Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host. And today we will be talking about purity. Very interesting topic. Maybe we haven't really thought about it much, or maybe we have a, it comes up a lot in religious conversations and other conversations too, but before we get started, please consider like sharing and subscribing as you know, that helps the algorithm to share our content with more and more people. And please consider sharing with your friends and family as well. So something just happened. And I'm going to give an example of this for purity. But first let's talk a little bit about it. So what, when I talk about purity, what do I mean? Well, There's physical purity, right? Like purity of water. Let's say pure water. Pure means that there's no alien substances or no other substances, no dirt, no waste, no, see the words I'm using, no dirt, no waste, no alien things like that don't belong there. So purity means that it is it, everything that it's supposed to be and nothing else. As I'm sharing this, you know, in, in, uh, spirituality, the main aspect of spirituality is about the self is about self understanding, self realization, self acceptance, self respect, things like that. So what I'm giving these examples of purity, I know many of you may be thinking that I'm talking about things, like I mentioned, like pure water or pure food or pure whatever. But internally I'm thinking about pure self, so I wrote here, what is the secret of purity? So let me talk a little bit about this other thing first. So purity in food, purity in, let's say, cleanliness can also be thought of as purity. Honesty can also be thought of as purity. So anything that is the essence of what it is, like I said, it's the essence. It is what it is, essence of what it is with nothing else. How many of us have had, so I'm going right into the personality now. How many of us have had a situation where you've been in a conversation with someone And you say something that maybe after the conversation, you wish you hadn't said, or let's say you have an idea of a project and you share it with somebody else and you're really excited about it. And maybe you talk too much about it, or maybe you, maybe the other person doesn't want to hear it at that moment, but you're kind of pushing yourself into the situation. So actually what I'm going to share right now is pretty deep, but I'm hoping that maybe you'll pick up on it because I'm going to tell you why many of us have the aim to get better in terms of our behavior and everything else. And maybe we've had limited success. And I'm going to say we've had limited success because we have been changing things on the surface level. Or reacting to things differently, but we haven't really changed the, the internal issue and the internal issue is that there's, it's not pure. There's other things that are at work. So, I'll tell, I'll give the example of what just happened. I was planning on doing something today. And I had it in my mind that I was going to do this. And I'm sure many of you can relate to this. Like you have an idea of what the day is going to be planned. And it didn't work out that way. Some other priority came up. I had to pay attention to that. And it lasted a couple of hours. And now I'm aware that I don't want to blame the person either. Like, I don't want to be angry. And I wasn't angry. So that's purer than I would have been before. I wasn't angry. But I wasn't calm either. I was, I was not satisfied with the way things were. I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to get what I wanted to get done accomplished. And I didn't feel like there was a resolution inside. And I was sharing this with my husband because My husband, of course, has been doing this Raja yoga meditation for many, many years, over 40 years. And he was there, as I'm going through this situation. And I said, what, what do I do about this? And he was just saying, it's, it'll go. It's like an impurity. It will go. Meaning that if I keep on meditating and I keep on working on it, I'll become more and more aware and I'll get less and less disturbed by changes that are happening in the world that maybe are different from what I want. Now, there's a continuum of this, right? Now, of course, being angry and yelling and blaming and abusing others, that would be one extreme. But the reason why I'm bringing this up too is because sometimes we feel like we would want to have better behavior. Like, like, okay, I want to be more patient. Then maybe you would start repressing. like repressing my feelings or something because I have to be patient or I have to look a certain way or I have to act a certain way. But internally, I'm still feeling, concerned, let's say, how am I going to get this done or whatever the concern is might still be there. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because it is possible to stay with yourself And little by little, those disturbances inside will begin to subside. I'm sure you've seen people that are in situations that don't react. Now you don't know what's going on inside of them, so let's be fair. We don't know what's going on inside of anybody. All I know is what's going on inside of me, right? So, but let's say you see somebody that there's a situation where if it was me, oh my goodness, I would be, you know, beside myself, but they seem to be very calm or maybe they have a faith or maybe they have some kind of internal, resource that they're pulling on at that moment. So I would say in that moment, that's kind of a purity because they're not really reacting too much to what's going on. They're focused on their internal stability. So they're in that case, they're not, the other things are not at play. But today what happened was I was saying, what is it? Am I impatient? Is it this? Is it that? So maybe some of you can relate to this. If you're doing spiritual effort and you still find yourself maybe acting in a way that maybe is not like that I would be the most proud of. It doesn't mean that you're not going to get better. So I wrote that, I'm saying this because of the secret of purity. You can change your behavior and still have issues inside. Purity means that there's nothing else there operating in the moment except you, your spiritual personality is there, but I'm not there yet. So I'm being honest about that. I'm not there yet because as I'm saying it, it's like, well, don't I have to be honest about how I feel? And the answer is yes. Be honest about how you feel, but understand that little by little my behavior will continue to get calmer and calmer and I'll have more and more of an internal resource and less and less of that other stuff. Whether it's reactivity, emotions, confusion, overwhelm, whatever it is that I'm experiencing. I wrote here that the last episode I was talking about authenticity. And authenticity to me is about you're telling the truth about the way it is. So just like I just did, I said well I'm not quite there yet. But I'm sharing with you the thought that yes, this is what purity is. Purity is eventually all those disturbances will be gone and I'll be full of myself, my pure soul conscious self. So authenticity means I'm telling the truth about where I am and who I am and how I feel right now. Purity I wrote here is when I can be proud of that, I'm satisfied with myself. I'm proud of my behavior. There's no feeling afterwards like, Oh, I wish I could have, or maybe in the moment, like even when it was happening today, I'm like, I'm telling the truth, but I, something inside still doesn't feel right. Even though I'm telling the truth. So to me, that means that there's an opening for even more calmness, even more. Maybe detachment in a good way because it's not like I'm going to forget how to do the fix the problem You know, sometimes we think that when we become spiritual It's impractical and that's not so because all of our Abilities and memories and experiences are still in us And they're going to be used. I guess the purity thing is like they get cleaned off. Like I'll use them without having to complain, or I'll use my skills without having to feel confused, or I'll use my specialties without feeling concerned if something's going to work or not. That sounds good to me. I'm not quite there yet. But so to wrap this up, The secret of purity is, and maybe this is what I'm trying to say to the audience here. I know many of you have not been, on a spiritual path for very long, or maybe you have, or, but what I'm going after here is to understand that changing behavior, go by how you feel. Sometimes we can change a behavior, but still not feel good inside. So I feel that purity means the possibility of you still know who you are. You still can do everything. You still have all your specialties and all your skills and all your abilities and all your memories and all your relationships and everything, all the resources that you have, but you're able to use all of them without the other stuff. That would be the impurity. Emotions, anger, impatience, behavior that I'm not proud of. You know, like I said before, confusion, things like that, overwhelm, acting out, maybe not taking care of myself, maybe going after addictions, things like that. Those are all impurities. Wouldn't it be great to be able to be myself and use all my skills and everything I have? Without, without ever feeling over emotional, without ever reacting, that's purity. All of you, the essence of you without anything else. How wonderful would that be? That's the aim of spiritual effort. One of the aims. Another aim is to be completely silent and still, right? So there's two, two main aims. One is to be completely fully expressed as your authentic self, your pure self, and the other is to be completely still, the soul, right? So I'll leave it there. This was a little bit of a philosophical discussion here, but it was interesting to me today because the way I felt was different. I wasn't beating myself up. I wasn't overly emotional about my behavior, but I was just curious. That's why I asked Ken. And I just said, I was curious about it. Like, well, what is this? I don't need any of this. So what is going on here? And he just said, no, this is just the impurity that's going to continue to go away. So think about that today. Remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And until next time, take care. Um, uh,
