It is not possible to advance on the Spiritual path without going through a process of purification. The word purification comes from the Latin and means „to make pure.“ („purus“ = pure; + root of „facere“ = to make) It literally means „free from extraneous matter.“
Being an extension of Source, we are – like Source – a trinity: Spirit – consciousness – matter; in intuitive philosophy this trinity is also known as: Monad (Spirit or life aspect) – Soul (consciousness aspect) – Personality (matter aspect).
Our mental, emotional and physical/etheric bodies constitute the so-called personality vehicles. Our bodies are made of various degrees of matter (physical/etheric matter, astral matter, mental matter). The quality of the matter constituting our physical/etheric, emotional and mental bodies is dependent on the thoughts we think, the feelings and emotions we experience, the words we speak, and the actions we take.
Now, I would like to take a moment and talk about the need of purification, focusing specifically on our matter aspect, our bodies. At the end, I will explain why purification is a necessary discipline which we cannot evade if we are to take the next step in our evolution and advance into a Soul-conscious species.
Let’s begin with our mental body.
Since in our current stage of evolution we are mostly unconscious and passive and pay little to no attention to our thinking, we naturally allow the people around us, the situations we find ourselves in, the programs playing on TV, global events, etc. to condition our mental body. Said another way: The newspapers we read, the shows and movies we watch on TV, the conservations we have at work and with our family, the people we hang around with, all play upon and condition the matter of our mental body. Since we, as a human family, are still mostly identified with separation, most of these vibrations are separative in nature. They separate us from Source and from one another.
However, the Spiritual path is the path of gradually replacing the illusion of separation with the reality of oneness. Therefore, to accomplish this, we need to purify our mental vehicle of all separative elements. If we do not systematically purify our mental nature of these separative elements, we will not be able to grow and advance. On the contrary: we’ll stay stuck exactly where we are and keep going in circles. You need to understand that we will not just wake up one magical morning having a fully purified and enlightened mental body. If our mental nature is going to transform into one of love and light and beauty, we will have to take the initiative to do so.
Now, how do we purify our mental nature? One of the most essential ways – and that‘s just one way – to purify our thinking is to begin observing our thinking. As you observe your thinking, the moment you catch yourself having a thought of fear, hatred, separation, anger, etc., immediately stop it and replace it with a thought of love, joy, gratitude and freedom. Energy cannot be destroyed but it can be transformed. When we replace a thought of fear with a thought of love, in that very moment of changing the direction of a thought current, we transform the energy of that thought current and thus literally transform the quality, wiring and substance of our mental body. Changing fear-based thoughts into love-based thoughts is literally an alchemical process. As we keep raising the substance of our mental body by purifying it on an ongoing basis (by continually replacing fear-based thoughts with love-based thoughts), we can use our mental body for an increasingly higher, divine purpose. (To think high thoughts, we need a mental body made of high vibrational mental substance; with a low order mental body we cannot think high thoughts!)
What about our emotional body? The quality of our emotional nature is dependent on the feelings and emotions we express – past, present, and future. Fear-based emotions are separative in nature. Cutting off oneness, they literally destroy the wiring of our emotional nature and create short-circuits in our nature. As as result, we cannot change our emotional responses but are caught in so-called emotional automatic reactions. Someone attacks us, and we automatically attack back (before we even have time to „think“ about what we are doing). To heal these cleavages, we need to flood our emotional nature with love and joy and gratitude, etc. Fear separates, love mends. This way we literally heal the wiring and raise the substance of our emotional nature. So: Observe your emotional automatic reactions. As you catch yourself reacting on automatic pilot, stop yourself in the middle (to the best of your ability) and make a conscious effort to consciously respond in a new, loving way. In this way you install a new program. Part of our evolutionary goal is to master and control our bodies so we can use them in service of the Soul and Spirit. When we have an emotional body that does its „own thing,“ the Soul cannot use it in service. When you purify your emotional nature by flooding your feeling nature with love and joy and gratitude, and by striving to respond to what happens in your life in new enlightened ways, you literally purify and thereby raise the very frequency of the cells constituting your feeling instrument.
Lastly, we also need to purify the matter out of which our physical body is made. Now, how do we accomplish that? Through fasting, deep breathing (I am not talking about pranayama!), sports, sweating in the sauna, etc. Fasting, deep breathing, sports and sweating are excellent disciplines to release coarse matter from our physical matter and build new, finer, higher matter into our densest vehicle. In other words: these are excellent exercises to purify and raise the frequency of the cells constituting our physical body.
Now, this being said, as we all know: we are NOT our bodes. So why bother to purify our vehicles if we are NOT our bodies? Excellent question! As I have said in the beginning, we are a trinity: Spirit, Soul, matter. These three aspects work together in unison. The Soul is Spirit’s vehicle of expression, and the matter aspect (involving ALL our bodies) is the Soul’s vehicle of expression.
