d prevent a
man from beholding his friend clearly is the presence of desires which can
be satisfied only by means of physical organs. Unless these desires are
extinguished, he can have no conscious perception of his friend after
death. When looked at in this light, the terrible and hopeless character
which after-death experiences might assume for man, according to the
descriptions given by occult science, becomes changed into one which is
thoroughly satisfying and consoling.

Now the first after-death experiences differ entirely in yet another
respect from those during life. During the time of purification man lives,
as it were, backwards. He lives over again the whole span of his life
since birth; beginning with the events immediately preceding his death,
and reversing the order of his experiences, he goes through them again
until he reaches back to childhood. In this process he sees with
spiritually enlightened eyes all those things which were not inspired by
the spiritual nature of the ego, with the difference that he now
experiences these things in reverse order.

For instance, a man who died in his sixtieth year, and who at the age of
forty had, in an outburst of anger, caused some one either physical or
mental pain, will go through this experience again when, on the return
journey of existence after death, he reaches that point in his fortieth
year; but now he does not experience the satisfaction which his attack had
afforded him during life; instead, he experiences the pain which he
inflicted upon the other man. It may at once be seen, however, that
whatever pain he feels in the after-death experience is caused by a desire
of the ego arising only from the outer physical world; in reality the ego
does not only injure another by the indulgence of such a desire, but it
also injures itself; although the injury to itself is not apparent during
life.

After death, however, the whole of the harmful world of desires becomes
visible to the ego, which then feels attracted toward every being or
object which had kindled the desire, in order that this may be destroyed
in the "consuming fire" by the same means that created it. When man, on
his return journey, reaches the moment of his birth, then only have all
such desires been purged in the purifying flames, and henceforth nothing
remains to hinder him from devoting himself entirely to the spiritual
world. He enters upon a new phase of existence. In the same way that he
la