So now this is a great art in knowing how to filter the impressions so that we don’t ignore them. But somehow, when I say “filter”—there are two things actually—one is the grosser way which we find in alchemy, the first step of alchemy which is sorting out things like the gross and the finer, and so on. So, for example, as I said rejecting those impressions that you can’t deal with.

For example, in my case, hard rock. I can’t deal with it. So I don’t go to hard rock concerts. I prefer Bach. So that’s me. Maybe there are some people who feel differently about it. But it’s just that, in my case, there’s a rejection of something that—and maybe it is judgemental, but I hope that it is not judgemental. I hope that it’s just because it’s something I feel I can’t handle.

So it’s like the samething with your food. There’s something that you can’t digest, so you don’t eat it. So when you’re meditating then you will find there are thoughts and emotions which are disturbing and the only way to reject them, to repel them, is by enlisting the forces of detatchment in your being. We have that in us. And in the course of a retreat, of course, these are, this kind of function in the human being is enhanced. It’s called vairagya in India, detatchment.

And I try to illustrate it by the mirror at the core of our being that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it. So a kind of immunity. And you know that the immune system, the physical immune system in the body, is based on “me” and “not me.” Like the body will accept an organ that is similar, the DNA is very close, but not too different.

And so in the same way our psyche has the ability to reject impressions that are too unfamiliar. On the other hand there is a second immune system which adapts itself so that the organ, the body can adopt an organ that is not quite, doesn’t quite correspond to the DNA. Or, for example, we eat food which doesn’t correspond to the DNA of our bodies.

We suffer from indigestion of impressions that we can’t digest.