Category
One of the three principal paths of a spiritual aspirant - renunciation, compassion and pure view. Pure view is the practice of sanctifying our world and everything and everyone in it. Since our world reflects back to us, and since how we look at things determines exactly how we see them, it seems like a good idea to work on the basis of even the remotest possibility that there could be divine beings among us, guiding us, showing us, teaching us.
Physical Benefits
Seeing ourselves and others as pure and sacred beings with exquisite physical characteristics goes a long way towards actualizing these qualities!
Mental Benefits
When we are continuously engaged in the divine play of debating with ourselves - “Are they an enlightened being? I can’t prove they are. But I also can’t prove that they’re not” - and if we go with imagining that they could be, and then act as though they are, miracles happen! Your mind becomes happy and contented.
Subtle Body Benefits
When our minds are happy and contented, prana is moving from the two side channels - ida and pingala - into sushumna, the central channel. This is where truest, highest pure view and bliss live - when the prana or life force has shifted itself from continuously flowing outward and dissipating, to moving into the central channel and moving upward.
Karmic Benefits
When we transform our view from wrong view (see last month’s Practice Corner) to pure view, and we work at this all through our day in all our activities and interactions, we are constantly planting the seeds to see all people, places and things in our world as perfect and divine.
Counterpose
The practices of karma yoga - selfless service and bhakti yoga - devotion - are lovely counterpoints to the practice of pure view. They approach the same goal in a slightly different way but get us to the same place.
Cautions
No one and nothing is perfect until WE are. Deluding ourselves that everything is perfect, when in fact it isn’t, is one of the subtle dangers of this practice. Seeing imperfection is the fuel that feeds the practice of pure view - without it, we don’t know what it is within ourselves that still needs work. A crucial point of this practice is the understanding that we must “start with the man (or woman) in the mirror” to perfect our pure view.