Removing Past Life Impressions
by Sri Jeff Poole.
The Vedas describe life as an infinite flow of energy and intelligence expressing itself from an unbounded pure field of consciousness. And just as when we place our foot in a river we never touch the same water twice, each moment our lives reshape themselves as the flow of consciousness expresses itself through the blueprint layer that resides at the finest level of existence. This layer is known as ritam bhara prajna (that area knowing only the truth) and is the home of all the laws of nature that give rise to this world.
Ancient blocks and impressions reside in our consciousness left over as the residues of uncompleted karma of our past lives. These impressions form scars or dents in consciousness, called samskaras, which give rise to imperfections or abnormalities that manifest in our lives through addictions, undesirable habits and/or unconscious behaviors, all of which create suffering in life.
Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras shed profound light on these tendencies of the mind, which Patanjali calls, kleshas. The kleshas are five fundamental negative expressions of mind which bring us unhappiness and torment.
They are:
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Ignorance (avidya) – being unable to see the truth or reality of what underlies existence. This ignorance comes with forgetting “who you are.”
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Egotism (asmita) – being certain that “I” really exist, and acting on that sense of “I.” We seldom ask “who is the I”?
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Desire (raga) – being filled with a passion, lust or thirst for something. This comes with the craving of “I must have it.”
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Aversion (divesha) – not wanting, or pushing something away. This resistance appears whenever we extoll, “I don’t want this.” This is the “inability to be with what is.”
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Fear of Death (abhinivesha) – the ultimate fear that exists in all living things; related to the persistence of the mundane. When all you see is only the munbdane workaday world, losing it brings fear.
Our karmic debt gives rise to these tendencies continuing to accumulate in consciousness as a result of our past, present and future actions. The laws of karma are so vast and complex that it’s impossible to determine what is accumulating, when it will affect us and how we can remove them all to find our way to freedom.
The purpose of sadhana, spiritual practices, is to remove karma. And meditation is the most effective practice for neutralizing and removing effects of karma from our lives. The Vedic masters went even further describing meditation practice as a cosmic washing machine that is capable of cleansing group consciousness of collective karma.
They assembled large groups (sadhakas) to meditate together so their collective influence would generate waves of positivity, significant enough to alleviate the karma of entire cities, countries, nations and the world. They created divine societies with groups meditating together to produce an enlightened age.
Vedic masters recognized that all lifetimes have connections with those of the past and they understood how to release samskaras. Using a process of samskara nirgata (impression removal) they freed ancient impressions stored in consciousness from past lives returning life to wholeness. They described the process like removing the husk from a seed by first soaking the seed in water, wetting it to soften the husk so it can be easily peeled away.
How this lila (play) actually plays out is rather interesting, comical and magical: The storehouse of impressions (the seeds) is the subconscious mind (citta). Citta resides at the finest level of creation (ritam bhara prajna).
The conscious mind (the husk) sheilds or protects citta from being seen or observed by it. Next, nature skillfully tricks the mind by ensuring it is constantly engaged in the kleshas, which totally dominate the conscious mind’s attention.
Meanwhile the contents of citta’s storehouse is constantly influencing and shaping the quality and character of the conscious mind, which is continuously recreating itself moment-to-moment through the blueprint of past life impressions that have been locked-up in citta’s storehouse. It’s a viscious cycle that goes on and on for eternity. This is what generates all distortions in life, manifesting as habits, character traits and life addictions.
The process of samskara nirgata skillfully disengages the conscious mind from the kleshas and places it in a transcendent suspended state where it simply becomes inactive. This relaxes the conscious mind's hold on the subconscious mind.
Now citta is free, and becomes animated naturally releasing its contents of impressions. The impressions begin to unwind like reels of film. Meanwhile, the conscious mind in its rested state simply witnesses the release from citta. In this way, citta becomes just "like the seed that is soaked in water" and all the most ancient impressions that created the abnormalities in conscious awareness begin to "bubble to the surface" where they are effortlessly released.
The Vedic masters instructions to the participant were to surrender and let go, effortlessly: “Once you have offered them up, you are free, you recognize this is all like a movie , andall the karma gets burned up. Just be surrendered in this space and the karma is gone. Don’t attach too much to the name and form then you are fully in the Brahman Consciousness.”
The overall results of the process make the participant's meditation practice reach a deeper level becoming even more subtle so that the process of removing karma and impressions continues to become more effective over time. This is how Vedic science removes the blocks to ensure everyone's progress.
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