A Grain of Sand

Impressions are food. There is food for the instinctive center, for the moving center, for the emotional center and of course, food for the intellectual center. Every experience and encounter, one way or another, feeds the four lower centers.

When we are not present, we look and do not see. We hear and do not understand. We eat and do not taste what we eat. ~ Chinese Letters

Without self-remembering we are passive receivers allowing all and anything to enter, ’eating’ anything that enters the sphere of our existence. Some of what is ingested is digested, and much that enters is unconsciously spewed back out by unnecessary talking, imagination and expressing negative emotions. Many impressions, due to the refined or intense nature of their energy have the possibility of increasing consciousness. Moments of great or mortal danger, moments of sublime beauty, moments of stark or irreconcilable contradictions; but all these impressions arrive willy-nilly into our lives, and there aren’t that many to make any practical use of them. Ouspensky astutely observed that these infrequent intense impressions are like finding money on the street. Pocket money for a moment, but you can hardly make a living.

Simonides: The food you give your soul must be supreme.

Impressions are a tool that schools use to introduce and prolong presence. The first step is to improve our attentiveness. When attentiveness is sufficiently sensitive, divided attention is possible. With divided attention the choice of which impressions we allow, and even select, becomes a mainstay of our efforts. The more we are attentive, the more we remember ourselves, the deeper we experience and verify how the quality of impressions affects our ability to be present. Through educating essence we learn which impressions feed our aim to be present, bring us closer to the third state and which ones keep us in mechanical habits.

As mechanicality fades and self-remembering emerges, what we believed to be unimportant and inconsequential moments become filled with significance and abundant with impressions to which we were once oblivious. New experiences and new worlds are accessible.

And beyond this is the promise of school and an evolved consciousness realized; that each moment, and every impression within it, contains the signature of Higher Centers and immortal harmony.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

~ William Blake

Post by Charles R

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Image: Persian Warrior With A Rose,

Iranian miniature, Hermitage