ON DEATH

Abstract

In the discussion with which we are concerned on the subject of death, I’ve tried to collect such testimonies as I could find both in the form of personal testimonies and some from literature. 1 However, I find that I did leave out one that is of particular interest. It was a testimony of an individual with whom I had had several contacts in the past and who has recently reestablished those contacts. This case is of an especial interest because there is a possibility that I may have known him in a previous body during this lifetime. He’d had this clear memory of fighting in the First World War, and that he was killed in Chateau-Thierry. He had memory of being in a bayonet attack. He seemed to have killed two Germans by the bayonet and then was killed himself by a bayonet thrust. And as he remembered it, he rose then above the field of conflict, which you may remember or have heard was one of the most bloody battles of that war. He felt the immensity of the conflict, and at higher levels found himself in a state of a kind of ecstasy—an ecstasy of combat, a kind of delight in the massive killing process. He ascended above that, in space, as it were, and then his memory train ceased.