Why do we limit the impression we have of any given moment? We never limit an impression when we're sitting in front of a nice plate of food. Can't get enough of that! We never limit the impression of the idea of some beautiful place to go where we're going to have a marvelous time. There's no limitation to the impression produced by imagination. We want it with every bit of our being! Then why would we limit the impression that comes with an unwanted moment? Why would we cut short the impression that comes from a negative reaction? Why would we limit any impression at all if we understand we are being given something to see and understand, and it is the impressions that produce our actions?
Do you remember when you were very young, how hungry and thirsty you were for impressions? You couldn't have enough of them! Everything was precious: a leaf, a piece of moss on a branch, a bug, the way the clouds moved. There was nothing that you weren't interested in and being nourished by. But you weren't thinking to yourself, "I'm being nourished." There was simply the natural relationship between an impression and the reception of that impression that produced a certain action inside of a young child's soul being fed by it.
In contrast, our present consciousness is so mechanical and habituated to the little world of the official business of our life, and the habitual pattern of impressions that we receive and confirm us as we imagine ourselves to be, that we've become fearful -- uselessly suffering by trying to protect ourselves from our own unconscious reactions to any impression that comes along and threatens to take us into some state we've projected based on past experience.
Haven't you ever been shocked by how instantaneously a certain kind of hurt (that you didn't even know you were carrying around) can be triggered? And suddenly, there's pain. We have become isolated and captured by a level of consciousness that wants to control, at all costs, the flow of impressions so that it receives and realizes only the impressions it wants and summarily rejects and refuses any impression that comes to it that brings up any form of related pain in the past.
But there is no impression that isn't divine in nature. You know why? Because the only way that you receive the impression is by the influence of something coming in and touching your consciousness for the purpose of revealing the content of itself. And the purpose of that revelation is to release you from all the unconscious identification inherent in rejecting and resisting any particular impression that doesn't match your perfect idea of what life should be like.
The rejection of the impression produces anxiety. It produces the sudden sense of urgency that I have to act. We are not in this world to suffer from impressions. We're here to perceive, consciously, the appearance of every impression. Everything in us that rejects the impression and says, "You can't," "You won't," "You'll never," "There's no time," is all the time pushing, pushing, pushing. The impression itself never pushes. The impression is a reflection! The impression never pushes; it reflects.
Those reflections reveal to us a relationship between what is timeless and what is in time. And when they are brought together as they're intended to be, in our awareness, they bring about a complete revolution inside of us where we'll no longer be pushed around by those impressions because we understand to receive them consciously is to be released from what they show us about ourselves. If we reject the impression, we condemn ourselves to remaining a captive of that consciousness.
What do you think the exercise is? Leave the impression alone. Just sit with it for as long as you can. Let it reveal to you why it has come to you. Let it reveal to you what you don't see yet. You will see it in the reflection. Isn't the fingerprint that appears in the clay the reflection of the finger that touched it? It's the same with the Divine. Let it touch you, and let it touch you, and let it touch you. And when you (at last) stop rejecting the touch of the moment, you will find yourself in the arms of something that can never harm you.
