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110
HERMANN KUHN
SUTRAS
Incarnations in regions with nether, 'hellish' character are caused by excessive attachment to objects, persons, status etc., unrestrained
like 'All this is mine' and revengeful, cruel thoughts at our time of death.50 This manifests the deep desire of the being for further attachment to matter and for the experience of cruel, revengeful behavior. Since the nether, 'infernal'
state and will become active after the desires (the karmas) that caused the celestial birth(s) have been fulfilled.
Celestial beings can become so immersed in the enjoyment of their 'heavenly' conditions that they forget to develop higher stages of awareness. But here also the karmic mechanisms ensure that their
(temporary) stability is broken up for further progress. 50 Most people hold fast onto the belief that their time of death is far
away. We abhor to think that we will experience death with inevitable certainty.
We further tend to regard thoughts and emotions as of litt quence since we experience such an abundance of them.
Anything we may feel or think in that 'far away' and supposedly 'brief' moment when we ultimately leave our body, we therefore regard of minor importance for our current life.
Yet the fact that we evaluate this moment' as unimportant does not in the least diminish its profound impact on our future conditions of life. The point of our death is an extremely intense experience. Here all unfulfilled desires and all our ideas of what we still would like to experience condense into one intense feeling, into one intense longing. And this deep longing draws us into exactly that (new) environment that enables us to experience the physical manifestation of these desires in the best possible way.
At the point of our bodily death all we only pretended to be, all we only made up before ourselves and others, falls off like a discarded shell. What remains is raw and real yearning deep within us that dynamically attracts exactly those components we still want to experience. This tendency to new or 'renewed' experiences we only shape ourselves through the way we conduct all our current life.
It certainly is everyone's own decision to regard his or her moment of death as irrelevant or to envisage it so far in the future as if it would never occur. Yet death is inevitable. And once we experience this event in all its intensity, there is no opportunity left to alter the tendencies that then propel us into our new environment.
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