Experiences Of The Beyond

EXPERIENCES OF THE BEYOND

People often ask whether, on our journey through a series of incarnations, we also pass through the intervening stages between lives and, if so, what people report about the beyond. Our experiences of the beyond and of the intermediary stages are at the time of writing considerably wider than they were a few years ago, but they are by no means complete. In our therapy we try to pass through only those stages that are relevant for the patient, and we avoid enquiring about things merely to satisfy our own curiosity. This is why our experiences of the beyond are still at a somewhat early stage.

It is difficult to make generally valid statements on this subject since the beyond does not present a homogeneous picture but is just as differentiated as are the different stages of human consciousness. The beyond is an astral world and therefore purely a plane of images where the forms that a soul perceives will reflect the acquired content. The soul of a dead person, by the law of resonance, will reach whatever plane of the beyond corresponds to this soul's level of consciousness. These different levels make it difficult to give a unified picture. It depends on the individual whether the beyond for him is heaven or hell. A deceased will often experience the beyond as a landscape whose appearance and mood will reflect his own quality of soul. One female patient who entered the beyond after a life (very remote in time) as a cruel and powerful ruler, describes it as follows:

I die a painful, slow and lonely death. Above all I have a horrible fear of death which almost takes me out of my senses. I hear dreadful noises and find myself within a dark sphere, amidst a bizarre landscape. Everything is terrifying, everything is shivering with fear. The landscape is inharmonious, everything is sharp, angular, cold and repellent. It is windy, the air is filled with anguished groaning. Aimless and disorientated, I look for a hole or a crack through which to crawl but find nothing. Even colours are threatening. There are also many other beings, including some that resemble rats. I have to spend an agonizingly long time here, ceaselessly looking for some corner to hide in. The worst thing is that one never gets used to the horror of this place. After a long time I finally find a crack; I hastily thrust myself into it and at the same time am pulled in.

Similarly unpleasant experiences could be related by others who have entered the beyond after a life dominated by greed, cruelty and selfishness. Apart from these cases, the beyond is described as pleasant and beautiful. For example, here is a description given by a dying child:

Slowly everything becomes lighter, and I begin to float. I am no longer myself, yet I am myself. I can see everything: my mother, my father, the woman and myself in bed. I float higher, up towards the ceiling, then down again until I am near my mother. I stroke her. Then I float up once more and see the house and the garden. Someone is leading me by the hand. It is my grandmother, the mother of my father. She is very sweet to me. She says she is going to take me somewhere and show me everything. We come to a gentle, undulating landscape, and I see other beings. We do not speak, but one can tell what they are saying, and they know what I am saying. This is a place where one feels good and happy. There are soft, light, gentle colours which somehow merge into one another.

Descriptions of the world beyond present a wide variety of scenery, ranging from ultra-horrific wasteland to magnificent countryside. And the beings that one encounters there correspond to the quality of the environment. It must be emphasized again that we are not talking about a material plane but about a purely psychic world, which is nonetheless real.

The experiences we have discussed show that the beyond reflects the soul's level of consciousness and that all other beings encountered there belong to roughly the same stage of development. There is contact with other souls and entities, and evidently further learning also takes place. Help from more highly developed beings only comes to those who ask for it. Usually after physical death, the mistakes that an individual has committed during his life become suddenly clear. Apart from such experiences as the dark sphere, the beyond is found to be so pleasant that no one wishes to return to the material world. It is only when the individual recognizes his own mistakes that he feels a desire to compensate and make good and hence finally realizes that he must once again be incarnated.

The beyond is just as varied and many-faceted as the material world. As death alone does not make a person essentially more intelligent or mature, in the beyond wisdom and stupidity are distributed in much the same proportions as they are on earth – a fact which is often overlooked by the followers of spiritualism. I am not trying to cast doubt on the “genuineness” of spiritualistic phenomena but merely wish to warn against accepting any utterance and giving it a halo of infallibility just because it comes “from the beyond”. The chance of obtaining messages of really high spiritual quality through a medium is very small. One is much more likely to receive only the private opinions and views of certain underdeveloped souls or even non-human entities.