Samskara Shuddhi - the Art of cleansing past impressions

By Lee

Samskara Shuddhi is a preliminary course for Diksha course. Samskara means "past impression recorded in mind."
Shuddhi means "cleansing".
So, Samskara Shuddhi course is a course for cleansing past impressions. Why do you need Samskara Shuddhi? To be free, says Dasaji.

In our life, similar situations occur repeatedly and we respond to them all the same way. For example, suppose when you were a school boy(or girl), you giggled in the class and the teacher heard you and punished you hard. You thought you were so unlucky. Thereafter, you often meet similar situations in life and every time you respond by thinking that you are such a unlucky person. You wonder why this should happen to you all the time but find no answer.

The reason is this: Each one of us responds differently to any given situation because everyone has different background. However, regardless of how each one responds, if the response accompanies strong emotions like fear, hurt, etc. that emotion remains even after the situation is over. Later, if you meet a similar situation, this emotion(samskara) revives from your memory and makes you respond the same way as before. You have no choice. Samskara controls your response.

Furthermore, this emotional charge grows stronger and stronger each time and it gets power to attract similar situation because this samskara, the emotional charge stored in your memory, is a vibrating energy and by force of resonance, it attracts the same frequency. Kalki says, 'Your past is your future. The past winds itself through the present and manifests into the future.' Such is our life. To be free from the hold of our past, we have to cleanse the samskara.

Dasaji gives an example of this. A hard working banker lived a successful life overcoming every obstacle in his career wonderfully that many people appreciated his achievement highly. Now he wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life in peace. But again he met another obstacle where some ill willed people started to talk badly of him and made him a swindler. But this time he found no energy to overcome it.

He came to do samskara shuddhi and he could find in his past the samskara: When he was a child, his father lost all the money in gambling and his family had to rely on his uncle. One day he witnessed his mother being scolded by his uncle. At this scene, his hatred of his father and uncle grew to the extreme and he thought he will overcome all the obstacles of life and prove that he is different. This hatred had been attracting all the obstacles as well as the energy to overcome them. When he cleansed this, the problem solved itself automatically without any effort on his side.

Samskara reduces us into a program. We are living just as we are programed. Unlimited possibilities are lying before us but we respond to our life only in one stereotyped way and lose all the other possibilities. All our fear is either about the unknown or about losing our knowledge. That's why we loose all our knowledge and understanding when we are caught in fear of something. Once fear starts responding to our life, we loose our own choice and it is this point that our whole life starts from. Everything starts to feel old and bored.

In samskara shuddhi course, you work with all the emotions from the past and cleanse them away. Then your life becomes different. your perception of the world changes. Living becomes so easy. Many answers to your life will be given. Emotions will still come, but they don't have the same influence anymore.

And when you cleanse samskara and get enlightened, your heart flowers. That is, you can move into others and experience them completely. You become connected to Oneness, all the differences are gone. Then you can really relate with people and really love them.

Dasaji gives answers on some practical questions.

Do you have to handle every one of past emotions?
Not so. If you hit a few basic programs, all the other programs will fall down.

Why samskara shuddhi has to come before diksha?

Samskara shuddhi is preparation for diksha both on emotional level and physical level. It purifies your body. And if you get diksha without cleansing samskara, every emotion will be amplified and burst out. Enlightenment does not change the programs. It only lets you declutch from them. That's why cleansing is needed beforehand.

Mind setting and heart setting are needed for samskara shuddhi. Mind setting is collecting courage and being prepared to face one's own life tens of times and to witness all that one believed to be so nice fall down. Heart setting is to have good bond with Bhagavan and believe that he will do it for you. You have to be able to ask him for help freely. For without Grace, help from outside, samskara shuddhi will be very difficult.

He also adds that enlightenment is a biological process. For example, there was a girl who seemed to have nothing to handle in samskara suddhi course. She grew up in a nice background and was quite happy. She accepted all this as being too natural, granted. But later in the course, she found herself being arrogant and indifferent.

When she handled them, her ulcer healed right away. Such is the influence of emotion onto our body. Once we purify our body, we will find that our body has everything in it. The lecture was ended with a simple practice. Dasaji said, joy is fully experiencing whatever it may be. Even pain changes into joy when you experience it fully without resisting against it. In that way, we can be free from bodily karma.

Each of us intentionally sat on the floor in an uncomfortable posture and breathed deeply into it trying not to resist it. Many of us found that it was not so painful as it was before.