The word purity used to leave me reeling from a general sense of shame and a self-flagellating longing to be a better person. ‘Pure’ felt like something that I could never be. I knowing myself as I do, I know that I cannot be a thing that is all light and goodness, never angry or mean in petty ways, someone who never thinks about telling the critical co-worker who never stops complaining to go and shove it.
I know myself enough to know that I am a healthy mixture of both light and dark impulses. Enough people are talking these days about this mixture as the essence of being human and teaching that we need to learn to love this about ourselves and to learn that we can choose which part of ourselves we wish to express from in any given moment.
….so I experience it as curios that so many people that I respect still speak of purity.
They obviously do not mean the repression or eradication of shadow. The concept of purity that goes:
Degree of Purity = (How Much You Have to be Ashamed About or Not) is out
…. so what do they mean?
Last Thursday, I sat in a group and heard a reading on the creation of your world and I heard purity mentioned in the same way that it often is and I realised that I did not have my usual creeping feeling of just not being good enough.
I noticed that I had heard purity not as ‘degree of light’ but as ‘capacity to focus’. I realised that how pure I am is about how dedicated I am to my mission. Purity is about the effort that I put in, at different levels of myself, to harnessing my energies or focusing my energies on what I want to accomplish and who I want to be or express.
Focus at its different levels
Thursday’s revelation came from a rather complex reading on creating our world in general and the idea of purifying firstly, the six senses and secondly, the “5 aggregates”, in particular. The five aggregates refer to the process of stimuli moving through us. The first of the aggregates is the input, lets say colour falling on to the eye, this leads to the second aggregate which is the reception of that colour within us which in turn gives rise to a thought which leads to an action (or physiological response) which leads to a sense (I think of this as a sense of self). In purifying the aggregates, one is engaged in the act of training one’s own mental process to align with a desired outcome or self. One is choosing ones mental structure.
In refining the 6 senses, one is choosing what one focuses on. The choice of both what to focus on and the choice about what will lead to what within my processing process, means that I have made a core decision about what I want to be and to express.
In other words, if purity and being pure means that one has honed the way a random input is channeled to a sense of self, then purity is about deciding, by the cleaning up of that process, who one is going to be. Purity it seems to me is about focusing my perception of the world and my reaction to it in such a way that it is in service of my ultimate goals. – The self I choose to be and express.
Enter the new idea (for me)
Purity = Focus
Below are some levels of ourselves where we can intend and work towards greater focus or purity.
Focus is the act of finding out, of all the possible things, which one I should focus on (just for today). Dedication to finding – my mission
I can work on aligning my emotions, my physiology, my ways of thinking, my ways of making meaning.
I can focus on what I give attention to, who I spend my time with and why.
Today I can make a commitment to focus.
Today I can be aware of the potential gifts of living in a focused way.
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