THE Divine Comedy and Consciousness

"Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost."

So starts Dante's Divine Comedy, and over the course of 100 cantos the narrator takes a most decidedly un-straightforward path to get to his goal, Paradise, where waits Beatrice. Through all the levels of Hell he must travel, from the outermost to the deepest and most terrible. Only then can he traverse all the levels of purgatory before he can make his entrance to heaven.

It seems to me that this is precisely the journey of consciousness. Awakening suddenly, already descending into Hell - else we would not want nor could be conscious in the first place. How lovely it would be to come back the way we came, straight back to the Garden of Paradise! But innocence lost cannot be regained. The way is shut, we have fallen and continue to fall. Dante, lucky soul, is fairly limited in his exposure to that of a mere witness to the horrors of Hell.

The only way out is forward, deeper into hell, whereupon knowing its depths can we then circle back around to Paradise - only from the back door, as it were, the long way around. The deeper into hell one goes, the stronger the consciousness must have been to make it through intact. Only then does one have the character and the constitution to return home, to Paradise, to Union with the good, resonant with deep harmonies and where every action is laden and ripe. Only with the full consciousness and experience of one who has made the travels and survived the dangers. We come back to where we started, or something close to it, but changed by the experience. To paraphrase Jung, for a tree's branches to reach to heaven, its roots must extend to Hell.

The long way is often the shortest way, in the end, because it affords the transformative experiences that shape us into the people capable of getting to our destination in the first place. What looks like a short-cut or the most direct way is also where resistance stiffens. The harder you push, the more what you push on, pushes back. Richmond, 70 odd miles from Washington in the Civil War, fell only after four years, a million casualties, the loss of the trans-Mississippi, Kentucky, Tenessee, all their ports and railhubs. The two most influential Union generals cut their teeth in the West - the long way around.

Of course this presupposes that consciousness is the a-priori good. In a paradoxical and tautological knot, the lack of this awareness means we are still in Hell somewhere. But we emerge from the Round, the Void, and return to it with a Self. I suppose that counts for something. Until, of course, we have to do it all over again. We perfect the process, and the process never ends, moving towards God-knows-what. We have inklings, and we have guides, but the experience must still be lived with the faith that what emerges on the other side will somehow be more complete, that there is an image unfolding through this process. And perhaps the movement towards is enough anyway. It stands to reason that it is better than the alternative.

If we can't move forward, we rot in our own personal Hell. What could have been a comedy dies a tragedy.