Observing the Influences and Suggestions That Shape Our Responses in Life

If one practices a simple exercise, even just for a short time, one becomes aware of the numerous forces that are acting upon us, shaping our thoughts, emotions, feelings and reactions. The practice is to sit quietly and observe the various thoughts and feelings that arise while one is sitting there, and then trace back where that thought or feeling came from and how it arose within one’s awareness.

The first thing one generally notices is that we become acutely aware of small discomforts of the body, signals that cause us to move slightly to try to find a comfortable position. Then we begin to acutely tune to the senses, such that we hear sounds, feel the breeze, etc. If we work to bring the mind-stuff to a state of stillness, like a lake without a ripple, we may then be able to observe how various thoughts, feelings, etc. enter and create ripples. At this moment, if we trace them back we can observe their source. Sometimes it is a force that is active in our environment; at other times, it may be a rising of a memory; and at still others it may be the body, or the vital being, asking for attention in some way. With the advent and pervasiveness of electronic media, social media, radio, tv, loudspeakers, we will often find that impressions we have received, consciously or subliminally, rise up in times of quiet reflection. Possibly it will be a mental activity related to some unresolved issue or problem we are trying to solve. One way or the other, we can begin to see how impressions work.

Forces are constantly at work to try to influence us, to direct our thoughts, to raise up emotions, to inflame our vital nature, to motivate our physical being into action. Some of these are consciously directed by those seeking for power and control; others are available to us to support our growth and development and protect from hostile influences. In many instances, our choices remain subconscious. With this simple exercise we can begin to recognise and then consciously choose which influences to permit in our lives.

Once we see how this works, we will understand that we are constantly inundated with suggestions, and that we tend to act almost automatically under the influence of these waves of energy and their direction and impulsion. So long as we are unconscious of these influences, there is very little we can do to choose and direct our responses. Once we become aware, we can choose to limit our direct exposure, to resist those influences that we find to be out of harmony with our basic goals and aspirations, and to support those in our lives that are there to help us grow and thrive. We can ‘tune’ our being to respond to specific frequencies and energies, and to deny others.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “There are powers of the mind and the life-force which have not been included in Nature’s present systematisation of mind and life in matter, but are potential and an be brought to bear upon material things and happenings or even brought in and added to the present systematisation so as to enlarge the control of mind over our own life and body or to act on the minds, lives, bodies of others or on the movements of cosmic Forces. The modern admission of hypnotism is an example of such a discovery and systematised application, — though still narrow and limited, limited by its method and formula, — of occult powers which otherwise touch us only by a casual or a hidden action whose process is unknown to us or imperfectly caught by a few; for we are all the time undergoing a battery of suggestions, thought-suggestions, impulse-suggestions, will-suggestions, emotional and sensational suggestions, thought-waves, life-waves that come on us or into us from others or from the universal Energy, but act and produce their effects without our knowledge. A systematised endeavour to know these movements and their law and possibilities, to master and use the power or Nature-force behind them or to protect ourselves from them would fall within one province of occultism: but it would only be a small part even of that province; for wide and multiple are the possible fields, uses, processes of this vast range of little-explored Knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XIX Occult Powers of the Subliminal, pp. 149-150