A subset of narratives that were consistent with compatibility frameworks, but were distinctive and consistent enough to prompt further scrutiny, were purification narratives. In general, purification narratives involve an interpretation of meditation-related challenges as an often-necessary component of the transition from an inferior state to a better one. This often involved having elements that were less desirable eliminated or transformed, often with difficulty or suffering as part of the purification process. Practitioners and experts alike used the language of “purification” in ways that illustrate how religious concepts can be blended not only with psychology but also with folk depictions of physiology, neuroscience, chemistry, and physics.

The specific substances, processes, and mechanisms of purification varied, and often mingled scientific and religious referents. In some instances, Buddhist concepts described what was being purified: “karmic patterns,” saṅkhāras, or “obstacles to body, speech, and mind.” In other cases, purification was described in psychological language as transforming “impulses,” “past habit patterns,” “neurotic patterns,” “mental complexes,” “past traumas,” and “personal material,” as well as more general language such as purifying “dirt and refuse,” “impurities,” “unpleasant stuff,” or “stuff from the past.”

In an example of how religious and scientific referents might be blended in a purification narrative, one practitioner in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition stated that “working with meditation is really bringing up and rooting out and kind of leaching out old habitual mind patterns, habitual karmic patterns.” A teacher in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition explained how he thought Buddhist notions of karmic purification were congruous with neuroscientific findings:

in Tibetan Buddhism, the whole purpose of meditation is really purifying your mind or breaking down all the habitual tendencies, like the karmic patterns. Perhaps in modern science, especially neuroscience maybe, the way of dissolving or undoing those grooves in your brain. . . . You don't want to use the word “karmic pattern” in mainstream language because people think, “Oh that’s just another belief, another Eastern belief.” But this is more than a belief. To me, it’s really scientific because now, as you know, the neuroscientists are discovering the idea that the brain is very much central to our personality, to our being, but that also personality is no longer really a permanent trait—it can be changed by means of meditation or self-reflection. So that’s the purpose of the practice of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism is really to purify our consciousness of karmic patterns, which is another way of saying undoing those grooves in your brain.