The Ego’s Hell Realm & The Hero’s Journey: Understanding The Central Myth of Western Culture
The central myth of Western culture was best expressed in the Middle Ages by Dante. His trilogy of the Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, expresses very graphically, metaphorically, the three levels of consciousness—one could even say the three worlds, from a certain perspective—that the consciousness must traverse, in its journey through time and space, and its awareness of that which is beyond time and space.
The central myth of Western culture was best expressed in the Middle Ages by Dante. His trilogy of the Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, expresses very graphically, metaphorically, the three levels of consciousness—one could even say the three worlds, from a certain perspective—that the consciousness must traverse, in its journey through time and space, and its awareness of that which is beyond time and space.
Now, Dante’s myth, however, presented the three levels of reality—consciousness, psychological modalities of being—as a linear progression, that, first, you have to “abandon all hope ye who enter” into the inferno, and you have to do the “shadow work”, as Jung would call it, and retrieve those aspects of your soul that had been sentenced to one hell realm or another—and there are many different circles of hell—and for Dante, I think very accurately, the center of hell was not burning hot, but was freezing cold.
And it was that frozenness—the rigidity and the fossilization, one could say, fixated nature of an ego that refuses to change, refuses to learn, and is stuck in an inauthentic pattern of behavior and thought—and a system that is frozen in place and will not allow new information, new ideas, new creative imagination and new potentialities of consciousness to enter in, and thaw out one’s stagnated and cryogenically preserved, in suspended animation, soul. And it is this frozenness at the center of hell that first must be thawed out, before one can get out of that realm.
Now, there are other circles of hell, however, in which the consciousness is burning, indeed—burning with perverse desires that have become irresistible impulses that cannot be stopped, that one has no control over, that produce karmic backlash and suffering.
You know, we talk about jouissance as being a kind of enjoyment that produces suffering—but Lacan is very clear in saying that the intention of jouissance is that the one who is acting it out has the enjoyment, and he or she makes the other suffer. But it never works out that way. There’s always a blowback, and the jouissance always includes the return of the projection, and of the consequences of those projections, karmically, in order to free one from the illusory belief that was behind the projection.
In a sense, all karma comes down to the need to eliminate false beliefs, which can only be done in real time, in real situations, with real other people. Unless, of course, you’re willing to realize from the get-go that all your beliefs are false. But otherwise, they have to be tested in the arena of karma.