The soul comes from an infinite expanse of freedom and becomes trapped in the body, so to speak, which feels constricting. Death is exactly the opposite;
the soul leaves the body, and it is experienced as an enormous liberation and actually very, very beautiful.
Klaus Bielau: Dr Dahlke, you are a doctor, holistic physician, and seminar leader and have been a bestselling author for decades with book titles that make the hearts of spiritually sensitive contemporaries beat faster, such as “Illness as a Path” (with Thorwald Detlefson), “Illness as a symbol”, “Illness as the language of the soul”, “The laws of fate – rules for life”, “The shadow principle”, “Sleep – the better half of life”, or “Crises as an opportunity for development” and similar titles. In the blurb of the book “On the Great Transformation”, you talk about your desired goal and goal to contribute to a field of contagious health. As a doctor and psychotherapist, you repeatedly deal with Death and dying. “We die and will live on” is the subtitle of the above book, “On the Great Transformation”. What do dying and living mean to you personally?
Rüdiger Dahlke: Yes, I’ve just been affected. My daughter died recently at the age of 31. It’s always different when you feel it like that than when writing a book in theory. I dedicated the book to my mother-in-law, a stalwart woman from Linz. She was dying. I wrote it relatively quickly so that it would still be printed. She really wanted to have it, and that worked out. Her daughter, my sister-in-law, read it to her.
Dying has now become very close to me again. It’s easier for those who are leaving than for the bereaved. As we say, it’s the whole grief aspect, whereas those leaving don’t. So, in shadow therapy, which I did for over 30 years, or reincarnation therapy, as Thorwald Detlefson always called it, something turns around because we also look at conception; it is always a constriction for the soul. It comes from an infinite expanse of freedom and becomes trapped in the body, so to speak, and that feels constricting. But the foetus still has plenty of space in the womb. It is in a wonderful situation, with the same temperature inside as outside. Its perception is still boundless and transcendent, as the body is still transparent. You can see that when you look at the pictures by Nilsen, the Swedish photographer. And then it gets tighter in the womb when it comes to giving birth. Birth is something very stressful, sometimes even frightening for the newborn.
And we celebrate it very much. Death is exactly the opposite; the soul leaves the body, and it is experienced as an enormous liberation and actually very, very beautiful. Perhaps we need to rethink this a little from the perspective of spiritual psychotherapy. For most people here, Death is something quite frightening. It no longer has much to do with resolution, with redemption, which it does in other cultures. We have expressions like Gevatter Tod, which means Father Death; people even used to call it a friend. There are wonderful films on the subject. In my life as a doctor, I have prescribed more films than pharmaceuticals and have also written two books on the subject, “The Hollywood Therapy” and “The Feature Film Therapy”. There is a wonderful film, “The Book Thief”, where you don’t even notice for the first hour that Death is narrating, and he is very approachable. There’s a whole series of films where you can see that beautifully. So, for the majority, there’s also a film with Brad Pitt, “Rendezvous with Joe Black”, with a very attractive, fascinating Death or another one entitled “His Best Day”, where Death also has a very protective, saving role. We have entirely lost that in our modern industrialised society. Even among devout Catholics, Death is often a horror story. There are perhaps still a few anthroposophists who live a purely spiritual Christianity and who can still see it differently.
KB: The Gnostics of all times, including the modern ones, including Rudolf Steiner, see it similarly.
RD: But for the majority, Death is black. According to Goethe, black is not a colour at all, but it is a total lack of colour, like our pupils, who are black. Why is that? Because all the light disappears in it. All energy disappears in the black holes in the universe. But the Indians, for example, celebrate Death in white. White is all the light that comes from the sun, so to speak. We can’t see it at all; we have to put a prism between them, and then we can see the rainbow colours. Black is the total lack of colour, and that’s how we perceive Death. But I believe that reality is different; it is how we see it in the world of soul images. This was always very clear in shadow therapy. In this respect, it’s not so frightening for me. But my daughter had Down’s syndrome and a severe heart defect. Yet, it was unexpected, surprising and quick, and then it was different again. I experienced a lot of sadness, tears, and an unpredictable amount of dejection. And as a doctor, there was nothing I could do. I’m not a fan of this do-it-yourself medicine, but then you want to. I realised that I was more of a father than a doctor. And when I looked at the monitor, and the oxygen saturation went so low that as a doctor, I knew and I thought: “Oh God, oh dear God”. But as a father, there was still hope that she would stay with us. I was very discreet about it. I’ve noticed this discrepancy. I live in this culture, too and feel like a Christian, even though I’m not a member of any organisation; I can’t stand it anymore. You live in this field, and I don’t really have any reason to feel great sadness from what I know. But it happened quickly, in a day and a half, and she didn’t suffer much. You can wish for that. I wished for it so much; I also saw in meditation that she was on the right path.
Nevertheless, I realised that the field also has a powerful effect and takes you into it. That’s when I noticed such great sadness. It was similar to when I said goodbye to my mother, but she left very consciously at almost 89. She wanted to go, so letting go was a more straightforward exercise, so to speak, than when someone leaves at 31.
I’ve experienced this before. I was once involved in a resuscitation; it was a motorcyclist or rocker with a polytrauma. He then came around and kept talking about beings of light and so on. That didn’t fit in with his outfit at all. He was wearing one of those thug outfits, I’d say, with old German badges, not exactly the swastika, but all in black leather. He acted quite differently from his usual behaviour. The girlfriend, who was hardly hurt, asked what we had done to him. We hadn’t done anything. I then visited him in the ward, and he was completely different. He experienced his Death and saw the beings of light. He no longer wanted to know anything about his helmet and his accessories as a rocker; he was so moved by the encounter with the beings of light and spoke of love, of light. And his girlfriend was utterly flabbergasted and didn’t understand a thing.
And then I read a lot. From death researchers from Kübler-Ross, I have experienced her personally. And then you get a different idea. The whole field of death research goes toward realising a little of what the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes, for example, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It’s all in line with what Elisabeth Kübler-Ross found. It bothered me in the clinic and drove me out of there that you’re not allowed to talk about Death. They said, “The patient in room 18 has passed away”. It’s all such an avoidance strategy …
KB: out of fear.
RD: Yes, you’re not allowed to talk about dying. We have two views of the world … and mine is not the one we know from conventional medicine, which is the usual one. We should reconcile ourselves much more with reality, the reality of the soul. Because that determines our attitude to life. And it’s not so horrible when we die, but this process of detachment is actually a liberating, beautiful one. There’s also a good film about it – I know films about everything – it’s called “Beyond the Horizon”, with Robin Williams, one of his last films. You can see very nicely how they try to describe the transition beautifully in Hollywood with their methods, how the soul sees everything much more clearly, and how the colours are much stronger. I know this from many people in therapy. In shadow therapy, you look at past lives, and you also experience a lot of dying transitional situations. There’s something very harmonising, releasing, and redeeming about it. Just as it used to be described in religion and is still described in Hinduism today. It’s more of a positive story. The Indians have this four-part division of life, at least in the classical Hindu tradition: four times 21 years.
The first 21 years are spent learning, and the second, up to 42, building a farm, company, and family. Then you have 21 years to secure it all. For the last 21 years, the Brahmin left the family the farm and only concerned himself with spiritual development. All he has to do is ensure he is in Benares on time, by the Ganges, where the cremation occurs. As a Brahmin, he must have his sandalwood together for the cremation. His life is now purely spiritual, up to the age of 84, which is the ideal, four-stage life. Behind this is the understanding that Death is redemption.
These are entirely different attitudes to life; we can only imagine this and empathise a little. I also experienced this in Bali, where Hinduism is very traditional. What huge festivals they have for funerals! The mood is not downcast or sad, as is usual here. It’s actually the same in Catholicism, but a bit different. I was baptised a Protestant, but it didn’t affect me. I grew up as a Catholic. For a Protestant, that’s amazing, as are the funeral feast and the tidy atmosphere. That’s still the old tradition; it knows a lot more.
KB: Yes, in our culture, Death is repressed out of fear. What we have built up with so much effort and ambition regarding material things, our cleverness, and the great things our ego has planted around us collapses when we die. But in the last few decades, we have seen an evident change. There is a noticeable connection with Eastern culture.
RD: Yes, that’s the case; you can see that in younger people. So, either there’s little interest or, if there is, it’s very spiritual.
KB: There is no age; it is just an eternal now.
RD: That’s what all spiritual traditions say. There’s not a single spiritual tradition or religion that doesn’t really say that. Even Christianity has a spiritual tradition, ultimately. St John’s Christianity, for example, is something completely different from the church’s St Peter’s Christianity. There has always been such depth there. I know Sufis who have an incredibly beautiful view of the world. – There is always a tiny spiritual direction and a large external one responsible for the world. The spiritual aspect is certainly in ‘ ‘John’s Christianity, who was also the favourite disciple or the disciple close to ‘Jesus’ heart. Christ had a lot of “trouble” if you look closely. Peter didn’t understand him and ended up denying him three times. I believe Christ knew his twelve disciples or apostles or archetypes, as you could also call them. He also considers Judas Iscariot’s betrayal and speaks to him about it, as well as to Peter. Dealing with Death is not always easy.
KB: Is there a final word on our topic of “living and dying” or “dying and living” instead?
RD: We should lose our fear. I recommend films like “The Book Thief” or “His Best Day”, which I also interpreted in one of my two film books (“The Hollywood Therapy” and “The Feature Film Therapy”). Spending one and a half to two hours on such a big topic is very nice. These are age-old themes; Ingmar Bergman already portrayed the story of “Everyman” (by Hugo von Hofmansthal) in the film “The Seventh Seal”. I think we will find it much, much easier if we integrate this. Angelus Silesius, the “Silesian Angel”, once said, “If you don’t die before you die, you will perish forever.”
Once you have come to terms with dying and reconciled yourself to it, life is so much better, and it can be a little freer. And then it’s still painful to say goodbye to someone you loved very much.
KB: Thank you very much, Rüdiger Dahlke, for talking to us.
