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1) Karmic, or Impure vision - This refers to causation (karma means "action") from the past, whether past lives or the present life. What we have sown in the flow of Consciousness, though pleasing, is a distortion of reality - so "impure." We are not seeing things as they are; we are seeing them as we saw them. We assume we have freedom of choice, but how many of your thoughts arise from choice? How many arise before you choose? Have you done something and asked yourself, startled by your behavior, "How could I do that?!" or "From where did that come?!"
Christian Scripture refers to this vision - Galatians 6.8:
If one sows to please selfish desires, he will be planting seeds of self-harm and will surely reap a harvest of spiritual decay and death; but if he sows the good things of the Spirit, he will harvest the fruit of eternal Life the Spirit gives.
2) Vision as spiritual experience - These experiences refer to any consequence of spiritual practice. Here, persons are attached to spiritual experience and, so, to spiritual materialism. An example would be feelings of calm in meditation, visualizations, and paranormal experience - visions, voices, dissociative feelings, past life experiences, prophecies, ... While many persons, possibly most, live totally from karmic conditioning, the spiritual devotee can easily get enamored, so stuck, regenerating so-called spiritual experiences that are not pure vision but tainted with the egocentrism that seeks to capture Grace for its own purposes, especially to aggrandize the self, now seen to be spiritual, holy, mystical, or godly. These are not pure; spiritual experience is only a transition realm from impure to pure. Here, one is pulled back and forth by the poisons of greed and aversion, which in Buddhism cause pervasive suffering: greedy for what one esteems spiritual, righteous, holy, enlightened, and aversive of what appears not so. Hence, the karmic inclination for the self to revolve around itself still dominates, as in impure vision, only now the ego clothes itself as being a spiritual person.
3) Pure vision - This is the vision Trungpa refers to as "utter reality." One, here, realizes the nondual luminosity, wherein everything appears the luminous expression of the Light. All one sees is mirrored from Consciousness, in theism, from God. In Christian terms, here even "Satan" manifests the Light, for all things manifests the Light. Simply put: What is, however it appears, arises from and reflects the Absolute. Hence, here, one is no longer attached to spiritual experience. One no longer aspires for spectacular spiritual experiences, for she or he sees any experience as manifesting nondual Reality. That is, for example, your walking on water is no more spiritual than eating your lunch, and your listening to your friend is no more holy than listening to the Voice of God. Here, so-called spiritual experiences are neither spiritual nor unspiritual: they are what they are. Hence, in pure vision, one receives life, one does not try to manufacture special states of experience. One has nothing to become, for one is. The holy being is an absolutely ordinary being - so ordinary many persons find the holy being intolerable. Sacredness offers you nothing except the suchness of what is, all else is a distraction, a fabrication of mind.
Hence, outer beauty, magic moving in form, is a means to entice us to Life, the beauty of the Beloved to the Beloved, even as someone might be lured into the arms of a lover by his or her scent, perfume or cologne or natural body odor. Or, one may, as I have often experienced, have the flower blossom lure one to itself, to inhale its sweet-smelling scent. The blossom seems to call, "Come near," and I do. Being drawn to and moving near in reply is the whole spiritual Way - "Come near," and we do. In pure vision, we come near, not through special experiences, but through life itself to Life. To say, "Life is special" is to say, "There's nothing special about Life." Hence, this vision is paradoxical; one sees without losing the view of either one or many. Nondual Buddhists call this "the View" or "One Taste," among other things.
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What we adjust to on the Way is how remarkably and powerfully ordinary this magical, hidden-in-plain-sight quality can be. We learn to relax into just-what-is, the suchness of here-and-now. Then, this simple presence allows the spaciousness for Life to manifest in a way extraordinarily subtle, in fact, extra-ordinary in being so ordinary.
In Christian terms, we can relate this to a Jesus saying, in the Gospel of John 14.8ff, where he says, "When you've seen me, Philip, you've seen the Father." Philip, a disciple of Jesus, had asked him to show to the disciples the Father - the Ultimate, the Formless. He had been looking at Jesus, the form, daily and not seeing Jesus was an appearance of the Father. Jesus reminds us ~ the Formless appears in and as form, while form is not the Formless. This is true, as the face is all the expressions of the face, while the face is not equal to any one or all the expressions.
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