The kamaloca process in which a soul, dismembered across space, feels its own deeds from the receiving end, forging the ties that reunite those people at rebirth.
The Technique Of Karma in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of how karmic ties are actually forged, set out in the seventh lecture of Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99), given in Munich on 31 May 1907. Steiner locates the process in kamaloca, the period that follows the laying aside of the etheric body, where the astral being is dismembered in space, present at once in Munich, Mainz and Basle, even beyond the Earth sphere, with nothing at all filling the intervals between those centres. At each centre the soul stands inside a person it affected during life and undergoes, from within, what that person felt. Those transposed experiences do not dissolve when kamaloca ends. They harden into forces of attraction that draw the same human beings back into one another's biographies at the next birth. Restorative justice conferencing, which seats an offender before the person harmed, runs a compressed version of the same reversal inside one lifetime.
The technique of karma answers the question the law of karma leaves open. Not that deeds return, but how. Steiner's answer is spatial and precise. Between death and rebirth the soul is scattered across every place it touched, and at each of those places it receives its own act back from the other side. The receiving is what builds the tie.
In Steiner's Own Words
Five Vehmic judges in the Middle Ages condemned a man to death and executed the sentence themselves. In his previous life, this man had been a kind of Chief and had ordered the death of the five. Then the Chief died and passed into Kamaloca. During this period he was transported into the others at the place where they now were and he was obliged himself to experience what they had felt when they had been put to death. This is the starting-point of forces of attraction which bring human beings together when they return to the Earth, in order that the law of Karma may be fulfilled.
What it Means Today
Steiner describes a court turned inside out. Five judges execute a man who, in an earlier life, had ordered their deaths, and the moral weight of the whole affair falls not on the sentence but on the later moment when the Chief undergoes the dying he commissioned. Something structurally close to that reversal was rebuilt inside ordinary legal time by the restorative justice movement. In 1974, in Elmira, Ontario, probation officer Mark Yantzi persuaded a judge to send two young men who had vandalised twenty-two properties to meet the people they had damaged, door by door. Howard Zehr gave the practice its theory sixteen years later in Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Herald Press, 1990), which reframed crime as an injury to relationship rather than an offence against the state and made the encounter between the two parties the centre of the response. Zehr built the field's academic home at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A conference holds the person who caused harm in the presence of the person harmed until the account has been received from the other side, which is the operation Steiner assigns to kamaloca.
Thalira synthesis: the technique of karma implies that moral learning is a transposition rather than a verdict, so any practice that puts a person inside the experience they caused is doing in an afternoon what the soul otherwise does across the decades after death. Steiner is not describing a punishment ledger. He is describing how two biographies get sewn to each other.
Where to Read More
- Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, GA 99
- Find Theosophy of the Rosicrucian at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]