Ready for a lesson?
In the two slides below are two different forms of gold. In the first slide is raw gold ore. Also called impure, this ore is gold and non-gold materials that are with it in the earth. When you extract gold, that's what you get.
In the second slide is pure gold. It is refined, meaning it has gone through a process where the impurities have been removed from it. When you receive pure gold, that's what you get.
Before gold is pure, the ore is put through a purification process. After extraction, goldsmiths liquefy it in furnace, then add soda ash to it (other substances can be used). The impurities in the ore will combine with that soda ash and be separated from gold, then float to the surface where it is easily removed from pure gold that is now settled. Then pure gold is cast into bars. That's the process. Now, to a few lessons.
1. Pure, refined gold is of greater VALUE and USE than impure raw gold is. You cannot buy the some grams of impure gold for the value you buy the same grams of pure gold. One has a higher value and price than the other. Your mind is like raw gold from the day you have it. The purer you make it, the higher the value it attracts. Moreover, how many times have you admired or witnessed someone admiring raw gold on another's neck or wrist? Or that someone stores his wealth in raw gold form? The primary use of raw gold is to go to the smith's furnace and be transformed into pure gold. But pure gold is what the world all over uses for various things and knows!
Your mind refined is of greater use and value to you and to your world than it is left raw and unrefined. The mind is refined by mental exercises, and the least of that exercise is reading useful worthy texts. When you read such, you compel your inner conversations to follow a specific track of usefulness and insight. Other more important exercises are thinking for yourself, symbolising ideas and most importantly, thinking from your wish fulfilled (controlling your assumptions). All these make your mind 'the most powerful force' ever, and that phrase is best known by your experience than described from mine.
2. The purification process does not add to gold's value. It removes what has hidden the highest value of pure gold from it. Likewise, to purify your mind is not a process of adding 'more' to your mind, but removing from your consciousness states thst are unnecessary or impure for your ideals. All things exist in the mind of man, "He has hidden the world in man's mind," (Eccl. 3:11) All the greatest fortunes and the worst misfortunes are in a raw mind. But by becoming discriminating of what to keep and what to release, the individual will remove the unnecessary and unwanted from his mind.
Sometimes, people mistake this for removing from their quality of life, and they react to abounding life with shrinking. But that's a mistaken idea. Purified gold is the highest quality and attracts a stead on the King's Crown and Throne. But raw gold remains in the ore. Purifying your mind is removing from your mind impure thoughts by concentrating on the pure ideas to think from consistently. This only adds to your life, not remove from it. This only blesses you with more blessedness and increase, raises you to a higher status; it doesn't take away from you. Refine your mind and remove ideas that don't serve you by SETTLING into your ideals.
3. The purifying furnace was designed to separate pure gold from the impurities attached to it in the raw state. It never was meant to hurt gold, make gold suffer or change gold's nature from gold to something else; and it doesn't do any of these. Only the impurities are tampered with and removed by the intensity of the furnace. Likewise, the process of refining your mind does not hurt you, make you suffer, put you through agonies. It only separates you from the limitations you once accepted on the name of God: I Am. When a person accepts a limitation such as poor on this pure awareness, they claim I Am poor. Not knowing that is using God's name in vain, they are put through the furnaces.
Man is put through the furnaces of afflictions not to make him suffer but to discipline his mind in the art of separating his mind from impurities. It is God who refines you in what is the furnaces of afflictions. Isaiah 48:10-11 RSV — "Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another." Why would someone profane God's name and feel in himself, 'I Am poor.' Well, he experiences afflictions of poverty. May I assure you it is not the physical experience of lack of money. The afflictions are not physical.
They are rather mental nagging of himself with all characters in his mind as if they accuse him or abuse him to be poor. Then he may find money on the outside, but God's name will not stand profanity and he must learn to put the ideal pure state on that name and claim, I Am Rich, before his afflictions can stop. He must feel himself to be rich, as much as pure gold knows itself to be gold and does not gather together with the impurities that float in the furnace. Then and only then will he realise he was never suffering from anything except his own misuse or clinging to unnecessary impurities. But the furnace is never to harm gold. The only thing that burns away is what is impure.
Malachi 3:3-4 RSV — he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, till they present right offerings to the LORD. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.
Romans 12:2 RSV — Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Well, friends.
BE REFINED!
