Purification involves the elimination of all that hinders the nature of divinity from full expression.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner Sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is purification and before we get started with that particular theme we must remember that Alice Bailey is the founder of the Lucis Trust organization and Lucis Trust sponsors this show. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature, and the following thought comes from those works: “Purification involves the elimination of all that hinders the nature of divinity from full expression.” I think we’d like to find out more about this opening thought on purification. What are some of the hindrances that have to be eliminated?
Sarah: Well, it’s interesting to take a stab at this concept. Before the program began today, you and I were talking about purification, Robert, and I could see that you had a different slant on this topic, and I bet that many of our listeners do too. It’s a term that’s very familiar to all of us, and yet probably we all approach it from a different point of reference and different experience. But purification in terms of the spiritual life—as this opening thought implies—involves the elimination of all that would stand in the way of our essential divine self. We are, by our very nature, made by God. The Bible affirms this, that all people are created in the image of God. But we have done a very good job of masking it. We hide our divine innermost self with layer upon layer of effluvia that build up over the ages and the eons, and all of that has to be stripped away. I suppose the image of an ear of corn might come to mind. When you husk corn, you pull away all the husks, which by the very term means extraneous material that doesn’t need to be there anymore. So, it’s a pruning away, wouldn’t you say?
Dale: Oh, sure, and a lot of those hindrances we’re very familiar with in our own nature if we want to look at ourselves.
Sarah: We may even be very fond of them.
Dale: That’s right, and that’s part of the problem. (laughter) The selfishness and the self-centeredness and…
Sarah: Desire for comfort.
Dale: Comfort and the… desire for pride, or the display of pride in oneself, or the tendency to criticize. All of these are very common hindrances that really try to define what we are, in a way, but now—if one is really serious about this whole thing about purification—they have to be let go of.
Sarah: There’s an interesting definition of purification which I found. It comes from the Sanskrit word pure, P-U-R, in the English language spelling. But it means freedom from alloy and from limitation. Freedom from alloy. Gold jewelry, for example, is an alloy. Fourteen karat gold means that there are fourteen karats out of twenty-four that are pure gold and ten karats that are an alloy, such as nickel or whatever. Purification is freedom from alloy, from this adulterated substance.
Dale: We have the same need for purification in building computer chips. That’s why they have the clean room and the workers have to wear coverings just to keep dirt out of the building of these computer chips. You can get one little grain of dust in there; it ruins the whole thing.
Sarah: I came upon an interesting thought related to purification in the writings of Alice Bailey. She said that it is essentially the energy that substitutes good for evil. It’s a process of substitution, purification is. You build in new matter of a finer and finer substance into the bodies: physical, emotional, and mental bodies. There’s work done on all those levels and we can get to that in a minute but purification is the substitution of good for evil.
Dale: Yes, and we might ask also why one has to go through purification. What’s the reason for it? I mean, if we’re happy with the way we are, with all our foibles and our selfishness and our self-centeredness, then…
Sarah: Well, then stay that way, don’t you think? Stay that way until you’ve had enough of it, because purification is imposed by the innermost self upon the equipment, you could say, upon the bodies: physical, emotional, and mental. It’s a decision that the soul—which is our higher self—makes.
Dale: And the reason for it is in the opening thought. Purification involves a limitation of all that hinders the nature of divinity from full expression, and that’s essentially why we’re in the world: to be agents of divinity so that God, by way of the soul, can display and radiate its light and love in the world.
Sarah: But I think as long as a person is happy being just their normal physical selfish self, which is invested in comfort and materialism and looking out for the separated self, there isn’t this aspiration toward divinity.
Dale: No, that’s right and it hasn’t reached that point yet where there’s some dissatisfaction with all of that.
Sarah: Dissatisfaction is the stage where the impulse to undergo purification sets in, I think, when you begin to be dissatisfied with what you are witnessing in yourself. That’s a stage of the spiritual path that probably a number of people might be familiar with, where you’re not so satisfied, not so content with what you see in yourself. That’s where—at that stage— the sense that one has to redeem or purify one’s expression starts.
Dale: Right. Redemption is another word that goes along with purification, and it’s been so distorted.
Sarah: Redeem. Doesn’t that mean to buy back? To redeem is to buy back, and again, that’s the idea of regaining the divinity.
Dale: Well, yes, it’s the constant process of refinement and more and more refinement. That’s the purification process and it’s also the redemptive process.
Sarah: Don’t you think there’s an image of a circular journey of the soul in all of this? Because as I understand it, on the innermost planes of reality, life starts out perfect. But through manifestation—the experience of entering into the outer realm of life on Earth over eons of time—these layers upon layers of impediments build up by the experience of living in the material world and experiencing the emotional realm and so on. But in the pristine state of pure divinity—to which one returns on the path, having undergone the experience of life on earth—purification and redemption are required.
Dale: Yes, there’s a term for it in the Bailey writings: it’s called the divine circulatory flow. As you say, this flow emanates from God down into the dense physical planes of manifestation and then the return flow back to God. Of course, all of that is embodied in the story of the prodigal son. So, it’s the divine circulatory flow, and where there are limitations to this flow, then you have the hindrances and then you have the non-pure state, let’s say.
Sarah: I think that most people, even just beginning to think about purification, could come up with some ideas of things they instinctively know they should eliminate. So often, purification is focused on the physical plane, but it involves all levels, emotional and mental, as well as physical habits. We can probably all think of prejudices and attitudes and reactions and habits that we know don’t really serve the inner soul life or help it foster its expression. Wherever we can recognize those habits and tendencies, that’s where we should begin our process of purification.
Dale: Yes, it comes right down to the individual and as we said earlier, it’s looking at oneself honestly. If you’re really serious about working towards eliminating these bad tendencies, then it takes an honest approach to recognize these bad things in yourself, these tendencies that build up and attitudes of thought that we carry around with us all the time and usually react with automatically, because they’ve built up over the centuries, over many lifetimes, and it’s very difficult to let go of these.
Robert: I think that Dale is right, and basically anything—not everything faced can be changed within ourselves—but anything that needs to be changed has to first be faced, so that’s a hard thing to do sometimes. Is there a difference between purification and puritanical attitudes?
Sarah: Yes. I think probably the latter—puritanical attitudes— is more the familiar concept of purification. We are, after all, a nation that was founded by the Puritans, and they were certainly a dour, an unhappy lot of people, from what I understand. Purification is quite different. It is, as I said, imposed by one’s own innermost self, whereas I think puritanical attitudes are a social compulsion. People who belong to particular classes of society or to particular religious or cultural groups have sometimes some extraordinarily puritanical views of life, and they can be quite rigid and austere. Whereas purification is the elimination of that which hinders the inner divinity. So, you can realize that it would not have the kind of humorless, rigid, unkind, intolerant element that the puritanical strain has. It wouldn’t be that at all.
Dale: No, puritanical is more related to fanatical in many cases. It tends to lead to an overemphasis on the form, purity as seen through a way of living or a way of behaving or a way of dressing, or whatever. We see this, as you mentioned, in the pilgrims and in the Puritans, and it’s also seen, I think, in life in the monastery. There’s been so much emphasis on—in the past two thousand years in the Christian church—monastic life as being a pure life because one spends his days in prayer, in fasting, in meditation and in working with God. But the emphasis there has been very much on the form, and this in turn becomes a great distorting factor. So, it actually works against purification in a way. All of this becomes distracting and deflecting in addition to the limitations, in my estimation.
Robert: Does purification have a lot to do with self-discovery? Is that part of it, self-discovery, where you have the ability to look within yourself and discover aspects of the being that you haven’t seen before?
Sarah: I suppose. I think that you have to awaken within your own consciousness to that which is a hindrance to the indwelling divinity. So, it has to do with self-discovery, the recognition of what is impeding that inner divinity. Some people start at the level of the physical practices and habits, giving up smoking or dietary regulations or whatever. Other people probably see things that need to be eliminated within the emotional nature, a tendency to greed, resentment, self-pity, jealousy or whatever. You can name a huge variety of impurities. Other people might find trains of thought in the mind that need elimination. So, it’s really up to each individual, don’t you think?
Dale: Yes, all of that is included in the limitations. As we’ve said, we don’t really often see these drawbacks in our character as limitations on anything; in fact, they’re seen as ways of expressing ourselves, even though in a negative way, perhaps, or in a destructive way. If one is really serious about stepping on the path, then these are the little things in our life and our characters that have to begin to be changed. That’s where it all starts, at that very individual level.
Sarah: I think that a lot of people probably think that the problems in their life lie in others, in the environment, in the surrounding atmosphere, rather than seeing that the problems really lie within them. That may be why we’re told that the spiritual person has to learn to regard his environment, his present circumstances, as the place of purification and the field of one’s potential service. In other words, our environment, with all its limitations and with all its challenges and problems, is exactly what our soul needs to bring about the purification of the person through which it seeks to express itself. So, the very things that we find we struggle against, the very things that seem to us to be impediments and limitations, are setting up the friction that slowly buffs the vehicles into a state of more appropriate expression for the soul, the inner divinity.
Dale: Yes, I would agree with that, and the very act of focusing on these limitations tends to exaggerate the limitations, I think, too.
Sarah: We’re fighting against the wrong thing, maybe.
Dale: Yes. As it says in the Bailey writings, in the last analysis, purity is largely a question of motive, because as long as your motive is the satisfaction of your own personal desire or the motives are originating in the personality nature itself, then the results will be along the impure line. And the opposite is true, if the motive comes directly from the soul, then those lead us on the path of purity.
Robert: Wait a second now. You’re saying that these problems that I tend to run away from sometimes, that instead I should embrace them? (laughter)
Sarah: Well, you might as well because they’ll come back and haunt you anyway. I mean, I think all of us can see certain tendencies or strains or experiences in our life that come back to us over and over again. Or maybe certain types of people that we find return to us over and over again. That’s because those people and circumstances are the place of our planned purification. They are our teachers. They are the next step that our soul has to take to master its equipment. So, instead of resenting them and fighting and running away from them, try to embrace them for the lessons and the creative friction that they contain within them. I don’t think we’ve ever done a program on friction, have we? We should because it’s so fascinating.
Robert: It relates to purification, actually.
Sarah: Yes, friction is one of the fires—speaking of spiritual fire—and fire is an intrinsic element of purification; the burning ground of the spiritual path. People might think that the spiritual path would be strewn with roses, but that is not the case. It’s a burning ground. That, again, touches on the elimination aspect of purification. All the dross is burnt away, and what’s left is that which is precious and perfect. Maybe that’s why incense is a symbol of purification.
Dale: Fire is also a symbol of the mind, the mental aspect. The mental energies are often equated with fire. In fact, they are at the esoteric level seen as fire. It’s these fiery energies of the mind that are needed to really burn away the dross of the emotional nature, all the impediments that we have in our emotional nature. So esoterically, you might say, that’s one of the reasons for the mind principle and one of the values of the mind principle.
Sarah: Water is another principle, but I don’t think we have time to go into it today. Maybe another time we can talk about water and fire.
Dale: Yes, when they come together, they create a lot of steam.
Robert: You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called The Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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