This shows us how much can depend on our reactions to impressions. This is why vigilance is a vital necessity, for those who are not vigilant are soon overcome. The helmsman only needs to fall asleep for a second, and the ship is doomed.
Epiktet

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man ...
... For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.
Jesus in: Mark 7,15-23

Make yourself free from the impressions in life!

We must be constantly aware that the external world only reaches us via our senses as a filtered, pre-censored selection. Of the millions of bits/sec. of impressions we are only really conscious of 6 to 16 bits/sec., which we process. Try to imagine somebody standing outside your front door and asking to be allowed in. He may turn out to be an agreeable visitor or an unpleasant, malicious one. You must not allow everything to enter without examination, just as you would not open every email and naively download any attachment without prior examination, as it might contain a nasty virus and destroy your entire system.
Not allowing everything to enter, but rather being selective, is to receive impressions consciously. This is the start of a conscious, personally responsible life.
The average person reacts and thinks mechanically, i.e. unconsciously, allows all impressions to enter unexamined, accepts them and bases his thinking on them by identifying with them. Controlled by the drive belt of external circumstances, he becomes a mere plaything who is subject to what life throws at him from day to day, and a slave to every negative emotion.
He may be a politician, general, captain of industry or university lecturer, but he is still a human machine under the illusion that he is a conscious person with the power to make decisions freely.
So be mistrustful of all impressions that want to enter from outside, and do not blindly accept them to avoid being infected with every virus, for:
"The thought is father to the deed." (Moltke).

Accept the good thoughts and reject the bad ones

The image of the perfect mind (which has control over its thoughts) is well portrayed by the Centurion in the Gospels.
In the story about him, the moral strength – which enables us to avoid being carried away by every incoming thought, but rather to accept the good thoughts and drive off the bad ones without difficulty according to our own judgement – is figuratively described in the following words:

"For I am a man with authority
and have soldiers under me.
If I say to one GO, he will go,
and if a say to another COME, he will come,
and if I say to one of my servants DO THIS, he will do it."

J. Cassian, Council of Nizea, 360 - 435 BC

“Give us this day our daily bread”, it says in the Bible. In fact this does not refer to real bread, but rather to impressions or ideas. Man lives on food, and we must distinguish with G. between three types of food with different levels of development:

1. Normal food such as potatoes or steak
2. Oxygen
3. Impressions

While it is possible to survive for a few weeks without normal food, we can only last for mere minutes without air to breathe. But without impressions a person cannot ”survive” for a moment. A telephone call from his lost son can cause a sensational improvement in the condition of a dying father – more than the most expensive life-prolonging drugs and medical equipment could ever do. An SMS from her lover can give new heart to a desperately unhappy woman.
And yet it is so important to feed on the right impressions and reject the wrong ones, like a cow avoiding toxic grass in a meadow. If one takes a conscious look at the day-to-day impressions of the average person, it really makes one think. Whenever you read a mass circulation newspaper or switch on a talk show, you are confronted with a flood of negative, perverse and pathological information. The whole world seems to consist only of sex and violence. This sick and unhealthy material constantly assails you, as your anti-virus system has not been installed. Writers in the pay of a powerful and degenerate entertainment industry which lacks all conscience would have us believe that all this has no effect on us, and on young people!

You must become selectively illiterate!

The unconscious person, the automated human, has no choice but to absorb impressions of all kinds. But the conscious individual, the person who can more often remain awake, is able to absorb impressions selectively.
While a very large proportion of the world’s inhabitants are regrettably still illiterate, we suffer from being unintentional readers in this case. The human automaton is obliged to read and mentally absorb everything that comes in front of him. This habit makes us slaves to every idea expressed in black and white. Accordingly we must rid ourselves of this mechanical, unexamined reading by reversing the learning process. We must intentionally and consciously become selective illiterates. If our glance falls on something we do not wish to take on board, we must immediately become people who are unable to read. Don’t let impressions enter without authorisation, as they might fall on fruitful ground and, like a virus, give rise to unconscious processes within you.

Transformation of impressions

The fundamental principle in Taoist WingTsun is transformation, change, reshaping and adapting. The final goal is to transform the whole person into a new, better person who is able to recognise, activate and emphasise his latent attributes.
Everything happens through transformation: Bong-Sao transforms itself into Tan-Sao, the fire in your cigarette lighter is created by transformation, corn grows as a result of transformation, transformation turns a caterpillar into a butterfly and the idea in your head is transformed into a spoken sentence. The steak you have eaten is transformed into something higher in your stomach, and so is the air in your lungs. Everything inside a person is somehow transformed into something higher by one of the organs.
With one exception: Impressions gaining entry to the mind are not correspondingly transformed into something finer. But without such an ”organ” we are unable to correctly and completely digest the impressions of life, the unpleasant events in the daily fight for survival and what we call “blows of fate”.
Nature did not supply us with a fully developed version of this, therefore we must develop our own organ so that the impressions which daily gain unrestricted access through our entry portals (eyes and ears) can be transformed and digested. Because we do not have a correspondingly formed organ (or let me call it a catalyst), we humans in our normal state suffer from chronic mental undernourishment. How to develop this catalyst? By a particular quality of attention, by non-identification, i.e. by ”not forgetting oneself”. Some people refer to this as meditation, a word I like to avoid because of its overuse.

Keith R. Kernspecht