Into the Heart of Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

really nice person in her lifetime. She led a good and wholesome life. So she could well have thought, “Why is this happening to me? I’m so young, and yet look at this—what a very terrible thing to happen to me.” But once, when she was resting, she had a waking dream in which suddenly she found herself as a man: she was now a soldier in armor standing over another soldier, who was lying on the ground. He had a red cross on his breastplate, as if it was during the time of the Crusades. Holding a spear to his chest, she was looking down at him. He was pleading for his life, and she knew at that moment she had a choice. She could let him go or she could kill him. She looked into his eyes and his eyes looked into hers, and he was imploring. She thrust the spear right through him. And as she did that, she felt such an incredible pain at her chest, and then she awoke into present-day consciousness.
    Whether or not that was just something which her mind brewed up, who knows? But it could also be an explanation for why so many centuries later, she was now having this terrible disease. In this lifetime she was a good person. But we plant seeds, and they have to come up once the right conditions appear. We have to accept that.
    And that brings us to the next part of this whole question. Now we are here, and we have this lifetime. We don’t come into this world as empty blank sheets, no matter what the psychiatrists like to tell us. I’m sure those of you who have had children know very well that each child is very different right from the start. We look into the eyes of a small baby, and it’s a person! We bring with us the patterning and conditioning of many, many lives.
    Therefore in this lifetime there will be certain things which happen to us; certain events which are likely to occur. But there are infinite crossroads; it’s not all laid out. We are going along, and the road branches. If we take this path then we will go on and we will meet more turnoffs. Or if we take that path, we will meet with other turnoffs, and so on. It’s like that. It’s not as though one way has already been set out for us, one way predestined for us. Some people have the kind of lives which look like that. For instance, my own life has always seemed a bit predestined, presumably because of very strong imprints and aspirations from the past. When I try to make a detour, barriers come up, and I have to keep going the way I am supposed go. But nonetheless, we do have choice. This is the point of a human birth—we have choice. Even people who have clairvoyance say, This is only what is likely to happen. It doesn’t have to happen; other circumstances can come up and we can change it. For example, at one time the Buddha was walking outside the city walls, and he saw a ragged corpse. It was the body of a drunken wastrel who had just died. The Buddha said that this man, the son of a rich merchant, had originally been very wealthy. He had met with the Buddha, and was attracted to the Dharma, and had even thought of becoming a monk. But his wife dissuaded him and so he didn’t ordain. Eventually he began to gamble and drink and waste all his money. He ended up as a beggar. The Buddha said that if he had become a monk at that time, he would have become an Arhat. He would have become completely liberated.
    Due to the seeds we have planted in the past, certain things are likely to happen. How we respond to those events plants new seeds. In other words, we are constantly creating our own future. If we make skillful responses, the results will be good. If we make unskillful responses, we will have a hard time in the future. We are responsible for our lives now and in the future. It is up to us. Ultimately, we can’t blame anyone else. Of course we are influenced by those around us. We are influenced by our upbringing; we are influenced by many things. But nonetheless, some people have had extremely traumatic lives—terrible childhoods, dreadful