Q: I have been deeply trapped in a vicious circle my whole life. For thirty-five years I was addicted to heroin and cocaine. Although the drugs have stopped, the addiction has continued. It was covering up a deep grief and sadness coming from my last life when I apparently lost a child, and which I know from Vipassana I could not overcome.
John: What do you mean that you have apparently lost a child?
Q: I have seen clearly, in talking with my teacher, that I became addicted in my last life because I could not overcome that shock.
John: What shock?
Q: Losing a child, as a mother, in my last life. I became addicted in this last life, and this addiction, the grief and the sadness came with me into this life. For as long as I remember I always felt 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 wasn’t told. I experienced it in Vipassana, and my experience was so extreme I went to talk with the teacher and he said: “Well, obviously it’s not from this life so it must belong to your 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, for the first time I feel that this addiction and the underlying sadness has gone, but I’ve been tricked so many times in my life by my mind telling stories about being healed. I just want to check with you if it’s really happened this time, or if there is still any residue left which needs to be looked at and 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 yester-life free, yester-year free, yester-day 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. Add anything to that and you engage a process: difficulty.
Q: My God! (crying) Thank you.
