X. Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives?

Now there is still a third kind of opium consumption. This opium consumption is even very widespread in the world, although not in Europe, more for example among a certain type of Turks and namely in Asia and Hinterindien, with the Malay peoples. There these people take only such strong quantities of opium that they can just still tolerate it, that they wake up properly again, and do not die from it. In this way they experience everything that the opium eater experiences in a strange and interesting way. Only they gradually get used to it, and so they experience the story more consciously. The Turks then say: Yes, when I enjoyed opium, I was in paradise. — That is already the case in these fantastic interpretations. And the Malays in the Far East also want to see all that. So they get used to taking opium because they want to see all that too. This can be done for a relatively long time, and then you end up saying to yourself, “Well, there is something else.”