The Purification of Self

January 13, 2023 2 By Lance Kelly

The purification of self intensifies under the relentless scrutiny of the pure intelligence within the body. For a long time, a battle for supremacy rages between the self’s wilful resistance to the call of the spirit and the individual’s readiness to journey on into the deeper mystery of life. Beginning in blind ignorance, the self gradually begins to surrender its position as the usurper of the one good or God, not through suppression but in humility to the purity of this invisible Source.

In most adults, the self has become an unyielding mass of accumulated past emotion attached as a psychic structure to the flesh; thus the life is experienced with little feeling beyond instant gratification and self-satisfaction. The flesh is not the physical body but the pure sensation of the vital being. When in touch with this inner beauty, the being glows with a golden light which is the state of love. However, the self controls the life exclusively as the person until sufficient living experience has made someone question the sanity of the world. Disillusionment with the unending drama of conflict and suffering brings the separation from the past to the optimum point of the present. Although the transformation at this cellular level can be both painful and distressing, it must be endured while the body adjusts to the new frequency of being.

The degree of personal suffering is invoked by the willingness of the individual to undergo the procedure. It’s to know that only the self is dying and not the essence of the man or woman. Many mystics have endeavoured to communicate the agony of this intense stage in the purification of self. In my own experience, for many years I referred to the process as ‘the tremors’ since the energy was not unlike an earthquake shaking the very foundations of the self. As it enters the subconscious, the spiritual energy begins to undermine the husk of the emotional body by re-energising cells already partially enlightened through the living process. This upsurge in spiritual power can initially give the false impression of an uninterrupted state of enlightenment – until the self arises again. Suddenly exposed and suspended in the purity of inner space, the self panics and tries to assert itself even more virulently than before.

The purification of self can take a lifetime. But no matter how intense the experience, there’s the knowledge that the suffering will pass and that I, within each body, am being made whole as a more authentic and loving disciple of life. Nevertheless, the closer the proximity to the realisation of God or the Source, the more troublesome the self becomes as it tries everything it can to sabotage the resolve of the man or woman. Physical symptoms can occur such as skin eruptions, headaches, fatigue and other inexplicable aches and pains. There can be the resurrection of past fears and anxieties from the deeper recesses of the subconscious, and sometimes the appearance of psychic phenomena. The self can even create external circumstances to cause frustration and weaken the fortitude of the individual. However, it’s important to know that the integrity of the spirit ensures that nobody has to face the intensity of self beyond the threshold of their own understanding.

Whenever the self is confronted, its grip is loosened to a degree. This enlightening process happens every time someone is valiant and overcomes the demands of self by holding to their inner divinity. The self is not destroyed but transformed as it surrenders to something out of existence which cannot be described or defined. It’s this process of negation which purifies the body of the corruptive force in matter. The being is then free to communicate from a place of pure intelligence. The challenge for the man or woman is then to live their truth and endeavour to impart their knowledge to a world which has no time to examine with any depth the predicament of the human condition. As always, the truth is for the individual alone.

The spirit has no attributes and is as nothing, which is of course totally unacceptable to rational perception and is the ultimate conundrum for the human mind. And yet, in the perception of the other side of the sensory world, the dilemma of this apparently one-sided existence is resolved. Space, or the absence of form is the other side of our reality – not just the world we perceive through the awareness of the senses. Combined, they make up our total experience of life. When integrated as an inner and outer state, the spiritual vision of life as a whole is perceived. This is the ultimate self-knowledge, realised through the purification of self.

Extract from e-book: ‘Deeper into the Mystery’.