Imprinting

TOP AUTHORS

Imprinting

By VARIOUS AUTHORS

Cultural conditioning to behave in a particular way is something we all pick up with our birth packet. We receive our mother and father (present or absent), relatives, neighbors and schools, all on a certain side of town and portion of the country, working together to tell us. "This is what life is about, and this is how one acts." Parents especially influence their children's intellectual and moral development. For instance, a parent's competence in solving the dilemmas of daily life helps shape a child's problem-solving abilities, as does something so simple as a parent's propensity for early rising or ritual flossing of the teeth.

Many of your adult habit patterns and characteristics come directly from (unconsciously) imitating your parents. You likely have their walking style, their speech patterns and many of their very values. If you've lost your temper with a child, you may have had the experience that it is actually more your own mother's or father's voice and message spewing out through your mouth. And when a child grows and shouts back, it is often in your voice and words.

Michael calls this early conditioning imprinting. Most of it happens by age seven and all of it is complete by fourteen. Imprinting is in-service training which grooms you to get going and handle life. Since it can also be like the blind leading the blind, there comes a point when it is mandatory to drop indoctrination in order to gain your own adult viewpoint and flexibility.

Children are not born as blank slates ready for their parents to mould them towards crime and violence, fame and success, or spiritual enlightenment. Babies have their own agendas. Their personalities will develop based on the overleaves they picked before birth, and they have their own distinct past life influences and karmas to handle. And then they get parental imprinting.

Imprinting always causes a reaction, but people respond in different ways. Some may rebel and fight against a strong imprinting, while others agree with it and take it on, more or less consciously, as their own. Much imprinting is so powerful, people don't even know it exists, which allows it to exert a pervasive, subtle influence on belief systems. Everyone chooses all imprinting for the boost it gives to growth, even though the boost may only look like a decades-long battle to shed those bred-in-the-womb values.

Once on the material plane, a personality most always desires material things. In our culture, everyone receives a strong dose of Young Soul imprinting, which helps give the drive to go out, do and get. This cultural impetus to master the physical plane can be very helpful; its downside is that Old Souls often feel something is wrong with themselves. While they know they're smart and probably as deserving as the next guy, it often is difficult to pull their (physical plane) lives together. The strength of Young Soul cultural imprinting is so huge that it is difficult, even for a self-reflective old soul, to understand his own lack of ambition or follow-through.

Infant souls, who are two steps in the other direction from young, don't relate well to young soul imprinting and usually avoid it by staying in simple cultures where they get less of it. With all the basic trust and survival issues that need to be handled, infant souls find our capitalistic culture with its loose family structure, entrepreneurship, tax forms, checking accounts and monthly bills, due now, needlessly complicated and threatening.

Another kind of imprinting is role imprinting. This is where parents impress their children with the virtue and rightness of their own role(s) as a way of acting and perceiving the world. For instance, a sage child in a family with server and warrior parents will not get much reinforcement to be expressive, whether it's discussing feelings, standing out in a group, mouthing off, or simply acting funny.

Rather, this sage will receive imprinting on how people should be helpful, hardworking, organized, and probably quiet — which is exactly what the child "hired" the parents to do. Imprinting can be very helpful, or it can be like chains that need to be thrown off later in life. In case it is chains, the struggle is part of the reason the child chose the parents.

Once you have figured out your role or had that information channeled, take notice of whether you are actually doing, expressing, or feeling the kinds of things your role likes. Often imprinting from parents or society frustrates the easy expression of your role. Examples abound: a boy pushing himself into athletics where, if his true self could arise, he might prefer library time; a girl, imprinted by artisans, who struggles to become a designer, but would probably prefer to be a "less creative" doctor or nurse; a boy, imprinted by warriors, who loves to dance and perform, but pursues a legal career, and that proverbially meek woman who's actually a powerhouse underneath the pliant mask she learned to wear.

- Joya Pope

Michael, as channeled through Nancy Gordon, said the following:

Imprinting is the residue that a fragment carries from its earliest birthday to the 4th internal monad and sometimes beyond.

Imprinting is the amalgamation of parental teachings, cultural marks, and personality energy that is absorbed by the child and becomes a part of the human personality.

The manners that are expected in the household, the form of address, the way of speaking, the biases and the hopes that are voiced and implied also are part of imprinting. Body language that is evinced by those around the child as it grows also contributes. The kinds of reading material, or lack of it, is in there, also.

The ideas, hopes, and wonderings of anyone with whom the growing personality comes in contact are processed and retained in what you call the subconscious and become part of imprinting.

The kind of education, or lack of it, the form of authority under which the fragment lives, the selection of music, art, literature, or not, are other imprintings.

When the fragment begins the 4th internal monad there will be a beginning of questioning about much of this. Things, ideas, acceptances that seemed irrevocable in years past become matters of selection. Some will be retained as truly part of the evolving personality. Some will be jettisoned as not a part of the person but where planted by others,

Finishing the 4th internal monad in the positive pole means selecting from the imprinting that the fragment has been carrying for 30 to 40 to perhaps 50 years, only those elements that seem now to belong to the fragment as owner. Some of the parents' ideas, etc., may be retained as fitting the 'real' person, some will be abandoned. The same for all of the other imprints. What remains will be what the fragment considers his/her self.

- Nancy Gordon

When a person has had a lot of imprinting contrary to his role, sometimes his role isn’t very evident simply because he’s young and hasn’t yet had time to assert who he is. Two teenage girls once came together to see me, and one of them was a king, which she found hard to believe, although her friend could validate it. I imagine that she looks more kingly now. If someone completes his midlife monad (usually in his mid-thirties), he generally throws off any remaining contrary imprinting that he no longer needs (if he ever needed it), fully revealing or “manifesting” his true essence. If someone doesn’t complete it, he can remain stuck in his imprinting for the rest of his life (unfortunately, this is common).

Shepherd Hoodwin