Q: Hello John. I would like you to check out something with me. I have been deeply trapped in a vicious circle all my life long. I was addicted all my life, basically. Although the drugs have stopped, the addiction was still ongoing, covering up a deep grief and sadness coming from last life where I apparently have lost a child, which I know from the Vipassana I could not overcome.

John: What do you mean that you have apparently lost a child?

Q: I have seen this clearly. I have been talking to the teacher that I became addicted already last time, because I could not overcome that, that shock.

John: What shock?

Q: Yeah, losing a child as a mother, last life, and I became addicted, and this apparently came over to this life, this addiction and the grief and the sadness. I was always feeling that I had a twin, which my mother lost.

John: Don’t believe what you don’t directly know the truth of. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. Don’t believe what someone tells you just because it sounds interesting or just because it fits something. If you don’t directly know the truth of it, don’t believe it.

Q: But I was not told. I have seen that, I experienced that in, in the Vipassana and my experience was so extreme. I just went to talk with the teacher and he said, “Well obviously it’s not from this life so it must belong to last life.”

John: That’s a deduction. Don’t deduce the truth of anything. It’s important because what you deduce of the truth, you put together in your psyche and it holds. If it’s deduced, it’s fabricated.

Q: Well, it’s for the first time I feel that this addiction has gone and the underlying sadness. And I’ve been tricked so many times in my life from my mind telling stories about being healed, and I just want to check with you if this really happened this time, or if there’s still residuals left which need to be looked at, transcended.

John: The residuals are all there and they don’t need to be looked at, they don’t need to be sorted through. As they come up, don’t engage them, don’t address them. Engage no process with them, give it no thought. Just quietly open and soften in your heart in the midst of what comes up. It isn’t about what comes up. It’s all about what you are being in the midst of anything that comes up.

What comes up in your experience forms an internal environment. That environment doesn’t matter much. What matters is what you are being in it. What matters everything, what matters first, is that you are opening and softening within the quietude of your heart, in the midst of any internal environment, any outside environment, without needing to work on any of it. Your real beingness accomplishes in your self what your self is incapable of.

Whatever you experienced in your meditation, as powerful as it was, believe the part in it that you directly knew the truth of. Give your experience no interpretation. Give it no story. If you give it interpretation and a story you empower a false covering on it. Whatever was real and true in that experience remains in you and, on its own, continues to reverberate as long as you’re not putting something to it. Whatever you put to it, put on it, whatever you conclude and form around it will also continue to reverberate, and then you’ll have a mix of the two: the real and the false.

When you are deeply gentled and quieted in your heart, there you are past life free, whether past lives exist or not. Deeply gentled and quieted in your heart, right there, you are yesterlife free, yesteryear free, yesterday free. There is no past of any kind that is able to hold into openness, making profound openness your key into you.

Authenticity of being circumvents every holding, every form, every process. With authenticity of being within, available in your heart, you really are what you really are. There’s nothing else required.

Q: Thank you.