very different story because that is usually something which the soul had planned, et cetera. That is usually part of a karmic response here between the parents and the child. But when we vigorously or when we purposely cut down the evolution and the whole life, planned life of a soul, then there will be consequences. But no consequence is so bad that it couldn’t be, in a way, be forgiven by God.

Rick: Yeah, so you make it sound like, you know, a soul can choose its parents and choose the life circumstances that it’s going to go into when it’s born to those parents, but it can’t foresee something like abortion because if it could, then abortion would be part of the plan. But you’re saying it could foresee dying at two weeks old or a month old or something through whatever means, disease or accident or something like that. So, why should it not be able to foresee the body being destroyed through abortion when it can foresee it being destroyed through some other circumstance after it has been born?

Hans: Because the abortion is based on the free will of the mother. It’s a free will. A child which dies after two weeks is something which nature takes over. This can be karmic. There is no human free will selfishness in this. Now, again, I say this when I speak about the free will of the mother. There are many reasons, incest and so on, where you just have to make this decision, whatever it may be. So, I don’t want to be judgmental in any form or way, but the decision is made by the mother, not by the baby or by the embryo. And that’s where the difference is. So, the embryo does not necessarily know. Maybe there are times when the baby knows it will be aborted, as the soul knows, but I doubt it. This is usually a decision by the mother or anybody around it, by the parents, let’s say. And the soul has nothing to do with it, really. But the death afterwards is something which has to do with other reasons. That is karmic.

Rick: It’s like I’m not — I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing with you. I’m just sort of trying to think this out.

Hans: I’m thinking it too as well all the time because it’s one of the most asked questions, and I have not made a video on that one on purpose because I struggle with it myself. It’s very, very difficult to be so — to explain it in such harsh terms. But it is a decision which so many people go through and have to go through. And it’s just, I think, the reasoning why in our government, in our country here, wants to stop abortion has nothing to do with this. This is done politically, and this is a sad thing. It’s not taking care of protecting life or whatever it is. It’s a political decision. And the mother’s child or the possible mother’s child, this decision is something very personal. It’s something very, very different. It’s a huge topic. I am not able to give a totally satisfying answer. Everybody has to work it out themselves. All I can say, think about the soul’s life, which was planned and it’s suddenly disrupted. But the decision is always yours. And this is why we have the free will. And I think it is important. I do not believe in banning abortion. I believe explaining through understanding. Let a person make the decision through understanding, not through ban. Because the moment you ban something, there’s a counter. And once you resist, you resist, and so on, you have got this constant. And then you have got all the illegal abortions, which kill more people than anything else. So I believe that explanation and giving information is much, much better. Once you know the harm you do by smoking and understand how you harm your lungs, I think it’s much easier to give up smoking.

Rick: Yeah, understanding helps. It’s just that to really understand what we’re talking about here, we have to go into a very deep, esoteric understanding of the nature of souls, the nature of reincarnation, the nature of planning our life before we enter into it. And that is so far outside the concept of most people who are debating this issue. It’s like a pipe dream that anybody’s going to be thinking about these things and trying to decide this, you know?

Hans: No, this is a sad thing. But people are waking up everywhere. Rick, this is what I find so amazing. They are waking up. A lot of young people are waking up and so on. And the hunger for this information is tremendous. But it’s not offered sufficiently because it’s often offered either through the institutions, which are already having their own agenda, or other people who are just sort of making a lot of money on some of the spiritual, like the New Age wealth people and so on. They all have got their own agenda there. So it’s very difficult for a young person to find some information which is relatively free of any other ulterior motive. Just offer it and make it up your own mind. And that exactly was what also I did not have when I grew up in Germany. There was no Google. There was no website. I wanted to know all these things, but I couldn’t. There was nobody, I couldn’t at the church or whatever. It’s my parents not and so on. So I struggled. And it is this struggling, particularly when you’re a young person and you see all this information and so much more trash comes from the Internet. That’s why I created to do the YouTube series because that is exactly where a lot of young people are. And that’s why I try to connect and say, look, and I’m not saying this is the right thing. What my many of my videos, as you have seen, end with a book. And they’re all different sources of books, all different in parts and so on, where I took the special teaching from. So if you really want to know more, please go to the book, go to read, study it yourself. Don’t take my word for it. So I’m giving some guidance for where they can find more information, anybody who is interested in it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s great. You know, it’s really nice to, I mean, I’m just reading a book by a guy who had this profound spiritual awakening one time on a beach. Everything was one, and he just felt divine, and it’s this marvelous thing. He had no idea what it was. He hadn’t any background in that sort of thing. And then, you know, gradually it slipped away, and eventually he ended up feeling totally miserable again and going through all these difficulties. And back at the time, there was no Internet, and there was no way for him to, he didn’t even have a clue that this might have been some spiritual awakening. He just wasn’t oriented that way. So these days, it’s so great that, you know, with the Internet, I mean, there are all kinds of weird things on the Internet. But at least it can be used for this purpose, to provide this kind of knowledge, which as you say, doesn’t have to be like the Gospel truth, you know, because Hans is saying it or Rick is saying it or somebody, it’s true. But it’s sort of, you know, food for thought. And people can use these things as springboards to dive in more deeply if it interests them. And it’s a great privilege that all this knowledge is being disseminated all over the world. It wasn’t possible 20 years ago.

Hans: Right, right, yeah. No, I’m very grateful, and I think the emails I get show that a lot of people are really suddenly, “Wow, I always thought that way, but I could not find anybody who says it that way.”

Rick: Yeah.

Hans: Of course, there are a lot of books out there, etc., but young people or even older people hardly read any books anymore.

Rick: Yeah. We have become visual people, yeah. Yeah, and there’s so much bombarding us in the world, you know, so much information, so many distractions and excitements. It’s like, you know, this is like that small voice calling in the wilderness. It might get overwhelmed by the din.

Hans: Yeah, but your guardian angel will guide you to the right source, whatever it may be, at the right time. And so, I think if we learn to trust being guided, we will find whatever we need to find, and everybody has to find, I guess, something different to make it in this life.

Rick: Let’s talk about guardian angels. I believe we have them. I have friends who actually say they see them routinely and can see them around other people. So, who are they? What are they? Why are they here? How can we communicate with them, if we should?

Hans: Well, these are our natural way of being is, of course, being a spiritual being or a soul, and it’s such in the spiritual world. But when we incarnate only here for an average of 800,000 hours, we are really exposed to a lot of danger, a lot of temptation, etc., and a lot of tasks we have agreed to prior our incarnation. And we are given a guardian spirit, mostly one, some people have two, to be with us. They are not 100% all the time with us because they also have to do their own lessons to learn, but they’re directly connected to us. So, if we are in the instant danger, like, for instance, an unexpected car crash or something, they are faster than light there and can intervene if that needs to be done, whatever it is. So, they are there and they guide us, and they speak to us continuously, not, of course, with voices, although some people may hear them, too. I don’t. But they do speak to us with our consciousness. They speak to us very much with our solar plexus. When we are doing something which we know this isn’t quite kosher, this isn’t quite right, etc., we have got this uneasy, queasy feeling. This is usually a message from our guardian spirit which says, “Be careful. Don’t do this.” Now, this may be exciting for some people. I especially want to do it because I have this rather funny feeling here. So, we do have communication there all the time with our guardian spirit, and our guardian spirit cannot communicate with us if we are in deep anger or upset or hateful thoughts. Then we are sending out negative vibration of such intensity that our guardian angel has to remove himself from us for a while until we have calmed down. So, whatever our thoughts and our actions are very important, and they have also to do with how close we can be with our guardian angel. The guardian angel is there basically to help us to fulfill the tasks, which we have set out to fulfill in this particular lifetime, in a way that it more or less we go on the course we had laid out. In my video, I show that I see our future life before we incarnate like a riverbed, sort of winding, and there are some rapids in it, there are some waterfalls, some go fast, some go slow. Our life is full of these little challenges, a little unevenness, etc., and we have to swim through this river until we reach our end in this lifetime. Our guardian angel makes sure that we keep our boat sort of halfway on track because the life outline that we have agreed to prior our birth is only, how shall I say, it’s not 100%, it’s a suggestion. This is how it more or less will be or should be, and here are the danger points. Here you have to be careful. You are meeting this person, and he will challenge you. Here, there’s a difference. Here, you come tempted. You should be careful. So, we agree to all this, and hopefully, we swim according to the guidance of our guardian angel, which is basically through our good conscience, if we want to say. So, with what we do, we do it from a good conscience and living by the Golden Rule.

Rick: So, here’s a few quick questions about guardian angels. I’ll ask three or four questions, and you can answer to them all. You said that there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between guardian angels and people. So, is it sort of like guardian angels might have a group of 20 that they’re responsible for, and they kind of run around and keep track of those 20? That’s one question. Another is, were guardian angels once human beings who have ascended to become angels, or are they going to become human beings later after they serve as guardian angels? And I guess I only have those two questions. What do you say about those?

Hans: So, the first one is, yes, the guardian angels, like every spiritual being, is taught by higher beings. So, the guardian spirits as such, in a group or not, are taught by teaching angels, which are usually coming from the pure heavens and teaching them, really. They have never incarnated on Earth, but they’re teaching them and keeping them on track. So, every soul has got teaching angels according to the levels of where they are. And the other one was, again, the second question?

Rick: Well, there was — okay, so that just —

Hans: Oh, yeah, yes. No, they do not incarnate as human beings. On the contrary, they may have been human beings and have slowly evolved back to at least the third or fourth level of purification when they then, out of love, because they have reached the level of opening love again, go back and want to be a guardian angel for somebody here on Earth to help them to go through their life. So, these are — this can be — not everybody has been incarnated here on Earth. They can be incarnated on other planets or even not incarnated at all. But they are not the ones going down to later become a human being. It’s somebody who already is higher than a human being.

Rick: Okay. And then there’s the thing about the numbers. I mean, are there as many guardian angels as there are people on Earth, or is it like a one to ten ratio, or what?

Hans: No. You can say everyone has at least one. Some have two guardian angels.

Rick: Then there must be billions of them.

Hans: Yeah. As I said, we mustn’t think — we think so limited with our Earth. As you said earlier, the example of tiny little Earth and trillions of galaxies and so on. This is where our mind is so limited. It is gigantic. Creation is so gigantic, we have no idea. And, therefore, we are really having all these helpers here around us. The whole universe is helping us. Everything what we experience is nothing else than a calling back coming home. Everything we see of medicine to help us to heal ourselves. So, every person we meet is there as an angel basically for us to bring us home. Every challenge we have is a challenge to bring us home, to bring us higher, into a higher vibration of love again.

Rick: Have you ever seen the movie “Ghost” with Patrick Swayze and Whoopie Goldberg?

Hans: 100% correct movie.

Rick: Yeah. Bruce Joel Rubin wrote the screenplay. He’s been on “Batgap.” But, in that movie, negative entities were portrayed as well as positive ones. There were these really bad guys that came and took the guy, the villain of the movie when he died. Would those be also doing their thing in the whole scheme?

Hans: Oh, definitely. That’s a problem. These are the really, really deeply fallen angels who really have gotten so enmeshed in the material temptations, world, and energy. So, they have lost their own energy. So, they have fallen down, and these are the so-called negative entities. Some call them demons or whatever it is, and they are there. That movie “Ghost” is 100% correct. And we are surrounded by these souls, and these souls are very, very dangerous, and they’re very tempting and very alluring. And they have no interest in us, but they want our energy. And they get our energy. Sometimes we call them possessive souls, but in many, many ways. The whole struggle we have here on Earth, even the wars, whatever it is, is nothing else but fighting for energy. Because we have lost our original energy, which is our divine energy, because we have removed ourselves so far away that our vibration is so low that now to survive, we have to now eat a lot of food and stuff like this, et cetera, to feed ourselves, to survive. And very low entities really feed on us, on our negative energy, what some call it the “loosh” energy, which is the energy which we have in wars, in destructions, in hatred, in fighting. This is a strong energy. I said earlier the guardian spirit can’t come close to us because the energy is so strong. It’s a negative energy, but this gives energy to the negative forces. So they will guide or misguide us into anything that can be of destructive and harmful way, but only so that they get energies and can survive and also do not get caught up in the wheel of reincarnation. This is basically the reason why they do this as well. They don’t want to reincarnate facing their stuff. And they can avoid it as long as they can pull energy here on Earth from other beings. It’s very complex, but in my video, I think I show this in greater detail on possessive souls and so on. So what I’m saying here may sound very abstract to many people, but once you see how simple it is and how prevalent these entities are around us continuously, and particularly when you’re speaking about possessive soul, I made a video on that one. At the end, I think I’ve got five medical doctors in this video who have written books, medical doctors, have written books about people who were possessed by negative entities and what to do about that. So we are not talking about some kind of spiritual, [airy] fairy stuff here. We are talking here things with medical supported evidence that these entities exist. These entities take over other people, and these entities can do tremendous harm.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve got a couple questions based on all that. One is that book I’m reading about the guy who had that marvelous experience on the beach. He also had throughout his life terrible eczema, skin condition, really bad. And at one point after he learned to meditate, his life started to change really profoundly, and at a certain point, he experienced this thing coming out of him, homunculus he used the word. But something that had been possessing him, and it was somehow expelled by the influence of his meditation, and then things started really improving for him. So I know this sounds kind of superstitious to some people, talking about being possessed by negative entities and so on. I’ve had experiences myself of things attacking me and also being released from me that make it very real to me over the course of my many years of practice. I think there is something to it, but to understand it necessitates understanding that there is a subtler realm that we don’t perceive with our earthly eyes, and there’s stuff going on in that realm, as you’ve been saying, and as you say in so many of your videos. If you can kind of grasp that concept, then this other stuff begins to make more sense.

Hans: Yeah, and actually if we could really see how busy, when we go to a city like this, and see the real human beings there and all the other spirits around it as well, we would be sort of shocked. People who have got the gift of seeing spirits would be shocked to see how much negativity, particularly in cities and so on, or bars or whatever it is. It’s enormous. It’s enormous. The quantities of negative entities which are here to nothing interested. I see them very similar like the mafia. They just use you as long as you can, and when they are not interested, they drop you like this, and then you are sort of finished or dead or sick or whatever it is. So that is a very severe, and as you say, most people are not aware of it or can’t even imagine it, but it is real. And there’s a lot of people playing with this field, and I’m one of the few people who say, “Be careful what you do when you do things like going to seances or [use] a planchette or even astral traveling and so on.” These are the areas where you can really get into and attract people, souls of such negativity that you have no power to conquer them. So I would stay away from all of this, and I would sort of as much as I can. And also anything which you feel are dark areas like bars or whatever it is, in a very, a lot of drunkenness or whatever happens, et cetera. And also even I would, I made a video of being careful even on graveyards. Now it sounds crazy, but graveyards are full of spirits. They are not always evil or negative or whatever. They are usually lost, they are usually caught up in the belief that they have to, they wait for Judgment Day. They are very brought up in this religious teaching, and they are sort of waiting there for Judgment Day forever after, and eventually they can cling on people as well. But anyway, that’s another story.

Rick: No, it’s interesting. Do you think that there’s, I mean, do you think that by the way people behave, they can make themselves more vulnerable to these things, or the opposite, that they can build up sort of an invincibility against the influences of these things? So like, for instance, if you take a lot of drugs or drink or whatever, you’re opening yourself, you’re making yourself vulnerable and susceptible to these negative influences. On the other hand, if you do the opposite of that kind of stuff and live a healthy life, then although these things may be around, they really can’t bother you because you have kind of a, there used to be a toothpaste ad where it was like an invisible protective shield that the bad stuff couldn’t get your teeth because that shield was there.

Hans: Sure, you said it. The thing is, the negative force can only do something to us if something similar is already in us. It has to be, everything works on the law of like attracts like. So the negative force can only harm the person who has got some similar weakness, desire, whatever, in it as well. So if you do not have any of that, and if you appear to be, they just, they cannot do anything to you. So you’re right. If you live a more positive life and a healthful life, less chance for anybody to do anything to you. But if we are having negative, extreme negative thoughts or angry or grumpy, all this kind of negative stuff can attract. Because we mustn’t forget, these souls, these negative souls can see our aura. We can’t. I can’t see your aura. Many people can see aura. I can’t see anybody’s aura. But they can see our aura. They immediately see what we are thinking and what we are feeling. And if they are going out on hunting and just, they immediately see somebody by what they are sending out, whether it’s something they could link into. So we are continuously sending out our, how we feel or what we sense of what, et cetera, through our aura. And these forces, these negative forces can see it and can then immediately latch onto us. So we have to be careful of how we think, feel, and act and speak. Because that all affects our aura. This all affects what we advertise to the spiritual world outside of us.

Rick: It would seem that if you are going to work in a place that has a lot of negativity in it, like a mental hospital or a prison, then you would have to have a lot of purity and strength yourself so as not to be infiltrated by those influences.

Hans: Yeah, it’s very challenging. Yeah, you better do. You better protect yourself. I mean, there’s always this exercise, put your light around yourself and things like this, but the best thing is it has to come from within. The outer light surely can help, but it has to come from within. You purify yourself as much as you can from within.

Rick: Yeah. When I hadn’t been meditating, I was meditating maybe a year or two, and my mother was in a mental hospital. I used to go and visit her, and I’d come in there feeling really good, and I’d feel like, you know, after about half an hour, I was really incoherent. Really incoherent, you know, because whatever degree of coherence I had established was just sort of broken down by all those influences.

Hans: You were a juicy morsel for them.

Rick: Yeah, really.

Hans: Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah. I believe that fully.

Rick: Yeah.

Hans: Wow.

Rick: Anyway, a couple of questions have come in. Let’s ask these, and I’m sure we’re not going to run out of things to talk about, but I’d like to get to these questions. There’s a couple that were sent in by someone named Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. One is (and this relates to things you’ve already said Hans), so you were saying that human beings are in fact the fallen angels who rebelled against God, and now life on earth is our opportunity or path to get back to our original nature? I guess he just wants you to clarify that point.

Hans: Yes, that’s exactly. If you see my video, why we are here, and et cetera, and yeah, purpose of life, yes, that is the whole purpose. That is a great opportunity. And let me explain why it is so important here, why planet earth is very, very unique. As I said earlier, everything is based in the universe on like attracts like. So wherever we are as a soul, according to our development, we are in the same, kind of surrounded by souls of same development in the spiritual world. So whatever we think, whatever we believe, the souls around us match that. So we are right between like-minded souls, which are just thinking and acting and feeling like we are. On planet earth, it’s one of the exceptions where souls from all different purification spheres can incarnate of different vibration. And this is very, very unique. So we on earth, we have an opportunity to interact with souls who are much higher evolved than we are or much lower evolved than we are. And they are thinking differently. They believe in this concept or that concept. Suddenly, we are really exposed to something we could never be exposed to in the spiritual world. And not only that, we also have here all the challenges which we have agreed to prior our birth to really clean up our karma. So this is a very, very unique life we have here. It’s only 800,000 hours on average, which is tiny, tiny, tiny. It is so small. It’s like for us going to the movie for two hours and come back and being lost in the movie and coming back. It’s a very, very short life. And in the short life, it is full of opportunities that we have to not have in the spiritual world. Furthermore, in the spiritual world, we have our soul body and we feel anything, everything right away. We have no buffer there. All our negativity, because also we explore karma there as well in the spiritual world. It’s not only on Earth. We feel immediately. Here on Earth, we have a buffer, our physical body. Our physical body can really buffer, can buffer all the pain. We can take drugs. We can go to medical doctors and so on. So whatever we experience, we can manage much, much better. So being born on planet Earth is a tremendous gift. It’s a very, very difficult task to live this life here, but it is a tremendous, tremendous gift. And souls try very, very hard to incarnate here on Earth. There is a tremendous rush to have this exclusive opportunity. It’s like when an Ivy League colleges, but there are not enough babies born to incarnate, let all these souls come in. But this is, as I said, a lot of people are tired of their life and I fully understand that. I think every human being, one time or another, goes through this period. But when we understand that this is an extraordinary privilege to be and experience this and gives this opportunity and also all the teachings which we can have here, it is incredible. See, when we are, for instance, just give an example. When we are in one certain kind of a religious group and are very intense believers here on Earth and we believe this is the right way, our whole vibration becomes this spirit, a religious group. Then this, our soul will also incarnate to similar religious believing souls in the spiritual world. There is no growth happening there. We are having the same stupid lessons learning that which we don’t have here on Earth. So here Earth is absolutely unique. So, this is one of the great, great opportunities and the School Earth is one of my favorite videos as well. We explain it that every day, every minute, from moment to minute, the planets are downloading our karma and our opportunity so that we’re continuously having challenges and tasks to do. It’s fabulous.

Rick: Of course, even here on Earth, people manage to isolate themselves and just hang out with the people who think the same as they do. In fact, not only in terms of religious things, but even political things. Certain people watch Fox News and certain people watch MSNBC and it sort of just reinforces your own way of thinking, you know?

Hans: Yes, yes. But, for the inquisitive mind, there is a lot to be found. We can see, we still see, but there are still things happening around us and we have this opportunity. This is still, even if we are always locked up in our own belief system, there is still so much around going on here that the spiritual world cannot give us on our path of purification.

Rick: Another question from Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Han’s knowledge is refreshing and has me looking at the Bible with very new eyes.” Would you say that the Bible has been manipulated by man? I ask this because I wonder now, which parts do we believe and how do we determine which parts are right?”

Hans: I think there is very little doubt that it has been manipulated tremendously. But, I would say, read the Bible for whatever purpose you want it, but take the essence. And the essence in the Bible is the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Anything else, you can read what you would like, people have changed it, whatever it is, but take these two things to your heart. And that is really the important thing, because if you are taking certain passages from the Bible, this, etc., and start arguing with other people about it because this God means this or God means this, it doesn’t get us much. Take the Ten Commandments and take the Sermon on the Mount and find your own God. God is not in some churches or in heaven, it’s only in us. And this is the key, we have to find the God in us. And the God in us will be the guiding light, the guiding energy in our life as we go on. And when we open ourselves up for that, we don’t need much of the Bible. But if the Bible gives you comfort, please read it. But do not believe that every word is on Christ. Because I have a very interesting thing. I was a while here with Quakers, together with the Quakers, and we were in a Bible study. And so, we took sentence by sentence on the Bible, and I had my German Bible there from Lutheran country, and it was something totally different there. I mean, it was – I mean, they’re the same Bible, and we couldn’t believe it. So, they have got two different versions, and all the Bibles have different versions anyway, King James or whatever it is. So, don’t stick to the word. Stick to the meaning, get the meaning of the words, but not to the word. The word kills, as the Bible says, probably.

Rick: Yeah, well, not only that, but nobody wrote anything down for a couple hundred years. So, who knows exactly what Jesus really said. I mean, some people argue that He didn’t even exist, but we won’t go there. But in any case, imagine nobody had written down anything that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had said, and now just through word of mouth, we’re supposed to write down what those guys actually said. I mean, how garbled could it be after a couple hundred years?

Hans: Yeah, yeah. But I like to say from my own experience of having written many, many spiritual books, there is one book which I may mention here, I may plug it. It’s not my book. That’s why I can’t do this. But it is one which I found – I am just reading it for the third time. It’s called “The Cosmic Teaching by Jesus of Nazareth to His Disciples and Those Who Could Grasp It.” It’s a very thick book. It is on my website under Recommended Books. You just click on it, you find it. That is a direct channeled material from Christ, as I understand it. And the lessons and the clarity of that book is just mind-boggling. Whenever I read something like this, so clear and so helpful that I just feel, why go back to the old texts which have been manipulated and manipulated? Because God speaks to us all the time, to us as well as to prophets and to people who have this inner word and speak all the time. He did not hide himself because he is a loving father. He doesn’t send his kids off eons ago and then come back whenever you want to. No, he continuously speaks. God never stops speaking to us, and he speaks to us directly in our heart.

Rick: Good. I think people who are listening, at least to the live interview, will have heard our dogs bark. You have a video in which you say it’s all about animals. Where do animals come from? Do animals have souls? What do you have to say about animals?

Hans: Well, again, the video shows it much better than I can quickly explain it. Animals, in a way, are sort of a progression from, let’s say, I show in my video how creation starts. It starts with an atom, with a divine atom, which then later becomes into the crystal and the field of crystals. And there we have got this group soul of crystal. And then it later goes through all the crystals and stone mineral kingdoms and then becomes a plant kingdom and goes through all the plant fields and then of all the different plants. And it is still a group soul. And then it becomes into the animals. So the souls also still as a group go then to all the animal kingdom. And once that has been achieved, they go to the nature spirit kingdom. The nature spirit kingdom are very interesting. They are the ones who take care of all the animals and the plants. These are like the gnomes, the elves, or whatever it is. We know the devic kingdom. And once this soul, by then the soul is already unique, a single soul, no longer a group soul. But when it has reached that level, it then incarnates as a child, as a spiritual being in the spiritual world, which means a perfect human, not human, a perfect spiritual being. And that is what these spiritual beings are the ones which populate the spiritual homes, our true home. And this is what we are in truth. All the time, this is all etheric of ether. This is all of light ether. They do not eat. They do not do consumption. They do not have organs like we have. But all these beings are actually created slowly and evolve from step to step. There is no such thing like the survival of the fittest like Darwin. It is evolving, slowly evolving up higher and higher. So we, and the spiritual beings, some of them like you and I and everybody else here, have incarnated here on earth. We are the form of the fallen ones. And we also got the animals. The animals joined us because human beings or spirits cannot live without animals. Animals can live without us, but we cannot live without them. Like the bees, if they would be there, not here on the earth, we would die, our human beings would die out within a few years, as Einstein said. So we need the animals, but the animals don’t need us. So the animals are basically earlier stages of ourselves. They are our little brothers and our little sisters, exactly like little brothers and sisters, who are a bit younger than us. They are the same kind of energy. They are on the way to become spiritual beings like you and me. So when we kill those, that’s not nice. You don’t kill your brother and sister. Therefore, it is much healthier to live a more vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, because the killing of an animal is really like killing your brother and sister. It’s just logical because it’s not making it up. Because we have gone through this whole phase. We have been everything, and the animals are on the way, and the animals look up to us. For them, we are these wonderful creations. We are God’s children. We are divine beings, so they look up to us, and what do we do? We kill them, we murder them, we experiment on them, and we do horrible things to them. So I like to just open up the possibility for us to look at animals differently, not as some kind of thing which nature provides for us, but as our little brothers and sisters.

Rick: So did you just say that animals don’t evolve directly from animal lives into human lives, but they sort of leapfrog the human and go into some higher spiritual realm, and then from there they may come back and incarnate as humans?

Hans: Exactly.

Rick: Okay, because some people say, “Well, okay, a cow becomes a human in its next life,” or something.

Hans: No, it still has to go to the nature spirit kingdom. It still has to become a higher being where the animal has got not a free will, and it slowly has to learn to have a free will, and this comes then through the nature being. When the nature being, out of love, helps the animal kingdom, and then later on the spiritual being. No, it’s not my understanding that a cow or whatever it is can become a spiritual being. Now, the soul sometimes can in the past until Christ came and stopped this whole evolution of soul, it could have incarnated in animals. That is possible. But it is not, I understand it’s no longer possible.

Rick: Okay. Incidentally, I just want to add that for your sake and for the sake of the listeners, that as I listen to all this stuff and think about all this stuff, I take, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, not just since this interview, I take everything with a grain of salt. But at the same time, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I take everything as a hypothesis, which is interesting to think about and talk about and investigate, and some hypotheses for me seem to carry a lot more credibility than others, but I wouldn’t absolutely deny anything you’re saying, nor would I absolutely say, “Yes, it’s got to be true.” It’s just the way I kind of go through life.

Hans: In the same way, I don’t try to convince anybody, neither you nor anybody else, but since you asked me the question, I tried to explain it.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so a discussion like this for me is fascinating and interesting and stimulating, and it’s a way of exploring ways of thinking that I might not have considered. It’s not like an opportunity to take on new beliefs and cling to them tightly. It’s more like, “Let’s talk about this. Let’s explore. Let’s think, and maybe we’ll come away understanding things more deeply, at least with more possibilities open to our way of seeing things.”

Hans: Same like you, as me as well. Over the years, we both have been on the spiritual path for what, 50 years or whatever, and it is a gradual thing. The first time I heard this about it, it took me a second. It takes time to accept it. I remember there was so much stuff in Edgar Cayce’s teaching. I was fighting, really, saying, “This can’t be true. This can’t be true. I no longer read this stuff.” And then a few months later, it says, “Wow. Yes, it’s true.” So, yes, of course, we have to be skeptical, and it’s good to be skeptical, but nothing is worse than accepting everything right away without questioning it. But the answer should always come from our heart, most likely, and not from our intellect. Does the heart say, “This makes sense,” or does my head say, “My intellect makes sense”? So, if our heart says, “This makes sense,” then there’s something to go for. I think, in the end, that is our only guidance we really can trust.

Rick: Yeah, you have a video, actually, called “Intelligence vs. Intellect,” and there’s an important difference between the two, you say. Is that what you were just alluding to?

Hans: That’s part of it, yeah. Yeah, the intellect really doesn’t – actually, the intellect is a good tool in many ways for survival, but it never goes to the source of the problems, and it only comes with patchworks and never gives us the real answer. The real answer is always love, and the intellect will not give us that answer.

Rick: Okay. Another title of yours that jumps out at me is “Ten Surprises When You Die.” I don’t know if you can remember all ten. What are some of the surprises?

Hans: Yeah.

Rick: And maybe they won’t be a surprise to somebody like you, who already thinks about these things, but maybe to the average person they are surprises.

Hans: Well, since you mentioned it, this is actually why I do this video. I don’t know if you’ve read my introduction.

Rick: Oh, that’s right, the story of your father. Tell us that story. Yeah, it’s a good one.

Hans: Very briefly, my father was dying, and his four children were around him. And he was a real soldier in the war, and he had seen a lot of death in his life, and he just knew there was nothing after death. This is over, but he didn’t mind dying, but it’s just, “I had my life. It’s over.” So when I was – we all took our own turn in the last days with him, and I was alone with him. I said, “Look, Dad, I know that you don’t believe there’s anything after life, but just in case you are on the other side and you just find yourself still alive, these are the 10 things or whatever it is which you may see and experience. So don’t be surprised, but I want to tell you that.” So I told him these things, and then he just smiled. He couldn’t speak anymore, and “let’s forget it”, and so on. And “Yeah, that’s your belief system.” Anyway, I totally forgot about it. I never even gave it any thought. And I was just – some six or seven years later, I was at a book signing of a medium, Roland Comtois, very well known, who was very young, and he was – everybody raved about him, and I wanted to meet this guy. I’ve seen a lot of people doing that. There was nothing special to me. I wasn’t really curious. I just wanted to meet his approach to it. And since it was in a very small area in a bookstore, I wanted to come early. I wanted to sit down, so I came a bit earlier. It was empty. I sat down, closed my eyes, meditation. Somebody taps me on the shoulder, and he says, “Excuse me, I am Roland Comtois. I saw you coming in. The moment you came in, your father came to me and said, ‘Go to this man and go in. This is my son. Thank him for what he has told me.’ It was the most valuable information he has given me because it really helped me to find my way on the other side.” And then a lot of other things. And he also said, “Would you please write books about this?” I see a lot of people now where I work coming in every so often, coming on the other side, and they are totally confused. They don’t know what’s happening, what’s hitting them, and so on. So they need to know about it. Anyway, that was the idea. I said, “I’m not going to write books, but I make some videos.” Anyway, so let’s just go on to these points which I remember. First of all, the biggest surprise is probably that you are still alive. A lot of people, not everyone, “Yeah, it’s no change. You are still alive.” Second, you have a body. You have a body like some people have it younger, but it’s very similar like you had before. It’s a spiritual body, but it is a body. And then you can also– but then you will also notice that your body is sending out light, or maybe you’re not noticing it right away, but you can’t hide anything in the spiritual world. You are who you are. If you really lived a very horrible life, you will be in rags or whatever it is, etc. You realize, “Oh, my God, this is what I did.” So your body or your soul garment gives away who you are in a way. Then your character is also not changing. If you are a nasty person now, chances are you are nasty on the other side too. And if you are whatever it is, people don’t change through death. The characteristics are what we believe in. None of this really changes. So whatever I take on programs in this lifetime, and I take it into the other lifetime, so the personality as such does not change. Neither do our desires and cravings. If I am an alcoholic, if I do drugs, sex, or whatever it is, this desire, this physical body desire, is still in me very strongly. It can also be so strong that I rush back to incarnate again for that reason. I also will find out that everything that I thought was so important in this earthly life, the achievements, success, etc., are of absolutely no consequence. They don’t mean anything. The only thing which means there, “Have I loved?” That’s the only thing with them, “Have I loved?” Then, of course, I will also realize that I might meet other light beings around me. We call them angels or our guardian angels who may guide us further. There may be even relatives who have died to greet us. There may be most likely our pets who greet us. I think the most important thing is we will also find out that there is no eternal damnation, there is no eternal hell, and there is no big final judgment day for everyone. These are just a few of these points which most people will be– or many people who do not believe in life after death will find very surprising. Now, every death is unique. What I just mentioned here is a very broad brushstroke. There are, of course, very horrific life forms, people who have lived very horrific lives who might be immediately pulled into very negative astral areas. So, there are a lot of other little possibilities which can happen. But for the majority of souls who step over on the other side, this is basically one of their first realizations. I’m sure you have heard that many times. Maybe you’d like to add some other stuff to it. Rick, I mean, there must be some.

Rick: That’s a pretty good summary. I’ve interviewed some people who regressed people hypnotically back to the between-life area. Michael Newton I haven’t interviewed, but he was one of the founders of this line of thinking. I’ve read his books. But there’s a great deal of agreement among these people and among all the people that they have hypnotically regressed as to what happens after we die and between lives. They’ve mapped out the territory quite clearly and systematically. But, I mean, if we want to put it in a nutshell, it’s just that you don’t die. Like you said, you do come back, and there’s a life review, and life is for learning, and we may have a rest period in between lives, and all kinds of things like that. But I think that maybe the bigger picture point that we’re making here is that if we think this way, then our vision, our perspective, is so completely different than if we think that we are just this body and our existence ends when this body dies. I mean, what a completely different orientation to life. It seems to me that it would dramatically and profoundly influence the way you function in this world, if you’re thinking one way or the other.

Hans: Yeah, that’s why I find it so sad that the churches don’t give answers on it, the Christian churches at least. I must be careful here. But they know very little, there’s very little written about after death etc, what happens. This is very nebulous. You can’t ask any priest, “Tell me what’s really happening.” because it’s not mentioned there, really. And forget even, about reincarnation. That has been suppressed totally. So, you’re right. So, therefore, our society has the, “You only live once” mentality, which means, “Give me all I can get.” This is unfortunately, the thing.

Rick: Yeah, Yogananda in “Autobiography of a Yogi” said that reincarnation was edited out of the Christian teaching at the Council of Nicaea because it was felt that it gave people too much latitude for their salvation. Like, “Oh, well, if we have lifetime after lifetime, I’ll just do whatever I want in this life because I’ll fix it next time.” But it actually had the opposite effect, telling people that this is the only life, as you said, made them greedy and cynical and short-sighted.

Hans: Yeah, I made a special video on this one, on why it was taken out. On Reincarnation Part Two, which really goes into these facts, which are facts and have nothing to do with spirituality, and why they were taken out, and the sad result from it.

Rick: Now, you mentioned this Roland guy that you had met, he was a medium, and earlier you had said that it can be very dangerous to function as a medium, or were you talking about a different kind of thing? Would you say that there are some people, there are some popular mediums on TV, there’s a lady on Long Island, she calls herself the Long Island medium, Teresa Caputo, and there’s a young fellow named, what’s his name, that young guy that you watch in California? Anyway… I; Tyler

Rick: Tyler Henry. And they seem very bright and very good at what they do, and it doesn’t seem to be hurting them in any way. I mean, would you sort of say if it’s done right, there’s a certain category of people who have learned how to do it in such a way that it’s not dangerous for them?

Hans: When I talking earlier, I didn’t mean this type of channeling, I was speaking more about seances, people who sit together in a room together to ask the spirits to come through.

Rick: Right.

Hans: That is very different, this is inviting the possibilities of negative spirits. When a person goes to a medium because a loved one has died and finds some connection and comfort and so on, this can be very helpful. I’m not saying that it’s really the most ideal way, but I was just interested in him because he just sort of..everybody raved about him, and I have no doubt about it, that souls, like in my father’s case, come and speak to us. But we must be very careful here. As I said earlier, these souls are not smarter only because they are dead. They cannot help us. Should I marry him or should I not marry him? They don’t know. They don’t, etc. So relying on our ancestors or anybody else here for guidance is not a way to go. You may find some comfort here, say, “Look, I love you, and can you forgive me?” or whatever takes place sometimes in these wonderful kinds of communications there is some healing taking place. But if people want to find them for curiosity or for guidance, that is definitely, I would say, no, because that’s where the danger is. But I cannot say don’t do it if you are a mother, your child has died, and you’re so confused and you want to go to somebody who has kind of says, “I can’t blame you doing that,” but don’t go there because, “Oh, my God, I wish I could ask my Aunt Mary again what she would think about whether or not I should marry this guy or whatever.” Yeah, that kind of thing. They are not smarter. They are definitely not smarter.

Rick: Yeah. Also, I remember the first time I met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was on a course with him, and somehow this topic came up. And he said, “If this mediumship involves anything where you are channeling or allowing some other entity to use your nervous system as a way of communicating to people on this level, it can be very dangerous because it breaks down your mind-body coordination by sort of putting you in the backseat, as it were, and them taking over.” He said, “Over time, it can have a very deleterious influence on you.”

Hans: Yeah, and the danger is that so many of these entities who speak to someone even in public give this wonderful spiritual information and so on, and we are at awe of what they are saying, but they are not necessarily highly evolved beings. They are just basically copying what they heard from other angels or whatever over there. The fact that somebody is used by a spirit being does not necessarily mean that the spirit being is a very highly evolved being. We have to be very, very careful and critical about it. I mean, you have read, I’m sure we all have read channeled material, and some of them are really questionable.

Rick: Yeah. A lot of it sounds like it wouldn’t pass a high school English test because it’s written in such a convoluted way.

Hans: That’s why go within. I always say go within. You have got every–everybody has everything within ourselves. Go into meditation, quiet, still, as Christ said. Go into your room. Go within yourself. God lives in you, not somewhere else, and when God lives in you or Christ lives in you, if you believe in him, then this communication takes place, and speak with him there, and everything will be given to you, whatever you need to know and whatever you have to interact. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people that say they’re to pray and so on, they wanted to know, they were so confused and so on, and for some reason they very quickly found my channel and find some others. I’m not saying mine are the ideal channel for everybody, but immediately help is given on the frequency the person can take. So my videos are on a frequency certain people can take. There are other videos and other stuff out there. So when we ask for help, the guidance will be right there, and the guardian spirit can guide us right to it.

Rick: Well, actually what you just said in the last minute or two led me right into the next thing I wanted to ask you, which is you have a video entitled “12 Things Higher Evolved Beings Have in Common.” You were saying that these entities that come through aren’t necessarily higher evolved beings, but you know, so what are the things that genuine higher evolved beings have in common? What characterizes them?

Hans: Rick, you’ve got me. I made this video years ago. I don’t know all the things.

Rick: Maybe you remember a few of them.

Hans: Yeah, yeah, no, of course. First of all, higher beings means we are no longer selfish. We are really aware that everybody else is connected with us, and the welfare of everyone else around me is as important as my welfare. So that is already cut out. That also means that we, a higher being, would never abuse the Earth or any animal or whatever it is. We would respect everything. Everything is living. The matter or material or the material kingdom is also living. Everything is living, and we respectfully deal with everything. We would never have a competition like we have here, sports or whatever it is, where somebody would win and 100 are losing and so on. This would be out of the way. And gosh, what else is there? We would know why we are here. We would know that our goal is to become higher and higher, more purified, more loving, to come to a higher frequency. That’s why at the moment I’m totally blank, but I think these are some of the good points.

Rick: I mean, as Jesus said, you should know them by their fruits, you know?

Hans: Exactly, exactly. And of course, they can see the auras of each other. So you cannot lie. You cannot cheat. So you’re totally yourself, totally honest. So all these things are there, and it’s a very different life than what we lead here on earth.

Rick: Yeah. What comes to mind is sometimes these days there are spiritual teachers, and everybody thinks they’re very highly evolved and enlightened and all that, and then it turns out they’re really doing horrible things. They’re sexually abusing their students or taking their students’ life savings or just misbehaving in various ways. And so it begs the question, how enlightened are these people? Are they really all that evolved? Maybe they’re good showmen. Maybe they’re possessed by some demonic entity which has some kind of powerful radiance but actually is a taker and not a giver, you know, that has some kind of negative agenda.

Hans: I think many of them started off honestly and pure, with a certain kind of purity.

Rick: Got corrupted.

Hans: But then became corrupt, and corruption, which you see everywhere, spiritually as well as in religion, comes through fame. And when you have people following you, putting you on a pedestal, and then suddenly you have got the Bill Clinton phenomenom where you think you can get away with anything, you know? And so that I think the temptation because people are giving you their energy. When you are standing in front of an audience, and they like you, and they love you like pop stars, you’re getting all the energy from your audience, and you are high, you as a singer, as a musician know that, you get totally high on stage. That is the energy which you get from the audience. And a lot of them afterwards go to the empty hotel room and collapse because the energy is gone, so they go to drugs or whatever it is. So the energy comes, and the spiritual leader or a religious leader has the same thing. It dresses up nicely, etc., and he gets all the attention from his devoted flock, and that energy builds him up, and they start believing, “I am better than the rest,” etc. Vanity, vanity, vanity. And that’s also part of the reason why I at the moment don’t do any personal experiences because the danger of having given talks all over the country and the world as an author, and having always this loving audience and so on, it is a very tempting thing. You can really fall for that. And I don’t want to mix this with my spiritual stuff. So the videos are fine. At the moment, every day I have 15,000 people watching my videos. This is more than I can fill at a stadium on my own if I work on it. So this is better, and I can stay as I am and who I am, and I can sort of run in shorts around, and we don’t have to dress up. So it’s a great opportunity.

Rick: Yeah. Pride goeth before a fall, there’s that saying.

Hans: Oh, definitely. And you see it everywhere. You see it everywhere.

Rick: It’s something I deal with a lot because I interview so many people, and then out of all these hundreds and hundreds of people, some of them become bad apples or were bad apples to begin with, and I didn’t realize it, and so then we have to decide what to do. So anyway, it’s an issue.

Hans: Yeah.

Rick: So we have a little bit of time left. There are a few other things that are interesting, I think. And of course, from your side, if I’m forgetting to bring some topic up that you feel like talking about, just launch into it, and we’ll talk about it. But one is that you have this thing about the horrors of organ transplants, and I listened to that carefully, and I thought about it, and you say in the description of that that for a soul, an organ transplant can be a terrifying experience. We must make sure that our loved ones know our wishes with regard to organ transplants so they don’t have to make the decision for us. And usually these days, if you get a driver’s license, you can check off a box whether you want to do it or not, and I suppose it would depend upon other things we’ve been talking about in this interview. Like if you think your body is going to die and it doesn’t matter whether it gets sliced and diced the moment you die, then maybe you’ll be upset if you die and realize you’re still attached to your body and they start cutting it up. If you sort of have more spiritual perspective and are liberated from the notion that you are your body and you realize you’re much more than that, and you’ll go on into another body, then maybe you won’t care and maybe you’ll be happy to extend somebody else’s life. Let me just say one more thing and I’ll let you go with it. There’s a story of a young girl–well, firstly, there was this girl in the news recently who was just a real sweet girl, and she needed a heart. She was going to die. She was a big fan of the singer Drake, and Drake came to her hospital room and she was so delighted. It was a really sweet, heart-rending story. She eventually got her heart transplant and then she’s really doing well and she’s dancing and happy. You see that and you think, “Whoa, heart transplants are great for this little girl and for many like her.” There was another story where a little girl got a heart transplant and she started having these horrific nightmares of being attacked and killed and everything. The nightmares were so vivid and so specific that she was actually able to provide details to the police of the person who had murdered the child whose heart she now had, and it actually led to the conviction of the murderer. So that’s interesting. But, of course, she had to suffer these nightmares. This is like the abortion issue. There’s so many pros and cons and thoughts we could have about it. But let’s hear what you have to say.

Hans: Well, first of all, I think our strong desire to extend our lives here is only because we don’t understand why we are here. When our term is over, even as a child, I know it’s horrible to lose a child. I don’t deny that emotion. But there’s a purpose why a child only has to live maybe six years or seven years. Any extreme extension like a transplant is not in the sense of the soul. Of the child, maybe it sure wants to live and be, but not the soul. The soul says it’s ready to go. The other thing is the death process is not just like this. You jump out of the body instantly and you are gone. It sometimes can take long. It takes two or three days sometimes until the soul has totally separated itself from the body. We have in the Christian traditional religious belief three days’ wake, for instance, in some countries and so on, where the people are having a wake because the soul can still linger on with the body, particularly a soul which doesn’t know what life is after death. It can be even up to a week sometimes. And the important thing, which I think I show in my video, is life for thousands of years was when the heart stopped beating. When the heart stopped beating, the person was dead. Then the soul really left the body in a way. But this is not the case. They do not allow the heart to stop. They now decided it is the brain. When the brain no longer has a signal, then they call it clinical death. It’s the death which is decided only recently. And so they keep the heart. The heart is still going. The body is still working. So now if they are allowed to make a transplant, they cut open the body with a beating heart because the heart has to beat. Otherwise, the organs are useless. So that does not mean that the soul has left the body because the heart is still beating. And the fact that the soul is on zero doesn’t mean it hasn’t left the body. Maybe you’ve heard about Eben- what is his name?

Rick: Eben Alexander, yeah. He was comatose. His brain was flat-lined. He was still alive. They thought he was never going to come back, but he came back.

Hans: Typical example. So this is an example. So they normally would have cut him open and take all his organs. But he was still connected to that body. Otherwise, he couldn’t have returned. The silver cord was still intact fully. And when that happens, the soul feels all the pain of the cutting, of the opening of the body and taking out of the organs. And because some of the souls are so attached, they cling to the organs like a heart which gets transferred now to a new body and stay with that soul of the patient who now gets a new heart and sometimes take over it. There are a lot of reports. You have just mentioned that the recipient of the donor part takes over different personalities, has memories they’ve never had before, has habits which they’ve never had before, et cetera, et cetera. And on my video, I mentioned I think some books at the end which sort of make that point as it has laid out. So I really, really feel strongly that organ transplants, if you want to do that, fine. I’m not saying do whatever you like, but please be aware of it, that you might still be alive. You might be still attached to your own body. You see them cutting, opening your beating heart because you’re not dead and taking the thing out. Do you want to go through it? And also understand that when the time for a person has come to end, like they need a new liver, they need a new heart or whatever it is, that is a normal way of life. That is leaving graduation day for that person. The school of earth has come to an end. It’s a normal way. And making excessive extension through organ transplant is not what we had originally signed up for.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I’m sure there are people who could debate you on that, but we won’t go into it too much more.

Hans: Sure.

Rick: I mean, there might be instances where the heart has stopped because you actually got in some accident and you’re dead and they harvest your organs quickly enough, but then you’re saying there’s still this three-day period.

Hans: They can’t. Sorry, they cannot take bodies from where the heart has stopped. It’s not possible. That organ doesn’t work. The heart has to keep going. That’s what people don’t know. The heart has to be still beating for the transplant.

Rick: I didn’t realize that. Maybe if it was fresh enough and quick enough, they could still get them out and they’d work. I don’t know. I have a friend who is a very spiritual guy. He’s been meditating since the ’60s. He was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s personal secretary for a couple of years. He was within a day or two of dying because his liver was a mess because he had hepatitis C from his wild days in the ’60s. And he got a liver transplant, and he’s doing pretty well. He’s happy, and he helped set up an interview with Eckhart Tolle and all kinds of things. So I don’t know. This is one of those things where I have a hard time making hard and fast rules in that there are exceptions to every generality, but I respect your thinking on it.

Hans: The question is, the question you can only answer the question for yourself. Are you willing to let somebody take your organs out of your body? Yes and no. That’s the decision you don’t have to answer. But that is the only decision you have to make. Am I doing it right? And this is all you ask for. Anyway.

Rick: My feeling would be, I mean, if I were somebody like Eben Alexander and I was actually going to come back, then yeah, I wouldn’t want them harvesting my organs. If there was no chance I was going to come back and I was really dying, then I would think, yeah, take them. I’ll get a new body and maybe — I mean, even little things like corneas, you can sort of have transplants that can give sight to a person or some little minor thing like that, which is not so minor if you’ve been blind. It would be like a way of serving or giving something that you no longer needed or could use and it could help other people. But as you say, you know —

Hans: This is your choice and yes, you make that choice. And if your choice is done out of love, which obviously it is, I’m sure it is a very — that is basically the underlying energy of everything. If you do it out of love, it can be very different.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, I’m no saint, but my life is kind of about giving — making as much of a contribution as possible, you know, being as much of service as I can be in this life. And maybe that would be a final act of service. Okay, so what do we got here that we haven’t talked about? We’ve talked about a lot. One is — well, here’s one. And we have a little bit more time, I think. We don’t have to stick to two hours exactly. We can even go over a little. A lot of the things we’ve talked about have implications for other videos you’ve made. For instance, everything we’ve said about death and dying has implications for mourning and grieving. You know, like there’s a verse from the Gita that comes to mind, “You grieve for those for whom there should be no grief, yet speak as do the wise. Wise men grieve neither for the dead nor for the living.” And the implication is that nobody dies. And yet people really get bent out of shape when somebody dies because they feel like they have ceased to exist. And we’ve pretty much covered that that doesn’t happen. But anything you want to say about mourning and grieving?

Hans: Well, I think mostly that they mourn about themselves, not about the other person.

Rick: That’s true. They’re going to miss the person.

Hans: Because if they’re really logical, if the other person doesn’t exist anymore, then the other person wouldn’t experience any negativity.

Rick: That’s true.

Hans: If it doesn’t exist. So we only mourn ourselves, and it is absolutely natural to mourn. We should take that very, very careful that we must mourn a certain process. Like somebody amputates my arm, I will miss it. It takes time until I really accept the fact that I suddenly have no arm anymore. And a loving person in our life suddenly not being there anymore is a major adjustment. So mourning, but we must understand we mourn for ourselves and not for the other person who has left. And that is fine. And what I found so interesting, and that’s why I made the book, “I Will Always Love You” a long time ago, which is a children’s book, but it is basically the teaching of Dr. Kübler-Ross, who very clearly said anybody who does excessively mourn is somebody who thinks they haven’t verbalized “I love you” whilst the person was still alive. I think that is very important, that we do say “I love you” verbally to everybody around us and in our mind to everybody we see and interact, like the old ho’oponopono. I love you. I thank you. Forgive me if you see. I’m sure you had some ho’oponopono people on your internet.

Rick: It’s come up, but we never dedicated a whole interview to it.

Hans: But it is basically true love. And it’s basically so important, the message is here, to say “I love you” in this lifetime. And it’s just a funny story there. When I grew up in Germany, of course, we do not say “I love you” to our parents or anything. We understand it, but the word “love” is just not used. It just doesn’t. In America, I love ice cream, I love sunshine, I love everything, I love you, it’s okay. It’s easy. So I realized when I made this book, and I said, “Oh, my God, I’ve never said that to my parents.” So at that time, we didn’t have internet. We had letters. So I wrote a letter, a long letter, and somewhere I squeezed it with many thinking, “I love you.” I said it to them. So I felt I could have said it to them. So I sent the letter off. Two or three weeks later, I got the letter back and said, “Thank you very much. Very interesting letter, but we were not quite sure what you were after.” So anyway, but I’ve said it, it’s all that matters, you see?

Rick: That’s funny.

Hans: So it is important for us to say that, yeah, definitely.

Rick: Well, while we’re on the topic of love, let’s close by talking a little bit about relationships. There’s a couple of your videos. One is entitled “Four Secrets of Relationships,” and your comment is, “I wish I had known these incredible secrets earlier in my life.” And another is “Five Facts About Soulmates.” So what would you like to say about relationships and soulmates?

Hans: Well, I don’t remember that video too much anymore, and it’s a fallout. You put me on the spot here. But the main thing is often that we are feeling attracted to another person because we feel he or she has something that I don’t have. That is basically why we fall in love, because we like his strengths, his energy, and he likes the sex or whatever it is, et cetera. So many relationships are nothing based on trading. I give you a little bit of what I have. I can cook well. I’ve got sex. I get your security, whatever it is, et cetera. So there is this wonderful exchange, and everybody thinks they’re in seventh heaven because it’s wonderful. They fit wonderfully together. That’s why they have a trophy wife, et cetera, a nasty-looking person, a trophy wife, but he is very rich and very powerful, et cetera. So it works perfectly. A lot of relationships are based on this and not necessarily on love, because sooner or later comes a time when one of the two partners no longer wants to give what they used to give. They may change their mind. They may change their views or whatever it is, and then we fall out of the magnolia tree. Then, of course, it’s the end of the world, et cetera. It’s no longer get this, and then we are getting angry, et cetera. So it never was a love relationship. It was a trading relationship. So the idea is why are we attracted to these opposites is so that we develop in ourselves the very qualities we admire in the other person. We have to become independent, strong, and whatever it is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So then we are strong, and then we are a true partner for our partner, because we then both are strong in our own way because we are complete. But as long as we are infatuated by what in the other person’s quality, whatever they may be, characteristics, financial or whatever it is, position, and we don’t develop ourselves, we are totally dependent there, and this will usually crash. It has to come to an end, that relationship, sooner or later. So we have to develop whatever we admire in the other person. The other three at the moment escaped me, and the other thing is soulmate. Soulmate is an interesting point. It’s my understanding. It’s very different than what most people say. They long for their soulmates here on Earth because this is what a lot of videos, a lot of New Age gurus tell them, and so on. Look for your soulmate. There are things, shelves of books, how to find your soulmate. And my understanding of soulmate is very different. It says the soulmate is truly your partner in the spiritual world. They are male and female, totally together for eternity in love, and they are just totally close. The soulmate does not normally incarnate at the same time when you are here, because again, you must learn on this planet earth all the tasks on your own. You have to become strong. The soulmate would make it just too easy. It’s just like you’re going to college and you get your mommy as well as your dog as well into college, all your comfort and your blanket and your food, everything to college. You wouldn’t grow if mommy would be around you all the time. So you have to be on your own for a while in the college year, so really to become strong. So the soulmate is not somebody we find here on earth for most of us. There is an exception. One of the exceptions is that if I decide with another spirit being, my soulmate, to do some major spiritual work here on earth, like something, either Mother Tereza work or whatever it is, in a way where I help other people, where my purpose is not to undo my karma, but my purpose is to serve to the people, to the souls. That is the only exception that I can think of why it is. Now, that does not mean we can’t have fantastic love relationships with other souls here, and that is absolutely normal, and this is how it should be, but they are not our soulmates. They are not our partners in the spiritual world, but we can deeply in love, and that is absolutely perfect to be wild and crazy in love with anybody we meet here, and the same person can in another lifetime have been your brother and your sister, whatever it is. We play the partner role here in this lifetime, so it just changes, but looking for your soulmate so that you are saved in your hard life here on earth, and it would be so nice to have a comfortable person to cuddle up with and experience this life. Forget it. This is not what you are here. You have got 800,000 hours. Most of it you probably have spent already. Now, live it up and become the strong person you are. Become the powerful, loving person right on your own with all the help given to you, but not by your soulmate.

Rick: Good. Well, that’s probably a nice, emphatic point to end on. So, as people listening and watching this can tell, Hans has made like 76 different or 70 different videos, and we’ve sort of touched upon a whole bunch of them here, not even half of them, and each time we’ve touched on one. I calculated because I downloaded all your stuff and converted it to audio, but it would take about 14 hours to listen to it all. That includes several other interviews you’ve done. So we’ve just touched upon a lot of things and people can take this as a sort of a tickler or a teaser, and if they find this interesting and they would like to actually see you go more deeply, “Like 12 Things Higher Evolved Beings Have In Common” you can only remember two or three. If you want to know the others, watch that video. And you’ll see not only him say this stuff, but illustrate it on a whiteboard as he goes along and it’s very entertaining and that’s why his website is so popular– over 110,000 subscribers and many, many viewers. So this has been an introduction to the work of Hans Wilhelm. And let me just hold up your books here. I didn’t do that in the beginning. So this is the one you referred to, “I’ll Always Love You,” inspired by the work of Dr. Kubler-Ross, and it was actually based upon your experience with your dog, I guess, when you were younger. Here’s a couple you wrote with Byron Katie, “The Four Questions for Henny Penny and Anybody with Stressful Thoughts,” and you’re the illustrator, obviously. And then, “Tiger, Tiger, Is It True?” Another one written with Byron Katie, “Four Questions to Make You Smile Again.” Good little books. They’re kind of written for children, but adults could even, well, if you know some children, buy them, read them, and then give them to the children. You’ll both benefit.

Hans: Thank you so much, Rick. It was such a pleasure to be with you, and I’m very honored that you thought of me and gave me the opportunity to share the little I have discovered with such a large audience like yours.

Rick: Oh, it’s been great. I want to apologize to the people who tuned in for the live thing, and then I had a computer problem and I lost you all. So we only had about five, six people on here instead of the usual 150 or 200. So I’m sorry that happened, but you’ll get to see the whole interview, you know, when it goes up permanently in a week or so. Actually, it’s up now if you’re hearing me say this. So anyway, sorry about that if you were looking forward to the live one. And you mentioned you get emails a lot from people. Can people actually contact you to ask questions or tell you things or whatever?

Hans: Yeah, but only on email. I mean, some of my videos I do allow comments, and people make comments there, but I do not respond to them. There are too many. I can’t deal with that. Because this is the sideline. I am a children’s book author. I’ve got many contracts to do children’s books. This I only do as a sideline. So this is not my main job, and I do this, so I have to be careful. But if they send me an email, and under each video there is my email address. So you can just write me an email, and I do answer then what I can, and yes, I can do that.

Rick: Okay, great. So that’s clear enough. So thank you for doing this with me. It’s really been fun.

Hans: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: And it’s been fun preparing for it, too. Every week I, you know, spend the whole week kind of listening and reading and thinking about the person. And I kind of get to know them before I even talk about them, talk to them, you know?

Hans: It’s amazing how much work you have to put into all these interviews, I mean, to prepare yourself always for it. I mean, sure, you enjoy it, too, but it’s a lot of work, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah, but it doesn’t seem like work, you know, because I love doing it. It’s like, you know, if you love playing baseball and you’re a professional baseball player, then it’s not work. So this is fun. All right, so thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we will see you for the next one. If you go to batgap.com, not only will you be able to look into all the previous interviews, as I mentioned at the beginning, but there’s a few other things you might want to check out. There’s an audio podcast, you can subscribe to that. There’s an email notification thing if you’d like to be notified each time a new interview goes up, and a few other things. Check out the menus. Also, if you’re watching this on YouTube, if you feel like it, subscribe to the channel because it helps to have a lot of subscribers. And if you’re listening to this on iTunes or Stitcher, one of those things, if you leave a positive review, it makes the whole thing more prominent on those platforms. So do that if you feel like it, that’s a good way of supporting the show. So again, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. Bye.