By KEN KORCZAK
Deep meditation practice led a German-British man to mind-blowing OBE adventures with profound implications for all of us
Astral travel and meditation are two esoteric practices that are, in many respects, aspects of each other. They go hand in hand because people who learn to meditate will succeed more in inducing an out-of-body experience.
One has been largely stripped of its “esoteric” connotation in recent decades while the other it remains relegated to the realm of High Woo-Woo.
I bet I don’t have to tell you which is which.
Today, millions of people practice meditation — from corporate board rooms to private bedrooms. Increasingly, meditation has been shorn from its association with Eastern religions or mysticism. Now we can all meditate in an unfettered, secular way if that’s what we prefer.
Meditation is now mostly viewed as a “legitimate self-help tool” embraced by everyone from your family physician and mental health therapist to Oprah Winfrey and Chuck Norris. But astral travel is probably a bridge too far for most people or mainstream consumption as of yet — though I dare say millions of people are eager to try their hand at inducing the OBE even if they would never tell others.
The average person is more likely to tell her friends down at the office that she meditates 20 minutes a day while that same person is unlikely to casually admit:
“Oh yes, I fly out of my body at night to visit the magical and mysterious Astral Realms!”
I bring this up because today I am reviewing the writings and work of the German-born artist and designer JURGEN ZIEWE. He has lived in the U.K. since 1975 and has been practicing meditation and out-of-body-travel since about that time — some 40 years, he reports.
What is remarkable about his books (among many remarkable things) is how they demonstrate the way an intensive integration of meditation and OBE practice has played out in Ziewe’s extraordinary experiences.
I’ve been reading books about astral travel since the late 1970s, but I’ve never encountered an approach that shows a more unified adoption of both the OBE and meditation practice as does this guy’s methods. But as I write this — and now that I think of it — I should include a third “esoteric” practice that Ziewe has leveraged — lucid dreaming.
Here, again, it can be said that lucid dreaming is intimately linked to astral travel. There’s been much debate about the differences and similarities of both. Some say they’re basically different aspects of the same thing.
I’m going to put that discussion aside for now. It’s clear, however, that both the OBE and lucid dream practice are enhanced and assisted by meditation. I can vouch for that based on my own experience. Ziewe is one of the few consciousness explorers I’ve read who can achieve the lucid dream state and hold onto it in a highly stable manner — and then while “inside” a lucid dream, he can settle down to practice meditation in his dream environment.
This, in turn, often leads to fantastic out-of-body adventures to far-flung magical realms of truly unlimited and infinite variety, potential and locations. Ziewe’s stories are astounding. In his books and lectures, he regales his audiences with details of journeys to other planets, alternate dimensions of reality, certain places he calls “consensus realities,” parallel universes — and the occasional Hell. 
Ziewe’s facility with descriptive language is extraordinary. Even though many of the fabulous locations he enters would seem to defy description using these crude symbols we call words with their limited ability to convey meaning — he finds a way to impart to us a vivid sense of the mind-boggling experiences he encounters.
Ziewe frequently enters realms that are psychedelic. They embody an LSD- or DMT-like quality of experience and environment. That includes things like wildly swirling colors, endless fractal iterations of geometric shapes, organic-biological patterns, hyperspatial structures that could only be defined by mathematical formula in our mundane world. But Ziewe is able to encounter through direct experience and without the use of psychoactive drugs.
Readers may sense Ziewe’s obvious frustration as he strains to find a way to help us relate or impart to us the tiniest taste of the kaleidoscopic transcendent realms. He grapples with the limits of human language to tell us what these exotic realms are like. Sometimes I felt that reading Ziewe’s descriptive prose was the closest one could get to experiencing an acid trip without dropping acid.
He’s an amazing writer!
At the same time, Ziewe comes off as a man who has been rendered genuinely humbled by his astral odysseys. He presents an endearing aura of authenticity — like a man who has been granted a glimpse of The Godhead — only to make him realize that he is the merest speck, a kind of a bacterial-level bit of individuated consciousness. He is also cognizant, however, that he is in possession of what the great JANE ROBERTS called, “an eternal validity of the soul.”
The final chapter of his book, VISTAS OF INFINITY, should be considered a classic essay in which a philosopher lays out his view of reality derived through his own transcendent experience. This crowning statement is wonderful in its lucidity and unrutted flow. It takes on what it means to be a human being and how we can all view and appreciate our own special place within our infinite, awe-inspiring and indescribably extravagant multiverse.
It’s interesting to note that the subtitle of Vistas of Infinity is:
“How to enjoy life when you are dead.”
I suggest you read this book to discover what he means.
NOTE: For more in-depth reviews of books exploring paranormal topics, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM