As we were growing up, we created several impressions or imprints from many of our day to day experience that involved strong emotional reactions. We continue to create strong impressions during our daily experiences all through out lives. And these imprints create our reality. Mostly, we don’t want to believe that it is us who are creating our own reality but we prefer to blame our fate or God. We may ask, if it is me who is creating my reality, why would anyone want to experience something which is not equal to joy, happiness & peace?

In this part of the article, let’s look how we create imprints and how these imprints create our reality in return. Few months ago, a client of about 50 years age walked into my office. He is not working but staying at home because whenever he tried doing some business, he ended up making losses. Whatever little savings he had, he started losing fast and he is worried about his future and his family. He is clueless why he is such a failure in everything he did in life and he is stressed and depressed. After some discussion, he started telling me his story with tears rolling down his face, that his present parents are not his biological parents but adopted him when he was just one day old in this world. His parents dumped him on the day of delivery, as the pregnancy was very unexpected and his parents were never ready for a child in the first place, by the time they realized that his mother was pregnant, they let go off the chance to abort the child. As he related this story, we realized this led to a sense of rejection in the child that remained unresolved and had a huge impact on his entire life.

This kind of experiences with strong emotional charge lead to strong impressions or imprints in our subconscious. For this person, there are two imprints, 'I am rejected by everyone' and  'I am not good enough'. Initially, because of the sense of rejection, “I am being rejected by everyone” is imprinted on to the subconscious mind, and it started growing along with him and it was transmitted into Universe continuously. Because Universe responds to subconscious content, all his experiences as a child were like a child who is being rejected. He was never liked by any of his relatives, teachers or friends except by the adopted parents. These experiences started engraving one more imprint on the sub conscious mind “I am not good enough”. Now, two imprints are being transmitted into the universe, “I am being rejected” and “I am not good enough”.

He could never excel in his studies or in sports during all his childhood days. After he completed his studies, he ended up in a job, which he didn’t like but he joined because he is in need of money. Because of these imprints, he felt rejected by people at workplace too and he had to move on to new jobs very frequently. He felt he was rejected by either his boss or by his team members and that he was shown he is not good enough to continue in the job. Finally, he gave up all his efforts in getting jobs and started his own business. He ended up making losses within a couple of years of starting the business and entered into wrong partnerships too. He was making  losses continuously and saw all people he cares for, walking away from him.

Subconscious is so very well connected and is in sync with the Universe, whatever is imprinted on it, will be transmitted to the universe and the universe is such a lovely friend, it gives the energy back to us after multiplying it by 10 times. It doesn’t matter even if my client shouts at the peak of his voice “I am being accepted” with his conscious mind, Universe takes the energy that is transmitted from the subconscious mind alone and gives that energy back to us. Universe never makes any mistake in returning back the energy to the rightful owner.

Although we develop our conscious mind at the age of 5-6 years, our subconscious mind is available from the time we are in the womb of our mother. The best part is, it doesn’t grow old, nor it forgets anything. It is like a hard disk with zillions of bytes of data space available at any point in time even if zillions of data is already occupied in it. It doesn’t crash. It carries this information to the next birth too, like we carry the unused data plan on our mobiles, tablets to the next month! This is one of the reasons our elders tell pregnant women to spend time in peace and happiness and be in satsang, listen to bhajans or discourses and read something pleasant or about God. Subconscious doesn’t record just the events, it picks up emotional charge too. In fact, it is the  emotional charge that leaves an imprint in the subconscious.

Not every experience leaves a strong imprint that creates our reality. An imprint is created on the subconscious mind whenever we judge, decide or conclude something to be wrong. When we make some experience wrong, we avoid feeling all the emotional charge in the experience. We keep fighting and resisting the experience instead of allowing ourselves to feel it. So it gets stored in our subconscious as an imprint. Universe creates similar situations until we have experience all that is there to experience in that impression. Imagine the good, bad, right, wrong, positive, negative kind of conditioning we should have received from the time we are in the womb of our mother till the age plus a bonus from the past lives. So much of conditioning leading to so many imprints. We all have seen or experienced instances where we felt fear or insecurity that “ I am not good enough” or "I am being rejected” or we believed that “I am  in lack”, “I have no luck”. When we face such experiences, we try to resist them instead of feeling all the associated pain or anger or disappointment and moving on. If we just allow ourselves to be with the experience and feel through it, its just one more experience in life. But we create strong imprints during many experiences because we made ourselves to be wrong for having the experience. If we look back, how many imprints we have created from the time we are born in this life time. Countless, aren’t they! To this balance, imagine subconscious adding many more imprints from our past lives (for those who believe in past life). What a fat balance we have in our subconscious memory bank.

Now you may think OMG, there is so much to clear, how can I do it and how many life times do I need to clear this. The solution is not so complex. We just need to experience the emotional charge in each of the events, situations and people without judgement. We need to remove those right and wrong tags attached to what each of the experiences is bringing us and just be in allowance. We will look at the solution in more detail in our next article.

-Ramakrishna