Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, one of the great realized teachers of modern India, had a radical practice: whenever he found himself identifying a substance as "impure," he would consciously touch it and ingest it.
He found a bone on the ground — something a culture obsessed with purity would deem contaminated. He picked it up. He licked it. He sat with a student who was deeply troubled by this.
The student asked: "How can you do this? This is defiling."
Ramakrishna said: "What is defiled? Show me. This bone is matter. This body is matter. Both are Shakti. Both are the divine playing in form. What is the difference?"
The student had no answer. Because there is no answer. Both are atoms. Both are expressions of the same field. The difference is entirely conceptual — a category the mind has imposed.
This is the radical teaching: purity is not a property of things. Purity is a category the mind creates to sort reality into acceptable and unacceptable. But at the level of actual reality, there is only matter. And all matter is equally sacred.
A girl gets her period. Her mother tells her: "This is dirty. You need to be careful. Men can tell when you're menstruating. You're unclean." The girl learns: my body is a source of contamination. My cycle is something to hide. My natural biology is something to be ashamed of.
A teenager starts feeling sexual desire. They're taught: "These thoughts are impure. This desire is sinful. You're not supposed to feel this way." The teenager goes to war with their own body. Sexual pleasure becomes something shameful. The teen learns to police their own thoughts, constantly checking for desire and crushing it before it surfaces.1
An adult spends their life uncomfortable in their body. Uncomfortable in pleasure. Uncomfortable in their natural appetites. All because somewhere, a purity doctrine told them their body was the problem.
Here's the genius of purity doctrine: it makes the person police themselves. The institution doesn't need guards or punishments. The person carries the prison inside themselves. A woman doesn't need to be forced to hide her menstruation — she's already ashamed. A person doesn't need to be forced to suppress their sexuality — they're already repressing it. You've turned the person into a surveillance system watching themselves for contamination.1
And the institution gets to define what counts as pure. Your desire for food is gross. Your desire for sex is sinful. Your menstrual blood is disgusting. Your body is the problem. Accept the institution's interpretation of reality or you're impure, fallen, unworthy. Perfect control, because it's all happening inside the person's own nervous system.
But here is what Ramakrishna saw that revolutionized the teaching:
If Shakti is matter, and matter is the divine creative principle, then all matter is equally Shakti. The sacred and the profane are not actually different. The clean and the contaminated are not actually different. They are the same substance, the same atoms, the same field.
The bone is Shakti. The womb is Shakti. The corpse is Shakti. The shit is Shakti. Not metaphorically. As actual physical reality.
This seems scandalous. It seems to violate something sacred. But look closer. Ramakrishna was not saying the divine is in the gross and disgusting. He was saying there is no such thing as gross and disgusting at the level of what things actually are. Disgust is a reaction your nervous system has to certain stimuli. It is useful at times — it can keep you away from spoiled food. But it is not a property of the thing itself.
The bone is the same substance as your body. Your body is composed of atoms that have been recycled through millions of other bodies, through soil, through plants, through animals. You are literally made of what you call "unclean." The boundary between pure and impure, between you and the world, is entirely a nervous system boundary. Not an actual boundary in reality.2
The moment you see this — the moment you recognize that the purity categories are arbitrary human constructs imposed on a reality that is fundamentally undifferentiated — something shifts. You are no longer at war with the material world. You are no longer contaminated by your own body. You are no longer split.
You are simply matter recognizing itself as matter. Shakti recognizing itself as Shakti.
Watch what happens when someone releases purity doctrine:
A woman stops believing that her menstrual blood is unclean. Suddenly she is no longer required to isolate herself. She can move through the world without shame. Her cycle becomes simply information about her body's rhythm, not evidence of her contamination.
A person stops believing that sexuality is inherently impure. Suddenly they can feel desire without guilt. They can experience pleasure without needing to justify it or hide it.
A culture stops believing that the body is the problem and the material world is something to escape. Suddenly people can inhabit their lives. They can enjoy the sensations of being alive without needing to transcend them.
Ramakrishna's teaching is not permissiveness — "anything goes." It is clarity. It is recognizing that the arbitrariness of the purity categories has been creating suffering that didn't need to exist.
You still use discernment. Spoiled food is still not good to eat — not because it's spiritually impure, but because it will make your body sick. Disease transmission is still real — not because certain people are inherently unclean, but because pathogens exist. Consent and harm are still relevant — not because sex is impure, but because violation causes damage.
But you are not now organizing these discernments around a metaphysical doctrine of purity and contamination. You are responding to actual consequences. The anxiety dissolves. The obsessive checking dissolves. The splitting dissolves.
You are simply alive, in your body, in the world, without the constant low-level sense that you are contaminated by your own existence.3
Modern psychology recognizes contamination anxiety and obsessive-compulsive patterns around purity as specific pathologies. A person with OCD may wash their hands hundreds of times because they are convinced they are contaminated.
We treat this as a disorder. We help people reduce the checking behaviors and the washing behaviors. But there is something deeper that psychology sometimes misses: the entire culture maintains a low-level contamination anxiety that doesn't get named as pathological because everyone shares it.
Women are taught that their bodies are inherently a source of contamination. People are taught that sexuality is contaminating. The body itself is contaminating. These are culturally normalized forms of contamination anxiety.
Ramakrishna's teaching would say: the entire purity-based organization of society is creating a massive, normative form of OCD. Everyone is checking themselves against invisible standards of contamination. Everyone is engaged in compulsive behaviors (bathing, covering the body, controlling sexuality) to manage the anxiety.
The tension reveals: Psychology treats contamination anxiety as an individual pathology to manage. Ramakrishna suggests that the pathology is structural — built into the culture's purity categories themselves — and that the cure is not managing the anxiety but dissolving the categories.4
In behavioral-mechanics, the most powerful control systems are the ones where the person controls themselves through internalized shame. And purity doctrine is the apex of this.
A purity-based system teaches you that your body, your desires, your natural cycles are contaminating. Then you police yourself. You control your own sexuality, your own appetite, your own aliveness. You don't need an external surveillance system because you have become the surveillance system.
Particularly for women: purity doctrine makes women's bodies the primary site of control. A woman is taught that her sexuality is dangerous, her menstruation is unclean, her desire is corrupting. So she controls her own body. She restricts her own movement. She monitors her own behavior. The system has created a self-policing subject.5
Ramakrishna's radical move is to say: the categories themselves are the control mechanism. The moment you recognize that purity and contamination are arbitrary human constructs, the control breaks. You cannot be shamed about your body once you recognize that the shame-categories are invented.
The tension reveals: Control systems built on purity depend on people believing in the reality of pure and impure. The moment people recognize these categories as arbitrary, the system collapses.
If all matter is equally Shakti, then the purity hierarchies that structure civilization are built on illusion. The hierarchies that rank certain people as more spiritual, more pure, more worthy — they are all built on the arbitrary imposition of purity categories onto a reality that is fundamentally undifferentiated.
This applies to class systems built on purity. To caste systems built on purity. To gender systems built on the purity of men and the contamination of women. To sexual hierarchies built on which kinds of sex are pure and which are perverse.
All of these are based on categories imposed onto a material reality that knows no such distinctions.
The moment you see this, the entire justification for hierarchy collapses. You cannot say "these people are inherently more pure and therefore more worthy" once you recognize that purity is arbitrary.
Where have you internalized purity categories about your own body, your sexuality, your desires? What would become possible if you released those categories?
What would change if you recognized that the body, the material world, the substance of existence is all equally divine — equally Shakti — with no hierarchy of purity?
How much of your self-policing is actually based on internalized purity doctrine? What energy would be freed up if you stopped?