PURIFICATION

In Vedanta, awakening into Brahman, i.e. realizing God, is the goal of life.  But how exactly does one accomplished this?

It begins with purification.  This means that a person must become desireless, since the biggest obstacle to awakening is, as it is termed, craving and clinging.  It is an individual's craving, clinging, grasping, desiring of the whole cornucopia of things and experiences that life has to offer.  It is, in short, the longing for everything other than God.

There are two courses of action.  The first is that one can indulge himself, as anyone can do quite completely and successfully over his lifetime, until he is satisfied that he has done everything that he ever wanted to do, has everything that he ever wanted to have, to the point that he can say "been there, done that."  This is the long way around, but it is still purification.

His other option is to desire Brahman, God, more than he desires anything else.  This has the advantage of immediacy, no need to wait a lifetime, and endure all the misery that indulging oneself to the maximum invariably brings.  If there is a difficulty with this it is that not everyone is capable of this intensity of desiring God.

These options, however, are not mutually exclusive, allowing for a mix of the two.

With, then, the mind purified, cleared of "ignorance" and "impurities," as they are called, awakening will occur.