XII. Karma Technique

To our ordinary way of thinking it is difficult to imagine how such a long span of time can be apparent to the soul in one and the same moment. But another element also plays an important role here. In the physical world, every event in life brings pain and pleasure, eagerness or reluctance. And when we look back on our lifetime, eagerness and reluctance come back to mind again. After death, however, pain and suffering have gone. The images are objective and do not cause pain; they do not evoke personal feelings. A tableau of memories of this kind can also come up in life on exceptional occasions, for instance in individuals who are about to die of drowning or are in danger of their life in some other way. The best people to cite as witnesses for this are those who don’t want to know about spiritual investigation in any real sense, for instance the Viennese criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt.[^1] He has told in his memoirs how on one occasion he was close to death on a mountaineering trip and how the whole of his life went through his mind at that moment. The phenomenon arises because something happens to the ether body when someone gets a major shock in life.