Episode 17 – What Happens When We Die? A Shamanic Exploration of Death, Life and the Soul’s Journey

In the middle of vacuuming the stairs, Amina broke down in tears and told the vacuum cleaner: “I don’t want to die.” Pål-Esben guided his own sister through the last months of her life, introduced her to her own death guide, and stayed in contact with her in the Bardo until she turned towards the light.

In this seventeenth episode, Amina and her teacher and guide, Pål-Esben Wanvig, talk about what happens when we die. They explore why the fear of death is unnatural, how the dying process begins months before physical death, what the Bardo is, and how karma and dharma shape the next incarnation. It is part of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a podcast about the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to yourself.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

In this episode

• Why the fear of death, and of ending something to begin something new, is unnatural, and how religious dogma and epigenetic imprints keep it alive
• Amina’s fear of making the wrong choice, and how primal anxiety steers us from the unconscious
• The three elements of the process of development, and letting go of the past without digging into it
• The vacuum cleaner on the stairs, the tests along the way, and Amina’s journey away from a fear-based faith
• Preparing for your own death, the first signs of the dying process, and meeting your own death guide
• Pål-Esben’s sister’s last journey, the Bardo and the life review, and the monk who died more than a thousand times
• Near-death experiences, belief systems, and why karma steers most people into their next incarnation
• Karma and dharma as two currents, why a life without death would have no meaning, and The 7 Golden Keys as the foundation

This podcast is for you if you:

• Seek real depth in your spiritual practice
• Want to understand yourself on a more fundamental level
• Are curious about shamanism but tired of superficial “new age” spirituality
• Have taken many alternative courses but still feel that something is missing
• Feel an inner longing for freedom, love and wholeness

In a time when so many get lost in external methods and promises of quick fixes, this podcast invites you back to the only place where true answers can be found: your own heart.

Listen above, or read the full conversation below.

Transcript

A warm welcome to the podcast “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. This podcast is a collaboration with our favourite magazine, the health and lifestyle magazine Medium, and is devoted to exploring the bravest journey a human being can set out on: the journey home to oneself. We follow Amina, a student at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School, as she goes through a deep primordial shamanic process of development together with her guide and teacher Pål-Esben. It is a raw, unpolished journey of discovery towards true joy in life, deeper meaning, and a life that truly feels good to live.

This episode is an English translation of our Norwegian original, voiced by the digital avatars of Pål-Esben and Amina.

Pål-Esben: Hi, and a warm welcome to a new episode, Amina.

Amina: Hi, Pål-Esben. Thank you, likewise.

Pål-Esben: And a warm welcome to you, dear listener. Today, among other things, we’re going to talk about physical death. What is it that happens? What actually goes on before, during and after death? So it’s a very sensitive but exciting topic we’re going to talk about, Amina, and one you have quite a bit of experience with yourself, which I hope you’ll share.

Amina: Absolutely. In so many ways, the topic of death is the story of my life, both consciously and unconsciously, all through my life. So it’s a very exciting topic, and not least a very important one, because it’s also something we don’t talk about very much.

The fear of death is unnatural

Pål-Esben: Yes, and there are many misunderstandings around it. Before we start getting into what happens when we physically die, I’d like to talk a little about the fear of death, which we also discussed in our two previous episodes: the fact that we humans have a very, very great fear of everything to do with ending something and beginning something new, and the most extreme form of that is physical death. We’ve talked about the processes of life and death, and we’ve talked about the runes Othala, Dagaz and Fehu, which are the closing runes of a life process, the death runes, and not least the start of a new life process. So if this strikes a chord with you and you haven’t caught those episodes, I recommend going back a couple of episodes and listening to them.

But the fear of death, or the fear of something new, or the fear of ending something so that something new can begin, is something unnatural. The only living being in our biosphere, that is, on our planet, that has this form of fear is the human being. Elsewhere in nature this fear doesn’t exist. Take a tree, for example. When autumn comes and it’s about to start letting go of its leaves, the tree won’t say: “No, I’m afraid of letting go of my leaves, because I don’t want winter to come.” You won’t find beings in nature that think or feel this way. It’s all about letting go of a season when it’s drawing to a close, and then opening ourselves up to the next phase of the process, whatever that may mean. The seasons are a very good example, going from summer to autumn, winter and spring, and summer again: how the trees and plants let go, go dormant, and then something new arises, and they sprout again in spring. The same goes for the animals in nature. You won’t find animals in nature walking around afraid that a change is coming now, or afraid of death and that sort of thing. It’s something only humans have, and from the point of view of our nature it’s unnatural; there’s nothing normal about it.

One of the biggest challenges, of course, comes through religious dogma when we talk about physical death. Because what is it that happens? Have I been good enough and done enough good things to end up in heaven? Or have I not been good enough, so that God punishes me and puts me first in limbo, so I can marinate for a bit, and then in hell afterwards? Well, the Catholics abolished limbo a few years ago, but that’s another matter. Of course this is a fabrication, an invention of human beings, that is, of religious institutions, in order to have control over other human beings, and it has helped create a great, great deal of anxiety in people, both consciously and unconsciously. Even if you’ve never set foot in any religion, church or mosque, you have this fear. It’s several thousand years old, it has shaped our society for at least the last 3,000 years, and it sits in your epigenetic structure, as we talked about in an earlier episode, and is passed down from mother to child and so on. This plays a big role in the unconscious and subconscious fear we have, both of physical death and of ending something and starting something new, which is just another image and another way of living out this same fear. We hate change, we hate ending things, we hate the constant nagging thought that we ought to quit our job and find one we could love, and so the days and years go by while all this runs on autopilot.

A simple example to prove these things is to look at the indigenous cultures, for example the Aboriginal people of Australia before the white man came in and destroyed their whole culture. They lived in harmony with nature, they lived in harmony with the rhythms, and they didn’t even have words for anxiety and fear, or for fearing death or whatever it might be. It was a natural part of life. When it was time for a person to end this life, they went on a walkabout, sat down in a sacred place, and within a day or two they were dead. And the tribe celebrated their life, instead of going around saying: “Oh, everything’s terrible, they’ve left us.” That’s just something modern human beings have, and it didn’t exist in the indigenous cultures. So that’s the background to these things. And if you, dear listener, say, “I have no problem with ending things, I have no problem with starting something new, I have no problem with death”, then perhaps something doesn’t quite add up. Because in the last 20 years I have never met a human being, and I’ve met a good few thousand, who doesn’t have this fear quite massively in their unconscious mind. It shows in practice when people deal with things in their lives: how challenging it is to change and develop and so on. It’s something I’ve worked with for quite a few years now, with quite a few thousand people. You’re one of them, Amina. And when you came to me, this business of change in general, of changing things, wasn’t easy.

The agony of choice: the fear of choosing wrong

Amina: Definitely not easy. This is the story of my life. I’ve had great difficulty letting go, because there has been a fear there. I’d rather have held on to the old, the uncomfortable, the painful, than stepped into the unknown, into something new. But back then, even though I also knew I had a fear of death, I couldn’t connect the two. The first time you introduced this idea that we humans can’t make choices because we’re so afraid of making the wrong choice, you gave the example of looking at the menu in a restaurant, of the people who perhaps spend an hour and a half making that choice. And I thought: “Wow, there are so many people who struggle to let go, struggle to make choices, who are terrified of making the wrong choice.” I’ve also talked to many people who describe challenges where I can see that, oh, this person finds it very hard to let go of what no longer serves them. They’re afraid of making the wrong choice, of the consequences of the wrong choice, but the same people can also say: “I have no fear of death. I just think I’ll move on, and it’ll be fine.” Many people can’t see it, and I can understand that. If you haven’t been given the knowledge or studied it, it isn’t easy to connect the two. But it’s also proof of how many people struggle with this without fully understanding the connection: that there’s a fear of death at the bottom of it.

I’ve worked a great deal on letting go in many areas of my life, and I’ve experienced that when I let go, or when I make the new choice, it always turns out well. I don’t always get the outcome I thought I wanted, but as a rule I’ve got the outcome that was right for me, perhaps also seen from a higher perspective, from the soul’s perspective. When it came to choices, I’d much rather just order the same thing from the menu as everyone else. I could stand in the queue at the café and ask my friend: “Which coffee should I have? How much milk should I have?” I didn’t want to choose wrong, and surely everyone else knew better what was best. Because if they could make the choice for me, I didn’t have to answer for it. So I’ve worked a lot on this.

Primal anxiety steers from the unconscious

Pål-Esben: And the sneaky thing is that this really comes down to the same kind of fundamental anxiety, the one I call primal anxiety in a human being. We won’t talk too much about it now, since we talked in detail about primal anxiety, and where it comes from, in two previous episodes. The thing here now is that we’re talking about choices, we’re talking about ending things, we’re talking about creating something new, we’re talking about change. But in the end all of this, that is, the challenges we have, pretty much everything, at least more than 99.9 percent, comes from the unconscious, which we aren’t conscious of, and which steers us more or less on autopilot. When you go through this kind of profound primordial shamanic process of development that you’ve been through, and which you’re still standing in the middle of with both feet, we take hold of these things. It isn’t something you can get rid of just by snapping your fingers and saying that now you won’t have any more fear, now you’ll just be in the moment, and then everything’s OK. That’s not how this works. If you want to work through this to set yourself more and more free from this unconscious autopilot, you need to go through some kind of process of development where you take hold of these things, learn to understand them, learn to handle them, learn to let go of them, learn to heal them, learn whatever you need to do. There are no shortcuts here. You can’t read a book or watch a YouTube video and simply think your way to everything being fine. Because this lies so deep in our nature, our imprinted nature. When we say it’s epigenetic, it means it lies within us and has been with us for thousands of years, through the way our genes express themselves. In an earlier episode I talked about mothers who experienced trauma in the Nazi concentration camps, and whose children went on to experience the same trauma. When the psychologist looked into this, he said: “But they’ve never experienced what they’re talking about.” And when they interviewed the mother, it was the mother who had experienced it. As far back as 60 or 70 years ago they began to wonder how this could be. How can a daughter inherit trauma from a mother? Today the mechanisms here are crystal clear, through epigenetics and this kind of inheritance of both trauma and experience, and also certain karmic and dharmic aspects. So this is something that applies to all human beings.

Adapting to a changing society

Pål-Esben: Say you want to set yourself free from this bond, this fear, this resistance to doing what’s right, the resistance to change and the resistance to adapting. After all, our society is going through massive change. And those who find it challenging to adapt to today’s society will have big, big, big problems in a few years. So the question is whether you’re ready now to do what it takes, to let go of what stops you from being able to adapt, for example. In the end, everything comes back to what we talked about as primal anxiety, and getting a grip on it. But before we get into what happens when we physically die, and the process there: how are things with you today, Amina, when it comes to changing, to opening up to something new? How do you relate to it today compared with how you related to it before?

Amina: Yes, before, I was very rigid about… well, rigid. I wasn’t willing to change.

Pål-Esben: Stubborn.

Amina: Stubborn, thank you. You don’t always find the right word. I was very stubborn. Whereas now I’m more open to input from the right people, mind you, not input from all directions. Because I was a bit like that before too. I’d perhaps ask a hundred people what I should do about something, and then it’s like making a chocolate cake using a hundred different recipes. It won’t be much of a cake. So I’m very open to input, I’m very open to reflecting, and not least to looking inwards and getting help. And in everyday life, smaller things have also become very easy for me. OK, so that happened, or this didn’t turn out the way I’d actually thought or wanted it to. How do I move on from here? It’ll be fine. So it’s much easier to make good choices, and also easier to see when I might be about to make a choice that isn’t good. But I keep encountering myself at new depths. Because my experience on this journey, or process of development, is that every time I’ve realised something, there are also countless new ways of realising it. It comes gradually, so many ways of understanding that thing. So I don’t have the same kind of problem with choices today that I had before, not in that way at least.

Three elements in the process of development

Pål-Esben: To briefly sum up what we’ve done in your process: it mainly consists of three big elements. One is the modern side of what goes on in our psychology today. You need to understand your own psychology. You’ve been drilled in that: understanding how the mechanisms in your brain work, how your behavioural system works, what goes on in your subconscious. You’ve become familiar in detail with the processes of the amygdala, the hippocampus and so on, so you know in practice how your brain reacts. That’s one thing. The second big one is that you’ve come to know nature much better in the process, the forest and the trees, so you’ve begun to experience more and more how nature lives in harmony with its own change. That’s an experience-based process you’ve been through. And the third big thing is the profound shamanic rituals and healing processes, for healing the most complex bonds: this complex epigenetic current, the karmic current inherited through the ancestral line, and your own karma and the baggage you carry with you. You’ve become thoroughly familiar with all three of these big blocks, and through your process they’ve set you free from most of the challenges you had before.

Amina: Yes, and those are three big, important headings. Because I was in treatment at a district psychiatric centre for two years before I got to know you and the Yggdrasil Shamanic School, where I got help to change some of my behavioural patterns, or reaction patterns and that sort of thing. But when I came to you and really got to understand the psychology behind it all, it was a real revelation. It struck me in a completely different way, which meant I could develop much more deeply than by going to someone who just says: “Yes, you’re like this and that, try doing this and that.” Really getting to see what causes me to feel the way I do, what the mechanisms behind it are, what’s in my head, what’s in my body, what’s actually happening: that has been worth its weight in gold. And then there’s what you mentioned about getting in sync with nature and getting to know the eight seasons, through the eight seasonal rituals, and really becoming one with nature and feeling the transitions in nature. It isn’t just that we go from winter to summer. It’s a smooth transition: something dies, and something is born. It’s one thing for someone to tell us about it, to serve up the knowledge that this and that happens, and that’s important too, to bring the intellect along. But the experience-based part, where you go through these seasonal rituals, make contact with the spirit, that is, the spirit of nature, and can feel it in your body, gives you a kind of answer you can’t get anywhere else, at least in my experience. And as you say, there are these shamanic rituals we’ve done. All the rituals, right from module 0 in the basic training to where I am today, have been equally important, and they’ve all been potent in their own way. Through them I’ve been able to go in and let go of things I didn’t even know I was carrying.

And it’s quite interesting, what you say about what we carry with us from our ancestors and so on. Because part of what I’ve experienced in rituals, or in letting-go work, has been exactly this. My dad comes from Lebanon, part of my family is German, and my grandfather is one of the children born in Norway to German soldiers during the war. I’ve received quite a lot of, call them video clips, both from the war in the Middle East and from what happened in Germany, where I’ve seen how it has lain inside me, and how I’ve worked on letting go of it. Not that I think of myself today as a victim of war in any way, but it has been there. So it’s so interesting that you bring it up. These rituals have been extremely important, together of course with being willing to make new choices. Making new choices is also very important on that path.

Without digging into the past

Pål-Esben: Yes. And at least the way we do it, you skip this idea that you need to dig into your past. Because that’s often what’s popular today: digging into your past for years, what your mother did, what your father did, what you’ve experienced, what so-and-so did, and you often blame your past for the hard time you’re having today. Well, no past has power over us unless we choose to give it power. We have a great deal of power to let go of our past, but it often doesn’t get any better by digging into it. With the methodology we teach, there’s no need to go into situations in the past. Of course, if you have memories of them, you can do that too, but we resolve the themes without needing to go into these things, without even knowing what they are. Our measure is just one thing. Do I feel better in my life? Am I better off? Am I able to be with my kids in a better way? Do I feel more joyfulness in my life? Am I a better partner for my husband or my wife? In other words, the objective, measurable results: that’s the key thing here. With the methodology we use, you can let go of the baggage you carry without spending years digging into the past. Then you can focus instead on the present and live your life here and now, and learn how to let go more and more of the past, so that you gain more and more power over your present. In other words, the past no longer steers our emotional system and our behavioural system. Instead it’s my free will that decides how I react today, and how I deal with what happens in my life, the impulses and so on.

The dying process begins before death

Pål-Esben: And this process has also been part of preparing you for physical death. Because going into your physical death is a challenge for us humans, mainly because of the imprinting from the epigenetic current and the imprinting from religious dogma. When we observe people on their deathbed, we see that a person’s actual dying process begins up to two or three months before physical death occurs. And some people may ask whether the time is set in advance, the time when they die. I see that it’s often like this: when your soul comes into this incarnation, the soul has set an approximate time frame and an approximate window for when physical death happens, give or take, let’s say, six months or so. It’s fairly exact. And around two or three months before that time a process begins to take place. That’s when the real dying process starts, and we’ll come to that later. But before we get into exactly these things: how did you experience it when we began talking about how the shaman also needs to prepare for physical death? Because if the shaman can’t make peace with physical death, they’re still steered by primal anxiety, which will then limit the shamanic magic they can gain access to. How did you experience it when we began working on these things?

The vacuum cleaner on the stairs: when the resistance broke

Amina: Well, I made a little blunder, because I steeled myself to get this done. After all, I was going to be a good shaman, so this was something I simply had to heal straight away. I sort of put it on my to-do list, that I had to manage this, and I used discipline. We’ve gone through some quite deep themes to understand and work through physical death, for example thinking about our own funeral. How do we want it? Do we want to be cremated, do we want to be buried, what kind of songs do we want? Whatever religion, faith or outlook on life you have, these are important things for a human being to deal with, but very few dare, because it’s so taboo to talk about. “No, we can’t talk about me dying.” But we’re all going to, we all know that.

But to go back a little to the topic: at first I used discipline, because I wanted to be a good shaman, and this was something I simply had to heal. And I actually remember that moment very well. After I’d been working on funerals and wills and things like that, I broke down with the vacuum cleaner on the stairs, where I was cleaning rather aggressively, because my ego realised: “Whoa, if she carries on with this, she might actually let go.” I remember using the vacuum cleaner aggressively on the stairs, and then I broke down completely and began sobbing to this vacuum cleaner. And I began talking to the vacuum cleaner. Well, it didn’t talk; it was inside my own head. I said to the vacuum cleaner: “I don’t want to die.” And then the vacuum cleaner says: “No, I understand that. But you will one day, you know.” Then I say: “Yes.” And there was a little relief in that too, because I saw that I was really using the vacuum cleaner for, call it a dialogue, that was going on inside me. But it was also an important turning point, where I realised that, OK, this runs deep. I carried on working on it, and through these rituals, through the deeper understanding, I thought: “OK, now I’m beginning to integrate this more and more.”

The tests and the legacy of belief

Amina: And as I began to integrate it more and more, I’ve been tested all along the way, as if to ask: have you really healed this? At the beginning I’d notice: “Whoa, now my heart’s starting to beat a bit uncomfortably. Maybe I’m dying? What happens then? Well, then I’ll go to hell”, or whatever it was I had in my head. And then I’d go in and see: OK, here we have to heal another layer, and another layer, and another layer. It actually went quite fast. My process of development has gone quite fast, but it hasn’t been too fast; it has been gradual. I choose to call them the tests, because it’s when I come across situations where I would previously have had very strong death anxiety that I see how far I’ve come. That doesn’t mean I have to use discipline to move on, but I do a check-in with myself. I think I mentioned it in an earlier episode too: the most recent time it happened, a few months ago, when I went into anaphylactic shock. My body had a reaction where I got very frightened, and my old pattern came up, my old autopilot: what if you die? That could be absolutely terrible. But I had such deep contact with my soul, that is, the wisdom that lives in me. It said, and it didn’t just say it, it was a physical experience in my whole body: “The worst that can happen here now, Amina, is that you die.” And that’s a… oh, I’m getting a bit emotional now, I can tell. Because it’s such a great liberation to be able to carry that with me. Yes, I have a body that has imprints and an old autopilot, but I can get in contact with the part of me that can remind me that this is OK too. In human form I’ve died many times, and may well die many times again, and it has always turned out fine.

So that has been part of my process in this, because I’ve really had a strong fear of death, both in relation to religion and within the spiritual world. After all, I was a Muslim for ten years. I don’t know whether that’s what sits deepest, but I carry a bit from Christianity and a bit from Islam. The things I did when I was a Muslim, when it came to prayer and fasting and so on, I did out of fear. I had to get home and pray by five o’clock, because otherwise I’d go to hell. It wasn’t based on love for a God, at least not as I experienced it. And as I talked about earlier, when I moved into the spiritual world, I had understood more, at least intellectually, that this business of heaven and hell wasn’t real. I began to understand more and more that heaven and hell are more like states inside myself, and that these demons are different parts of me. And then I realised something. That was a real aha experience too; I don’t remember whether it was a meditation or a ritual or what it was. But I reached a point inside myself where I experienced: “Whoa, Amina, the only one you really have to be afraid of is yourself.” That was a real aha experience. But what I’ve worked on most since I came into the spiritual world has probably been the fear of disappearing, the fear of getting stuck somewhere, which I’ve had to work my way through because of my own individual things. There too I’ve had a few tests, through dreams, through lucid dreaming, that kind of thing, where I notice that whatever fear may want to come up, I find the way, and I trust it. And I’d say I don’t think I would have got there if I hadn’t gone through this primordial shamanic process of development. I think I’d have got lost in some stuff or other.

Preparing for your own death

Pål-Esben: Yes, unfortunately there’s a lot of stuff to get lost in: a great deal that’s fear-based, and so many misunderstandings around these things. The only thing that’s certain is that we’re all born one day, and we die one day. That’s the only certain thing about this life. We come in naked, and we’ll also disappear out of this life naked. That means life can’t be about accumulating a house, a cabin, lots of money, a career, whatever it is, and hoarding things. It has to do with something completely different, and we’ll come back to that in an episode where we’ll start talking about the soul, and what it’s really about from the soul’s perspective.

But back to what you were just talking about. In the advanced shaman training you’ve been through, we begin to go deeper into the process of making peace with physical death. That’s when we begin to train teachers who will learn to carry out birth rituals, wedding rituals and confirmation rituals, but also the death rituals themselves for other people. When we get that far, and are being prepared to lead another human being through their dying process, we need to have come quite a long way and be very stable in relation to this. The first exercise I give when we get there is to prepare for your own death: write a will, talk to your nearest and dearest about how you want your death to be, how the funeral should be, where you want to be buried, in a memorial grove or a churchyard, and how you’d like it all to be. My experience is that it’s a really good test of where you stand. Because there most people, at least nine out of ten, come up against massive resistance, massive fear, massive everything: “No, I don’t want to do this, it’s uncomfortable.” That shows you still have a few steps left to make peace with this primal anxiety I talked about, and with physical death. So what you’re talking about now isn’t something we do in the basic training, because it’s pretty raw stuff, which requires you to have come through a somewhat longer process of development. But by doing these things it’s entirely possible to make peace with physical death as well. And only then can you be stable enough to guide another human being through their dying process, as the shamans have done since the dawn of time in primordial society. Unfortunately they don’t do that so much any more, since religious dogmas and religious institutions have taken over that job. But I believe the only healthy way to guide a human being through their dying process is the shamanic method. I’ll explain a little about how we do it, what happens, and not least answer the question and the fear you had: what if I get stuck somewhere after I die? Shall we do that?

Amina: Yes.

The soul prepares the farewell

Pål-Esben: OK, good. So, roughly three months before a person’s physical death is due… That is, roughly. It can be longer, it can be shorter, and there are many exceptions in these things, so there are exceptions to everything we’re talking about now. Nothing I say holds true every single time, but here’s the broad outline, the general pattern, of how it normally happens. It can also happen suddenly, through accidents and the like, or through serious illness, but let’s talk generally now in this setting. Roughly three months before a natural dying process takes place, and here I’m talking especially about dying of old age, the first changes begin to happen in the person’s energy system, which then begins to get ready for death. For most people this happens on an unconscious level, of course, but you can see it in the energy system, and you can see it in the eyes. Those who work with people in palliative wards in nursing homes and hospitals will notice that when this process happens, the eyes begin to change gradually. That’s the first place you can see that this is beginning to set in. What’s the reason for that? It’s that the soul is withdrawing. The soul is preparing to leave the body, and the energy system is preparing to leave the body in a harmonious, gentle way, which happens through our chakra system and so on. It’s a process of preparation: our spirit, our soul and the energetic component of us begin to prepare to leave the physical body. Normally it’s around two or three months before physical death that this picks up speed. Often it starts a good few months before that too, but we won’t go into all the details now.

Another thing that happens is that certain kinds of shamanic guides and helpers will come and visit us. We can call them angels of death, but there’s also our own death guide. And when I as a shaman observe these spiritual beings appearing around a person, I know that this process has started and is well under way. In our tradition, when you come into the teacher training and set out to learn how to prepare for this dying process, for yourself and for others, you’re introduced to your own shamanic death guide, which is an extraordinary being. You learn to get to know it better, learn to make peace with it, and learn how to get help from it, both when you’re going to guide others through their dying process and on the day you come to your own, so that you’re able to carry it out alone, without a shaman doing it for you. Ideally you have a shaman guiding the process, but my students are trained to be able to do it themselves, with the help of their own death guide. You’ve been introduced to yours too, and you’ve come into very close contact with it, and it has also been part of the process of freeing you from death anxiety. What was it like the first time you came into contact with your own death guide?

Meeting the death guide

Amina: It was very moving. It was very emotional. It was like coming home, in a way. There are so many ways you can feel this coming home, but a piece of a puzzle fell into place. And there was an added sense of safety: knowing that you’re not alone, that you’re being looked after. There’s a huge healing process in that alone. When you’ve connected with that guide while you’re alive, it will also be easy… though of course I haven’t tried it yet, so to speak, but I feel inside me that it will also be easy to contact this guide in the transition into death, when you’ve worked on getting in contact with it, and to follow this energy, this voice, or however it shows itself to you. That makes the transition into death feel safer once you get there.

A sister’s last journey

Pål-Esben: Yes. And to take a practical example, since I’m talking about how I guide people through the dying process: a few years ago my sister ended up in a situation where she became seriously ill with cancer. Before that time we hadn’t talked at all about alternative approaches and that sort of thing. She was a little interested, but never interested in going into it in any particular way. I’ve always said that the day she’s ready to know more about what I do, she’s very welcome to get in touch with me. About a year and a half before she died, she gets in touch and says she has been given a very serious cancer diagnosis and is ready to do something about her health, and to come here to Germany for treatment with our specialists here. And since this is a very complex cancer that spreads very quickly, after a year it came to a point where her body couldn’t take any more. I had said to her all along: “When you’re ready for me to start telling you about death, and to start the process of guiding you through the last part of your life, your dying process, you must get in touch with me.” And about half a year before she died, she says she’s ready for her preparation process. Then I take the basic shamanic things you learned in the basic training, and I also introduce her to her own death guide. I teach her how to make contact with the death guide, and how to get help from the death guide through her own dying process.

Of course it was very emotional. Difficult, because I’m her brother, and now I’m the one leading my own sister through death. But for her this was like a miracle. She had always struggled with this business of endings, and with fear. Our father was a Jehovah’s Witness, and she was part of it too when she was young, with all the religious fear and so on. I went through this process of teaching her how, in practice, to make shamanic journeys to her death guide, to get help from the death guide to prepare herself. And about three months before she dies, I begin to see this change happening, and the other angels of death beginning to appear. I talk to her about it and teach her how to make contact with these extraordinary beings. It was a very, very emotional process. By then she knew that death was coming, and I told her it would happen in about three months, and I told her how she should relate to these things. It’s important to let your shoulders drop and relax, and the moment the fear comes in, to let go of the fear and get help from these beings around you, who are really there to help us through a gentle transition. But as long as we’re full of fear and anxiety, they have very little access to us. I also asked her to tell the doctor treating her that if the anxiety came and she couldn’t get it under control, she should ask for anti-anxiety medication. Because there are many good medicines today that can help people reduce anxiety without just sedating them. And I followed the whole process from my side, from the shaman’s side, from the metaphysical perspective. Two or three days before death itself occurs, the energy system begins more and more to leave the body through the chakra system, where karma is uploaded to what are called the sacred mountains. That’s just a temporary astral place where our karma is stored between incarnations, to help us keep this thread of continuity. In the last two or three days before she dies, she begins to drift more and more in and out of consciousness, which is often normal. But she had a very, very, very peaceful transition. And the angels of death and her own death guide were with her.

Bardo: the intermediate realm and the life review

Pål-Esben: When this release happened, on the day she left her body, she came to a place the Tibetans call the Bardo, which is really an intermediate realm between our physical world and what comes afterwards. In the Bardo Thödol, the book they use in Tibet, which describes the process and death and what happens, you have this intermediate realm that you glide out into right after you die. There you’re no longer physically connected to your body, but your consciousness is still present, and you’re still connected to time and space. What the Bardo really is, is the process of working through: letting go of the material. Many say your life flashes before your eyes, and you’ll experience everything you’ve been through in your life in that process. But you’ll also experience how your actions have affected others, by experiencing it from the other people’s perspective: how your actions have affected them, for better and for worse. It’s a tremendous process of working through that you go through, so that gradually you can make peace with what you’ve done, make peace with what you haven’t done, make peace with the good, make peace with the less good, make peace with your mistakes, make peace with having let go of your family, your children and so on. That process of working through can take anything from a few days to several months.

The monk who died a thousand times

Pål-Esben: I have a good friend who was a Tibetan monk and was trained in a temple in Lhasa in Tibet for several decades. He is an enlightened, self-realized master, and one of my mentors. He describes this in detail from their tradition. So this isn’t just how I experience these things when I guide people through the dying process; he describes exactly the same thing. And just to go off on a slight tangent: in their tradition in Tibet they learn to die physically. The temple he was in is one of the mystical temples, which have nothing to do with Buddhism as an organised religion but belong to its mystical branch. There the master of the temple stopped the monks’ hearts in a special ritual. At the start the heart was stopped for a few seconds, but in time they could do this for several minutes, because they iced and cooled the body down, and they could be physically dead for several minutes, up to 10 to 15 minutes at the extreme. He tells me what it feels like, again and again, because they did this once or twice a week over a long period. He says he has died more than a thousand times. Whether that’s so, I don’t know, but he explains exactly what it feels like. And he said to me: “Pål-Esben, would you like me to do this with you too?” So I say: “Yes, if my heart were healthy, I’d do it.” But my heart isn’t healthy, so if he stopped my heart, there’s no guarantee he’d get it started again, and I’m not quite finished with this incarnation yet. But he explains this both from the mystical side of Buddhism, the Bardo Thödol, and through his own experience, and tells me about this process of working through.

And while my sister was in this place in the Bardo, I journeyed in my own way and visited and supported her in the process, together with the angels of death and her death guide. And she was ready. It took only seven or eight days before she was ready. She was just waiting in the Bardo until the funeral, because she wanted to say goodbye to friends and family and all that. After about 14 days she was gone; by then she had moved on. As long as she was in the Bardo, I had direct contact with her. From the Bardo you move on into what can be called a realm of light, but which is really just a light: the moment you pop out of your next mother’s womb. And then there’s no longer any direct contact with the soul. She needed only 14 days, and she told me, after she’d been at the funeral and said goodbye to everyone, that she was ready to move on. And what she did then was simply turn towards the light, together with her death guide and the angels of death, walk towards the light, and be gone. And whoosh, into the next incarnation. It’s such a beautiful process if you get to do this in a good way. And it can be a horrible process if you go through it filled with anxiety, frustration, hatred and resentment. That’s the reason I prepare my shamans for these things and teach them what I’ve taught you. I want the day you come to your process to unfold in a harmonious and good way, and not be filled with fear and dread and everything else that has to do with the transition. Because that’s the only challenge we can have: that we’re filled with fear and resentment and all these things, and take it with us into the Bardo when we die. Then it’s entirely possible to get stuck in your own chaos, and that’s where the real hell is. It’s something we create for ourselves by being filled with fear. We don’t see all those standing around us, ready to help us; instead we’re disoriented, lost, filled with fear, resentment, whatever it is we bring in with us, completely blind to what’s happening. Through my shamanic process over the last 20 years I’ve helped both people who have been stuck there and animals that have died in horrible circumstances to be guided onwards. There are lots and lots of stories around these things. That’s why I’d say it’s much healthier and much better to have a qualified shaman guide you through a process like this than a member of a religious institution who talks about hell and Satan and heaven and so on, and who then may not be the right person to guide you through a healthy process.

Near-death experiences and belief systems

Amina: Many people have had near-death experiences and talk about death, or about what happens, in different ways. Some talk about travelling to Paris and eating pastries and drinking fizzy drinks, others are met by their whole family, while some come back and never dare do anything bad again, because then they’ll go to hell. I remember that when I began to study death a little, I wondered why people have such different experiences. What I think today, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that you come face to face with yourself, with your subconscious, with your belief system, and that’s what makes it possible to experience such different things.

Pål-Esben: Of course. When we experience things, nobody knows whether it’s real or whether it’s our own fantasy world experiencing things. Most of it is our own fantasy world, our own belief system, things bubbling up from our own subconscious. But say you really study this, as I have. First, I’ve guided people through the dying process and have experience of it. I have my own memories of what it’s like through my own dying processes. And I have mentors like my friend, who spent several decades up in Lhasa in this temple in Tibet learning and experiencing these things, and who says exactly the same thing. And when you then find it again in the oldest scriptures, you can say that most of this newfangled way of seeing it has very little to do with reality. Death is a natural process. Your soul lives forever, and your soul has chosen to come into a physical form to learn and experience. So it’s really only this meat suit of yours that dies, that is, your physical body. Your spirit, what you really are, lives forever. Then there are these fantasy notions, which are perhaps told so that people won’t be afraid of death. Whatever you do in life, the story goes, when you die you’ll have a house of your own you can travel to, and you can travel anywhere in this world, and you can sit in a café in Paris drinking coffee and tea with your friends and eating croissants. That has nothing to do with reality. That’s not how it is. Hello? If your soul is timeless and spaceless, do you think your soul has any interest, once you’re dead, in sitting in some metaphysical setting drinking tea in Paris? That’s not how it works. You die, and you go through a process of working through that can take anything from a few days to many years, depending on how much fear you have, and how willing you are to turn towards the light and walk towards the light. It’s your choice that decides this. And some choose to stay behind. They may appear as ghosts, poltergeist activity and so on: people who for some reason or other have clung on to this material existence and won’t move on. There’s lots of exciting stuff to talk about there too, but then we’d be at it for hours.

Karma steers the next incarnation

Pål-Esben: So the point here is that when you die, you glide up into the Bardo. It’s a process of preparation for moving on, not for going off to some place in this world and drinking coffee with your friends. Your soul family may well be standing there waiting for you, absolutely. But as a rule it’s your karma that steers how things go from there. Most people incarnate more or less on autopilot. That means the karma and dharma you’ve built up through X number of incarnations, and through this incarnation you’ve lived now, create a certain vibration, a certain frequency. And when you’re finished in the Bardo, that vibrational frequency will attract a suitable mother, and you pop out into the next incarnation. So when you see the light, it’s the baby’s first cry as it comes out and sees the new world: that’s what the light is. For most people that process doesn’t take place consciously. But one day you may go through your profound primordial shamanic process of development, or whatever process of development it is you go through, and come to the point where you find stable access to the timeless and spaceless and have experienced oneness while you’re alive. You can call that being spiritually enlightened and self-realized. Then, after you die, you’ll be fully conscious of everything that’s happening, and you have a choice about what you want to do. You have a choice whether you want to move on to the next incarnation, you have a choice whether you want to stay behind as a spirit and help other people on this planet, and you have several other choices. But only then do you have a choice; until then this runs more or less on autopilot. You die, your karma steers where you end up in the next incarnation, and then comes your soul’s learning theme. Your soul, which is infinite, can of course stop this at any time. But is your soul interested in stopping anything at all? After all, it has come here to learn and experience. We call it the elite university for souls. It has come here to learn and experience certain things, and until we’ve learned and experienced what’s necessary for the soul, it will just pop along to the next incarnation, right until it comes to the point where it gets to learn, experience and grasp the point. That can take one incarnation, and it can take a hundred thousand incarnations. For the soul it makes no difference, because everything happens now. Time is an illusion: for the soul, your present and past and future are playing out right now. It’s a very exciting thing when we start talking about this from the soul’s perspective.

So when people say that the way they live their lives has no consequence for what happens after they die, that’s completely wrong. Of course there’s a consequence. Bringing massive fear into the Bardo has consequences for the process that takes place there. The karmic rhythm you bring in with you has consequences for where you end up in the next incarnation. And there’s a consequence if you’ve walked the path to freeing yourself completely, walked the path to spiritual enlightenment and self-realization. Then it’s a radical consequence, in that you actually have a free choice about what you do next. That’s the reason why my task, where I stand today, my only task, is to help people set themselves free, as I’m now doing with you and many others. I help you come to the point where you stand with one foot in the timeless and spaceless, your Sahara, the soul’s true nature, and the other foot firmly placed in your material life, where you live a normal life and learn and experience around the themes your soul has come to learn and experience. The day you stand with one foot solidly in the one camp and the other solidly in the other, you’ve come to the point I call going through the soul’s doctoral thesis at the elite university, and then you’re free to do whatever you want from there. That’s my task.

Karma and dharma: two currents

Amina: Yes, and I remember back in the senior shaman training, because you have a whole seminar on this, and I remember this business of the word karma. Some people perhaps perceive it as a bit harsh, but for me it resonated in deeper layers of myself. I realised that it isn’t about “are you good or are you bad”. It’s just that everything you do has a consequence, and everything you don’t do has a consequence. That was very liberating for me. Of course, in the time afterwards I became very observant of my own nature, everything I did and everything I didn’t do, but for me it makes a lot of sense. It’s a sum that has to add up, in a way. One thing that really puzzled me when I came into the alternative world was that so many people talked about this cycle of incarnation, about having lived before, and perhaps about some regression therapy they’d done. People talk about incarnating several times, while at the same time there are mediums who make contact with people who have crossed over to the other side, but who in a way are also still here. And I couldn’t make it add up. If they’ve incarnated again, how can you make contact with them? That was one of the bigger questions I had. I don’t know if we should go into it today, because it’s perhaps a rather big topic, but there are many interesting things to think about.

Pål-Esben: Normally, when a person is in the intermediate realm in the Bardo, you can make contact with them without it being very complicated. But once they’ve moved on, it’s extremely difficult, because by then the main focus, the soul, has disappeared into another life, another incarnation. That might be as a baby, a young man or a young woman, or whatever it may be. Then very little can come of any contact. Of course, since everything exists at the same time, if we see that time is an illusion, we’re into another discussion about what incarnation is, and whether there’s really any such thing as incarnation. And there isn’t really, since everything happens at the same time. But then what is it? That’s something we can take up in another episode, because it’s a topic that’s out of this world. Karma is also a very exciting topic to delve into, and there’s often a lot of misunderstanding around it. People think it has to do with reward and punishment, but that has nothing to do with reality. Karma is just a consequence of your action, of what you do. Karma means action: the consequence of your actions, and especially the consequence of the intention behind your actions. That’s how you create a karmic current and a dharmic current. The karmic current is created when you live out your intention and your actions based on fear and secondary feelings such as hatred, control, aggression and ignorance. The dharmic current is created when your intention and actions are based on your heart, what we call the Path of the Heart: primary feelings such as empathy, compassion, love, passion and so on. So there are two currents you create, the dharmic current and the karmic current, which are just a consequence of the action you take, whether in a waking, sleeping or dreaming state. It makes no difference; they’re being created continuously.

These two currents help push us in certain directions when it comes to what we’re going to experience. For example, the karmic current will grow stronger and stronger the more we try to avoid engaging with a theme our soul has come here to learn about, avoid relating to it, learning from it and growing in it. The more ignorant we are, and the more we avoid it, the stronger this karmic wind, this karmic current, becomes, and eventually the karmic push becomes so strong that we’re almost forced to deal with it. It can take many, many, many incarnations, quote unquote, if we’re to simplify a little. If we talk linearly, we can talk about incarnations; if we talk about time not existing and being an illusion, we can no longer talk about a linear stream. But let’s simplify now and talk about a linear stream. When you incarnate, this karmic push will grow stronger and stronger the more you avoid dealing with a theme and learning and growing around it. Then you come to a point where it often becomes so intense that you no longer have any choice. An example from myself: I’m the sort who tends to be stubborn now and then, or at least my dear wife says so. If you had my wife here, you’d get the truth. Before, at least, I was extremely stubborn, and it ended with me collapsing into my burnout, which nearly killed me in 2003. It was karmic pressure that had built up so intensely because I avoided dealing with what was really important, and learning about it, exploring it and growing out of it. In the end I collapsed. It was one of the greatest gifts of my life, and it’s why I’m sitting where I’m sitting today.

So karma and dharma are important mechanisms that we need to learn to love, because they help us learn, and they help us put our finger on when we perhaps ought to make some changes. They’re there to give us a certain push and a certain help. And we have to remember that every deed, every action, has a consequence. But think what it would be like if death didn’t exist, which would mean that karma and dharma didn’t exist. Whatever you did, it wouldn’t matter, and there’d be no consequence of it. What would a life like that be like? It would be a life completely without meaning, where you could just lie on the beach drinking your piña colada, or whatever healthy drink you made in your blender, all day long, and there’d be no consequence of anything at all. Then we can imagine what it would be like after a year or two: we’d die of boredom. So without death, without karma and without dharma, meaning doesn’t exist. That’s why there’s nothing to fear, nothing to be negative about. It’s just like a helping hand that helps us and leads us in the right direction.

Amina: For those who don’t know, what is dharma, compared with karma?

Pål-Esben: Karma is this pressure, this wind, that’s created when we act and our intention is based on fear and anxiety and ignorance. We all know what that pressure feels like. When we try to avoid things we know we have to do, it feels like a very uncomfortable pressure. The dharmic pressure feels completely different, because the dharmic wind is created through your deeds, your action and the intention behind it, where you’re led by your heart. It’s a wind that brings you into situations where you experience dharmic synchronicity: things fall into place in your life, with opportunities and people you come across. We can talk later about what synchronicity really is. A completely different kind of synchronicity arises in your life when the karmic wind is steering. Then you experience challenges and problems that you’re forced to solve. Being massively steered by the karmic wind as opposed to the dharmic wind is a completely different way of living life, with completely different kinds of synchronicity, opportunities and input arising. So we could talk about that in an episode of its own on karma: what karma really is, and what karmic memory actually is.

Amina: Yes, very exciting.

Everything has a beginning and an end

Pål-Esben: Yes, it’s out of this world. Truly. So perhaps that’s enough for this time, dear Amina?

Amina: Yes, it feels as if we’ve come to the end of the road. Everything that has a beginning has an end.

Pål-Esben: Correct. And remember, dear listener, that we’ve only scratched the surface of this topic of physical death. It’s of course far more complex and far more exciting than what we’ve managed to tell you in this short hour. But it’s well worth keeping this in the back of your mind: how this affects our life, especially unconsciously, and how it affects our autopilot. And remember that there’s a fantastically positive consequence of going through a process where you set yourself free from this and take this power back over your life. It will affect the rest of this life in a very, very positive way. That’s my parting thought. Do you have any words of wisdom to wrap up with, dear Amina?

Amina: Yes, it has to be that everything has a beginning and an end, and perhaps realising that transformation is important. And perhaps looking a little into your own life. Where am I clinging on to old ways of doing things? Where am I clinging on to something that no longer serves me? What am I afraid of letting go of? And perhaps diving a little into yourself around some of the topics we talked about at the beginning of today’s episode.

The 7 Golden Keys: the foundation

Pål-Esben: Yes. And it all starts with becoming an expert in change and adaptation, and that’s the main theme of my first book, The 7 Golden Keys, which is where the whole thing starts. That’s where I start with everyone who wants to be in contact with me, whether in guidance or as my student. They have to read this book first, because that’s where I set out this philosophy, and that’s where you already start working with these things and begin to engage with them a little. That’s how it was with you too: when you started reading it, it was the start of your whole process. The 7 Golden Keys is a thin book that you can actually read in an evening or two.

Amina: Yes, and I just have to chip in there too. My partner Erik is also a student of yours, and he’s in the senior shaman training now. In the first months he started out simply working with The 7 Golden Keys, your book. I say simply, but it isn’t simple at all. He really went at it wholeheartedly to understand it, live it out, and learn by trial and error. And good heavens, what I saw when he started the training with that foundation! So many exciting things have happened to him on his path there. So whether you choose to go through a primordial shamanic process of development or another kind of process of development, The 7 Golden Keys will be worth its weight in gold as a foundation to build on, because it will permeate every area of your life when you really go into it wholeheartedly. And it isn’t a high price to pay; I think the book costs about 17 euros or something like that. When you really commit to it wholeheartedly, miracles can happen with that book alone.

Pål-Esben: Yes, and it’s quite fantastic what happened with his own study there, and the wholehearted way he went about it. After all, it’s two decades of experience compressed into a few pages, so that anyone can start this process completely alone, without a teacher, without a guide, and get great results. Next time we’ll talk about a new, exciting topic, and whatever it turns out to be, dear Amina, I hope you’ve got it ready. We might talk about karma, or the soul, or whatever it may be, but we always have something exciting in store. Thank you so much for staying with us all the way, dear listener. We really appreciate your feedback, and a five-star rating on Spotify helps our podcast reach more listeners. And thank you so much for being here with me, Amina. I really appreciate it.

Amina: Likewise, Pål-Esben.

Pål-Esben: Thank you for being with us, dear listener. I hope you’ll join us again in the next episode. And until then: have a truly wonderful day, evening, night or morning, wherever you are listening from. Take care.

Outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of “The Journey to Self-Realization”, a primordial shamanic journey of development back to your true nature. We hope Amina’s story has inspired you to explore your own journey of self-discovery and development. Remember that the path from suffering to self-realization can be demanding, but with courage, patience and support from a competent guide, mentor, teacher or therapist, almost anything is possible. We wish you all the best on your journey, and we’ll talk again in the next episode.