On the Art and Skill of Purifying the Awareness

Source/Copyright: Przykuta/Wikimedia

The art of purifying awareness is simple, but not necessarily easy. I'm not exactly in the mood to preach this morning, but thought I'd just note down a few brief comments on it.

To begin with: The skills of purification go from western "releasing negative thoughts" to eastern "purifying the imprints of karma". The idea of letting go of these imprints is that they somehow affect us, not always to our amusement. I won't go into modus operandi - there are plenty of sources for that. More to the point, I'm looking at the main components that make such methodologies work.

Let's work with metaphor as a model. An imprint is like graffiti on a wall. The instinct in dealing with it is to "Erase it all! Mua ha ha!" The temptation is to shower it with the water of positive thoughts, and everything will be just fine. Or will it? Positive thoughts, while potentially beneficial, are just another form of graffiti. You're attempting to overwrite the old stuff by painting it over. It is still beneath the surface. Worse, you have in fact made it more difficult to clean off! And worse yet, the CLOSER it is to the wall, the more power it is able to draw out of your internal energetic circuitry. Ouch. Yep.

So purifying really comes down to 3 components that I can identify offhand. I might develop a better model for this later, but here's what I have:

1. See the graffiti/Awareness - Difficult to purify what you don't know exists.
2. Own the graffiti/Ownership - It doesn't matter how it actually got there. If you don't take responsibility and own it, you can't change it.
3. Release the graffiti/Willingness - Once you own it, you become one with the wall. You don't even have to worry about the graffiti, you can just release it by changing the structure of the wall and the paint will fall off.

We've visited all this in past posts on ROLCE and the like. The key here is that when you take ownership, you gain power over it. Thus, you stop resisting it and the paint loses power to threaten or irritate you somehow. You have to become one with it to dissipate it. It is the art of destroying from within.

Once you have infiltrated it, then it becomes easy. If you make it easy, that is. If you still hold the image of spraying it with water, it becomes difficult again. Instead, regard it as a friend - so much more pleasant to deal with, don't you think? Then you thank it - gratitude always helps. But then imagine it becoming something light and dropping away by itself. Visualisations include blocks floating away in water, becoming smoke or butterflies, or even just shrinking and disappearing into nothing. In all this, one employs the idea of ease and gracefulness. So much easier than struggling with it with a sledgehammer, don't you think?

This has been a pretty pithy post, but that's all I have time for this morning. Happy releasing!