IMPRINTS

Impressions & Conditioning

There’s an art, naturally, or a science, or both, maybe it’s the same, to gaining power. And to be honest with you, there’s a natural force or inclination in all of our beings to accumulate power. The problem that we come into is conditioning, our own conditioning and the conditioning of others. Now listen carefully. This sounds simple but it’s very complex. It runs deep into the psyche. When you were born, you were free. Your attention field, your awareness is not yet formed. Your attention field is the sum total of your experiences from other lives, yes, but yet, it is not conditioned. It is not fully manifested as a seed. Within the seed is the tree. Yet if we know seeds, we can look at a particular seed and say, “This will grow into an apple tree, this will grow into an oak tree, this will grow into an orange tree”. The entire tree is contained in the seed. Some seeds will never germinate. But if the proper conditions are provided, they will. So, when you were born, you were a seed. You were the seed of your past experiences and actions in other theaters of existence, in other worlds, in other lives. Those lives are gone, for all intents and purposes. But yet, you are the seed, and if the seed is planted in the right ground, it will grow. And one who can see can look at a child and say, “Yes, I can see the evolution of this child and what this child will grow into when it is mature”. The child may not outwardly evidence any of those traits or characteristics yet, but one who sees looks through the physical and temporal and can tell you the potential of a child. Well, of course, I do the same thing. As a seer, I naturally can see the evolutionary potential of a being. But the potential will not necessarily be actualized. A particular being will not necessarily realize their full height. If we plant an orange tree in a cold climate, it won’t grow. Or it will grow for a while and then die. If we plant a tree in too much shade, if there are other big trees around it and it doesn’t get enough light, it will grow, but it may never bear fruit. So conditions are important, conditioning.

Conditioning comes from parents and the adults or others around the child. The child is born with a potential in seed form. The conditions, though, are not so much the geographical areas but the people, the luminous beings, who surround the child. Each person has an attention field. Their attention field is the sum total of their awareness and their imprinting. There is normally, in the life of each child, a dominant male and dominant female — usually the physical mother or father. It could be the adopted mother or father; it could be anyone. In other words, the male or female that the child has the most exposure to in the first four to six years of its life, particularly the first four, is the primary imprinter of the child. The imprinter of the child will condition the child.

In other words, nothing has to be said, nothing has to be explained. Just by being around the awareness field of the male or female imprinter, the child is imprinted. The child will also gain imprints, obviously, from others, and in later life — teachers, lovers, husbands, wives. We continue to imprint throughout our lives, but the critical imprinting, the deepest imprinting, occurs in the first four years. But the other imprinting that follows is also extremely significant. The first sexual experience, for example, is a significant imprinting. Everyone imprints all the time and is imprinted because our consciousness is never completely hardened, but it becomes more stratified as we grow older, as more and more imprints are taken. In mysticism, the first course of action is to do away with the imprinting. We have to take all the imprinting that’s occurred to us in this life and wash it. We have to make ourselves soft again and push it all aside. Then, we need to be re-imprinted, but in a different way. Imprinting is important. Without it, we don’t survive. The child needs to be imprinted. It seeks it, as a matter of fact. It’s essential. The child seeks to be imprinted because it has to have a way of dealing with the world, and those who imprint it obviously have managed to survive in this world. Imprinting is critical. If your parents were strong in one way and weak in another, you will be strong in the same way and weak in the same way. Even though you may detest the weakness that you saw in them, you will find that you will do exactly the same things in the same situation because they imprinted you. Not by choice. That is to say, they didn’t want to give you a weak imprint. They might have wanted the opposite, but they couldn’t help themselves. Perhaps they were imprinted in the same way. We are all carrying the imprints of our most ancient ancestors. Not simply in the genetic code, in the DNA within us, but in the imprints of attention that are passed on. There are also subtle imprints that occur in a society. A whole society imprints us; a language, a culture imprints us. 

We are formatted to do certain things. But obviously the people who imprinted us are not completely happy and they are not completely powerful. If you lived in a world of completely powerful enlightened beings, then obviously you would have a clean imprint. But we don’t. We live in a world filled with poverty, suffering, war and unhappiness and transitory joy. So naturally, we receive that imprint, and we have to fight our whole life against that imprinting.

But we need a new imprinting. We need the imprinting of enlightenment, of freedom. And that comes through our association with a higher being. So classically what occurs, is one meets a teacher, one who has knowledge. And that being will teach you how to overcome your old imprinting by changing your way of life and by teaching you the ways of power, how to store it, collect it, amplify it, how to stop losing it. By bringing enough power into your life, you will gradually erase or actually overcome your imprinting. And then the teacher will have a certain imprint, and each teacher imprints differently. They imprint according to their own characteristics.

Now still, even ultimately, to a certain extent, the imprint of the teacher is a limitation that you will finally have to overcome in your final stages of self- realization, of knowledge. You will go beyond the teacher’s imprint. But if you had a truly enlightened teacher, the dominant spiritual figure that you came into contact with personally or inwardly, then they will give you a correct imprint and that correct imprint will aid you in your self-discovery. In the last stages, you will overcome it. But it won’ be something that will hold you back. It will fall away naturally if it was a correct imprint.

If your parents, your physical parents, or whoever imprinted you were well balanced, if they were happy, if they had a good attitude about life, if they didn’t try and hold on to you, to wrap you up, to make you feel guilty and all those things that most parents do, then they did you a favor. Their imprint is not necessarily bad. It has to be transcended if you want to go into the other worlds of attention, if you want to be free. Because even at its best, it’s still a limited description of the world, unless they themselves were mystics of a high order.

Then even the best human imprint is still a human imprint, and it has to be gone beyond. And it requires power to do this. Power will take us beyond the gravity field of the imprint. So it’s necessary, then, to do systems analysis of your life to look at where you gain power, where you lose power, and to do the things that empower you and avoid the things that drain you. And then it’s necessary to seek out one who can re-imprint you.