Purify the mind. Is that a strange idea for you?
Most of what I write about in THEE is common-sense knowledge. All I am doing is putting it into order and explaining how different aspects of social life need to be more finely discriminated.
I like explaining how bits of living relate to each other, especially when those relationships are misunderstood or taken for granted. However, now and then I come across something which is being ignored. Usually on a rather temporary basis but sometimes over many decades. Rarely longer.
That sort of thing happened today: with the notion that you ought to purify your mind.
I was doing some internet research on the various ways that people deal with the hurts that attend living. Any pain or suffering leads to a breach in the experience of unity. Suddenly I think: they (or it or he or she) are making life hard for me or are hurting me or letting me down. I'm suffering and I wish things were different.
In coping with these situations, there is quite a lot of talk in the blogosphere of the importance of gratitude and forgiveness. Other virtues are also identified.
But what seems to be absent is by far the most important healing method: purifying yourself. That means something is not good in your thinking and you must purify your mind.
Instead of pages and pages of quotations, as you get when googling the other items, «purify» and «purification» throw up almost nothing apart from making dirty water clean. In the psychosocial sphere, you mainly get quotes from the Koran, the Bible and Buddhism. There are also religious websites where the writing is so permeated with doctrinal assumptions and religion-specific terms, that it is near impossible for an outsider to understand or sympathize. If you have the misfortune to understand without being a believer, then all enjoyment is removed.
Holy scriptures have a lot of good material, and believers do need to nourish themselves from it. But most people these days have lost touch with that terminology. We need something a little more contemporary, something written in psychological language that is immediately easy to grasp and apply.
My point about «purification» is that it is simply common sense and lots of people should be pushing for it.
No deep thinking is required. No contact with the ultimate. Just common sense … imagine:
If you try to do something and it goes wrong, a review helps. OK?
The failure might have had absolutely nothing to do with you, and then you are unable to fix anything. OK?
But it's hard to know that. So you might just possibly have contributed to the failure in some way. OK?
If so, it's surely worth a quick check … let's imagine for a moment:
Were your expectations negative or too high? Or did you rush the process? Or were you unnecessarily critical? Or did you act insensitively? Or were you trying to take an unfair advantage? (If the answer is all of above, we are talking heavy duty purification … and that's a topic for a different blog.)
I'm not saying any of these things were the issue, but you can easily see that however many positive qualities you brought to the initiative, just one negative factor could spoil it all—whether it is attitude, impatience, unpreparedness, over-confidence, insensitivity, or deceptive tactics. Such factors can be described as the impurities within your mind that spoiled your interaction. It is easy to imagine that they could have led to the failure.
Now, let us assume that you suddenly discover that the failure was based on a totally independent event affecting the other party. It had nothing whatsoever to do with you. OK: but now that you've identified that negative factor, are you still happy to go into your next initiative with it active? Those factors are all still bad and harmful. Ignore for now that they are bad and harmful for others. Instead focus on the fact that they can block you getting your result. If so, might it not be a good idea to make some inner changes?
If you think about yourself in this way, and if you recognize something that is harmful within yourself, and if you then act constructively on your mind in a way that also manifests externally … why then you are purifying yourself. Like it or not!
That is the healing process.
It's as easy as that.
Because purification is based on a deep unity between yourself and others, you will find that benefiting yourself automatically benefits others, and even spreads benefit more widely.
So go for it.
Perhaps people nowadays are using another word for "purification". If they are, tell me in the comments.
WK
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Warren Kinston