How does bhakti change our inner impressions?
What does bhakti do to our impressions?
It creates pressure impressions—strong, fresh impressions that can reshape our inner world.
In general, our mind has a bias toward the recent. For example, we may have had a long, positive relationship with someone, but if we recently had an unpleasant interaction with them, that recent experience will likely dominate our perception of them. This bias toward the recent also applies to our inner impressions.
We carry many impressions within us from the past, but when we practice bhakti, it creates fresh, healthy spiritual impressions. These new impressions begin to overwrite the old ones. As the older impressions are overwritten, they gradually lose their power—they become less defining and less consequential for us.
We might still experience desires stemming from those past impressions, but they won’t dominate us as much. That’s because the new, healthier impressions offer us better alternatives.
To illustrate, imagine the mind as a whiteboard. Normally, we can’t erase the old impressions completely, but we can overwrite them. While any good habit can help create positive impressions to replace negative ones, bhakti goes beyond that.
Consider three levels of our being:
Physical, mental, and spiritual.
At the mental level, we form impressions and can create new ones. But bhakti doesn’t just operate at the mental level—it goes deeper. Bhakti awakens and activates the soul, which is a part of God and is inherently pure and virtuous.
So, bhakti transforms us in two ways:
- Externally – by creating healthy impressions that overwrite unhealthy ones.
- Internally – by activating our innate spiritual goodness, which lies deeper than our mental patterns.
Our negative impressions exist at the level of the mind, but our soul has pure longings that can be awakened. While any good habit can replace a bad one, it is only bhakti-based habits that can unleash the virtue of the soul.
Thus, through bhakti:
- We overwrite unhealthy impressions when we engage with sacred places, saintly people, and spiritual practices like chanting.
- We also activate the soul’s goodness, which comes from a realm beyond the mind.
This two-fold transformation is what makes bhakti thoroughly and uniquely transformational.
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