Meditation 35: The Danger of Purity

Nothing is pure or impure in Nature.  Human beings imagine that some things and practices are pure and others are impure.  It is a distinction made by humans out of their own needs and desires.  Somehow, the distinction worked its way into the heart of human life, where it sits to this day as part of a magical view of the world. 

Where "pure" and "impure" find a literal meaning, it is in measurements of materials in our environment.  For example, we can talk about impurities in the water, and we mean the chemicals we do not like to see in the water. In reality, water always has impurities.  Some are tolerable, others, not.  We measure the differences in parts per million or billion.  We can drink pure water, bathe or swim in it.  If it is too acidic, alkali, or contains too many viruses and bacteria, we cannot.

All this makes sense.  We can talk about levels of purity in the air, and even in the soil.  Purity is good, and impurity is bad; that is, we judge one to be good for us and the other bad.  In themselves, air and water and soil are always mixtures, and therefore only relatively pure or impure.

Talk about the pure and impure becomes dangerous when the words start taking on a metaphorical or religious meaning. There is no measure here, and so anything goes. We hear about inner purity, purity of the soul, moral purity, the purity of sexual abstinence.  Plato tells us to prepare for a life after death by running as far away from bodily desires as we can. In this way, he thinks, the soul will be purified of earthly desire and stand face to face with the eternal Forms.  The body and bodily desires are corrupt and must be controlled by the mind and reason.

Ritual cleansing, acts of expatiation and penance, asceticism and spiritual exercises all work with a metaphorical notion of purity.  The acts are supposed to bring about an inner transformation, but a fixation with purity leads to excess.  One becomes a judge of the pure and the impure.  An extreme example is that of the Untouchables in India.  They are considered impure by higher castes, like the Brahmins.  The belief that we can distinguish the pure from the impure, and denigrate what we call "impure" is a great cause of strife in this world.  In fact, everything is impure, which is only to say that it contains a mixture of many things.  The distinction plays a magical role when moved from its literal context, and we forget that it is a metaphorical or magical idea of purity that is invoked.  Believers take the distinction between the pure and the impure to be a real distinction in things.  Their wills and emotions become entangled in the distinction and their reactions to the thought of purity or impurity becomes inflamed.  The obsession with purity is a snare and delusion, and the sooner we come to recognize magical thinking for what it is, the better.