In the course of daily life, we are exposed to a lot of impressions that reach us through our five senses. Regardless if we live in the East or in the West, the modern world has taken on a path that has some very harmful aspects for our spiritual progress – things such as wild capitalism, insatiable consumerism, bombardment with ads wherever we go, senseless trends, addictive and low entertainment, degrading use of sexuality, a sick pleasure in gossiping, etc. These types of impressions enter our mind through the five senses and are polluting it, building up a heavy weight of a low substance that we carry in our subconscious mind, and as the result are becoming increasingly subservient to this low way of living. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to free ourselves, to free our soul from the shackles of the trends of the modern world – trends that are indiscriminately pushing us down and thwarting our spiritual evolution.

It is necessary to become aware of how different things in daily life affect us. You have most likely observed already in your life how seeing a certain image, a scene, or a situation has affected you negatively, which might have even caused you mental pressure when you would remember it later on. Similarly with audible impressions, with sounds that you might have heard that were very unpleasant, or have latched onto your subconscious and due to the process of association have started causing troubles. These type of things we can observe much more when we begin the process of inner transformation, of inner cleansing, because we become more aware of our psychological structure when we start with practices such as self-remembrance and self-observation. However, you might have also observed how some seemingly pleasant impressions have caused problems in the long run.

Places that we go to, what we choose to watch or listen on TV, smartphone or computer, people that we decide to meet with, conversations that we have….all these things leave an impression of a certain type upon our psyche, often time etched in our consciousness and in the subconscious mind. Such impressions can be good, bad or neutral. If someone has a low lifestyle, if they vibrate on a low frequency, then for such people it doesn’t really matter if the impressions that they receive through their five senses are low – moreover, they seek such impressions due to the law of affinity. On the other hand, people who started to vibrate on a higher frequency as the result of their inner work, would look for a higher type of impressions to feed their soul with. But when low impressions enter our psyche, if we are not careful, they can settle in the subconscious mind and feed the egos. This can be prevented by being careful not to allow such impressions to enter in the first place, or if they do, we can transform them by the technique of the mystical death at the moment when they enter. Sometimes though we may be psychologically asleep at that precise moment, in which case we have to return later on in a retrospective meditation in order to transform that low impressions that have entered and settled in.

It seems to me that a lot of people who do the inner work do not have a proper idea as to how such low impressions can affect them, and that they can even cause them to lose interest in the inner work or to stop it completely. The reason for this is that with the inner work we are building up our soul from the material that we already have (the essence), and because this essence is weak and small, it needs a proper environment in which it can grow, so to eventually grow enough to be shaped into a proper soul. This is a very delicate process, and every heavy substance put onto the growing material could extinguish it, could submerge it back into a drowsy state in which no type of concrete spiritual growth is possible.

Sometimes we give in to what we call “harmless fun of life”, things such as gossiping and exposing ourselves to low visual and audio impressions etc., thinking that here and there it is fine to allow ourselves such things, but this indicates that we haven’t taken up the inner work properly. To take it up properly, it is important to have it clear what Enlightenment is and how to achieve it. Unfortunately, it seems that majority of people who have an interest in it are only ready to sacrifice a fraction of their habits that go contrary to spiritual progress.
I am not saying here that one should become a monastic hermit in order to reach awakening, but rather to be attentive through the practical means of self-observation to see what is harmful for your spiritual progress, and what is good for it. Everyone who is honestly working on themselves will be able to observe this, as long as they are honest with themselves. Because when we are not honest with ourselves, what can we really hope to achieve spiritually?

Having said that, it is certainly not easy to fully avoid low impressions from entering our mind. After all, we live in modern world that is very loud and thus it is common to, without us wanting to, see and hear things that we rather wouldn’t. Sometimes our life circumstances are such that we are more exposed to those things, however this is not an excuse to keep having them, because we can always work to modify our circumstances to a degree that we can, so to avoid an overload of the things that are harmful for us. At the end of the day, despite our karmic circumstances and lessons that we need to go through, once we decide for the Path, we become creators of our own destiny, shaping our life in the way that we feel is the best for our inner work, while also taking into account other responsibilities that we have. Ultimately, we can do a lot more than we normally think. Despite being pressed down by karma, we can always do a lot more, and a great thing is that divinity allies with us in helping us shape our future, once we are determined to achieve the Great Work.

HDP, November 2020.