The impurity of the will consists in heteronomy, i.e., in its being determined by something other than itself. In western culture, because of the prevailing extroversion, the conviction that every action must have a sufficient reason is widespread, or that there must be a reason or a cause for its happening or not happening, for its happening in such a way and not otherwise, and this has joined with thinking that things do not happen in a different way through a divine act. It is precisely such a mode of action that is called impure. In fact, in it, action draws its own impulse not from itself, but from a motive, reason, impulse, or object by way of appetite or aversion, etc. In it the will in the thing desired does not want only and nakedly itself, but something else, so that it is properly said that it is willed by that other. That is the sakama karma of the Orientals: action based on desire, action that is not through itself, but through what proceeds from it. Purification in this case is instead connected to the conviction that the sufficient reason of an affirmation can be the affirmation itself, rather than to the concept of an act that is done only from a pure creative impulse. One can also find the best expression of this in a passage from Eckhart:

From this deeper principle you must do your works, without a why. I affirm it decisively: even if you do your works for the kingdom of heaven, for God, or your sanctity, although motivated by the other, even then you will not really be in the right. If you ask a true man, a man who acts from his depth: “Why do you do all your works?” he will answer you rightly only if he says: “I act only for the action itself.”

Here it is rather important to note that the need for purification assigns both the pure and the impure, the good and the bad, in a word: not particular terms but the combination of pairs of opposites. The purity in question means full autonomy, pure possession of oneself, and in respect to that, the link to the good, the sacred, etc., is no better than any other link: if that which is called good or pure by men binds the will, that is likewise to be called impure. Hence in such order, they appeal to expressions like cleansing oneself, baring oneself. Afele panta [from Plotinus, “forsake everything”]: it is necessary to cleanse oneself of everything — the “high” as the “low”, the “spiritual” as the “material” — it is necessary to reduce the will to its naked essence resting only on itself. Once that point is reached, everything becomes equally pure, just as prior to that everything is equally impure. And that in such an order the pure must not be said of things in themselves, but of a way to live them, the measure of which is autonomy and autarchy, so that in being compelled to call something impure, only the proof of its own impurity is conveyed.

Here a particularly subtle discipline is necessary for the fulfillment of the requirement. In fact, how to guarantee that what one wills proceeds truly from the unconditioned and not from an obscure, incomprehensible complex of inclinations and impressions rooted in the subconscious? The answer is, an in-depth interior analysis, to make everything progressively emerge into the light of consciousness that previously had been taken away. Even among us today we begin to work in this direction with psychoanalysis. Beyond that, there are methods of control based on the principle, that depending on whether action is conformed or not to a hidden inclination, it will produce pleasure or aversion. Along these lines, it is not enough to believe that the alternative is indifferent, or to put aside one’s own will and to leave decisions to chance; for example, by the flip of a coin. In the sentiment that results from it and extending this discipline to a topic that always more closely concerns us, we will have a real means of indicating the progress or decline along the path of the purification of the will.

In general: it is necessary to be able to renounce everything once one feels that it becomes necessary, or once one uncovers a desire or satisfaction for it; it is necessary to do, on principle, not as one pleases, but what is required, to always take, on principle, the line of greatest resistance and, thereby, to make the will ever stronger and purer, to make self-possession ever more energizing. Hard discipline, which one would hardly know how to adapt to unless one succeeds in feeling in the naked will in autarchy a stronger motive and a more intense and vaster pleasure than what things in themselves can ever offer us. In any case, it leads to a rather difficult point, whose reflection is precisely the difficulty that common knowledge meets in conceiving an action where there is no longer a “because” to arouse it. One feels as if the entire inner being were crystallized, so that no movement is any longer possible: it is like a paralysis, an absolute aphasia, that contrasts painfully with the sense of inner possibility. Almost as if one had something to say but the mouth remains mute and inert to command. The experience of such an inner state provides the sign of purification and for that reason the individual knows how little what he called his action was truly his, how much a real impulse was absent from his ordinary life, “higher” or “lower”, and he being not an author, but a puppet, a medium blown about by alien forces. He knows however the I, and beyond that, how to find an excess of strength, he knows in spite of all acting, that he has achieved in himself the principle of a higher life, a power that stands beyond his being made from dependency, contingency, and finitude. And the door for that higher accomplishment, which is connected to the remaining purifications, is disclosed to him.

Purification of the Mind

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