Question: Guru, what is the highest kind of purity I can aspire to?

Sri Chinmoy: Purity in the physical. The lower physical and the emotional vital below the navel have to be purified totally. Human beings have purity to some extent in the heart. In the mind the quantity is very small. In the vital, purity is totally mixed with impurity. There dynamism and aggression play together, but aggression is impurity and dynamism is purity. Below the vital is the physical. There, because of inertia and sloth, darkness reigns supreme. And where there is darkness, you can rest assured that impurity is the lord.

You have to aspire for purity in the gross physical. How can you do it? It is through constant elevating prayer and constant inner cry for light. Light and darkness cannot stay together; it is impossible. Similarly, purity and impurity cannot stay together. When you pray for purity you have to feel that what you actually need is light. And you must not just repeat the word “purity” like a parrot. You should meditate on the transcendental Light. When light descends into your emotional vital and physical body, then automatically, spontaneously, the light will purify the conscious, the superconscious and the unconscious or lower worlds within you.

Please pray for and meditate on the inner light, the higher light, so that light can enter into your system and illumine you. First it will purify and then it will illumine your consciousness, which is now unconsciously expressing the physical truth: the world of temptation, frustration and destruction. You should try always to invoke light in the unaspiring body. The heart is aspiring, so you do not have to worry about it right now. It is the physical in you that needs radical transformation, and for that what you need is physical purity. Purity in the physical can be established only by bringing down light from above into the physical and lower vital consciousness, especially below the navel centre.