Marshall, Gene, The Enigma of Consciousness, Realistic Living Press, Bonham, TX, 2012. Chapter 14.
Inherent Purity (excerpts from Chapter 14 please read the original material for complete context)
1) Central to the I Am in its relations with anticipation and the future is an aspect of the I Am that I am calling Inherent Purity.
2) Inherent Purity is the action of the I Am originating in the clear space of freedom.
3) This aspect of the I Am entails living beyond good and evil beyond the stories of the superego that hold all our oughts, duties, customs, and morals; beyond the approval of our parents, offspring, friends and other social peers; beyond all the libraries of ethical thought, beyond all the preferences of our own bodies, minds, and habits.
4) Inherent Purity is the pure freedom to act out of the spacious emptiness of the I Am with uncaused, unauthorized, unprecedented options of creative response.
5) This confident purity of action is an audacious boldness, a freedom so primordially rooted that it shocks our personality habits into a sideline share of our living.
6) This audacious boldness uses our personality gifts when appropriate, but will also contradict all personality habits and values without qualms.
7) All impulses to be righteous in terms of superego conditioning are bypassed; a new form of righteousness reigns: freedom itself.
8) Our essential freedom is our Inherent Purity of action.
9) When fully allowed to realize its being, freedom is liberating.
10) But because we cling so tightly to our moral certainties and ethical principles, freedom may seem dreadful.
11) In fact our dread of freedom recurs whenever we wish to feel certain about a particular decision.
12) In the real world all our choices are ambiguous.
13) There are many ways to view each choice.
14) There are many values to consider, and some of them will have to be negated in each specific choice.
15) The boldness of such living is truly audacious.
16) This awesome initiative of essential freedom can break through our personality habits as a state of being that happens to us from time to time.
17) And we can also come to recognize that Inherent Purity is a permanent station of the I Am that we never need to leave.
Read one of the lines from this reading that caught your attention.
Where were you surprised by this section Where did it cause you to say, Hey, wait a minute
What does sentence 3 mean What is the difference between a bad person and a free person How does someone live beyond good and evil (3)
What is a personal illustration of something you ought to do (3) .of something that is a duty you perform ..of a custom to which you adhere . A moral practice by which you abide .
What is freedom (4) (8)
What is creativity (4 6)
What other line or concept would you like to have the group explore with grounding experiences
Why does the encounter with freedom potentially fill us with dread (10-11) Who can illustrate this dynamic with a real life example
How many of the choices in my real life are ambiguous (12)
What question of this material would you like to discuss with the author for further clarification or guidance .(How would anyone else address this question)
How might I live my life differently because of the awareness provoked in this material
What personal practices might be indicted from the encounter with this material