Purifying

We have looked at some of the ways that we lack inner unity and how that situation changes as the quality of our inner energies rises. As we seek inner unity, we also seek purification, from our self-centeredness, our selfishness, our separateness. Without that, we risk creating ourselves on a faulty and inherently limiting basis. We risk baking egoism into ourselves permanently. First, we look at how unity of will relates to purity of will.

For opposing impulses in us, it rarely helps to feed an internal war between the two sides. If I want to lose weight and I love ice cream, I could seek out a low-calorie ice cream to satisfy both desires. If I love to smoke tobacco, but want to stay healthy, I could look for a safe, nicotine vape to satisfy both desires. However, if I have a personal project that matters to me but have little time for it and TV watching takes what spare time I do have, I am stuck if I cannot properly engage in the project while watching TV. In such cases, I must choose. Life regularly presents us with these either-or choices, many of them more consequential than whether I watch TV. We have these incompatible interests, desires, wishes, and goals.

In one sense, this is simply a consequence of the structure of our reality: we cannot fully do two things at once or be in two places at once. The gate of time is narrow. But instead of focusing us, it leaves us inwardly fragmented in our approach to life with all its limitations. In another sense, it is a problem of values. Perhaps we do prioritize, in theory, in planning, but that may not carry through into action. The first sense of purity is similar to unity: having motives that are not mixed, or at least acting consistently from a single set of compatible motives.

A major part of the solution, with impacts not only on our external productivity but also on our inner life, is to work toward freedom in front of our inner world. If we practice quiet and simple meditation, wherein we sit in straightforward awareness of whatever is arising, we begin to see our thoughts as just thoughts, not as my thoughts, not as speaking for me, but just these inner verbal formulations or mental images coming spontaneously to the foreground of awareness and taking center stage. By using the word "I," they purport to represent me. They claim to express my wishes, my needs, my desires, my opinions. But they are just thoughts with a posture, a pretense of representing me.

In recognizing thoughts as just passing thoughts, emotions as just passing emotions, and desires as just passing desires, we gradually wrestle ourselves free from the tyranny of thoughts, emotions, and desires. We see that we do not need to believe in our thoughts or emotions, that we do not need to act on desires, that we do not need to engage, debate, or stop any of that. We become free to let it all come and go and lose power. We become free to just be.

Crucially, as one repeatedly watches this endless parade of thoughts, emotions, and impulses, all claiming to emanate from me, or even to be me, one begins to suspect that the me they claim to represent does not exist, except as something referred to by thoughts and emotions and impulses. Yet when we look for it, their referent, the supposed me, is not there. We see that we are not our thoughts. This pseudo identity that we have bought into for so long is a house of cards, all pointing in the same direction, all pointing to nothing.

This is a deeper purification of our will, wherein the illusion of self is revealed and with that our self-centeredness, our selfishness, and our separateness begin to fade. As we realize that our core is empty of self, our identification with our self, with this non-existent self, weakens and evaporates. This liberation from the illusion of self opens the way for higher motivations to enter and lowers the barriers between us and other people. We drop the burden of pretense, the burden of propping up a non-existent self.

Seeing through the personality pattern of thoughts and emotions that we took to be us is the first stage in dispelling the illusion of self. But it leaves us hoping and believing that behind all that we have some will that we are. Behind my personality there is I, my will. And truly, that is who I am. However, the deeper we go into our I, the more we become our I, the more we again suspect something amiss with this picture. We see that we cannot lay claim to our I, in the same way we once claimed our personality as our self. We see that the root of our I, the source of our will, is not in us. Our I does not come from us. It is not independent. We are not independent.

We look for ways to explore our root, our source. We find one way in prayer, in reaching inward, back along the chain of our attention, our will, our I, reaching toward and opening to the Sacred. And we find our source there. This is a more profound purification of will: that nothing in or about us is separate, that our source is shared with everyone else, that we are each unique because the sacred that lives in us all is unique, and that we each have a place to fill in the spiritual ecosystem.

For this week, please look into yourself, into your own sense of self, into your own will.