Jurgen Ziewe is bringing Virtual Reality to the Spiritual Experience |465|

Jurgen Ziewe is bringing virtual reality technology to his experiences as an out of body traveler.

photo by: Skeptiko

[Clip 00:00:00 – 00:00:19]

That’s from the movie The Shack, which does a pretty good job of exploring the interplay between, consensus reality and the impossible to understand extended reality that seems to pop up now and then. It’s a topic that I explored with the extraordinary astral traveler, Jurgen Ziewe. Here are a couple of clips. 

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:00:51] I was at that time painting taught by a Vienna surrealist, that went on really well. But than one night I had an extreme experience, like a poltergeist thing, I had this picture of a demon on my easel and it fell off, and not only that, but an ashtray which was next to it was catapulted across the room. At that time I just didn’t believe in anything supernatural and anything like that was totally out of my realm.

I stood at the shore of an ocean and the waves crashing in towards me were made out of light, and each light, each wave that came to me was a revelation, was offering a higher state of consciousness. And all time this was happening, I was in a state of total ecstasy. And every time a new wave came crushing in on me there was another revelation, not just a revelation, but an even higher state of consciousness.   [box]

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Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:13] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics.

As you know, this show is primarily about consciousness and what I like to call extended consciousness, that is all that strange but impossible to deny stuff that seems to be happening beyond space and time in these metaphysical realms. And I’m really keen on people who are kind undaunted in their effort to enter into those realms and try and bring them back and bring them down to a level of, if not science, at least a pre-scientific deeper understanding of them. And that’s one thing I’ve always thought is so super impressive about the work of today’s guest Jurgen Ziewe.

Jurgen was on the show a couple of years ago and then I’ve begun this kind of intensive investigation into evil, not for evil’s sake, but maybe as this lens to maybe giving us a different understanding of these extended consciousness realms. And there I am on the Skeptiko forum and I’m kind of babbling on and people are like, “You have to talk to Jurgen. Go back to Jurgen, he has the most extensive and well-documented exploration through his out-of-body experiences, into these realms and has really tried to catalog them.” And I was like, I hit myself on the head, I was like, of course, this guy really has the goods.

So a couple more things about Jurgen that you’re going to want to know. He has some amazing books out, Multidimensional Man, Vistas of Infinity, The Ten Minute Moment. Please go and check those out, they’re amazing. He also has an incredible website, Multidimensional Man, where he features all sorts of interviews that he’s done in the past and other amazing stuff. 

And then as |I was talking to Jurgen before this interview, and he saw some of the questions in the places I was going, he alerted me to the fact that he has this really great, and I hate to just kind of be pumping all this stuff up, but it’s fantastic. I haven’t even had a chance to watch all of these because it’s been a super busy week for me, but I’m going to watch every single one of them in this multi-part series of Afterlife Answers. And again, it’s Jurgen sharing what he’s learned from these extended realms.

So, this is a real treat. This is truly one of the pioneers and one of the most, I think, important explorers, I want to say researchers, because in so many ways he is, but we’ll reserve that word for a careful scientific kind of way, but explorers and documenters of extended consciousness, which is really where all the action is.

Jurgen, sorry for going on and on. Thank you so much for coming on and joining me.  

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:05:23] Thank you. It’s nice to see you again Alex. It’s good to talk to you. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:28] So folks who are jumping into this, take a big step back for the uninitiated. Can you tell folks a little bit about… because there’s so much to you man. I left out an amazing artist, just an amazing artist, a commercial artist, but now moved into doing other just fantastic works that anyone would look at and say, “Wow, that’s really great stuff.”

So please fill in the bio there, Jurgen tell people what you’re about, how this came to be and what is going on and your collective body of work.

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:06:02] Yeah, it started off really when I was in my early 20s, when I went s, late 60s. As you do, when you’re an art student you experiment with all kinds of substances, one of them was LSD. At that time it was still legal, so there was no fear attached to it.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:34] Other than the normal fear that one…

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:06:36] Just the normal fear that comes as an experience. But that was really an event which catapulted me, after about a year or so, into a deep state of depression. So in order to get out of it somebody suggested to take up meditation. So I enrolled on a course of TM and of course the depression went almost magically after about three months. And then I became very curiously interested in the phenomenon of meditation. I started reading up all the books that were written about it. 

So I started embarking on this, which was a very fashionable pursuit in those days, because there was a hippy movement going to India, and I embarked on this adventure of meditation. I really wanted to know the essence of it. So I even meditated for about five or six hours a day at one stage and nothing really happened, except I got into some quite dark areas, to the point that I started painting very dark pictures.

So what happened, I tapped into my unconscious and out came these demonic creatures. I was at that time painting, taught by a Vienna surrealist, that went on really well, but then one night I had an extreme experience, like a poltergeist thing. I had this picture of a demon on my easel and it fell off and not only that, but an ashtray which was next to it was catapulted across the room. And at that time I just didn’t believe in anything supernatural, and anything like that was totally out of my realm. But I was totally fearful. So I thought I’d give this whole thing up, it wasn’t getting me anywhere and it’s negative and I didn’t like it.

So I just returned to normal life, but then six months later or so, a fair time later, I had a spontaneous peak experience, at first when I was eating breakfast, eating a sandwich, I lost my connection with my hands and my breakfast. And before long I was in a completely different state of consciousness.

I wrote about it in my first book and I’ve reported about it, but this totally changed my life, not only did I experience for the first time in my life that I wasn’t the body, but I also noticed that there’s no such thing as me, as I understood myself. For about three weeks I was walking around in a space which was myself, and then gradually I returned but my life wasn’t the same. 

On top of that something was triggered, a few months later I started having lucid dreams and then I had full-blown out-of-body experiences. Again, if anybody would have talked to me about it before I would have just told them they were superstitious or lunatics. 

So I didn’t know what had happened and then I started investigating into it and I found out there is such a phenomenon of out-of-body experiences. So it started from there. I then became curious and followed it up.

And what followed after that was some 14, nearly 15 years of inner experiences which unfolded as I kept meditating, as I got deeper into it and it’s still unfolding. When I wrote my book The Ten Minute Moment in 2013, that for me was another breakthrough experience because at that time I was in a sort of solitary retreat in the Scottish mountains. I was experiencing what I can only describe as a unity consciousness, and after that I couldn’t go back to my old narrow self again. The way I describe it is as if a cage made out of frosted glass had fallen to pieces and I couldn’t put it back together again to see the things the way they were.

So after that I wrote my book Multidimensional Man, which was basically chronicling all of my out-of-body experiences I had right from the beginning and I just wanted to keep a record of it and make sense. 

And then the book came out purely by chance because my daughter followed the manuscripts, my diaries and she became curious, she wanted to read them. She said, “I can’t read your writing, can you type it all out for me.” And I was curious because I hadn’t looked at them for a long time, so I started typing them out and sure enough out of it came a book and that was the beginning.

And then in 2013 I wrote The Ten Minute Moment and in 2015 I wrote the second out-of-body book Vistas of Infinity. Well that followed on from 2008 to 2015, seven years of very, very intense experiences. Altogether, if I add up all the time and the hours I spent, 60 hours in alternative realities, 60 hours which is longer than most people would spend when they have a near-death experience also. So I had plenty of opportunity to actually do an in-depth investigation and research, and that was all combined in Vistas of Infinity.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:26] There are so many interesting parts of that story I just have a million questions right there. But let me start with a couple of those, one as we we’re chatting about just a second before I hit the record button. I think the kind of intersection of you as a visual artist and then as an experiencer of this extended out-of-body realm kind of thing is super interesting. You mentioned as we began to roll tape that you’re really interested in virtual reality right now, and you kind of have the green screen image, but you’re kind of immersing yourself in different technological realities, which is something, we’ll leave that to maybe the end to talk about.

But I’m interested in what you understand to be, to me, kind of a strange intersection between visual artist and the way that your chronicled this, like an accountant or like a bookkeeper, to go in and make these intensely detailed records. And anyone who’s tried to keep even want a dream journal, you know, that’s a hard process to stay on top of, and you did this for years and years. Have you given any thought to what drove you and how that relates to this kind of visual artist sensibility that you have? Is there anything there that’s interesting to you?

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:14:55] Yeah, the thing is, of course I’ve been always a very highly visual person and I connect to events or thoughts, I see them in highly visual way. Right from when I was a child and when I started learning to read and write, I started writing little stories about the things I actually experienced inside, inside myself. And I remember travelling through space and visiting other planets and of course, the visual stimulus was absolutely overwhelming, and I was sort of fortunate enough that I could draw.

So initially when I first started trying to document these experiences visually I couldn’t really think of how you could possibly represent this. So I thought watercolor was probably the best medium because watercolor has a luminosity which you can easily represent the atmosphere, like the lights. So I was drawn to watercolor for a long period, I tried to pain in watercolor, but they were mostly abstract because there was no way I could reproduce the visual abundance which I experienced just with a few brush strokes. But out of the watercolor emerged a few shapes and things, so I focused in on these.

Then I started doing improvisational paintings. Basically being in the moment and doing abstract work and occasionally out of the abstract paintings I did, visions emerged trigged by the color and the energy. And I suddenly was drawn into a completely different state of consciousness which was aided by the fact that the improvisational paintings happened totally in the here and now. So there was no agenda, no plan of doing that. And this here now gateway opened me up to enter into completely different kinds of realities.

And then one painting in particular in 1980, when I got up in the morning to meditate, I looked at a painting I did the previous day, it was completely abstract, but suddenly my vision was drawn behind the brushstrokes and I closed my eye and I had probably one of the most intensive out-of-body experiences which probably lasted a couple of hours. 

But before then, years before then I met a Master, a Chinese guy who taught me basically, guided me. And you have to bear in mind, I never had a teacher in meditation, I never went down this route, but I had this Chinese Master  who gave me these incredible riddles to solve and at one stage he would communicate with me by symbolism and he would give me these symbols. And the symbols had the effect of raising my awareness and taking me into a different state of consciousness. 

It’s very difficult to describe but I sometimes think of crop circles, what do they mean? I think there is something from a higher dimensional level which cannot be communicated in human language, in words. And the effect of these symbols was that I made a direct link to a state of consciousness which went beyond the human mind, this is how I saw it.

And then, when I looked at this painting I was doing, I closed my eyes, I mediated, I had the most tremendous out-of-body experience and in this out-of-body experience I went through all the different levels of consciousness, through the astral level, the lower mind, right through the higher mind. I saw things which absolutely I could never experience and had never seen before, I could see thoughts had shapes and form had sound, had animation. Abstract swords were no longer abstract, they had incredible fascinating shapes, which are difficult to describe. But the moment I looked at these swords I could understand a whole philosophy which was behind these swords, which would have taken days to unravel.

So the symbols which this Chinese Master sent me was a gateway into this super-dimensional level which allowed me to expand into a way of spirit or thinking or a state of mind which went totally beyond our human limited way of reasoning. And this was an absolute revelation, I wrote about it in Multidimensional Man, but this was not the end.

And then my Master came to me again and then he took me beyond this dimension of the mind…

Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:17] Yes. Good. When you say your master came to you in this, uh, extended realm master or 

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:21:23] yes.

Yes, he was, this is the thing boss. He was only a presence. He didn’t have a physical. But I could hear him. I could be communicated by our thoughts. He had a presence and he also community communicated this sort of sense of humor as we were exploring. And then he, then I went into this state of, I suppose, samadhi, you know, I suddenly found, I found myself in a.

The way I described it for us. I stood at the shore of an ocean and the waves crashing in towards me were made out of light and each light, each wave that came to me was a, was a revelation, was offering a highest, the state of consciousness. And when I thought, Oh, and all the time, this was happening, I was in a state of total ecstasy.

And every time a new wave came crushing in on me, there was another revelation, not just a revelation, but an even higher state of consciousness. And this went on and on and, and, uh, The ecstasy in itself for us was not just a feeling. The ecstasy in itself was a revelation of a different kind, you know? So, so this is so difficult to describe because it’s not something that can be easily processed.

So the mind, because it’s totally beyond, um, you know, what one kitten normally sort of make sense of. But the thing was, I came out of this. And I think I only had about three experiences like this in my whole life bitch all have the same sort of intensity. The first one I mentioned earlier, um, you know, after having my son and the second one in 2008 and the third one in, in Scotland when I was on the retreat.

And each time these happen, um, you know, you, you get to a new state and of course along the way, different, different, um, things that happened, you know, um, jumps the way value is sort of opening save up to other insights, you know, and I think my. My focus on my, in a life, my artistic focus, going back to what you just said, it’s very much to do with going beyond traditional reasoning thinking is just going beyond that where language is no longer, the appropriate means of embracing the experience, you know, and I think that’s where the two things.

Joined. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:24:40] Oh, that’s, that’s really, really fascinating on so many levels. You know, the, the one question, I guess, I, or area I wanted. Dig into a little bit, is this idea of mapping, which you’ve really tried to do this all like mapping these standard realms and the way you do that is really important because we need that.

And then the second is the meaning part. And it seems to me like you’re careful about separating those two to a certain extent, as opposed to people who jump into. The meaning part, you know, like a lot of my investigation up to this point has been in the near death experience. And one of the reasons I like the near death experience is we can ground ourselves in some science there.

In some respects, we have to say it’s very faulty science because it’s a science on the idea that consciousness doesn’t even exist. But even in falsifying that. Premise falsifying that paradigm. It’s a huge step forward. So what the near death experience does, is it. Follows it from adjust boots up or bottom up way of saying, okay, what is, what more the vitals of that person before they had their cardiac arrest?

How did we measure it afterwards? And then what were they able to retrieve and Chronicle dadada? I like. The science of that. And I would even suggest that in the last 10 years, almost more than any, I can think of that science has changed the dialogue in some fundamental ways that we don’t even realize around consciousness that materialistic consciousness is illusion stuff.

It just. Does it hold up and even the people who are spinning it out there, you can see that. Yeah. Kind of like know that it isn’t going to work. I kind of think, I shouldn’t say, I think I’m wondering, and I’m hopeful that we can make just that similar kind of step with these extended consciousness realms.

And I think you have such a key role to play in that. So it’s not a matter of. I want to immediately as everybody does, she wouldn’t mean what did that demon mean and why did it fly off the thing? And is that real or co-create is over reality. What about, and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but I want to take a step back and say, how would we begin to.

In the best way possible, just start mapping these realms in a way that might be understandable and useful to us. Does, does that make sense? What I’m 

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:27:26] yeah, I’m fascinated by science and I’m a real bit of a science OnDeck and right from the beginning, I thought the best way to deal with these experiences is to be as factual as I can.

Possibly can and just record it. And ever since I saw myself as a reporter, rather than a Theo Titian or somebody who can make sense of it because they are. Lot more people better qualified to, to evaluate or the data. I see what I’m producing is basically data reports, you know, and, and. There were some people who have taken it as such and there were scientists and looking at it from purely from the evidential, the report aspect of it.

I tried to, um, in my books, I try to find. Uh, some sense or come to some explanation in it, but it never really quite work because, uh, I’m an artist, you know, I did, um, I did meet Tom Campbell. Um, he has built his own model of reality. He’s much better equipped to do that, but then I look at all these models in the end, it comes always back to.

We just want to have a narrative. We want to make sense of it. Okay. And we want the explanation. We have always done that. We went like the Greeks, they invented their gods to make sense of reality, and we just still want to do that. But the difficulty is. The moment we dress it into, into this duality of words.

We inevitably leave an aspect out, which is beyond it and which cannot be easily explained. And the moment we do that, we start limiting these and, and I found reality is a very dynamic process. The moment, the moment you’re trying to catch it. It’s like herding cats. You know, the moment you, you think, ah, I’ve got it all under control.

Now that is how I day is a religion is for, you know, 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:30:00] well, one, one possible explanation for that in very simple terms is that we are in the wrong dimension to do that. Just slowly hit you was just, you know, I kind of set up that I wasn’t going to do this, but I am going to do this. Kind of just ask you the question and then.

Based on your experience, what do you think, do you think. This is because this is like, so commonly expressed, right? The nearby, what you just said. So take your experience, which is an out of body experience, which is different. And then a near death experience. We don’t know in what way it’s different, but we accept going in that it’s different cause you weren’t dead at the very least from a physiological standpoint.

And then we start seeing these similarities like Tilly or over and over again is a near death experience. We’ll come back. And these are people that are truly dead. I always mentioned this because people get hung up on this and go, Oh, you don’t realize they weren’t really dead. It’s like really? I talked to dr.

Sam Parnia, the leading. Resuscitation expert in the world and also a near death experience. Or, and he’ll tell you, no, these people were more dead than most accounts we have because we had them in a hospital and we know they’re the physical condition they were in, but I digress only slightly people come back from their near death experience.

And they say, essentially what you just said, you’re again, they say, I knew. Everything, no sooner would a question enter my mind that I knew it, and I knew it more completely than I could’ve even asked it, but don’t ask me to express it now, because from this realm, this dimension I can’t. And is that a hint that, you know, always going to be kind of handicap, maybe severely in trying to explore that from this dimension.

Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:31:52] Yeah. So I think that’s a, that’s a really big problem. That’s fine. I’m very keen, um, to use technology really, to, to grade, uh, to find a stimulus for people to have their own experience. Really the thing is, for example, you need to have the experience because, um, even skeptics who had the near death experience.

You know, they would never have believed it before what they experienced. And there are a number of numerous experiences who are skeptics and they’ve, uh, and change people. And a lot of the things that I have experienced are very similar to Natus experiences, but I think because I’ve been able to. Um, to focus on different strata of consciousness deliberately, rather than being catapulted into an out of body state, like a near death experience, I was able to focus my awareness quite deliberately, knowing exactly what has happened to me.

I could go into a higher States of consciousness and I could go down into the lowest state of consciousness and, and map everything out. Without being fearful that I have died or not, you know? And so there’s a big difference in that, but, but then a lot similar similarities, you know? So, so, um, yeah, I mean, from a, from a science point of view, it’s so difficult.

So what I was thinking now, I was hoping I can use virtual reality to create. Um, a tool that you may allow people to trigger, um, an artist’s state of consciousness, you know, and, and I was encouraged when I first came across virtual reality. In 2014, I created a. A kind of ton of experience, which is very often reported.

And I try to combine the tunnel experience with the sounds, which, uh, also going into a certain place. It was in the body, which. You don’t have certain creates a certain stimulus and then being SU surrounded in this virtual experience rather than seeing it on a flat screen or just listening to it. This extensive, um, bombardment of stimuli, uh, hopefully creates a trigger to an innocent ascetic.

A reality. Now, the interesting thing was after I really released the first, uh, app of this tunnel experience. I’ve also needed developers, um, group they’re all the techies hung out to work with virtual reality, Devin. No, nobody was interested in any spiritual experiences or anything. So I released this in the tech group and soon enough, I think there were about.

3000 downloads in the end. And I had some interesting comments. Some people said it felt like a near death experience. They felt, this is how it must feel if you die. You know, people said, Oh, I lost total sense of time. You know, because the experience is such, it takes you out of the linear times stream.

You have no bearings. We don’t know what’s beyond it. You’re just in a tunnel, literally in a tunnel innovation. And, and so I’ve taken this on and this morning I completed the second experience, which of course is based, based on everything I’ve done before. And I played it to my daughter who is a yoga teacher.

Okay. I I’ve wanted to ever first sort of impression. And she actually reported, there was certain things happening inside her body, especially in the heart chakra. She knows all about these different energy centers. And, and she said she felt a very powerful connection, which he bitch was like a forgotten memory, you know?

She didn’t even know she had and she connected to an archetype. And I think that is really important. If we can create tools, which, uh, allow us to create a connection to our archetypes and the archetypes become activated and take over, then we have an experience and, and if we can make this experience, um, You know, independent of let’s say drugs.

So any, any other sort of methods, then we can possibly give a large, in a large enough number of people, the tools to report on these experiences they have and find a consensus where scientists can say, Oh, Statistically 75% have reported so such and such by using this tool that you open that consciousness and, and amongst these people, so many people experienced the light phenomenon and other things.

So they’ve got a much broader base. To create a science based, the science on which is based on statistics. And these statistics is like a lot of people reporting the same phenomena in nature. Then enough people report the same phenomenon and other science feel accepted as a gift, you know, and they pulled out illusion, delusions and things like that.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:38:15] Yeah. That’s that’s terrific. And what a, what an interesting place to imagine that we might get very encouraging what, let me take this in a kind of another direction and I. Kind of tipped my hand at the beginning of where I’m going. And as I’ve gone down this thing of why evil matters, which is my book, no one quite gets it.

They’re always kind of, they want, they get stuck on evil and that’s like, it’s not, I’m not talking about evil. I don’t care about evil. I’m all about the opposite of evil. That is without doubt without having to define it. But what I think it does. Is, it is a lens, another lens into this extended realm that if we are going to do the kind of mapping that you’re talking about in the broadest sense, and I love the way you brought science into it, where, you know, I get the sense that you.

Have gained knowledge that informs your life on a daily basis. And I can see like you’re a family person and the love I can see in your face. When you talk about your daughter, you know, that is what you’re about. It, it just comes through. So. I go to evil just because I think we have to go there. Like one of the interviews I have in my book is with a woman named Annika Lucas, and I connected with arnica.

Cause she’s into yoga. I’m super into yoga. Like your daughter have been for the longest time. And Annika is very cool yoga teacher. Who’s used it to really transform her life after some unbelievable trauma when she was a young child. And that trauma was that at six years old in Belgium, she was sold by her mother into a satanic ritual abuse cult.

And this is the cult that I always mentioned this, you know, if you’re interested or want to fact check this, look in the nineties, this cult was all over the news in Belgium because it went to the highest levels of government throughout Europe. And they were going to, you know, drain the swamp, get these guys and all the rest of that and what they were doing to, for purposes of our discussion, they were doing the worst of the worst, but what they were doing was.

Trying to mess with these kids consciousness, trying to destroy their consciousness in a way that I later learned the reason why they do try and promote disassociative identity disorder and why they did it in the MK ultra program. And I talked to a clinical psychologist named bear talk. Named dr. Tom Zinzer.

Who’s worked with, uh, patients for a long time and he’s found a similar result in his communications with the extended realm. And here’s, what’s very dark, but needs to be put on the table is. These folks are trying to connect with extended realms. We can only assume from what you’re saying, that these are very dark, low realms.

Uh, but that is part of this game. Apparently this is part of this terrain and I just. I want to know if you have any insights into that, that part of it. I don’t want to steer into the abyss. I don’t want to dwell on it or talk about these horrific, the crimes, which we all know exist. I want to try and understand it from an extended consciousness realm that you’ve explored.

Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:41:55] Yes, I have my own set of encounters. This is what can only be described as will either, you know, uh, during these out of body experiences. But, um, I always found it is identification gone wrong. People who identify. First of all, there’s no way that you can go into a higher dimensional level if you are holding on to an identification, you know, to kind of selfishness or self interest, you know, because that just doesn’t work because it’s like I’m going into a hot air balloon, uh, which is still tied to the ground.

You just cannot. Get out of this level of consciousness. My, my encounter with Eva came when I, you know, after these atrocities happened, nine 11 month is suicide for me. I was dead keen to find out how do these people believes they can go into paradise when they commit these. Unspeakable crimes. And, and so one day I was taking, I would say out of body experience and, and I was taken into a very dark red and it looked like a, sort of a Victorian industrial wasteland.

It was very dark. The ground was covered in suit and debris and the horizon. The sky was. Black with red flashes of lighting, big smoke belong. It was like a picture out of Dante’s Inferno, the proverbial negative picture of hair. And I started God, man, where have I been landed here? No, you have to bear in mind that I’m always in, in this PNL consciousness.

Okay. I’m not identified in the sense, so. So I still have the objective aspect viewing these things and I’ve encountered some very dark things. There’s Oh, losing an ounce of my integrity or my connection to my higher self, you know, but then I was led into this pit where, um, there were piles of human bodies and out of these pints, there was a guy which I instantly.

Identified as a suicide bomber was trying to disentangle himself from these materialized thought forms of his victims. And whenever he tried to pray to Allah to relieve him of this pain, any of us in, and it was, it was a real physical pain and mental pain. He, he was confronted this the reality. Of his situation that he cannot undo what he has done.

So he was in a feedback loop. Okay. And this, uh, situation he couldn’t get out of. And then that places like that. And then this guy came to me, a Muslim guy. Was a turban and he was quite dirty from all the sword. And he said, please, please help these people. You know, he was trying to help them, but he was as if I was trying to help them, he was attacked by other people there, roaming around in this area.

And, um, and I think what, what is happening inevitably is. Evil is an absence of awareness. And because of this absence of awareness, the focus is on things they can identify with and make sense of. So they’re continuously looking for some form of gratification, which enhances. Uh, identification, this bitch was whatever they’ve grown fond of.

So therefore I have a truck in this realm of identification and also, um, there’s no end to it. When you think you’ve reached the end, there’s always another level where you can go even a little bit, you know, a little bit darker. And it’s almost as if it’s part of, of consciousness itself, part of consciousness, wanting to explore, wanting to find out, you know, and at any cost almost.

And I think the problem is that people, instead of finding out. The string that connects them to the core consciousness, to that core identity. They’re entangled with strengths of identity, focused on other things which provide temporary gratification. You know, 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:47:31] , can I bounce something off you?

Uh, this is kind of another model, but what you were just saying there in the strings thing kind of ties this, let me just bounce it off. You see what you think? I think we are beings of light beings of connection with this infinite divine intelligence. Forgive me if those words kind of trigger people one way or another.

Let’s just say that’s the model and. What we’re really identifying with when we think of evil. And when we think of addictive behavior or when we think of really unhealthy behavior is a block good of that energy. And sometimes when that energy becomes blocked, we just need, we so intensely want to get it out, that we will take any path of getting it out.

And sometimes we connect that with. Energy from other places that are benevolent and dark and are stuck in that same pattern. And actually identify with that pattern of blockage that we have. And this is not my model personal experience. I’m trying to, I guess, recap and condense what I’ve heard from a couple of different people.

But in particular, what I heard from dr. Tom’s Windsor, who was this clinical psychologist, which for 15 years, we worked with people in deep, deep hypnotherapy under, uh, uh, psychologically. Rich rigorous clinical model, but he’ll be the first one to tell you, he went completely off reservation that he had the assistance of a spirit guide who was instructing him in how to help these people.

And the diagnosis was that kind of like you’re talking about on the sandbags, on the air balloon. The ego States that they had created sometimes very innocently as a child, you know, afraid and then, you know, develop that little kind of wrinkle in the consciousness that kind of becomes a little bit of this traumatized individual.

And then in sometimes for some people it’s a lot worse or it’s just a mile, I need to be the protector I need, you know, all these different. Shadows to put it in kind of young in terms, you know, all these different ego States that we create, that we haven’t fully resolved become blockages of energy. And, but here’s the key thing that he said that I guess I want to get your opinion on just straight away.

He suggested a certain science to that in that those. Ego States if they become developed. And if they are connected to a negative energy field can actually be entry points for entities that are stuck on these lower levels that want to connect with this level. And that can create a lot of, you know, Pretty unhealthy bad stuff for people.

And we could go in and Chronicle that. And here, I’m not talking about the worst of the worst. I’m just talking about this as being widely, widely reported. And I think misunderstood in terms of the role that might these other entities that we don’t fully even understand. Might be playing. Does it, does any of that, uh, zing that fit at all with what you, your understanding of things?

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:51:07] Yes, very much so. I mean, um, what I found out is that the, these negative entities of which there are many, if you get to a certain level, a dementia level, you know, um, they, they can only connect to you. If you have a similar spot inside, you. You know, they can unchain too, if you don’t have the, any of these spots, they’re totally helpless.

For example, when I went into this, uh, DACA ran, but suicide almost where there were also some, some, um, ISIS fighters, people. There’s machine guns and things, you know, running around, looking for enemy is finding them and in, in the form of their thought forms, you know, uh, and they looked very real to them.

And then they, they tried to attack me and shoot me with machine guns. But as soon as it trained the machine gun on me, the bullets sort of plopped out of the. No sir. And fell to the ground. There was nothing they could hang on to. And, and, and that is the thing. So they continuously looking for, um, for a victim who has got these sort of dark aspects was in them or compatriots, you know, they can.

They can identify as an enemy. So they’re keeping themselves to themselves very much. And, um, I had some interesting experiences for, um, there was a woman VR report in my book. She died of a heroin overdose and before she died, she had. A very, very negative life. She was in a dependency situation. She was really badly treated and she was in a very dark place.

And when I saw her, she looked like a zombie, you know, she was diseased on this low. It was very dark and she, um, I could immediately see where she came from because then I’m. In this state I have, um, I’ve got access to, to the people, you know, to the knowledge for the sort of combined this is, I, I immediately get a sort of, um, information download what had happened to, uh, anyway, I then, um, I felt really sorry for her.

So I went up to her and I, I asked her whether she knew that. That she was dead and she’s solid. She was just in a bad dream, you know? And I said, no, sorry, you’re dead. You know? And she started crying and she, um, she was in a terrible state. So I put my arm around and I started talking to her and the gradually Volk kept walking.

And as we, as I was talking, she had a skin sort of cleared up. She became better. The atmosphere became lighter. It was like morning. Uh, and then we ended up in a park there’s green grass and trees, and she was completely. Restored to a normal itself, by the time we arrived there. So, so this is sort of identification is broken.

We can get, we can start part of this, uh, role playing we have adopted, or this, this habit we have entered into, you know, we have been conditioned into. And when that happens, of course, it becomes very quickly, very clear that we are in a much better. More powerful state, you know, and inevitably the people I met on the lower level when a very narrow, a narrow bandwidth of, of their mind, and they felt they may have felt very powerful because a lot of people under that control of their dream, but they were in a very narrow bandwidth of, uh, freedom.

You know, they were very limited. And the moment this. It’s peers, the moment they show signs of a need of wanting to break out that can be used as an anchor for anybody who is sort of coming along and gradually during the amount of it. And I gave an example in my book, this is of infinity of one of these rescue missions, you know, so I don’t know whether that answers any, any of your.

Points you just made earlier. 

Alex Tsakiris: [00:56:06] It does, incredibly powerful. Hey, a couple of big picture questions. I think we can assume the answer here, but I don’t want to assume, I want to hear your take. Hierarchy of consciousness, again, it’s just baffling to me that we live in this super-scientific age where biological robot, meaningless universe meme still carries the day. If you’re an academia, they completely deny it. 

But let’s get past that because we are past that, and then let’s even embrace the idea as we have in this interview that there are these extended consciousness realms. If we draw a big circle around all that, does there seem to be a hierarchy to it? And the trigger word that we don’t want to say is God, because if there is a hierarchy that kind of suggests that. Or is it just kind of this blob of consciousness that doesn’t really have, we couldn’t really attach any kind of hierarchical kind of structure to it?

Jurgen Ziewe: [00:57:19] Yeah. I have to say, I never really followed a word for my experiences of higher consciousness. You know, even though when I faced this incredible light as I sat on the ocean, the thought never occurred to me to use the word God. 

I had an experience when I wrote The Ten Minute Moment. I meditated and I suddenly was gripped by an intense fear, and the fear was that I was being dissolved and not only lose my ego but lose everything, my existence. And I felt if I go one step further there will be God, and whatever this is it will just obliterate me. So this fear started developing within me, and that was the only time I felt there must be God. But the funny thing was, I spent the rest of the day hunting for me ego, trying to find some form of identity I could feel comfortable with. I didn’t want to go anywhere near, I’d spent all my life looking for this big thing, looking for God and now he is waiting in the wings and I got scared and ran a mile. The interesting things was, of course, it was all in my mind. 

And the thing was, the next day, I went to sleep, I finally calmed down, I went to sleep, I had some illuminating dreams. And the next morning I woke up and I had this sort of ten minute moment experience. Again, there was no way I could find a word for it, but the idea of the hierarchy, the feeling of a hierarchy has always evaded me because there’s only being, and that’s all I can come up with. It’s just pure and simple being, and it’s an “it-ness” and I can’t find a name for it other than the reality that I am. And it’s everywhere. I can look at this glass of water and it’s just confirmation that it is. And that’s only ever how far I’ve got to that.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:00:15] That’s awesome, and I don’t want to pull you into saying stuff beyond that. I will share with you a story that from a recent interview I had that gets at this same thing a different way.

I was interviewing this really wonderful guy, English guy, I was entering this really wonderful guy, English guy, David Ditchfield, and he had this incredible… He’s also an artist, which is part of his story. He has this incredible near-death experience where he’s pulled under a commuter train, he’s going to kiss his girlfriend, the door closes on his jacket, like everyone’s worst fear, and he’s dragged under this train and he dies, and he has this incredible experience.

No artistic talent before that, now he draws these huge, huge, largescale paintings, but that’s kind of a side story. Because David comes back, and he understands his experience as being a very Christian experience and seeing Jesus and seeing Jesus creating universes and stuff like that. And I said, “David, I’m totally fine that you had an experience with Christ consciousness,” he goes, “No, no, don’t say Christ consciousness, it was Jesus,” you know, like the son of God kind of thing. And I said, “David, here’s what I’ve learned studying near-death experiences, is that one, when people study on the cross culture, across time, a lot of these religious figures go away. But more significantly from a meaning standpoint David, when I talk to people that have had multiple near-death experiences, they often tell me in the first experience they do experience Jesus and they experience all that wonderfulness of Christ consciousness. But in subsequent experiences it goes deeper, it doesn’t contradict their initial experience, but they get the sense that there is more beyond that, that there are deeper and higher forms of experience.”

Again, to me that’s a hierarchical language and David’s response was to go, “Absolutely, I do feel that that is true.” There’s a slight contradiction in how he’s thinking about it, but who am I to pick apart what his experience is.

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:02:28] Yeah. It’s a really interesting story. I can synthesize with that because a friend of mine and I, we went in 2017 to Greece, we wanted to go on a kind of pilgrimage to revisit the ancient sites, Delphi Oracle, and we ended up in Mount Athos. And that is a story I could write a whole book about because I’m not a Christian, my father was an atheist, my mother was a Christian, but I wasn’t brought up as a Christian as a kind of belief. 

So we went into this monastery, we didn’t have any bookings and it was a bit of an adventure where we ended up. But I made friends with a monk and we had the most fascinating conversation. And during the conversation he said to me, “Why don’t you come to one of these chapels. Normally people are not allowed into them, they’re only for ordained monks, but I think I’ll make an exception because it’s a very interesting conversation.” And I made quite clear to him that I’m not a Christian, that I’ve never been taken to it. The only thing I like is the early Christian art. He said, “Come with me, I’ll show you some of these icons.” 

So he took me into this chapel, and this is absolutely true, he took me into this chapel, and it was quite dark, and he seated me in front of an icon, I couldn’t see it because it was too dark. He lit a candelabra, he lowered it down in front of this icon and it was the Virgin Mary with the Jesus child. And before I knew I was overcome with this total emotion and I had a breakdown, and I had an ecstatic experience. I felt an overwhelming love. You could have hit me with a feather, I just couldn’t… there was no rational explanation to it. And as I was crying, I was overcome, I started crying and then my friend, he went out and the monk went out and left me on my own.

And then he came back in and he said, “You’re okay, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, thank you,” and I didn’t speak about it. And then to make matters worse he said, “Well, it’s quite interesting, I want to show you another icon.” And then he led me into this other chapel which had an icon of the Saint Anastasia, he was tortured to death in the 3rd century, and the picture, and the same thing happened. The same thing happened again, I was overwhelmed by this incredible love. 

But the other thing that happened was I went back the next day, the monk wasn’t there, the other monks totally forbid me to go anywhere near the chapel, I was not allowed in there. I said, “I’ve got to go back in, I want to find out more about it.” So then I saw a monk up on a balcony, he killed himself laughing because I was trying to explain to him what I wanted. So he relented, he allowed me back in and I meditated in front of the same icon, and suddenly there was this woman standing right next to me. I couldn’t see her with my eyes, but I felt her presence and she said very clearly, “I am still alive, I am still alive.” And if that is the case, then people who have an out-of-body experience, I’m sure if they meet Jesus, they absolutely meet Jesus because there is no such thing as death.

Now, the interesting thing was, this woman, for six months I only had to think of her, and she was right beside me and we had an exchange. And it was literally death is just a massive illusion. We are not able to go beyond our physical senses. Once you bridge the gap and you become familiar with the expanded reality, then there is no mystery, it’s all reality and people are only a thought away.

If you had told me that 10, 20 years ago I would have said they’re slightly crazy, it’s all an illusion, they’re making it up, but I’m not so sure anymore. 

Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:09] Well, you’re not so sure anymore, but you’re not a Christian. 

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:08:12] No.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:08:14] I don’t know why I get into this. People think I’m a Christian basher and I’m not, I just always say, I’m highly respectful of your Christ consciousness experience. And I’m not trying to limit that or pigeonhole that or say that that’s somehow lesser, I’m just saying it wouldn’t make any sense to say you met Christ. So it was in this extended consciousness realm and you met Christ, I don’t know exactly what that means, but I accept the reality to that. What I don’t understand and what just seems, like ridiculously obvious to me in the same way it seems absurd to think that science could continue to prop up this consciousness is an illusion thing. It’s just like, there’s something deeper going on there, that’s more than just a meme. That is a conscious effort on some people to systematically control people, because that’s a better way to keep people afraid and scared and buying shit and not thinking too deeply about stuff, that’s my take on it.

What I wanted to really tie this back to was religion, because what I’m thinking lately is that religion is similarly absurd, in the sense that if we come to the understanding like we’re talking about here, that there is this extended realm, and by all accounts, the highest purpose of your life is to connect with this super light, love, energy, in whatever form, and you’re doing a VR to try and help people do it, and your daughter’s doing yoga class to try and help her do it and these monks are trying to help people do it. But religion is kind of doing a little trick there. They’re saying, “Hey, we can help you do that, but by the way, we will be…” This is always the case with religion, this is the cult part of it, “we will be the sole keepers of your access to that and we will say how you access it and how you don’t access it. And we will similarly control and manipulate you,” in a way that seems completely unnecessary. That’s why the important part of your story is, you can have that experience and accept the Christian experience and say, “But that doesn’t make me a Christian.”

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:10:47] That’s the thing. The main issue that always gets lost is liberation, is the freedom aspect in religion. There’s always this tendency of wanting to own people, wanting to own something.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:11:07] The ego.

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:11:08] Yeah, wanting to limit it, but the end result is liberation from all concepts, from all demarcations, it’s total liberation. If that aspect is missing then I’m afraid we are not seeing the bigger picture, not fulfilling our whole potential. To me that has always been the number one thing, is the freedom it grants us, the freedom to go beyond out limitations, go beyond our identifications and be able to dynamically experience a new world every moment, every day without any boundaries, without saying, “Oh, this is how it is. This is what it’s all about.” No, we’re just discovering it again and again new, because we are now part of that thing we are discovering. And in discovering it we are discovering ourselves which is it. 

And there lies the incredible liberation and also there lies the ecstasy it brings. There’s ecstasy to be found in living every moment because we are not tied up, we’re not tied to one single thing, to one belief, to one theory, to one model. We transcend that and we are opening ourselves up to being explorers, not knowing what is to come next. And it’s beautiful because we already know we are it and we cannot get lost. Whatever we explore and discover is another level of our ecstasy, of our ecstatic living.

And any beliefs which don’t allow us this exploration of freedom, they’re just limiting us, and that’s why I’m not anti-religious because they do give people steppingstones. But when you come to the last steppingstone… or let’s say they create a scaffold. But once we’ve built the sculpture we don’t need the scaffolding. We are it. That’s the thing with religions, that’s why I find them always limiting. But religious people don’t like to talk about freedom, they don’t like that word very much.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:14:15] I think that was absolutely wonderful, beautiful, so fantastic. And I can’t think of a better way to wrap up this terrific conversation you’ve treated me to.

Can you tell folks a little bit about what else is going on in your world, how they might keep track of what you’re doing? I definitely want to point them to those YouTube videos you did that were fantastic. What else do they need to know about what you’re working on?

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:14:45] I belong to a group of afterlife researchers, which is very interesting, it’s a very interesting, beautiful group because they explore the whole territory of the afterlife. And I’ve been a member and once a month the people gather questions and I try to answer them from my experience and that’s really interesting because some of these questions allow me to bring out things which are not widely known. And that’s why there’s always something new coming out. 

The other thing is, because I’m mainly an artist and the virtual reality is what I’m really, at the moment exploring, and I’ve had a lot of help, people trying to make it possible for me to go into any depths. So hopefully, I will be able to find some very practical and very illustrative ways of taking people into realities via documentation which they can experience and hopefully it will lead a bit further than that. 

The ultimate goal would be to devise a tool which hopefully will trigger lucid dreams in people. That’s a goal, so people can have their own experience. First of all by getting a much closer feeling of an alternate reality via maintaining wakefulness, but an alternate reality, and therefore making it easier to make the jump into the dream consciousness and then perhaps trigger a lucid dream, and that’s what I’m aiming for.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:16:42] Well, that’s just fantastic work. I mean, anyone who isn’t excited about all those things, that could be truly culture changing, history changing. Although we don’t know what effects those kinds of things have, but we have to go forth and try the best we can. 

Our guest again has been Jurgen Ziewe. It’s terrific, terrific to connect with you. Thanks again Jurgen so much for joining me.

Jurgen Ziewe: [01:17:09] Thanks Alex. It was a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you. 

Thanks again to Jurgen Ziewe for joining me today on Skeptiko. The one question I have to tee up, and it’s not I guess so much of a question really, but what do you make of Jurgen’s experience of waves, of love, and knowledge? There’s something there that I think is central to this whole thing that we’re talking about. And Jurgen is such an awesome embodiment of what he’s talking about, isn’t he? So, what do we think of that? What do you think of that? Is that too light and love for you? Or how do you process that? 

Let me know your thoughts. I’d love for you to jump over to the Skeptiko Forum and leave a comment there, leave a note there, really dig into it. But if you’re not so inclined, find another way to telepathically send me a message and tell me what you’re thinking.

As always, thanks so much for joining me on this little journey that I’m on, and for sharing it with others who you think need to hear it. Until next time, take care, and bye for now. [box]