How spiritual wisdom can help us clear judgment, old hurts, and assumptions—and see life freshly

I woke up in love this morning.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a lover of “ideas.” My favorites to contemplate and write about are the virtues—all of them. This morning, it seemed like I’d spent nearly two hours in the twilight zone (between sleep and awake) thinking about the idea of “purity.” I think it was prompted by watching the television episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Marie liked Amy better than Deborah because she was a “good girl,” a virgin.

What Do We Mean by Purity?

Marie’s definition of purity got me wondering. Beyond its familiar association with sexual innocence, what have the world’s spiritual traditions meant by a pure person or pure of heart?

My research turned up several teachers from different traditions—and there was a common denominator:

Purify your thoughts.

Not because they’re sinful, but because what builds within us—fear, resentment, judgment, prejudice, self-interest, distraction—can cloud our perception. Purification, viewed this way, is less about becoming morally spotless than about removing what prevents us from seeing clearly.

That possibility led me back to one of the most familiar teachings of Jesus:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

I’ve heard that Beatitude so often, but this time, being visually oriented, the word SEE jumped out at me. Jesus didn’t say the pure in heart will please God or obey God. He connected purity with perception: they shall see God. The suggestion is that purity has something to do with our capacity to see.

The Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda used the metaphor of a mirror. He described the pure heart as the best mirror for reflecting truth. The image is simple but profound: truth may already be present, but the condition of the instrument affects what can be perceived. For those of us who make photographs, the analogy is irresistible.

Clean the lens.

It doesn’t improve the landscape; doesn’t change the subject at all. But it removes what we have allowed to come between ourselves and what is there.

The great Sufi poet and mystic Rumi takes us deeper into the same metaphor, speaking of the heart as a mirror that must be polished. Anger, vanity, resentment, possessiveness, self-importance—the accumulated debris of living—can obscure its reflective capacity. So in contemporary language, his question to me might therefore be:  

What is clouding my mirror?

That’s so much better than asking whether or not we’re pure—in spirit or any other way. The latter is judgmental. The former invites contemplation. What assumptions am I holding onto? What old hurts? Prejudices? Expectations? Beliefs that no longer work? What do I think I already know so well I don’t bother to look?

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh introduces another dimension: freshness. I like that word in relation to “purity.” His teachings on mindfulness repeatedly invite us to the present. What is actually here? Not yesterday’s memory of it, tomorrow’s anticipation of it, or the labels and judgments we’ve accumulated around it. It reminds me of the scriptural invitation to become like little children. They haven’t yet learned to take things for granted.

A leaf can be astonishing.

A puddle can become a universe.

A spider’s web can stop a walk.

A popsicle stick can become a boat.

Perhaps, along with innocence comes freshness of perception—the ability to encounter rather than merely recognize. To see deeply, what’s beyond the surface. To pay attention to the seemingly ordinary. For me, that’s the message of these spiritual teachers.

Jesus: clear the heart—and see.

Vivekananda: purify the mirror—and truth can be reflected.

Rumi: polish away what obscures the heart.

Thich Nhat Hanh: become present enough to encounter life freshly.

Suddenly that rather old-fashioned word purity began to take on new life. It isn’t about remaining untouched by life or dividing people into categories of pure and impure. Rather, it’s about becoming increasingly free from whatever prevents us from engaging life directly, authentically, freshly.

We live surrounded by information, opinions, algorithms, advertising, political identities, inherited assumptions, old grievances, and endless invitations to judge almost everything instantly. Rather than hoping and praying for a purer world, might a better response be to clean the lenses through which to see the world as it is?

The purity of childhood is largely given to us, whereas the purity of maturity may have to be recovered. Learned. So practically speaking, what would it mean for me to purify my life?

Clean my lenses: how I see myself, others, the world, the universe and God.

Clean up my expression—what I say, write, photograph, and create.

Clean up my act—live more authentically.

Clean up the present—release the mistakes of the past.

Partly for laughs, I offer an example of this latter point: in a meditative state I visualized the stuffing of my lifelong mistakes—major and minor—into an enormous garbage truck. With it positioned alone atop a mountain of garbage, sitting in the front seat of an F/A-18F Super Hornet Fighter Jet, like Tom Cruise’s character Maverick, I locked onto the truck and obliterated it with four air-to-ground missiles.

The visualization made me laugh—but it also felt surprisingly liberating. Maybe purification doesn’t require pretending the past never happened. Perhaps it means no longer allowing yesterday’s debris to cloud today’s seeing.

• Clean the lens.
• Then look again.

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