Jurgen Ziewe Interview

Summary

Jurgen Ziewe describes how intense meditation first brought fear and psychological turmoil, then led to experiences of radiant clarity, love, and peace. He also recounts decades of out-of-body experiences and a later shift in which personal identification fell away and beingness became his natural ground.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can intense meditation produce difficult or destabilizing experiences, and how can they be understood?
• What can a spontaneous awakening or nondual realization feel like?
• Why might fear arise when spiritual practice approaches the loss of personal identity?
• What is the relationship between out-of-body experiences, meditation, and spiritual development?

Key takeaways

• Pushing meditation without preparation can amplify fear, aggression, and unresolved inner material.
• Awakening may feel like disembodied clarity, ecstasy, love, and profound peace.
• Fear can arise when practice approaches the dissolution of personal identity.
• Out-of-body experiences became a long-term form of inner training and exploration.
• Awakening felt less like gaining something than remembering an identity always present.
• Freedom from identification can become a natural, ongoing state rather than a passing experience.

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. We’ve been doing this for about six years now—a little more—and there are hundreds of them archived. If you go to BATGAP.com, you’ll find them all categorized in various ways under the Past Interviews menu.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So thanks to those who’ve been supporting it, and if you feel like making a contribution, there’s a PayPal button on the site. It’s made freely available to anybody who wants to watch it. There’s no obligation or anything in order to watch it.

🧘 Early meditation and a difficult breakthrough

So my guest today is Jurgen Ziewe. Jurgen lives in the UK, originally from Germany, and he’s a fascinating fellow. You began meditating, Jurgen, in 1969, right?

Jurgen: Yeah.

Rick: Was it TM, or some other form of meditation?

Jurgen: I started with TM.

Rick: I had a feeling you did, because everybody was learning TM in those days.

Jurgen: Yes. That’s what was available at the time.

Rick: And you mentioned that in 1973, you did a six-month course of some sort that was also offered in the TM movement. Was that within the TM movement, as well?

Jurgen: No. No, that wasn’t a course. That was just me being totally dedicated to locking myself in my room and not getting out until I had had a long sort of session of meditation behind me.

Rick: Ah.

Jurgen: I was very keen to reach the apex.

Rick: Yeah. Hopefully that went well for you. That can be a little dangerous for people sometimes if they’re not prepared for that.

Jurgen: It went wrong, actually.

Rick: Yeah. You mentioned in your bio that there were some negative side effects.

Jurgen: Yes. I mean, the thing was, until then I’d read a lot of books, and I read about enlightenment. I had no idea what it was all about. I expected—I didn’t even know what to expect—but I thought I needed to know. I needed to have the experience everybody was writing about in these books I read and talking about. I thought that was a very desirable goal.

So I started meditating on the light, on mantras, on the TM mantra, on all sorts of things. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, and I meditated until about nine. Then I went to college. Sometimes I came back in the evening and meditated. I did this for about six months, but in the meantime, I noticed I became really aggressive and frustrated. I had bad experiences, and I thought it had the absolute opposite effect of what I was hoping for.

Rick: Yeah. Do you understand now why that was happening?

Jurgen: Yes. I think I actually did get into some quite dark areas. One of the signs was—and I didn’t really talk much about it in the past—that I was painting at the time, because I was an art student. I was trying to deal with my inner demons and my fears and all sorts of things, and I started doing a painting of some demons. I literally did a representational painting of demons, and I became very fascinated.

The more fascinated I became, the more I was drawn into this sort of dark art, and my meditation went in that sort of direction because the anxieties also came out. Then one night, I sat down to meditate, and I found that the painting I’d finished had fallen off the easel. An ashtray—at the time I was still smoking—was catapulted right across the room, with all the cigarette ends scattered across the floor.

I suddenly experienced an incredible chill. You have to bear in mind, I didn’t believe in anything supernatural at that time. To me, anything supernatural was just a superstition. But when I came into the room, there were no windows open. It was very chilly, the painting was on the floor, and the ashtray was at the opposite end of the room, about four meters from where I’d left it.

Then I experienced this fear, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was quite scared, so I found a book by Krishnamurti on the bookshelf. I opened it randomly, and there was a chapter on fear. As I read that, I suddenly had a sense of clarity, and after that I decided the whole thing was bonkers. I would rather be where I was before I started meditating and just not have anything to do with it.

So I was quite happy with the decision because that meant I could go back to my old hedonistic student days, with parties and doing the things I really enjoyed. I turned my back completely on the whole idea of enlightenment and meditation, and so on. That went on for some time, and I was getting more into the stride of being myself.

A spontaneous experience of clarity

But then something happened, and that was a crucial thing. Outside my student flat, where I lived, there was a market on Wednesdays. I always went to the same place, where they had beautiful, ripe, fresh rye bread, which I bought, and some very strong Tilsiter cheese. On Wednesdays, I would have a really nice breakfast.

So I cut a big chunk of my fresh bread, layered on a big, half-inch slice of cheese, brewed a very strong cup of coffee, and then started munching into this breakfast. Suddenly, as I was holding my fat sandwich, I lost my relationship with my sandwich. I couldn’t figure out who was actually holding it. Then, as I was looking at my hands, I suddenly thought, “Who do these hands belong to?”

I lost all connection with my body and the reality I was in. Then suddenly, the most extraordinary thing happened: I lost any sense of identity. I didn’t know who I was. Instead, the whole room turned into a blinding light, and I was totally disembodied.

That is the essence of what I am.

I entered into this space—the only way I can describe it is clarity. Everything became clear and sharp, but to such an extent that I was just not able to find anything I could compare it with. It was absolute clarity. It was really absolute; there was nothing further I could go. This incredible light filled everything, and I suddenly realized, “That is the essence of what I am.”

There was nothing before and nothing behind. That’s just it. It’s almost impossible to describe. I couldn’t find any attributes that I could give to it. The only attribute I could find was neutrality. There was no bias, neither for nor against. It had no attributes whatsoever. It was just absolutely clear. And that wasn’t the only thing.

The moment I entered into this space, I was overcome by waves of ecstasy, and they were almost painful. It was as if layers of false ideas, or anything other than this clear light, were being stripped off me in very quick succession. The more the light was stripped, the more ecstasy I felt, until I was totally consumed by it.

I remained in this space for—I can’t remember how long, but quite some time. Then I was overcome by incredible waves of love, and I felt that was the moment when I was returning to some sort of sense of normality.

The interesting thing was that when this happened, it was a bright summer day. It was quite bright, but when my senses returned, it felt as if I was returning into the middle of the night. It felt so dark.

Then, as soon as I got my heap of flesh together again, I was overcome with incredible emotion. I went into a crying session for no reason other than that my body was trying to deal with what had happened. Gradually, I became normal, but not quite, because I was in a state of peace.

I cannot even express what it was. It was just complete stillness; there was nothing moving. I got out of my room, and it was as if I had arrived on this planet for the first time. Everything was new. Everything felt as if I’d never seen it before. It was as if I’d been on this earth for the first time, as if I had descended into an alien world.

It was incredibly peaceful and beautiful. There was a radiation coming from everything I saw, which gave me a sense of belonging.

So this went on for some time. I didn’t know what to say to anybody. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I just quietly walked around with this sense and tried to get my head around art school. I went to art school, listened to the lectures, and went home again. I was just not able to participate.

Fortunately, in a way, this gradually faded, and I came back to normal. But then, some months later, I started having these spontaneous out-of-body experiences. The first one was something I wasn’t prepared for at all.

This happened just before I got married. I was lying in my bed, still on my own in my student accommodation. After we got married, we moved to another town, and then I had my first out-of-body experience. It was a total dislocation from the place where I was. I went to sleep—or I was asleep—and suddenly I was wide awake in front of my parents’ house.

There was no doubt about it: I felt I was physically there. The only difference was that I had 360-degree vision, so I could see all around me. The other curious thing was that I didn’t have a body. The body sort of reluctantly appeared when I wanted to have one, so I materialized.

As soon as my first panic thought came—”What is happening here? What’s going on? How do I get back?”—I was quite sure I shouldn’t have been there. That pulled me back into my body, and I woke up. I woke my wife and told her what had happened, and she just said, “Go back to sleep.”

So that was the beginning of it all. Then I became curious. There was no literature. I went to the library, trying to find out whether I’d had a brain seizure or some physical problem. Eventually, I came across a section on parapsychology. I wasn’t really interested in the subject at all, but there was a mention of a kind of doppelgänger phenomenon, and I thought maybe that was it.

Then somebody gave me a book by Castaneda called A Separate Reality, in which he described in great detail what I had experienced. To me, that was the clue to start becoming seriously interested in it.

Then we moved to England, and as soon as we’d moved and I came into a new environment, I started having spontaneous out-of-body experiences from then on. They happened almost weekly at first, and quite often. Some were very short, but as I started taking an interest in them and reading books about them, I was able to control them more. So that was the start of the journey, if you like.

Rick: Yeah, great. Would these out-of-body experiences happen while you were doing things like driving your car or walking down the street, or were they more likely to happen when you were in a meditative kind of state?

Jurgen: They happened usually when I was in a meditative state. My meditation completely changed after I had this experience. I didn’t do any TM or anything like that. It was just a kind of devotional practice, where I focused on a sense of gratitude, if you like, which was more heart-related.

Rick: Gratitude to whom?

Jurgen: Gratitude to what I had experienced, in a way. This experience was sitting with me from day one. It happened, and it never went away. It was as if somebody put up a lighthouse in my life, and it was always there. I knew it was there. I knew that was a beacon.

Later, when I totally lost my way, in a way, because I was bringing up a family and having a career, I was more focused on very materialistic things. I still had the knowledge of this otherness, though. The best way I can describe it is that it never left me.

The word I found for it was—I refer to it as a silent companion. An aspect of beingness that was with me all the time, and which I could rely on in lots of ways. It didn’t have a… It was like a presence. The best way I can describe it is that somebody was walking around with me all the time.

Rick: But you eventually discovered that it wasn’t someone other than you; it was your own inner silence that you were sensing?

Jurgen: Yes, yeah. That didn’t happen until much later. That actually happened in 2013, when I went on a meditation retreat.

Until then, I always referred to this as my silent companion. The silent companion did actually make appearances in deep states of meditation. In one particular instance, it entered the spontaneous state of samadhi, where this presence was accompanying me in this state. It was shortly after I came out of the hospital in 2011. It was a very powerful experience, which is also documented in my latest book.

Then, in 2013, I went into a solitary retreat in the Scottish mountains, in a little mountain hut by myself. I was deliberately meditating and keeping a record of the meditations.

After four or five days, I had this… The best way to describe it is like a recall experience. I don’t even know whether it’s an awakening experience. It was a recall experience, where I felt what I really was. I had forgotten, you know. All my life, I had sort of forgotten that I was that thing.

That was the moment the silent companion merged with me, where I felt that this otherness, or this entity, which was very, very closely related to me, was actually who I was. It was nothing more than a recall. This made me feel that this is what everybody actually has at the root of their being. It made me feel that I wasn’t anything special. I was just in a state where I could remember my authentic self.

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: Everything before then was just a smokescreen.

Rick: Sometimes in the traditional literature, enlightenment or awakening is referred to as a sort of remembrance or recall kind of thing. At the very end of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna says to Lord Krishna, “I have regained my memory,” essentially of who I am. So there’s precedent for this sort of thing.

Jurgen: Yeah, this is how it felt, you know. I didn’t have the same experience I had the first time. I have to say, all of these experiences—these states of samadhi or deep meditation—are completely different. Each experience is different, I found. I think the types of experiences you can have are infinite.

This one was quite different. It was preceded by a meditation the previous day, where I was faced with an abyss of reality. I sank into a state of depersonalization, similar to the one I had the first time. But this time, I fell into an abyss of reality, which became increasingly real—more real and more real.

I felt increasingly threatened by this reality. I felt that if I went too far, I could only be God, and I was afraid. I was afraid of this enormity I was about to become—faceless, faithless? All my life, I’ve wanted it. But now I was at the threshold, I was incredibly scared of it.

I thought, “If I go a step further, I will lose everything.” It was too terrifying, and it put everything into question. So that was a meditation I had in the morning, and I felt I just needed to go a step further. The only way I could do that was to allow this incredible, fearsome entity, which could only have been God, to obliterate me completely. Then there would be nothing left of me, and that was terrifying.

So I almost prayed to get my ego back. I went back and tried to reassemble my identification. I took my camera out and took photographs. I tried to fix some sort of arbitrary identity that I could deal with and control, which was the darkness of myself. Suddenly, that felt like the desirable thing—to be and to enter into again. I didn’t feel I was ready for this thing.

At the same time, of course, I felt like a great coward, because I’d been meditating for 40 years. When it came to the crunch, I didn’t have the guts, or whatever was needed, to take the step into the abyss. Before, I had often been told, or shown, that you really need courage and fearlessness. If you want to walk this path, you have to lose fear.

I felt I had lost all my fear. I lost my fear when I was diagnosed with cancer. I realized I wasn’t afraid, because, in fact, I was elated in a perverse sort of way. The fact that I wasn’t afraid anymore of something which was quite serious made me feel as if I had conquered fear. I wasn’t afraid of death or dying, and so on. Then that went away.

I came out of the hospital and had another very incredible experience, which I wrote about in Vistas of Infinity. It was my silent companion calling me into this meditation.

But this time, when I was in Scotland and went back into the abyss, I had this fear, and the fear controlled me. The next day, I spent the rest of the day basically regretting that I had failed, after spending all my life aiming, in a way, for this to happen—wanting this to happen.

The next day, I started meditating. In the end, I wrote a book about it, because I kept a journal for the whole week. I journaled everything I’d been through. The book was called The Ten-Minute Moment, because that was what it was all about.

The next day, I started off very gently. It was a very beautiful day. I felt an incredible love. It was almost as if, during the night, something had been stripped away from me, and I was free. I felt really free, and I felt good. The meditations went really well.

Then I sat in front of my hut and looked at the landscape. I felt this incredible peace and stillness, and it was beautiful—an incredible contentment. Suddenly, I noticed what I thought was the sun falling on the grass. It lit the grass up, and I thought, “How beautiful. What a beautiful light this is.”

Suddenly, I realized that the light was cascading and lying like mist all over the landscape outside my hut. Then I noticed that it wasn’t sunlight; I could see everything burning from within. I could see it as energy. This spread out and came toward me. As I looked down at myself, I noticed my body was made out of light.

Then this trivial thought came into my head, which made me think, “Oh, I must be enlightened.”

Then I had this incredible experience, which I referred to earlier. It was so powerful that I couldn’t even bring myself to find words for it. I had the experience of infinite pain as well as infinite pleasure, and the two things were just combined into one.

I noticed by looking at my watch that the experience lasted only about 10 minutes, but it was totally overwhelming.

After that, I felt that the sense of separation had totally disappeared. There was no way I could get it back. When I wrote the book, which was nine months later, and published it, I noticed that was still the case. I couldn’t imagine how I could get this alienation back. It just wasn’t happening.

The sense of separation had totally disappeared. There was no way I could get it back.

To the extent that I can’t even remember who I was yesterday, there is no persona I can assemble around this awareness that I could claim to be me. So this has disappeared now. It’s three years later, and what I’m finding is that it is a very, very natural state of being. I’m very convinced—very, very convinced—that this is what we all really are, and everybody is that.

For some unknown reason, we are not having the recall. We are not having the memory that connects us to our true identity.

Rick: When you say this has disappeared now, what has disappeared?

Jurgen: This sort of sense that I am something other than a person, or an identification with something personal. I’m an illustrator, for example, a commercial illustrator. All these identifications that I thought I was, which build up the persona we think we are, are irrelevant. They don’t have any meaning; they don’t carry any weight anymore.

If people were to refer to me and say to me, “Are you a really bad illustrator?” or something, I wouldn’t know how to identify with that. That’s basically what’s happening. It’s more a matter of seeing the bigger picture. Living in a beingness is the only way I can describe it. It’s always there.

Rick: So would it be fair to say that, for all those years—and we’ll talk about the intervening years later in this interview—when you had all those experiences, out-of-body things, lucid dreaming, and all that stuff, there was still very much an identification, the sense of “I” having these experiences?

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: Whereas this thing you just talked about, the identification dropped off. In fact, the day before that, it was like, “I am afraid. I don’t want to let go of who I am or what I am. God is too much; he’ll gobble me up.” But then, once you had relaxed into that transition the next day, the sense of “I” dropped off. Identification or definitions of yourself as anything other than being or presence dropped off and simply haven’t returned over the past several years.

Jurgen: Yes, that’s the state now. That’s what I find is actually the norm, the ground state of human beingness. I arrived at the point where I can safely say, “I’m human.”

Rick: This whole thing that you just described, even though you described it in the past tense—”This happened to me this day, and then the next day this happened”—is an ongoing thing. It’s not really past tense. It’s just your natural state of living now.

Jurgen: Yes, yes, that’s it. I have to say, the whole episode in between, with my out-of-body experiences, was actually quite relevant, I find, in my training. I didn’t discover how relevant it was until I wrote the book.

One of my daughters asked me, when I had several diaries filled up, what they were. I said, “They’re my out-of-body experiences.” She said, “I’d quite like to read them. Why don’t you type it all out?” So I thought, “Yeah, that might be good.”

That was the first time I started reading them again. As I started typing them, I realized that, over the years, there had been an inner programming going on—an inner teaching. I literally had a teacher who appeared during my out-of-body experiences and was training me, because I didn’t belong to any sort of yoga school or anything like that.

This teacher was a Chinese master. He appeared in my out-of-body experiences, and he trained me. For six months, he sort of groomed me…

🧘 Using astral experiences for meditation

Rick: Let’s set the stage a little bit, because we haven’t really talked about your out-of-body experiences, but you’re now alluding to them. After that first one you had during sleep, when you were in front of your mother’s house, you then went on to have decades’ worth of out-of-body experiences—hundreds and hundreds of hours if you add them all up.

There were all kinds of amazing, clear experiences of all sorts of dimensions and realms, after-death realms, and all kinds of things that are going on—even hell realms. This went on for years and years and years and years.

So, I’ve interviewed a couple of people who have had, or who have talked about, out-of-body experiences, but even though everybody knows the term and it’s commonly understood, for some reason it hasn’t been too common on this show. Perhaps because people who are interested in out-of-body experiences aren’t really interested in enlightenment as their main priority or goal. They just want to have interesting experiences. Do you think that might be true?

Jurgen: Yes, I don’t know. I belong to a Facebook group called Astral Travelers, and the regular people there, I find, are very spiritual people.

Rick: I’m sure they are, but how is it—you think of astral travel as, “Okay, my body’s going to stay here and my subtle body is going to go there.” But how does that relate to self-realization, which is not a matter of separating the subtle body from the gross body, but really a matter of discovering something much more fundamental than either, and living from that foundation?

Jurgen: The main strength I found in it is the fact that it is a very profound realization that you are not the physical body.

Rick: So it really drives that home.

Jurgen: Yes. That is one experience most of the people who call themselves out-of-body experiencers share. They have all had the fundamental experience that they no longer see themselves as identified with this physical body. I think that’s a very, very vital step on the path, and that can be very good.

Rick: But do they go on to identify with the subtle body?

Jurgen: Yes. That’s when I started having experiences of higher dimensions. It’s a bit like Theosophy, where they divide the realms of consciousness into the astral, the mental, and the spiritual regions. Of course, these can be experienced.

What I did was, when I had out-of-body experiences, I started using them for meditation. So instead of meditating in my chair, I was sitting in my astral body, in my astral chair, and I was meditating. This is a very, very powerful experience because it’s a bit like launching a rocket from space, where it doesn’t have to overcome gravity.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Jurgen: So it doesn’t burn any fuel. Basically, thoughts become instant reality. My first discovery was that if I used the mantra Om during these meditation sessions in my out-of-body state, it would immediately catapult me into higher states of consciousness.

This is one thing that I explained to the group, and people have confirmed that when they do astral travel and use Om meditation, they immediately get into a higher, elevated state of consciousness. This suggestion has caught on and spread a little bit, and many astral travelers now use it.

You have to bear in mind that an out-of-body experience can become really boring once you get used to it, in a sense, because you are limited by your imagination. You are limited by who you are. This is what happened to me. I felt I had reached the ceiling. I had visited these incredible places and met these wonderful people in these astral realms, but I felt I was limited. Whenever I tried to go higher, I literally hit a ceiling.

I’m not the only one who has experienced this. I read about Robert Monroe, who was an out-of-body experiencer and wrote Journeys Out of the Body, one of the first pioneering books. He came across the ceiling phenomenon himself.

When I reached the ceiling, it was literally like a plastered, ornamented ceiling. I used to punch my way through it in order to get to a higher level. Everything takes on a very symbolic meaning, and the symbolism actually becomes physically real.

When you are in an out-of-body state, the environment appears to be as physical as our environment here, but it’s on a different level, really. So you work just as hard to get through a ceiling as you would here. I literally ripped through the plaster ceiling in order to get to the next level, and I figured that was the way the mind understood that I had a desire to break through. The symbolism actually became the reality.

You could work with this to go to other levels. It’s quite difficult to explain, but these are tricks that you can use in order to achieve higher levels. The most important thing is that it has to be accompanied by the right kind of feeling. If the feeling isn’t there, then nothing really happens.

In 1988, this series of breaking through ceilings ultimately led, after the training by my inner master—the Chinese guy I mentioned in my first book—to his helping me break through the ultimate ceiling.

In that out-of-body state, I again reached this state of clarity, but by a completely different route. The first one was a spontaneous experience. The second one was an inner experience, an inner journey, where I went through the nonphysical realities, which felt just as physical as the reality here and now. But my consciousness expanded, and the realities and realms became increasingly more glorious, strange, and fascinating.

At the last level, I was accompanied into this state of clarity again. But this time, the way I experienced it was that I was standing at the shore of an infinite ocean of light. There were waves of light crashing in, and it felt just like standing on the beach. But everything was made out of light.

Each wave that crashed in on me triggered an ecstasy. I went through a series of ecstasies, until I entered the state of clarity again, which was indistinguishable from the first experience—the same state.

Then the third time was in Scotland, which broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Then it was unmistakable: that is not the status quo. That is what human beings are. That’s what we are, really. Everything else is an illusion.

Rick: Yeah, that leads into a question. Some people will remember Ramana Maharshi saying that—and probably many others, I’m sure—that anything which comes and goes is not the reality. There’s that saying in the Gita: “The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.” Therefore, one should not seek after experiences which come and go. One should make one’s priority the realization of that which always is, which never comes and goes.

There are so many points I want to discuss with you, but let’s discuss that one for a minute. There are a lot of people who have studied Vedanta and read Ramana Maharshi, and they might be thinking of what you just said: all these levels are ultimately an illusion. They might be wondering, “Why bother with them, then? If they are ultimately an illusion, why not just skip right to that which never comes or goes, which always is?”

Jurgen: Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot. But I think these are basically people’s individual paths. My path is that I’m an artist. I’m a very visual, experiential person.

When I connect with the outside world—even before I consider it to be anything spiritual—I connect with it from a visual and emotional point of view, as an artist. My inner experiences sort of reflected that, and I felt there was a natural attraction to exploring the inner worlds, in much the same way as I explored the physical world. I felt there was an attraction along with this path, and a fascination, because the worlds I discovered in there were incredibly rich, beautiful, and fascinating.

Of course, they were not any spiritual realization. They were more like a world of enhanced entertainment, if you like. But especially in my second book, I started using these experiences as a form of communication from consciousness—as teaching, with consciousness teaching me. So I took these experiences very seriously.

Whenever I had a question, very often consciousness would draw me into an out-of-body state where I found the answer. These started with very trivial questions. When I was asked to do an illustration about medieval knights, I wondered what they looked like. I wondered whether the reference books were accurate.

The next night, I had an out-of-body experience where I found myself on a battlefield with medieval knights. I was totally conscious, and I studied the scene—their dress, what color it was, how they rode the horses. I was just looking and taking in all the detail. Then I went back, and I had a clear picture of what it was like.

There were plenty of occasions where I used this information, which people refer to as the Akashic records, in a sense. You glean all sorts of information, and sometimes it is only a thought away.

For example, I’ve mentioned this before on my website and in my book. I was illustrating a book on deep space, and the editor asked me to draw an illustration of the Big Bang. I asked him, “What did it look like?”

He said, “How should I know? You’re the artist. Nobody knows. Nobody can say.”

I thought, “I can’t possibly do an illustration of something if I don’t know what it looks like.”

So the following night, I had an out-of-body experience, and I called out, “Take me to the Big Bang.”

As soon as I said that, I was suspended in a black void. But I didn’t see a Big Bang. I saw—or heard—four sounds. These sounds were feeding back on one another. That was it.

Then I went back, and I figured, “Okay, there was no Big Bang. There were four sounds, but what may have happened is that they were a feedback mechanism. When you hold a microphone in front of a speaker, the feedback mechanism results in a big bang.”

I followed up with my editor and said, “What if the Big Bang was initiated by four sounds, and there was a feedback mechanism that exploded and caused the Big Bang?”

He said, “No, no, no, no, no. Just draw a picture of the Big Bang. You imagine it.”

So that was the story. But I found after that it is actually possible to glean information during an out-of-body state, and there is literally no limit to the information you can access, because what we are dealing with is a Universal Mind.

We are just separating off a small section of the Universal Mind, which we call our own. We can get experiences, but by entering the Akashic mind, or the Universal Mind, we have unlimited potential if we want to. Of course, there was never really enough time—or even the interest—to follow it all in detail.

So, later, after 2008, I decided to take note of what was happening. I wasn’t really interested in out-of-body experiences; I was more interested in meditation and reaching a state of stillness. But when they happened, I saw them as invitations by the greater consciousness to draw my attention to certain aspects.

And one aspect I was drawn to was becoming familiar with certain aspects of nonphysical reality, because there was so much ignorance about it and so much speculation. I started taking notes, and therefore I wrote the book Vistas of Infinity: how to enjoy life when you’re dead, basically. It was a cross-section of what realities we are likely to find when we die.

And I found this is important work, because people have no clue what’s going to happen. We’re all sitting on the train, not knowing where the station is or when the train will arrive. And then there’s a big blank screen, and nobody knows. There’s only speculation and beliefs. Some of the beliefs I’ve come across are quite wrong, really, in my experience. And some beliefs are devastating to humanity.

Rick: I mean, there are people who believe that when you die, that’s it. You’re snuffed out like a candle. And there are spiritual people who believe that, actually. I’ve interviewed a number of people who say, “Well, there is no reincarnation because there is no person ultimately.” And so, if there’s no person, how could there be reincarnation? There would have to be somebody to reincarnate, some kind of kernel of individuality that goes on from body to body, life to life.

And I think they’re wrong, as I’m sure you do. But I just want to make a statement here to help put things in context and see if you agree with it. What you have been doing for most of your life—all these explorations—is obviously not incompatible with enlightenment or realization, because that has dawned for you. And so, all of this was not a trap, an impediment, or a distraction. For you, at least, it was conducive to the realization that eventually happened.

I think maybe it can be a trap, a distraction, and an impediment for some people. They can get overly infatuated and distracted and absorbed in it, and spend a lot of time just fooling around with woo-woo experiences and not getting right down to the core of things. So maybe there’s that caution. But I don’t think it has to be an all-or-nothing proposition the way some people would suggest.

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: And there are people who are keen on Vedanta who would just dismiss all of this discussion as irrelevant, superficial, and a failure to go right to the heart of things.

But you have to remember that Vedanta means “the end of the Veda.” So, if you respect Vedanta, maybe you respect the whole tradition of which it is the end. And that tradition includes consideration of all kinds of possibilities, relative phenomena, subtle realms, higher states, astrology, health considerations, and everything under the sun.

Life is multidimensional, and life can contain so many different things. Even if you’re enlightened, you still have a body, and that body probably needs food and support. And once enlightenment has dawned—or even before it has—there is still the relative creation, is there not? There can be value in acquiring knowledge of its various aspects.

There can be specific knowledge. Maybe you’re a scientist or a doctor, or a jet pilot, or whatever. There are a lot of things you need to know and skills you need to acquire, whether you’re enlightened or not. But in a more spiritual context, there is a huge, vast realm of possibilities that humanity in general is unaware of and does not appreciate. This may actually have tremendous benefit for humanity if we were aware of it and understood it better.

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: And so enlightenment or awakening can be a platform on which that exploration can take place. We, as a species, can grow up and become much more profoundly appreciative of the beauty, diversity, and subtlety of God’s creation.

So, anyway, that’s my little rant.

Jurgen: I agree with every word you just said, because dismissing this is like dismissing life, dismissing creation. We can’t dismiss it because it’s an integral part of creation. I also found these experiences tremendously educational on all different kinds of levels.

And one thing I find throughout all these experiences—we haven’t even scratched the very surface of our human potential—is that we have barely risen from the Stone Age.

It strikes me that our evolution hasn’t even really begun as a human species.

Rick: Just interrupt one more time, and I’ll let you go again. Would you agree, then, that spiritual development, evolution, enlightenment, or whatever we want to call it, ideally might consist not merely—I say “merely” of self-realization. I mean, self-realization is ordinarily considered a pretty big deal, and you don’t usually associate the word “mere” with it—but not merely of that, but that it could become a sort of starting point or foundation upon which all kinds of amazing possibilities for human development might be explored and unfolded?

And that those might have huge implications for us, not only individually in the way we experience our lives, but collectively, societally, in terms of what quality of society we could aspire to and rise to, and in terms of technologies?

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: I mean, look at all the suffering in the world for various reasons. That suffering is very real for the people who are undergoing it. Personally, I feel that spiritual realization is the ultimate antidote to that suffering.

And it might include more than just self-realization. It might also include the discovery and application of a vast range of latent capabilities that are going to be much easier to unlock if the self has been realized.

Jurgen: Yes. I never really could get my head around the idea of Buddha’s teaching, for example, that you want to escape into Nirvana or something like that. I never really could embrace it, because I could not separate the two: creation and consciousness.

And when people say, “Once you’re enlightened, you never have to come back,” I personally don’t see that as an issue. Living in the whole of creation, in all the realities, doesn’t necessarily mean I have to restrict myself to living in this physical place, or in that physical place, or anywhere else. Or be a poor person or a rich person. I can live in the whole spectrum of consciousness, which is literally infinite.

Rick: I suggested that the desire not to come back was perhaps the product of a society in which a tooth infection could kill you, in which the quality of life was pretty brutal in some cases, and you might think, “I want to just get out of here and never come back.”

Jurgen: Yes, I think this is probably the case. The philosophy arose out of the understanding that people wanted to literally disappear from the possibility of ever having to suffer physical hardships again.

But once you reach a true understanding of what reality is, it doesn’t necessarily remove the pain or the conflicts from your life. It does put them into a completely new perspective, so we actually have something we can work with and deal with. And this will inspire us to achieve greater evolution and become a conscious part of the evolutionary process, because we are part of nature.

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: And once we become a conscious part of this evolutionary process, it opens all kinds of doors for us.

I mean, I’ve been in the higher states of consciousness, where I saw evolution taking place right at the primary stage, where it was dealing with geometric shapes, with things starting to appear in a very abstract way. And then, as soon as attention was focused from whichever angle, it crystallized into manifestation.

The manifestation process was so infinite and so beautiful that universes were created on the fly and disappeared again. In front of my very eyes, I could see this huge creation process unrolling, evolving, and retreating. People even had the power to manifest things and pull them back. This enormous, infinite variety of what is possible was there for everybody to experience.

And the thing is that once you become aware of all this, of the mechanics of creation, suddenly enormous opportunities become visible on the horizon.

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: And so does an understanding of how the world is put together and how it works, and how our psyche functions. Because everything we do, everything we are, is basically nature growing and unfolding, even if it’s insanity. It’s just nature at work, doing its thing.

And the way I noticed how thoughts unfold and how thoughts are created is that we are basically following a natural program. We don’t do anything unusual. We’re just using the same mechanics that nature uses at the highest level in order to manifest. We’re using them to manifest thoughts and spin ideas and ideologies.

So we are very much part of nature; we just haven’t realized it yet.

Rick: Yeah, there’s something that relates to this, and also relates to the point we were just making about not wanting to come back again. It seems to me that the attitude of not wanting to come back again is oriented around a kind of rigid sense of oneself as an individuality: “I, this individuality, don’t like this, and I don’t want to come back again.”

Whereas, to me, a broader, deeper perspective would be that, after having been gobbled up by God, so to speak—which was the reference you made earlier, when you felt like you were about to be gobbled up—you function and regard yourself more as an instrument of the Divine. There’s more of a sense of service and surrender: “Use me as you will.” Whether I come back or not is not a big deal to me. I’m happy to be an instrument in whatever way I can be.

Jurgen: Yes, because you’re no longer so identified with a certain set of issues, whether professional or anything like that. You’re no longer identified with anything; you’re just a being state.

You just express what you are, expressing yourself with joy, from the state of being. And this is why I find it so beautiful to explore our inner worlds, because there’s so much potential we don’t know anything about.

We are just like robots. We are programmed by instincts, drives, traumas, and experiences, and we have no control over these because they’re just happening in some dark realm.

And yet, we are doing things to each other and having opinions, likes, and dislikes without having the slightest knowledge of where these come from or how they’re generated. But when we move consciously into the subconscious realm, we suddenly see everything in a multimedia presentation, which we can deal with and handle. We can see the monsters that are haunting us. We can confront the monsters, pose questions, and find answers.

I mean, it’s only a very recent discovery, which started this invention of psychology. Now, with lucid dreaming, there are quite a few psychologists who use it as a gateway to an inner understanding of what we really are. We can use these inner worlds to actually function better as human beings.

At the moment, we are just groping around in the dark. And a lot of things I have found is that when people do have these experiences, they very quickly jump to conclusions. Because they have an experience, they think, “Oh, that’s it.” They enter a greater state of consciousness, suddenly more things become visible, and they see the light. And they immediately think, “Oh, yes, I know. I’ve got the truth now. I know what it’s like.” Then they go out and preach their truth. Before you know it, you’ve got a new version of a religion or cult or something.

And this happens quite often, rather than seeing that what they have only got from the whole of infinity was a minuscule fraction of a diamond that has infinite facets. Suddenly, their attention is drawn toward this one facet, and it becomes a big thing.

One of the examples is near-death experiencers. They very often find themselves in a state of bliss, or even cosmic consciousness, as they would describe it. Then they come back and feel they have got the whole picture. And that is also an illusion. You don’t ever get the whole picture because the universe is infinite.

For example, some people say—I was attacked once because of what I wrote—”When you die, you don’t automatically go into heaven,” or something like that.

Rick: You wrote that?

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: Like you might go into hell or something, right?

Jurgen: The whole book is based on the continuation of the reality you foster during your waking life.

Rick: Uh-huh.

Jurgen: So there is no miracle taking place that suddenly catapults you into heaven or into hell or whatever. It’s just a natural chain of events, a process of nature unfolding. And just because your physical body disappears doesn’t make you a different person.

Rick: Right.

Jurgen: So you carry over what you are, and you’re still dealing with it. And what happens when people have near-death experiences is that quite often they are catapulted into a higher state of consciousness, which allows whatever forces there are to administer some form of healing.

Rick: Healing?

Jurgen: Yeah, and I think that’s very often the case. They get catapulted out of the limitations of the physical and emotional situation, and they suddenly find themselves in a state of clarity. But then they come back, and they have this awakening experience. It would be wrong for them to claim that when you die, you immediately come into the presence of God and all is forgiven. That’s not, in my experience at least, how I experienced it.

Rick: Yeah. So they may claim that because they had something of that nature in their experience, but it’s not necessarily going to be the universal experience.

Jurgen: No, that’s—that’s it. The reality is the reality. I mean, there’s no getting away from it. If you start claiming that when you die, you get into heaven straight away, then you open the doors for people like ISIS to do whatever the hell they like in this life, because they know they’re going to be safe.

Rick: Sure.

Jurgen: But in reality, psychology kicks in. And the mechanism, which is a very physical mechanism, works its way out so that people are actually confronted with the energies they have set into motion. And there’s no getting away from it. Because where should these energies go? You’re also attached to these energies like a magnet, and you will draw them toward you. And you have to work them.

And so the idea that when a person dies, people say, “Oh, he has peace now. Now you rest in peace,” is a big illusion. Reality just doesn’t work like that. And people may find it objectionable to make statements like that, because everybody is hoping that when they die, they are released from their misery. No, you still have to keep working, and you’re still on your path. And, okay, you’ve got new opportunities.

What I’m saying is based on hundreds of hours of experience, where I interviewed people, talked to them, met my brother and my mother, and talked in great detail, which I documented in my book. So even after all this, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is actually happening. But we need to address these things in order to free ourselves from these false ideas and illusions.

Mapping the multidimensional universe

Rick: I agree. I mean, if you look at old maps from when Columbus first came, or early explorers, you look at maps of what they thought North America looked like. It’s sort of funny. It’s all distorted and weird, and they had no idea what was in the middle of the country or anyplace else. And even Lewis and Clark, when they went across the country in the mid-1800s, had no idea what they were going to encounter or what some of the mountain ranges were that they were going to have to cross.

These days, with satellites and everything, we have everything mapped out right down to the centimeter, practically. We know precisely where everything is, and the whole topography is clear.

So, if we use that allegory, or that metaphor, to talk about the deeper realities of the universe, there’s a certain value in having things mapped out if you’re going to try to travel to California. In the same way, there’s a value in understanding how the universe works, it seems to me, as a human being—when you die, and if you’re interested in enlightenment, and all kinds of things.

So I think it would be really interesting and useful, and perhaps it will happen over the years, if, as a culture, we map out the whole territory of all the realms and dimensions and subtler realities. And actually, if enough people have the experiences, we might begin to get a kind of agreement between various explorers.

I can imagine there must be cultures somewhere in this universe that have actually done that, and who have as much clarity with regard to the whole subtle range of life as we have with regard to the geography of North America.

Jurgen: Yes, I think this is actually one project that we discussed on the forums: that we should collectively sort of collect all the experiences and just record them. Unfortunately, this project never really got off the ground. But it would have been an enormous research tool for people—for explorers to find where there is common ground and what the common experiences are.

Rick: Yeah. So from your own experience, having done all the exploring you’ve done, if you were to take, let’s say, the next five minutes and try to give us a synopsis—a guided tour of the universe in terms of how things are structured and all the various layers and realms and strata of creation—could you do that?

Jurgen: Yeah, only very quickly, really. I think it’s basically that the reality levels are reflections of our state of consciousness. So if we identified with very physical pleasures and very physical aspects of ourselves, we attract, on the next level when we die, the same sort of circumstances—pubs and clubs and whatever.

Rick: Do we do that, or do we go to a realm where that’s the way it is?

Jurgen: That’s already there because it has been a collective construction over generations. And the thing is, it is just as physical as this one.

People who have out-of-body experiences sometimes think they’re traveling to another place in physical reality. And I wrote an article in a journal for a new book explaining why that is not the case, or cannot be the case.

So you have an out-of-body experience, and you see buses and trains and taxis and pubs and people going shopping. Your instant reaction is, “Okay, this is just another part of the world.” You come to expect to find that, but that is not the case. It’s basically the thought forms—the collective thought forms we have created—a copy of what they experience in everyday life.

Rick: So there are kind of astral buses and taxis and trains?

Jurgen: Yes, that’s right.

Rick: Do they burn astral gasoline and need astral motor oil and so on?

Jurgen: That was a question I kept asking myself. For example, I’ve written about this in my book. I was at a printing plant, and there was a printer I knew who had died, and he was still operating the printing plant. I was very curious, so I opened one of the lids to the engines to see. If it’s a thought world, then it shouldn’t have any insides; it’s just generated print, simply by the power of thought.

But when I opened it, the whole engine mechanism was inside. And I tried to find some sort of explanation. I figured that what reality is, is basically a universal database, and it comes into existence by expectation.

For example, in one episode I described that I saw a car that was from the twenties. I thought, “Ah, that feels really weird. Let me go and have a close look.” When I looked closely at the paintwork, I found there were the minute scratches you get when you polish your car. And I thought, “That’s just incredible. Who could have thought about that? How is this possible? Who is behind all this?”

My explanation was that once we have a picture, we simply assemble it—or the reality level assembles it—from a database that is already in existence. So it’s basically like a hard drive, where all the data are stored. Then, when you look at it, it appears on the screen as a complete picture.

This is something that really needs to be investigated. I believe that the latest models about the holographic universe, the observer effect, and all this are pointing in that direction. I’m saying I don’t know much about the quantum mechanics of it, but this is very much an understanding we are arriving at: that the universe is not really in existence as just atoms or energy. The moment we look at it, we assemble it in our brain and complete it. These mechanisms seem to be in existence, and they’re responsible for our experience of what we see.

Rick: And yet, we all have a kind of collective agreement on what we experience. As you’re driving down the highway, and there are all these other cars, everyone is seeing basically the same highway, although their perceptions may differ. And they all stop at the same stoplights and things like that.

Jurgen: Yeah.

Rick: So there’s something more than just complete individual consciousness creating the world. Otherwise, we’d have total chaos.

Jurgen: Yes, it’s a fun thing which Robert Waggoner—he wrote the book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, or something, I think. He is a very, very good author. He wrote another book, too. But he said we don’t control the scene when we dream. We see a section of the scene, and we can influence it, but we can’t control the dream scenario. We can control aspects of our dreams, aspects of the reality.

There are so many multiple levels to this reality. There’s the individual aspect, which we generate from our subconscious, and even that seems to have a solidity which is difficult to ignore. But then there are other aspects, which are a consensus reality that we enter into during an out-of-body state, where we meet other people.

There I can talk to my relatives, and they live in an environment which is agreed upon and which is just as solid as this one. It’s even harder to change than the physical environment, because it has been solidified by the focus and attention of generations of people.

My eldest daughter went through a period where she had out-of-body experiences, and I asked her to do a test. I said, “Can you change the environment next time you have an out-of-body experience? See if you can change the environment.”

She came back and said she had fallen into, I think, a fountain. She tried to change it, and she succeeded. But as soon as her attention was withdrawn, it changed back to how it was before. So there is a consensus reality which feels very, very physical to the people who live there, and to which they are just as exposed as we are on this level.

Rick: Okay, so about five or ten minutes ago, I asked you, if we were to map out the whole range of creation—and now we’ve been talking about what probably is a fairly preliminary level of creation—

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: The place that people commonly go when they die, where they have this consensus reality. But there must be many, many, many, many more—

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: —and higher, if we want to use the word “higher,” strata.

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: Can you quickly map out some of that?

Jurgen: Yes. The thing is, of course, that as your consciousness becomes more elevated, your experiences become more positive. You get into more elevated, beautiful realms, which are also much more pliable—much less rigid, for example—and much more beautiful.

As your consciousness and awareness expand, you become more linked to what you see. You get more of a rapport with your environment. On the very highest of the lower dimensions, you get into a state of incredibly fluid synchronicity.

Rick: Now, regarding one thing, what I’m going to do is perhaps paste in some of your paintings in this interview. Maybe this would be a good point to show some as we’re talking. I think, by your own admission, you feel that they’re pretty poor representations of what is actually there, but you’re doing the best you can with paint to give people an idea of it.

Jurgen: Yes, I try to use pictures because it’s a natural medium for me to get some sort of representation of these realities. One thing which becomes increasingly clear as you get out of the very basic physical-type levels is that reality becomes much more dynamic. You become aware of many more colors.

On the basic level, everything is represented very much like the physical world. People look the same. As you move higher to more elevated levels, you find that the people become more attractive and more beautiful. Nature becomes more beautiful and more profuse. You get more vibrant colors and more harmonics in nature.

The interesting thing is how the environment reflects back how you feel. You get into environments which evoke feelings in you that you simply cannot experience in the physical body. For example, you could have a melancholic happiness, for lack of a better word.

That is expressed in the environment as a sort of lilac-purple mist or atmosphere. There is a strange river flowing through the landscape which forks off into the distance, and you get a feeling of a completely new experience—something you have never experienced before.

These new types of experiences increase as you get into higher states of consciousness. Everything unfolds, becomes more luminous, becomes richer, and your connection to this world becomes more intense. You feel more at home.

The higher you go through the levels, the more you feel at home.

There’s one thing which is very powerful: The higher you go through the levels, if you like, the more you feel at home. There is a feeling of coming home, and this feeling of homecoming intensifies. It is a good marker of how close you are to your core consciousness—to unity consciousness, if you want.

Rick: Are these higher realms populated by a variety of species, just the way the Earth is? Are there birds and other kinds of animals and whatnot, as well as human-type beings?

Jurgen: Yes, absolutely. I would say that there’s an even much greater variety of species. It’s almost as if it trickles down. On the way down to the physical level, it is narrowed down, and there’s less variety.

I drew a picture of a multidimensional model in which you increasingly find a counterpart of the physical realm. There is a counterpart on the higher-dimensional level which is much bigger, if you like. There’s a bigger Earth. There would be a bigger Jupiter or whatever. Maybe there would be additional moons which don’t show up on the physical level.

On the very highest level, there’s an infinite variety. The way I mapped out the multidimensional levels was that I found, when I started off in my bedroom and had an out-of-body experience, I ended up in a copy of the bedroom.

Then, on the next level, the bedroom may disappear and there may be a different apartment, but I still recognize it as my bedroom. On the next level, the house may have disappeared. There’s just an odd shape, but it still feels like my bedroom.

There’s a familiarity, or an energetic imprint, which still has the original identity of what it is about, so I could identify localities by the atmosphere.

Rick: I don’t know if this question makes sense, but in terms of what you just said, if, sitting right where you are in that room, you were to go to higher and higher and higher levels, would you actually still be in the same place? Would you be exploring subtler realms or subtler levels of that same place, where the more subtle you go, the less and less resemblance there is to the gross physical place in which you’re now sitting?

Jurgen: Yes, that’s right. They may actually totally disappear. I experienced and tested this on different levels. For example, a pub suddenly became a shop; on the next level, it was part of a park.

I went to Hamburg, where I had a lot of positive memories and where I went to art school. I visited the astral counterpart of the art school because I used to hang around there.

On one level, I was coming out of the art school, and outside the art school there was a little lake, with a kind of river feeding the lake. That lake suddenly became much bigger. The benches weren’t there; they were sort of monoliths. The art school had changed, but I still recognized it. I still identified it.

This gave me the idea that we live in a multidimensional universe where every atom has a counterpart, or has an origin, on a higher level or in pure consciousness. It filters down and manifests in different shapes and in different ways, without losing its original identity, if you like. So every object has a soul.

Past lives, other worlds, and the Akashic Records

Rick: On that note, if—and sometimes, if I interrupt because I’m going to ask you more questions, but you really want to finish saying what you’re saying, let me know, because I don’t want to leave out something important—you were talking about Jupiter, for instance, a minute ago. Ordinarily, we think, “All right, the Earth is the only planet in this solar system where there can be life. Everything else is too inhospitable to life.” So there can be no life on the Sun, for instance, or on Mercury or Venus. But if you go to subtler levels, do you find that those places are actually teeming with life?

Jurgen: Yes. I mean, I can only talk from the experiences which I’ve had. One of the planets I visited was Venus, and I found Venus was actually populated and had a very highly evolved civilization there. I know it sounds nuts.

Rick: On the gross level, it’s 800 or 900 degrees, so you couldn’t live there. But on the subtle level—

Jurgen: On a subtle level, it is habitable and is actually inhabited. I try not to go into these areas, because when I first had these experiences, people would say, “Oh, yeah, here’s your new story again,” so I kept quiet about it.

But also, in my latest book, I was quite bold about this, because I reported some instances where I had previous lives in different civilizations on different planets, describing their technology and everything. In one of the experiences, I was taken away by an alien species.

Rick: I started reading that bit. You were on a flying carpet or something that went to many times the speed of light to a different place.

I have a question about that incident. I don’t know if you can answer this, but according to Einstein, if we were to travel that fast, relativistic time dilation would come in—you know, Einstein’s twin paradox. If we came back from such a trip, we would find that many years had gone by for everyone and everything around us, whereas for us it might have been only a short amount of time. Did you consider that in light of that experience?

Jurgen: Yes, that’s right. It was a very fascinating experience because it demonstrated two things to me. First, there is other intelligent life which may not even manifest on the physical plane. Second, these beings have totally different civilizations and different ways of procreation and things like that.

I was invited on this journey with these species, and I tried to be as authentic and as accurate as I was capable of being. All along the way, I wondered, “Can I actually write this without being told that I’m imagining it, or that it’s a fantasy?” People might say, “Oh, yes, he is a fantasy illustrator; he made it all up.”

But it had just the same reality as I’m living here in the physical world—the same tangibility and the same waking awareness with which I observed it, as with everything else.

Well, I mean, I see things—I’m not a very scientifically minded person; I’m more of an artist. But the way I see time, for example, which has also been hinted at in discussions of karma and reincarnation and all these issues, I can explain it from my own experience.

We can travel back in time. I haven’t been able to travel into the future, at least not in the same tangible way. I’ve traveled into the past, or visited a past life, over an eternity briefly in my book The Ten-Minute Moment, but—

Rick: Maybe the future is still to be determined.

Jurgen: Yes, yes. There are so many factors that are unrolling in the same way as a plant grows, you know. If you put a bit of acid on the plant, it will not grow, or something like that. So that’s basically a growth process, whereas the past is already there. You can visit it, and you can actually visit it in such a way that you are there.

Rick: Well, one issue that science-fiction writers have dealt with a lot is: If you can go to the past, can you change anything there? And if you change things, what’s that going to do to the present? I mean, do you have much volition when you go to these places?

Jurgen: No, it doesn’t happen on a physical level; it happens on a memory level. The best way I can describe it is from my own experience. I went into a past life, and it started off with me walking through mud. As I looked down on my body, I found that my clothes were quite different from what they are now. I noticed that I had a sword. I had armor and a very coarsely knitted coat, and I identified myself as a medieval type of character.

As I was trudging through the mud, I suddenly became privy to the experiences and the mind content of this person. So at that moment, there were two of me: the observer and the person experiencing it. I was totally involved in the experience of personhood, but I was also conscious that I was lying in bed, and there was an observer part of me. So there were three aspects of me: the observer, the person who was having the experience, and the physical body, which was lying in bed. All the time I was walking along with him, there was no way I could influence him. He was totally oblivious to me.

Rick: So let’s say that happened 500 years ago, and you were walking along through the mud. Do you think that, from that guy’s perspective, if he had been aware of it—if he had been capable of being aware of it—he would have realized, “Oh, some being from the future—hey, it’s me—is watching me walk along through the mud here”? I mean, was there actually that kind of dynamic going on?

Jurgen: My feeling was that when I was this guy, there was no possibility of me being aware.

Rick: But he wasn’t aware of it. I mean, 500 years ago, when that guy was walking through the mud, were you actually there checking him out on some subtle level? Somewhere, if he had been capable—or someone else had been capable—of experiencing it, would they actually have observed you?

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: On some subtle level?

Jurgen: What it was, was that it felt so physical. There was no doubt in my mind that I wasn’t experiencing it as him. It was a real-life, present experience. It was almost as if I’d been transported back in time. That was a present awareness. There was no getting away from it.

That was not the only occasion. I had several other occasions where I was transported back in time, in a different life and in a different body. At one stage, I was on a council in a Peruvian empire. We were debating whether we should allow the savages to come into the town or whether we should keep them at arm’s length. Then it was decided that the savages were quite useful to the townspeople because they would provide cheap labor. To discriminate against them, they would be dressed in trousers, which was not the kind of clothing the townspeople would wear.

I experienced a whole episode in one go, and I was not sure it was a wise idea. Gradually, these people became very unhappy with being treated the way they were. Soon enough, they found weaknesses in the fortifications, and the whole empire went to pieces when this was heard about, and so on.

I had this whole episode unrolling in front of me, but at the same time, at each moment, I was aware of sitting there in the flesh and aware of the clothes I wore. The dialogue going on—the animosity and the tension—felt just as real as if I were sitting in a boardroom meeting on the physical planet discussing it.

To me, that’s the reality of the Akashic Records: an actual experience. It’s not visual; it’s not something that we think about. It’s an extra experience, and that can be experienced during out-of-body states of consciousness.

Individuality without limitation

Rick: So moments ago, we were talking about all these different levels, and you were saying that the higher you go, the more beautiful it gets and the more malleable it is—the less rigid or calcified things are. Do you get to a point, as you go higher and higher, where the dwellers of that realm are dwelling there more or less eternally and are not going to have to come back to the human realm? Is that the sort of permanent abode? Or are all these places just temporary abodes, which we’ll eventually have to shift out of and experience other things?

Jurgen: Well, the experience I had was that as you get into higher levels, there comes a stage where your self-identification is somehow surrendered—your ego identification. That is a point where you then enter into a much higher state, a type of spiritual culture. Then things really become very interesting, because your awareness is no longer limited by an identification. You’re much more in a state of fluid consciousness.

Rick: There must be some—I don’t know if we call it identification—some sort of sense of “This is me, and this is you.”

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: Because otherwise, if it’s just totally amorphous—

Jurgen: There is still a sense of individuality, very much so.

Rick: But it’s not at all predominant or limiting?

Jurgen: No. I mean, there are still people who are just representing themselves in the same way as we do, but in a much more creative or inventive way, if you like. They have more options at their disposal.

For example, the clothes you wear may change according to the kinds of thoughts you have. The buildings you occupy are usually very close representations of what you are like—the person you are like—but in a higher, evolved state. They’re very symmetric and very beautiful. You can immediately see, if you come to a certain building, what kind of person inhabits it. You get the whole atmosphere, the whole imprint. There’s an affinity between the individuals, and so you can have instant communication just by looking at their building; you can instantly inhabit their thoughts. There’s no objection and no deviation. There’s always a friendly, positive vibration, because on these levels there simply is no negativity. Everything is thinking in harmonious interplay, which is very fluid and very beautiful and always enhancing. There is this aspect of enhancement and positivity.

Rick: Maharishi used to refer to the ground state of creation as the field of all possibilities. Because nothing has manifested yet, anything can manifest.

Then the more things manifest, the more limited it becomes, and physics actually has a corresponding understanding: The vacuum state, or the unified field, contains all potential manifest states, but once a manifestation proceeds, greater and greater rigidity prevails. The more manifest things become, the more rigid they are.

Jurgen: Yes, that’s very much the case. I also found on the higher levels that there is this trickle-down effect. For example—and another very important aspect is thought forms—there are unmanifested thoughts, thoughts which have an extra abstract quality to themselves.

These thoughts create abstract shapes, which are very beautiful to behold, but they express perfectly the quintessence of that thought simply by looking at the structure and listening to the sound they give, and the animation. So you instantly apprehend the thought in its entirety. That can be a whole ideology manifested in a shape, almost like a big city or something.

Rick: I was supposed to interview David Spangler last week, who was one of the founders of Findhorn, but he had a health crisis. Hopefully, we’ll reschedule him soon. He said that when he went to high school and started studying geometry, he went deep into it. He discovered that the various forms in geometry actually have an archetypal intelligence fundamental to them.

He found that incredibly fascinating: that they’re not just inanimate forms, but are surface representations of deeper impulses of intelligence that structure or govern the universe.

Jurgen: Yes, that’s one of the key things I found: There is no such thing as inanimate matter. Everything is intelligent.

Rick: Yes.

Jurgen: And there is no exception to it. It’s just incredible. I once posed the question while I was there: What is the ego? How does the ego come about? And why do we have an ego?

Suddenly, when you have these questions on these dimensional levels, you don’t just get an answer. You get a multimedia slideshow. It has good sound and everything. I was suddenly confronted with an infinite web, a tapestry where each aspect of the tapestry bled into the neighboring part and created a beautiful carpet—an infinite carpet.

As I honed in on each ornament, if you like, which formed one pattern of the whole web, I found that from that viewpoint, everything spread out. The whole universe unfolded around it. The person who was at the center of each one of these, let’s say, crystal or snowflake crystals—which was one aspect of this infinite pattern—saw their universe expanding from that point, spreading out into the open.

I suddenly had a clear picture: This is how every person perceives themselves. Every person can consider themselves, quite rightly, the center of the universe, because that is their experience. When they look out from their standpoint, they see everything spreading out from them—their friends and everything. They are individuals, and they are unique.

There’s no doubt about it. They’re the most important person in the world. All the things around them, they identify with, and they build their self-identity from the information they feed on from around them. So they establish an ego identification because they see themselves as the center of the universe.

That doesn’t only apply to human beings. It applies to every plant, every animal, and every atom in the universe.

Rick: Some spiritual teachers use the phrase “life without a center.” Jeff Foster uses that, among others. In your experience, if the ego has been seen through, is there a sense that life doesn’t have a center?

Jurgen: Oh, yeah. I mean, what is happening is that I try, as much as possible, to only talk about what I have experienced. In one of the descriptions in my latest book, Vistas of Infinity, I had an experience where I saw myself as an expanded pattern, just the way I described it.

But this pattern was not just two-dimensional. It was a three- or four-dimensional thing that contained lives on other planets. I could zoom into each aspect of these patterns, which I was made of, and I could easily see the relationship to my core self-awareness, or my core being-awareness.

I could see the history that was created. I could see the weak points, the strong points, how it connected in the past to other patterns, and so on. The whole thing was visible to me simply because I had a more elevated viewpoint as a being, from a being state.

I was not necessarily identified with it, but there was still a strong connection as an individual, whereas my self-awareness was shifted onto a more universal level. There was still an appreciation of this individual aspect, which I have been nurturing.

Freshness, familiarity, and ordinary life

Rick: When you were a student, and much younger, did you go through a psychedelic phase?

Jurgen: Yes. I mean, when I was very young, in my early twenties, before—

Rick: Did you have any far-out experiences with that?

Jurgen: Yeah. When LSD was still legal, we went through a stage that lasted about six months or so, where every month we would experiment. We would read Aldous Huxley. We didn’t see ourselves as strung-out heads.

Rick: No. But I mean, you have pretty amazing experiences as a non-drug-using person, meditating and having out-of-body experiences and all that. Back when you were using drugs, were you the envy of your friends in terms of how amazing your experiences were?

Jurgen: I was sometimes surprised that they didn’t see what I saw. In some of the [strange] experiences, I could see through the ground. I had telescopic vision and things like that. I just took it in my stride.

I also had these revelations of newness, of awareness, and all these sorts of things. Of course, I find that these kinds of experiences have very much manifested now, but they are more of an everyday experience.

For example, when I go out of the house to get milk from the shop, which I’ve done hundreds of times, I always consider this to be a unique and new experience.

Rick: Right. There’s a freshness.

Jurgen: Yes. There’s no familiarity as such.

Rick: Well, you know how to find the store, but there’s not the sort of habituated way of perceiving the world, right? I mean, there’s innocence and freshness.

Jurgen: Yes. Everything is a first. It is new. It is a new experience. So you don’t fall into the pattern of referring to what you have learned or what you’ve known and making it into a cliché.

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: That sort of ability, or disability, has been stripped away. Instead, you see things fresh—unconditioned.

Rick: I mean, some conditioning is useful. You don’t have to learn how to drive a car every day, or how to brush your teeth or something. But I think there’s a difference between that kind of conditioning or learning and any sort of habituation that has taken place through repeatedly being identified with or overshadowed by experience.

Jurgen: Yeah. I think even brushing your teeth is a new experience. There’s an aspect that somehow strings all this together in an automatic way, which we rely on—a part of our nervous system that is actually programmed to make sense of things. It’s another aspect of ourselves that we allow to control the learning and things.

For example, when I write or do illustrations, I rely on the fact that I know how to use the tools.

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: That doesn’t disappear. But at the same time, you can actually have a new input during this process.

If you walk along to the store instead of thinking, “Oh, yes, I know that,” you don’t look at it like that. I had a fun experience when I went to Hamburg in the summer. We went over to the Baltic Sea and were looking at the sunset.

One person was wondering about it. He said, “Come here, come here, look at the sunset.” I said, “No, I’ve seen it before.” That sort of thing doesn’t apply anymore, because you see these things with fresh eyes, and that is what makes life so enjoyable.

It’s not only that, but also the absence of fear or the absence of alienation. You recognize that what you’re experiencing is all part of who you are. The alienation has been taken out of your life, and suddenly you’re always on familiar ground, so to speak.

In the way I sometimes describe it, the world becomes an extension of your living room.

Rick: Nice.

Jurgen: You feel this familiar ground. There’s no otherness, in a sense, and that makes it really enjoyable.

Rick: In Sanskrit, there’s a saying that goes something like, “Vasudeva XXX,” which means, “The world is my family.”

Jurgen: Yes. It’s this familiarity that is so beautiful. I think rooted in this is the spiritual idea that we are all family, that we all belong together.

Rick: There’s an interesting paradox here, because a minute ago you were saying, “Well, everything is fresh and unique, like it’s the very first time,” and on the other hand there’s this familiarity: “The world is my family.” That’s an interesting juxtaposition.

Jurgen: Yeah. I think that is fed by the fact that we realize the essence.

Rick: Right.

Jurgen: But the essence in everything is also reinventing itself. It is always refreshed from the inside. The energy is fluid, so nothing is ever static.

We’re picking up on the core aspect of the essence of this energy. Of course, within it is a bliss aspect.

Rick: That’s right.

Jurgen: Not only do we see the beauty of it, but while we are observing the beauty, there’s also a blissful experience associated with it.

Rick: Nice.

Jurgen: So I always look at things this way: The world is basically covered in bliss, with bliss covered in appearance. At various points, as you walk through the world, bliss pours out.

The bliss is always there, and you cannot really escape it. You just have to pop it out. You can do that by observing somebody smiling in the supermarket, or through a conversation where you think, “Oh, that’s really beautiful.” Suddenly, you see the bliss underneath it, which makes this togetherness come about.

The world is basically covered in bliss, with bliss covered in appearance.

The surface is peeled away from the world, and you see what’s underneath it—the beauty that carries it, or the eternal beauty that has no destruction associated with it.

🛤️ Questions from viewers

Rick: There’s a question. A couple of people sent in questions. Here’s one from Katherine in Liverpool. She asks—and this relates to what you’re just saying, I think—”Have you ever seen anything appear in this dimension from another?”

I’m not sure exactly what she had in mind when she asked the question, but we might say that the bliss you’re just describing belongs to another dimension, and yet you’re saying that it becomes characteristic of this so-called dimension all the time.

Jurgen: Yes. I mean, this is basically the experience I mostly have. But I think she may be referring to [unclear] people—

Rick: Yes. Or an angel showing up, or maybe she was thinking of that kind of thing.

Jurgen: Yes. I haven’t personally experienced entities, because what I see is basically physical matter in its primary condition, in its primary state.

I’m a very practical, down-to-earth, reality-focused person, and I’m only really clairvoyant when I am out of my body.

Rick: So that’s interesting. I know people who are sort of clairvoyant in their body, so to speak. In other words, they see angels and subtle beings all the time as they walk through the supermarket or do anything. But in your case, it seems like you have to go there to see them, and when you’re here you don’t see them.

Jurgen: No, that’s right. I’m quite a coarse kind of person, rooted in this physical reality.

Rick: You’re a regular British soccer fan.

Jurgen: Yes, that’s right. So, no, that’s very much the case. But when I’m out of my body—

Rick: Yeah.

Jurgen: I become highly clairvoyant.

Rick: Do you feel a desire, or any movement in the direction of integrating it, such that you would be perceiving these other realms while you were functioning in this room?

Jurgen: I have no interest in it, really. It sounds absurd, on the basis of what we just discussed, but I have no real interest in out-of-body experiences, because I find this reality offers so much content, beauty, and fullness that I have no desire to reproduce it on another level.

The attraction has almost faded. The only time I have out-of-body experiences now is, for example, when a close relative or a friend dies, if there is a strong motivation, or if there is a call from a greater perspective—

For me to learn something. But as far as I’m concerned, it is basically not necessary to have out-of-body experiences.

Rick: Yes. So, in that case: “Done that, been there,” as they say.

Jurgen: Yes. I’m more addicted to reality, basically. I really enjoy being where I am and embracing it, even if it’s sometimes painful.

So, at the moment, I don’t know what’s going to happen, or whether there is a need for me to do further exploration. With my latest book, I did feel there was a need for education, but I have since found out that only a handful of people are interested.

So it’s not going to become widely known—that was the hope—that the millions of people who are stranded on the lower level could get a preview of what they can do in order to move faster through the lower levels and get a much more enjoyable life out of the [unclear]. That was one of the things I intended when writing it.

Rick: Here’s a question from my wife, Irene. She says that in Hindu scriptures there’s mention of lokas, or spheres, or sometimes realms, or even worlds. Various lokas, like Krishna-loka and whatever. Does Jurgen feel that this relates to his travels in any way?

Jurgen: Yeah. I mean, there are so many different realms that are created by the consensus or preference of people, where they gravitate around a certain place that has certain distinct characteristics.

There are tourist centers, which are described in my book. But there are also quite beautiful thought-worlds, or realms, where people are interested in a certain subject and expand it into a complete world or universe.

These may even have quite a tangible characteristic in color. It may be a bluish-tinted world, for example, where you can feel that there is a certain consensus, a certain interest.

There is an infinite variety of these types of lokas. The same applies on the negative levels. It’s very, very, very negative—[unclear sentence].

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” I believe that’s the quote.

All these different affinity groups, you could say.

Jurgen: Yes.

Rick: If you have a certain quality or characteristic that you’ve brought, that you’ve reinforced in your life, then you will—birds of a feather flock together—find your affinity group.

Jurgen: And I think that’s where you feed from. If you’re an artist and you’re interested in modern art, or in Cubism, you’re probably connected to the Cubist sort of city on the astral levels.

Rick: That’d be a weird ???

Jurgen: Inspiration from there. Or if you’re into certain types of music, then you probably feed from these thought forms on higher energy levels, and are enriched by them.

Rick: Here’s a question from Mark in Santa Clara, California: Do you have any intuition as to what binds consciousness to a particular body? Does some bodily identification have to remain for a particular incarnation to remain coherent?

Jurgen: Yeah, I think what keeps people fixated in certain conditions is basically that they haven’t dealt with their fixations properly. Is that what he means?

Rick: What he means is, well, the second part of his question makes more sense to me than the first part. Mark is welcome to send in a clarification, but does some bodily identification have to remain for a particular incarnation to remain coherent?

In other words, if you had no bodily identification whatsoever, how could you live? You would need to—how would you dress? How would you eat? How would you prevent yourself from walking into walls? There needs to be some sense that this is a body. I need to take care of this body. I need to feed it, and I don’t want to put my hand on the stove, and things like that.

Jurgen: Yes, I think that’s in your program. There’s a physical program, there’s an emotional program, there’s an intuitive program, and all these things create the organism which we call human.

The only difference is that if you are fully aware, you’re not identified with this aspect exclusively. You only see it as an aspect of the whole of who you are. You will nurture it. You will look after it. You will do your best to make it work properly.

So you take advantage of all the functions which are inherent in the biological structure of the body, and in the mental and emotional structure. You make sure it runs properly. So there’s no way you can run into a wall or something just because your consciousness is expanded and encompasses more than the physical mechanism.

You have an additional quality of higher, expanded awareness, where you see your physical entity as an operator that you maintain to the best of your ability.

🧘 Meditation and the path of embracing reality

Rick: Yeah, good. So we’ve been going on for quite a while, and there are so many interesting things in your books. Perhaps we could conclude by—I mean, it seems like your current emphasis has left behind a lot of the things that fascinated you when you were younger. You were just saying that out-of-body experiences don’t excite you that much anymore.

Here’s a quote from your book, where you say, “Meditation can take you far beyond any out-of-body state and be far more rewarding. Meditation can teach you that you are consciousness and everything else is an image, little more than a projection or an illusion. In our physical life, we only see the tip of the iceberg. Our greater reality is awe-inspiring, immense, magnificent. In comparison to what our true potentials are, as a species, we are little more than slug worms rising from the mud.”

Here you say, “At the moment, I am interested in the mechanics of the higher states of consciousness beyond the out-of-body state.” So it seems like out-of-body experiences were a tool for you, and you’ve pretty much relinquished them.

Since most people aren’t going to have the facility for out-of-body experiences that you’ve had—I never have. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever had one. I’ve had a couple of little things, but nothing much, even though I’ve been meditating for 48 years—what advice would you give people, spiritual seekers in general?

Would you advise them to meditate? If so, how would you encourage them to explore out-of-body experiences or astral travel, or any of that stuff? Somebody might just be starting out, or perhaps has been interested in this stuff for a while but feels like they haven’t really gotten too far yet. What direction would you point them in?

Jurgen: Personally, I’m a firm believer in reality as it presents itself to us, as it’s presented to us. I feel that the crux of meditation is to become aware of and embrace what is.

What you said earlier is true to a certain extent: Why do we want to seek something for its own sake unless it’s part of our path, unless it is given to us and there is a clear mandate that this is the way we should explore our individuality or our life and find our way to the greater consciousness?

I think the paths are as infinite as people are, so everybody has to find their own way. But to me, the primary thing that’s important is to find my way to the being state, to how it presents itself at this moment, and not exclude anything.

To me, meditation means accepting what is, warts and all, and finding the inner aspect as it presents itself, and finding a relationship to this inner aspect. I feel that this is the only way we can overcome all the different hardships and problems we have created for ourselves: to find the essence of the reality of how it presents itself and relate to it, rather than seeing it as something outside ourselves, pushing it to one side and saying, “Oh, that’s not for me. That’s not my problem.”

The crux of meditation is to become aware of and embrace what is.

That’s very much the way I see it. All through my life, I have always welcomed the idea of being shown the reality of things, because I always felt that it brings me closer to the truth. If I’m able to embrace reality rather than reject it, I feel like that is the way forward.

Rick: Here’s a question from Dan in London. He says: Do you feel that there are different consensus realities on higher levels that are associated with different religions, such as a reality associated with the teachings of Jesus or a different one with Krishna? I might add to this question and ask: Are some consensus realities closer to the truth than others?

Jurgen: Yeah, that is a big question, really. I have a lot of arguments, or discussions, with people about this. My personal feeling is that the moment we create an ideology or religion, we tend to remove ourselves from the original blank sheet, or the pure clarity aspect, which I suspect will always fail to be adequately expressed in words by a philosophy.

There may be people, philosophies, or religions that take this into account and say, “Okay, we have this belief, but in the end it comes down to the experience of reality, which supersedes what our philosophy is all about.” But religions rarely do that. They always want to put themselves at the center of a worldview, because people have a natural tendency to want to be identified with something. They want to have an identity.

The only way you can transcend that is by getting into a state of unity consciousness, or a much greater identity, which is clarity. That supersedes everything, and then you don’t have any problems. You don’t make any assumptions that one thing is bigger or better than another thing. You just see things the way they are.

Then you don’t have any desire to create a philosophy out of it, because in the end, you know very well that it boils down to your own experience.

A hopeful future for humanity

Rick: We better wrap it up pretty soon, because it’s getting dark over there. We’re going to be sitting in a dark place. So maybe here’s an interesting wrap-up topic, and you can riff on this a little bit.

In one of your books, I was reading about some experiences you had which gave you a vision of the future, of what the future of humanity might be. Maybe you could just give us a glimpse of your sense of that, and how certain you feel it is, or whether it’s just one possibility and it could really go the other way if we don’t play our cards right.

Jurgen: Yes, I think this was an experience I had on the morning of my retreat, or one of the mornings, when I suddenly had a clear impression of what our future may actually be. I saw it unfolding in a very, very positive way.

I saw that the technology we are already creating is going to largely help us out of the sinkhole. There are things in progress at the moment which will make it possible to create energy that is not dependent on massive installations, but energy that can be generated locally. That is something that’s already in existence.

My view of it, or the picture that I was confronted with, was not like an out-of-body experience, where I was physically there. It was more a knowingness that I could access. That knowingness pointed to a very bright, positive future.

It came in two parts. One was the next 100 years, when society was completely changed because the parameters had changed and awareness had changed. We are just at the beginning of such a change.

As you have mentioned several times in your talks, there’s an awakening taking place where we become more cognizant of our real identity. If this sort of awareness is rolled out in much the same way as the awareness that the Earth is a globe was rolled out over the decades, it will eventually be taken for granted.

Then the mindset will change, and people will harness their intellect and knowledge to bring the communal sense of our species more into the foreground and make us a better-functioning civilization.

That was a very strong picture, and I feel very positive about it. I feel that these things are happening. I didn’t see any stage of destruction or global catastrophe at all.

Rick: That’s good. So you don’t think that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that global warming might kill billions of people or some such thing? You think that’s just going to—obviously, you don’t think Donald Trump will be elected president. Things are just kind of—

Jurgen: I have to say, I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure, because especially with people like Donald Trump, he seems to be personifying the ultimate ego. It may just be that we need to be confronted with an external representation of our ego before we actually see the light.

That seems to be the case. The philosophy is, “Make Donald Trump great again,” so we can see our ego more clearly. Who knows what way we try to find in order to see the light? I have no idea.

The danger of making any predictions of any sort is that we become complacent and then say, “Oh, well, everything is going to be fine.” I don’t think that is the case.

As I said earlier, in a metaphor, if a plant knows we are pouring acid on it, it may quickly die. That applies to everything we do. We’ve got to be vigilant, we have to be alert, and we have to nurture growth in a very careful, positive way.

Rick: The predictions aren’t certainties. They’re possibilities.

Jurgen: Yes, yes. That’s how I would say it.

Closing remarks

Rick: All right, well, great. There are so many more things we could talk about, but we’re entering into record-interview-length territory at this point. We should probably wrap it up.

Thank you so much for this conversation. I’ve really appreciated it, and I’ve appreciated getting to know you a little bit. I like these sorts of visions-of-possibilities discussions, as opposed to people who are saying, “Well, it’s only this far.” It’s like, “Yes, but it’s this and.”

I really appreciate your perspective in that way. It’s obviously based in experience. You’re not just sitting there philosophizing and speculating.

Jurgen: No, no, I try to stay away from that. It’s got to be grounded somewhere.

Rick: Yeah. So, as always, I’ll be creating a page on BATGAP for this interview and putting some biographical information, links to your website, links to your books, and anything else that you’ve asked me to link to. So people who are listening to this can go to that page and follow those links.

So thank you very much, Jurgen, and thanks to those who have been listening or watching. And, you know, the usual things I say at the end: check out the website and all the different menus, past interviews, future interviews, the donate button, and all that. Yeah, I’ve said it many times, so you know how to do that.

So thanks a lot, and we’ll see you all next time.

Jurgen: Thanks. Thanks, Rick.

Rick: You’re very welcome.