Karel from the Other World
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Karel from the Other World
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Narrated by:
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Marian Werner
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By:
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Marian Werner
About this listen
What happens to us after we die? Some prefer to avoid asking the question, some think they have a reassuring answer, some are still pondering the possibilities. Some distinguished scientists think that nothing happens: we simply disappear.
Marian Werner never thought that she would write a book about the afterlife but married a man who helped her to confront the question and answer it to her own satisfaction.
Karel Werner escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in 1968. As an expert in Indian philosophy and religion he had been on the threshold of a brilliant career at Olomouc University when the putsch of 1948 blocked it. He came to London on an invitation from the Buddhist Society UK to lecture at their summer ·school in 1968, and he and Marian met at the school the following year and married in 1970.
Throughout the fifty years they were together, Karel and Marian promised each other that whoever departed this life first would try to connect with the one left behind. Karel died on 26 November 2019. Almost immediately some unexpected things started happening. Friends of the couple have been witnesses to some, including a letter that disappeared and reappeared, and noises emitted by their smart meter. Listeners will form their own opinions.
©2025 Marian Werner (P)2025 Marian WernerThanks in part to KW’s example, I regard myself as an open-minded sceptic (= ‘skeptic’ in US English) and I would invite others to approach this book in the same spirit. But there are two kinds of sceptic…
The first kind is really a false one, who refuses even to consider evidence that does not accord with preconceived notions of what may or may not be possible. If this is your starting point, a mind closed to the possibility of survival of consciousness beyond death, you will find nothing in this book that you cannot easily dismiss as coincidence or wishful thinking.
The genuine sceptic, on the other hand, accepts nothing on faith alone and rejects nothing without properly weighing the arguments and the evidence. This attitude is, or should be, the guiding spirit of scientific enquiry – as per the motto of the Royal Society. It is also an attitude that the Buddha encouraged in his followers. KW did not regard himself as a ‘believing Buddhist’, but his own thinking aligned closely with the Buddha’s teaching as recorded in the Pali Canon.
As an academic scholar and a practising yogi, well-versed in both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions, KW was a truth-seeker and a great example of a genuine sceptic. He took nothing for granted and always maintained his independent, questioning mind, despite pressure to conform. He endured persecution in his native Czechoslovakia under communism, and in later life steadfastly resisted the oppressive groupthink so prevalent in academia in the ‘free’ world.
The audio version of “Karel from the Other World” is beautifully read by the author, Marian Werner, Karel's widow. It is clear to me, both from the way she tells the story and from his part in it, that there was/is a special bond of love between them – a love stronger than death perhaps. I am open to the possibility that he is indeed communicating with her, and one of the things I find most persuasive is that he seems to be doing so in ways that are true to the kind of person he was in life. His messages (or better, ‘signals’, since they never appear directly in words) are subtle and suggestive, full of gentle humour and compassionate understanding. That is how I remember him. And while the signals clearly have great personal significance, between Marian and Karel, they may also be very meaningful for the rest of us – for those of us, that is, who have ears to hear and whose minds are not too tightly closed.
“Only the closed mind is certain”
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