When somebody has done something that hurts another person, it has a certain effect on his whole life. Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. – Rudolf Steiner
What comes next in our journey after we’ve crossed the threshold? In the last two posts we discussed the moment of death in Our Last Moment, and the retrospective of our life in Panorama of Life. Now we come to the next phase: Kamaloca. We may remember discussing karma and reincarnation previously; now we will find how we recognize the need for karmic justice in our lives. During Kamaloca, a term Dr. Steiner uses from the Sanskrit meaning Place of Desire, we review our lives going backwards from our last moment before death to our first moment at birth. This process occurs over a period of time that lasts roughly 1/3 of our lifetime, so that a person who dies at age 60 would experience Kamaloca for approximately 20 years. (You may have noticed how this corresponds with the period of time we spend asleep during our lives.)
We can imagine that this thorough life review will show us the effect we had on the people we encountered while we lived. However, we do not merely observe our effect on others, we actually feel exactly what they felt from their encounter with us. The good and the bad, all of it. As we go backward through our entire life and finally arrive at our birth, we will have experienced objectively our entire life on earth. How, then, do all these feelings resolve themselves into karmic action?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process, you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realize you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.
Let us suppose that in his twentieth year B hurt A. He now has to feel the pain himself, and resolves to recompense A in a future life, that is, in the physical world, where the injury was done. The force of this good resolution forms a bond of attraction between B and A and brings them together in the next life. That mysterious force of attraction that brings people together in life springs from what they have acquired in Kamaloca. Our experiences there lead us to those people in life whom we have to recompense or with whom we have any kind of connection.
Now you will realize that the Kamaloca forces we have taken into ourselves for the righting of wrongs in life can by no means always be worked out in a single life. It can then happen that we form connections with a great number of people in one life, and that next time we are in Kamaloca we have the possibility of meeting them again. Now this depends, too, on the other people, whether we meet them again in the following life. That spreads itself over many lives. In one life we correct this, in another life that, and so on. You must certainly not imagine that we can immediately put everything right in one life. It depends entirely on whether the other person also develops in his soul the corresponding bond of attraction.
Excerpt from: The Being of Man and His Future Evolution, Lecture 6: Illness and Karma, by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin. January 26, 1909,
If we just step back a bit, we can see what a miracle we are contemplating now: the true justice, the harmony, of the universe and our place within it. We are always making progress, moving forward, becoming better human beings. We aren’t punished in the afterlife for the wrong we’ve done by some external and imperious judgment; we ourselves—our highest selves, our spiritual selves—are consciously resolving to right our wrongs by fully realizing them. As a result of our time in Kamaloca, we are filled with good intentions that bring us back into our next lives. These good intentions brought us back into the life we’re living now. All of us.
Recognizing that everything done has karmic consequences, however, does not mean that we get to sit idly by while injustice or pollution or hunger or poverty or any of the evils still exist in the world. We must resolve to change all these things for the better within our power to do so. Every gift of love and service we give to the world is a movement in the positive evolution of us all.
If you would like to know more about Steiner’s work as it is applied today, please take a look at this site:
https://appliedanthroposophy.org/overview, especially the Introductory Course. The faculty members are inspiring; it is exciting to see them all in one place.