The Concept of Spiritual Purity in the Integral Yoga

For most people, purity is connected with a moral precept, and for most, this has eventually been related to the question of sexual relations. The question of chastity, and withholding of sexual activity until the socially sanctioned relationship of marriage has been put in place, holds a central place in most cultural ideas of ‘purity’. The requirement of chastity, outside of the context of membership in a religious order, has mostly been placed on women, and it has been a force of social domination of women by men, who are not bound to the same rule in normal society. There are formal rules, such as the commandment against adultery, that technically are required for all, but women, even here, tend to bear the brunt of the social pressure for abandoning their “purity” of having sexual relations only within the scope of their formal marriage bonds.

In the context of religious devotion, the question of purity also adheres to the male devotees, and the concept of strict chastity and, in India, the concept of brahmacharya represent attempts to set up an exte
al mode of purity. With brahmacharya however, we see that the basis for it is not so much a moral precept, but one that deals with the energy and the flow of that energy within the being, including the need to harbor the force that creates the sexual energy and redirect it upwards to higher energy centers, eventually reaching the union with the spiritual center above the head.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother look at purity from an entirely different direction, wherein the management of the sexual energy and its redirection is but a part of the larger question of purity. In their view, purity is the coherence between the spiritual aspiration and ideal and the thoughts, emotions, vital actions and physical responses. Anything which does not align with the spiritual aspiration and focus represents an impurity which needs to be examined and successively modified over time to create the direct correspondence between inner and outer, and spirit and human life. The alignment of the energy which normally goes to the fulfillment of sexual desire is but a small part of this larger concept of purity. To the extent that any thought, any emotion, any vital action or any physical response goes to the aggrandisement of the ego-personality or the fulfillment of desires, separated from the aspiration of the psychic being and the dedication to the Divine Will, it represents a form of impurity somewhere in the being.

The Mother writes: “One is truly perfectly pure when the whole being, in all its elements and all its movements, adheres fully, exclusively, to the divine Will. This indeed is total purity. It does not depend on any moral or social law, any mental convention of any kind. It depends exclusively on this: when all the elements and all the movements of the being adhere exclusively and totally to the divine Will.”

“Now, there are stages, there are degrees. For example, insincerity, which is one of the greatest impurities, always arises from the fact that a movement or a set of movements, an element of the being or a number of elements, want to follow their own will and not be the expression of the divine Will. So this produces in the being either a revolt or a falsehood. I don’t mean that one tells lies, but I mean that one is in a state of falsehood, of insincerity. And then, the consequences are more or less serious and more or less extensive according to the gravity of the movement itself and its importance. But these, if one sees from the point of view of purity, these are the real impurities.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter IV Growth of Consciousness First Steps and Foundation, pp. 64-65