One Cannot Survive Without IMPRESSIONS: April 19th, 2005
05/17/2005 04:07 p.m.
One Cannot Survive Without IMPRESSIONS: April 19th, 2005


I eat, and the food provides my body with the necessary energies to survive. We count the energy in terms of calories and work out the intake and the outflow. The rest of this energy we believe we conserve and store in the form of fat that we use as and when this equilibrium of intake and outflow becomes imbalanced. Well, this ought to be, since no one can either count the intake or the expenditure from minute to minute, nor can one measure the energy level every minute. In any case, bestowed with this animal instinct for survival, nature takes care of this aspect and makes one feel hungry on a routine basis to compel one to 'intake' and conserve energy for the body’s use on rainy days. It is believed (by me too, apart from some esoteric schools) that this energy, which is a crude form of energy useful for mere animal survival, gets a 'shock' with every intake of oxygen.. This means that breathing is not a mere act of keeping afloat one’s heart and, in turn, one’s body, but also plays a vital role in providing the necessary 'shock' to this cruder form of energy for refining. Needless to say, the energies meant for our intellectual center are more refined than the energies needed for our physical survival. I am not sure what substance (already in the body) refines these energies into mechanical energies, which no doubt are finer, more powerful, and more forceful than the intellectual energies since one thinks faster when one thinks mechanically, and one reacts faster after having learned how to drive a car than when one is in the learning process.

But I know that IMPRESSIONS do refine these cruder energies into finer ones by providing a SHOCK. Yes, our sense instruments are just not there for mere seeing, hearing, smelling etc., but also for the intake of this important shock for this vital energy. One can live without food for days. One can survive for a minute or so without oxygen, but one cannot survive for a while without impressions. Can one shut off all the sense instruments and survive? But I am not talking of mere survival since this vital energy (and now let me reveal, this is very important energy) is emotional energy we are hardly aware of. We do not know what this is because we do not know how to use it, how to control it, or what to do with it. So we, in the absence of any understanding of its meaningful use and control, simply waste it. Rather, it wastes itself and the end result is always detrimental to us. Yes, anger is one of the umpteen ways of waste, though anger is not a creation of the emotional center for which this energy is meant.. Anger generates from a false center we all create by impressions and suggestions of comparison in the course of our formatory age. I will only say, at this juncture, that for any quality work one needs these energies and needs impressions for generating them or rather, for refining cruder energies into this beautiful energy. It is here where the impression become important. A crude example will suffice to explain this phenomenon . For example, I am in a bad mood owing to bad quality of impressions I registered in meeting a person with whom I have negative associations. At this point, a person walks in with whom I have positive associations and who provides me beautiful impressions, and suddenly, my mood changes and changes owing to a refinement of energies. We can take any number of examples. I am in a so-so mood, bored and lethargic. I hear beautiful music, smell the earthly smell of first rain, meet a beautiful friend, read a beautiful book, or eat a tasty snack. If the impression that I register through any of my senses, eyes, ears, touch, taste is good, I feel a bit charged up, my mood changes since the energy level changes. I am now charged by refined energies.

The quality of refinement and level of energies are directly in proportion to the quality of impression registered. This means we ought to register quality impressions and avoid negative and bad quality of impressions. How does one do this? By disciplining, by ignoring, by avoiding, by trying to remain in circulation where one ought to get quality impressions, by stopping our tendency to react, by living from moment to moment, by self remembering. The quality can't be had unless the impression so registered is intense and it is here where out attention becomes very a important factor because this alone can help us avoid, ignore, and BE to register intensely what we need to register. “I am seeing” but not seeing makes a lot of difference. “I am observing an object” registers one impression, while ”I am observing the observer observing the object” registers two impressions. The second impression provides an additional shock to this refinement process, further refining the energies. This means that 'conscious shocks' produce 'additional shocks'. Man cannot survive without impressions. He keeps on registering impressions through all his sense instruments every moment. We just have to be careful in what we register and how intensely, and what we ignore by simply ignoring. A man confined in a colorless cell will either go insane or die for want of impressions despite the impressions his sense instruments would be registering, simply because these bland impressions would not provide him sufficient energies to survive or maintain his so called sanity. We need our external but we ought to be cautious so that we draw what we want to draw and not what comes in because it is there. We just cannot avoid the external. We need our external but we also need control and discipline. These emotional energies, I believe, can be further refined into intuitive energies by providing 'conscious shocks'.