Religious scriptures talk a lot about purity—of mind, thoughts and intentions. Purity is a term that connotes the absence of contamination, or adulteration. In general parlance, it is used in the context of material things like food, water, fuel, gold, silver or other substances of day-to-day use. In the broad, general sense, purity means the absence of pollutants.
The vast visible material nature or universe was created by an omniscient, supernatural and omnipotent Creator who created millions of celestial bodies—planets, luminous stars and other bodies. Planets like Earth are abodes of a multitude of living beings, for whose sustenance, the Creator has created water, cereals, fruits and vegetables. The Creator has also created metals and minerals in a vast range to serve the needs of living beings, especially humans who are endowed with the intellect of the highest grade and can put those metals and minerals to wide use through the application of knowledge and development of technologies.
But where did the knowledge come from?
Quite obviously and logically, fundamental knowledge came from the same Creator who created humans and their supporting and nurturing ecosphere.
The Creator’s injunctions in primeval texts called Vedas underscore the importance of the term purity and emphasise strongly the need to preserve the purity of not just gross material substances but also subtle entities called the mind, intellect and knowledge. The concept of purity is broad-based in that it covers the integrity and wholesomeness of various natural material substances. Applied to subtle substances like mind and intellect, it connotes their states that are free from the banal elements that pollute the mind and vitiate the intellect.
Impurities of the mind increase the propensity to passionate desire, anger, greed, enchantment and pride which together generate all types of vice. This leads to the incidence of crime, corruption and other vicious acts in the otherwise civilised human society. The impurity of intellect makes humans deluded and consequently, they are unable to discriminate between the righteous and the unrighteous. The results are the same as with the impurities or pollution of mind. The third and perhaps of greatest importance is the purity of knowledge. Threads of divine, eternal knowledge which is universal and unalterable, could be carefully preserved in their pure form or distorted willfully or out of ignorance and illusion. Pollution or distortion of true knowledge brings about great danger to peace, harmony and progress. Pollution of knowledge leads to utterly misguided generations of humans performing unrighteous karmas without being aware of it. This is the worst situation that can be.
One can easily observe to what extent pollution has permeated the present world. Not only are the five primal elements—air, water, fire, earth and ether—stand polluted but even the minds of humans display grave levels of pollution. Physical pollution has brought climate change, global warming, deterioration and degradation of crops and also a greater incidence of wildfires, typhoons, cyclones, tornadoes, excessive rainfall, floods and landslides. Raging flames of material desire, anger, greed and pride are starkly evident in the current crop of humans.
Coming to intellect, many people seem to be seriously afflicted by biases and prejudices. Humans in large numbers appear to have lost to a considerable extent the discriminatory power of the intellect and are unable to distinguish right from wrong. They do not display that level-headed approach to understanding and interpreting things. And, finally, even fundamental, divine knowledge has been polluted which shows in the form of a wide multitude of varying ideologies at dissonance with each other on the same subjects. This is leading to unnecessary and unfortunate squabbles and strife among human communities.
We owe it to Mother Nature and our divine Creator to maintain the purity of material substances. It is our prime duty to preserve this purity for our forthcoming generations. To maintain peace, harmony, progress and equitable prosperity for all, we need to prevent pollution of minds and intellects. As the superior living beings on this celestial abode called earth, it is our obligation to our Creator to preserve and propagate divine, eternal knowledge in its pure, undistorted form.
As long as there is purity in natural materials and subtle substances, there is stability, balance and peace. Disturbance and disruption of this purity lead to the opposite states of instability, disharmony and imbalance in which negative vibrations of anger, and vanity permeate the ethereal space and disrupt peace. Progress can occur only in the fertile soil of peace when no such negative vibes exist in this space.