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.

 

Q: In recent weeks I’ve felt very strong survival issues and my survival seems more important than anything else. I feel a very deep, primal fear.

John: Have no issue with it. It’s clear: you are not going to survive. You’re going to die, so until then live from deeply within.

Q: I’ve twice felt I was getting into a story about it. Both times fear of a death so total came super-strongly, and I managed to escape from it.

John: If it is real and true, it’s good and it’s coming – now or later. If it’s not true and it’s false, there isn’t anything for you to do about it. There’s nothing there to work with. You being gentled and quieted in your heart makes you available for whatever it is that’s true, and you being gentled and quieted in your heart makes you unavailable to anything that’s false, whatever that is.

Q: I sense that spirituality can sugar-coat this kind of thing, but I don’t seem able to.

John: Primal fear doesn’t exist. That’s an oxymoron.

Q: But it does seem to exist for me.

John: Just because you are powerfully thinking and feeling something doesn’t mean that it’s real and true. All it means is that you are powerfully thinking and feeling something. That’s it. Give that no interpretation.

Q: What do I give it, then? Do I just allow it to be there?

John: Without you tending to it. What you really are is not fearful. Fear is an experiential add-on. The more you give it, the more tightly it holds to you, grips on you. Without you empowering it, on its own, it has nothing to do with you.

Q: There was another time in my life when fear came. It was almost like an entity around me, a spirit. Maybe it’s come back. Would you say something about the entities that are around?

John: You be gentled and quieted in your heart, absolutely rested in your heart, and whatever that entity does to you, however powerfully you experience it – it doesn’t matter what it activates in your self, what it feels like – all you are is rested in your heart. It’s all you actually know. You don’t know what to do about that entity, so then, quietly, don’t: don’t fear, don’t react, don’t want to run, don’t think of what you can do. Buy into none of it. You, absolutely, unwaveringly gentled and quieted, rested in your heart, leave an entity with nothing in you. Nothing comes from you to that entity. It can only have what it can provoke from you. It will do whatever it does to you, while you are rested in your heart.

Q: For your self – when everything disappeared that was you, John, before – was there such a thing as fear, or was it just total surrender and love?

John: Anyone who is free isn’t so without being so quiet within, believing only the truth within, and not putting together anything anymore based only on thought, feeling and past experience, and has allowed all of that to experientially die.

Anyone who is free, in their living, died peacefully in the midst of great upheaval and difficulty.

Q: In the midst of great upheaval and difficulty?

John: Yes, definitely. Anyone who is free – really free – paid for it.

Q: Yes. I like to have it but not pay for it! It’s so tempting: you know you’re going to die and are promised eternal life if you let go of it all …

John: You can have it all now, and pay later.

Q: What do you mean by “have it all”?

John: You – and you have the power to be this – being absolutely taken by the deepest quietude in your heart which makes you, as beingness, no longer like this (John extends a closed fist) and truly, all the way through, like this (he extends and opens his hand) open: quietly nothing from the perspective of your self. That opens your heart to what you are as a being, and as you remain in that quietude you flow into your being and your being flows into your self. Living that will cost you the upheaval of all of your subconsciousness. Everything in life that you come into is going to pull up every mechanism and trigger that you’ve been running away from. It will pull up and confirm everything not integrated in your self. It will expose all in your form, in your self, in your mind, that isn’t just like what you really are.

Q: Is this immediate or is it a process?

John: The dying, the passing away of all of your false investments and the false investments of your ancestors embedded in your self, happens slowly. That requires a process of you being what needs no process for you to be. Only core honesty within to what you directly know is instant. The everything is without process. The dying of what is false will take some time, while you live, in your walk.

Be now. Be in your walk and don’t mind paying for all of that as you go. If you mind, you’ll side with your self. You’ll side with what you feel and what you think. You’ll side with your past conclusions. You’ll side with all of the false conclusions that your ancestors have made and passed down to you, all embedded in your self – thousands of voices – and they will all hold you to them through your belief.

Q: This honesty, does that also include the honesty in normal living? I have this sense that sometimes it is beneficial to be dishonest on the surface.

John: Don’t address the surface first. Don’t apply your honesty to the surface first. That’s not a license for dishonesty, but where you go with your honesty is straight to your core and then you be from your core what you really are. You’re being it because all of your honesty pours into and faces what you really are, which enables you to be that. Nothing else has you, and then you be that coming back up through all of your levels, through your heart, into your self, into your personality. You let that, from the inside out, mean whatever that means in your life. Whatever you know that means, whether you like it or not, you’ll quietly be it.

Q: I want to ask you one more thing. I’m still puzzled by what “as above, so below” means.  It’s like a riddle in my mind.

John: The highest truth and the deepest truth are intimately mirroring each other. They are not without each other. Closer to your self, it also applies. The truth that’s there in your higher self and deeper self is there because at some point you’ve already lived it. There is no deeper self or higher self that you haven’t lived.

A deeper self and higher self come about by you being what you directly know the truth of in your heart, in your walk. That forms your deeper self. It forms your higher self. The two together comprise the realness of your self. It’s what you have actually integrated in your self of what it’s like to be what you really are, in your walk, in your life.

Q: Thank you, John.