Anyone who is concerned with the concept of cause and effect comes into contact with the subject of karma at the latest when children become seriously ill. Could incidents from a past life actually have an effect on our present reality?

We have reported on the view that illness is a message from the body. This idea is represented by many well-known proponents of alternative healing approaches, such as Dr. Joe Dispenza, Louise Hay or Rüdiger Dahlke.

The following essay is taken from a conversation between Gerald Hagler and Kurt Tepperwein:

What is karma?

Karma means: the deed, the created. Whether an action took place recently or a very long time ago, possibly also in a previous life, does not matter according to Kurt Tepperwein. I have to deal with the "out-effect" of it now. It is always about the following: I have gone astray, as a result life sends me a message and I am called upon to understand it and correct the corresponding aspect of life.

Think of karma as a vat into which everything you do or have done in past lives goes. And at the tap at the bottom come out the circumstances in which you find yourself today. According to these life circumstances you perform new actions again, which in turn enter the karma vat.

Thereby you are, so to speak, caught in the hamster wheel of your life. You can only escape from this if you stop being "the doer", if you remember once who you really are, namely eternal, pure consciousness, an undivided part of the eternal being.

Then you no longer act, but only observe. And by changing from acting to observing, no more new actions enter the karma vat. It empties little by little, and when it is empty, you are free.

Again and again the objection comes that small children cannot have set wrong causes to become seriously ill. But small children, according to Tepperwein, are in truth not small children, but old souls like you and me in a still young body. Every soul brings its karma vessel with it into a new life, and so it may be that a cause already set in a previous life manifests itself in a young body.

Then people react to this with pity - for the child and also for the parents. But if we see that the soul consciously chooses different life situations in order to get to know the most different aspects of life, respectively to complete pending tasks, then pity is no longer necessary. The soul of the child and also that of the parents live out a necessary aspect, fulfill a soul need and thus redeem karma.

From the child's point of view, this is not necessarily a hard fate, but it is even conceivable that a soul needs a life in a limited functioning body, and therefore downright seeks it.

Tepperwein brings as an example the soul of Albert Einstein, who led a life as a brilliant scientist, as a Nobel Prize winner and as a worldwide celebrated celebrity. This soul could feel within itself that the spiritual aspects in this mind-oriented life have come far too short. As a consequence, it now chooses a severely handicapped body in order to give as much space as possible to the introspection and the feeling uninfluenced by the mind.

This body may not be able to do much more than sit in a wheelchair and sleep. It may be "handicapped" on the outside, but for that the soul plays the main role this time. Because of the physical limitations, there is no possibility at all to leave this role. And so this person experiences a life which is highly significant for him, which is not only in no way inferior to Einstein's, but is even more significant for the soul in the end.

This way of looking at things arises when you look at the situation as consciousness and not as mind.

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Understanding & Resolving Karma

Normally, we live in the assumption of being our body and our mind. But the wisdom of the language already points to the inadequacy of this assumption. For something that is "mine" cannot be myself.

When we are born, we do not yet have an "I." We simply do not know that we exist. There are others, there are movements, there are colors, but during the first three months there is nothing to attach one's "I" to.

Even when a baby catches sight of its reflection, it does not know that this is its face. But at some point, the baby perceives that it can influence what's happening. There are these little hands that it can make appear and disappear. And that you can move from side to side, just the way you want. That is the time when a human being experiences himself as a creator for the first time.

This is a big step in development, and so it is not surprising that babies are fascinated with their hands for days. This gives the child its first impression of itself and its ability to actively intervene in the flow of life. It now knows: I exist. At the same time, the consciousness gathers information from the environment and, like a neutral recording device, absorbs everything that is happening around it.

It hears, for example, that it looks like its father, that it sleeps restlessly, that it eats well, that it will probably go early, etc. In this way, a person's personality is formed long before it can be influenced at will. In other words, what constitutes a large part of my adult self has been formed by others.

It is nothing other than a conception of myself that was fed to me by my environment in the first six years of my life. Tepperwein calls this the "child ego". "Nobody would think of walking around as an adult in children's clothes or even in diapers. Mentally, however, we do just that. Almost all people live in their child ego."

According to Tepperwein, therapy sessions or seminars are almost always about boosting the "child ego" a bit. But even if it is possible to adjust the dress a little, to let out the hem, to move the buttons, to remove the stains, it remains a child's dress.

"You are an adult when you step out of your child self. Most people, however, never grow up, but merely grow old. You are an adult only when you realize: The child's dress doesn't belong to me at all. I'll take it off and choose the dress that suits me."

Tepperwein deliberately uses the image of trying on clothes in a boutique. You can actually shortlist a self-image from many different ones, try it on and finally wear the most suitable one. And once you have done this successfully, you also know: my "dress", that is not me. The identification with the personality stops.

I am the one who chooses. Everyone has experience with changing personalities. Your behavior, your body language, and even your choice of words vary depending on who you are dealing with. For example, you play a different role to your partner than to your superior, or to your club colleague, or to your own mother.

Only when one becomes aware that one plays these roles, the one who slips into all these roles can be perceived. And this is no more someone, but pure existence, the "coming into appearance" of the one power. As a part of this power I am eternal being. This "I Am" is never born, does not die and can also not become ill. Only the body can do that.

And only one personality, that is, the particular role into which I have slipped, can be disturbed, or sad, or sky-high. As pure existence I choose an identity, appear as a certain personality, play different roles at the same time, but I am consciously the one who I really am.

"I shape the body, I use the mind, I feel my emotions, I perceive the world with my senses, I create and change reality, but I am pure, featureless being. I appear only through an ego. And then I also realize: everything I experience in my life, I have caused - most of it, however, unconsciously."

Kurt Tepperwein is not surprised that so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. It would not be their life at all. It results from a self-image that was created by others during childhood.

Once we have "grown up", we consciously choose our identity. And then the question arises: Do I want to make my ego happy or myself? Both are possible, but the paths are very different.

The ego wants recognition, power, possessions, advancement, to be loved, to be somebody, etc. All these things do not interest the self. The self wants to be "in tune", to be in harmony with itself, to play the game of life for the sake of playing and not for winning.

Think of your life as a dive. You need diving equipment, i.e. wetsuit, oxygen tank, goggles, etc., as your experience tools to explore the underwater world. If you have exhaled the oxygen in the tank before visiting all the planned points underwater, you have no choice but to surface and complete the dive.

Perhaps you did not pay enough attention to your experience instrument, breathed too hastily, moved too unsteadily and thus used up the available oxygen. Or perhaps you were careless and injured yourself on a coral. In all cases, you will have to end the underwater excursion prematurely - figuratively speaking, you will have to leave your body.

Applied to life, this could mean that you damage your body, for example, through smoking, poor diet, lots of anger and rage, or other wrong habits, feelings and thoughts. By doing so, you cause its naturally given capacity to be exhausted before time.

But there is also the case that you have already seen all the sights you had planned for your dive and surface, although there is still air in the tank and your equipment is still in perfect order. The soul can also go out of a still quite healthy body, which is then often completely surprising for the environment. Doctors then speak of sudden cardiac death, or organ failure, or a fatal accident has occurred.

"No one has ever died. The moment the instrument of experience is put down, the "I Am" stands beside it and feels more alive than ever before."

Kurt Tepperwein It's kind of like waking up from an intense dream. The dream may have felt extremely real, with intense impressions and perceptions, but after waking up you understand that it was "not real" after all. This has been taught by Hindus and other ancient traditions for millennia and is strikingly confirmed by hundreds of accounts of near-death experiences. In his unmistakably humorous way, Tepperwein tells the following story on the subject of "belief in life after death":

"Imagine if embryos could communicate with each other, for example via telepathy. And an embryo scientist would speak telepathically to the others: 'Dear embryos. Again and again there are fantasists among us who believe that there could be a further life after the 9 months allotted to us by fate. It should be clear to every realist that this is impossible. Let's keep the facts in front of our eyes. We grow up, protected in the womb, until we are expelled after about nine months. The umbilical cord, which until now has provided us with everything necessary for life, is cut and then it is over. We have to accept these facts and only absolute dreamers claim that life can still go on after that. Yes, some even stoop to the presumptuous assertion that this is only the beginning, this is the birth to the actual life. Every reasonably serious scientist can only shake his head at such nonsense and wonder how one can seriously believe such a thing."

Why does a part of the unseparated being go into the narrowness and inhospitality of a human life at all? According to Tepperwein, where the "I Am" comes from, everything is perfect. However, if you yourself and everything and everyone around you are perfect, there is nothing to learn. By incarnating into a body, you go into duality, that is, into conscious imperfection, which gives you a lot of opportunities to have learning experiences - because now they are imperfect.

"By understanding who you really are, you take the final transformational step: you move from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection to conscious perfection."

(Author's note: it is worth reading this statement several times to understand its profundity).