Purgatory

Dante suggests how a matured Reason actually works.

After the first receiving and connection of sensing Heaven’s outreach with “Gabriel” as the “Archangel” (literally: source message) in Purg X:40-45, the temptation internally is to make this a new focus and a new fixture.

And this is where something dramatic happens. Reason itself pulls the pilgrim away from this inclination:

«Non tener pur ad un loco la mente»,
disse ‘l dolce maestro, che m’avea
da quella parte onde ‘l cuore ha la gente

Roughly: “‘Do not hold your mind on only one place’, said the sweet master, that had me from that part where the heart has people'”

So this shows a big shift: reason does not actually always want to move the mind and attention towards control, a model, analysis or narrow focus. At this point reason reminds the pilgrim to keep moving, and receiving “from the side”.

The message is potentially massive: much of today’s brain science tends to portray the left brain hemisphere as “by nature” seeking dominance, total mastery, removal of all ambiguity and blocking the right hemisphere. And this to some extent could resemble more of the initial “dark forest” in the Comedy itself.

But maybe the truth is more this: the dominance-seeking and all power seeking rationality is actually a malfunctioning rationality. It is a Reason (and left hemisphere) in starvation of real inputs and influx of experience, unfiltered. It has choked off, or been choked off, from what is its natural function: getting fresh reality to process, analyze, and potentially learn from and update constructs and models of reality.

And if this is correct, the current challenge with constricted modernism, scientism, and rationalism posing as complete cosmologies, is not actually a fight against a constant force that wants hegemony in one’s own consciousness, but to feed it with unfiltered perception and experience of reality, and of spiritual reality, to enter in “from the side”, naturally seeping in, and not loop the attention back towards that which it “controls” for extracting more knowledge.

In short: Dante seems to suggest that the natural Reason is a matured one, that by nature wants to prevent itself from this starvation. Which is why then Virgil is the one to push consciousness further, to keep receiving as they move along.

And thus; Superbia itself has started to heal.

The beginning and end of the spiritual path: how to receive.

After the first ~40 lines, the confirmation comes in Purgatory X:40-45, that this is indeed the key or the technique, for how to connect with the Heavens.

And the words from the engraving are “‘Ecce ancilla Dei’, or “here is the handmaid of God“.

This is in many ways the main message of the entire Divine Comedy, and the first substance lesson as we enter the Purgatory Gate. Connect and Receive. This is the whole point. And it will also come back in its fullest form at the very end of Paradiso, when the reader has been transformed and built capacities over the whole journey. One can read the passages there already, but one cannot experience them in their fullness yet.

But the truth and the keys, are right here. The connection with God comes from the “side”, and it will be through receiving. That is the nature of the relationship with the infinite and eternal spirit.

A first gift after recalibrating the method of perception.

After several steps to reconfigure and gain a new awareness of the apparatus of perception, the first image or “substance” appears: the outreach from the Heavens. As in the Archangel “Gabriel”.

L’angel che venne in terra col decreto
de la molt’anni lagrimata pace,
ch’aperse il ciel del suo lungo divieto

Meaning roughly: “The angel that came to the earthly with the decree of the peace wept for, for many years, which opened the heavens after the long separation”.

So in the sense of the personal journey, this points to the mechanism that will reconnect you internally back to the Heavens again: that which has been wished for, for many years, and is in many ways the full reversal of the dark forest of the opening of the Comedy.

It’s worth noting how the first around 40 lines of Purgatory X are focusing on perception and appearances. Dante does not go directly to solutions and the “substance” of the answers, but steps back and shows us the necessary adjustments and understanding of the apparatus of the perception itself, before we can look at changing the distortions of how we see fuller reality.

And Dante keeps reminding us of the differences, here in how this image does not seem like a “silent image” to the Pilgrim, in many ways pointing to the living spiritual wisdom, that he is starting to sense and be open for receiving.

And as another note to readers of Purgatory in general: these “two dimensions” of perception can only make fuller sense after the Garden of Eden and the exploration and experience of Paradise. But Dante is planting the seeds here – that the beginning of the whole process is to step back and becoming familiar with perception itself, and its pitfalls. The “wall, path and void” are mistaken perceptions. The spiritual beauty of the carvings are beyond the perception of nature and arts. And now his perception of Gabriel is something more than what he physically sees.

These passages are taxing for the psyche and the self to engage with properly, but there is no way around this. A straight forward presentation from the start would only reinforce one’s earlier distortions, and be categorized into existing systems that would most often flatten or remove the deeper meaning. Therefore the sequence is imperative: step back, let the “moon wane“, then start from scratch (the plain), and be aware that the first impressions will be mistaken until the perception apparatus has started to be repaired again.

But when this is starting – the spiritual substance, inputs, insights, the light, will start seeping into one’s consciousness – as with this sudden recognition of “Gabriel” as an appearance(!) of new insight and experience internally.

Not directly in front, but receiving “from the side”.

After the basic first moments in the entrance to the spiritual path, Dante gives a first lesson and moves miles beyond the first misunderstood impression of “wall, path and void”. And the form here mimics the content: the lesson is there but not directly in front of the reader.

The passage is this:

Là sù non eran mossi i piè nostri anco,
quand’io conobbi quella ripa intorno
che dritto di salita aveva manco,
esser di marmo candido e addorno

Roughly meaning: “Up there our feet had yet not moved, when I recognized that bank/wall around, that the slope in front of us was missing, being of marble white and adorned”

This thus moves far beyond the first idea of the wall simply “rising up and up” and being insurmountable – as the perception of a misguided approach suggests – and establishes something new: this is a source of spiritual wisdom and truth, but it comes from the side and not straight in front. So before any substance of spiritual wisdom, Dante states the correct approach and method: keep moving forward on the path, on the slope, but be receptive of the insights and received wisdom from the side, from the “mountain”, that will illuminate your soul. This bears repeating: move forward, and receive wisdom from the side, not right in front of you.

Dante further then states how this received wisdom, in the sense of the beauty of the marble engravings, surpasses both human endeavors and that of physical nature itself. So here we are learning about received wisdom from the mountain walls, rather than the “appearances” with which the Pilgrim opened Canto X.

Meaning: already Dante is reconfiguring the perception apparatus of the Reader. Showing us how our filters need to be examined, and purgated of misconceptions. The idea of a “hard focus” and “direct analysis” is removed in six small verse lines. It is not the approach. It will not work for spiritual wisdom, nor for fixing the distortions in one’s own apprehension of Reality.

Move forward, but “listen”.

Early perceptions can almost by nature be mistaken – on the spiritual path.

After the empty plain in the beginning of Purg X:19-21, a new image is presented of the outlook for the Pilgrim and Virgil: a path, a void on the one side, and a wall that rises and rises on the other.

And this center path could further measure the human body in three “turns”.

Da la sua sponda, ove confina il vano,
al piè de l’alta ripa che pur sale,
misurrebbe in tre volte un corpo umano;

The literal meaning is simply describing the narrow path when the spiritual journey begins. But in an anagogical sense, the symbolism is much richer.

One can think of this as three conditions of the spiritual life, or three approaches for the soul, towards the spiritual realm. One is avoidance (the void), another is the fruitful path (which they now enter), and the third is the insurmountable wall, only rising and rising upwards.

But what we are also shown here is how this dynamic appears for the untrained or undeveloped soul itself. The wall could thus be the effort to apprehend the spiritual life “overall” without any building of capacity and experience beforehand. It will simply become a vertical “wall”, impossible to climb. The path might also look very narrow, as only “three bodies wide”, and the void might simply look like empty nothingess.

But once the spiritual capacities are built later, however, these three aspects can appear very differently.

The “wall” is simply a misperception for the untrained soul. The void seems like a “nothing”, but is in reality an infinite loss of richness, livingness, participation in fuller reality, and also loss of infinite joy and meaning. And the “narrow path” is not narrow at all. The “three times” of the measurement of a “human body” might even refer to the mystery of incarnation: the spiritual life can measure the human being as spirit, as matter, or as the unity of spirit and matter; the incarnated spirit operating in the earthly but connected with the Heavens. And in that sense the size of the fruitful path is indeed enormous, if not infinite in potential.

So as the first look at the forthcoming journey to repair the inner perceptions and structures, we see first the untrained vision – but with hidden layers of the fuller vision.

Dante also follows this up with the next tercet: “and to the extent my eye could draw out wings, now to the left, now to the right, this ledge/context appeared like this“. So Dante literally uses the phrase “parea cotale” to indicate the difference between true reality, and his limited perception ability at this starting point.

And a little comment in general for the readers: these anagogical layers in Purgatory are to some extent only possible to see and experience after the whole journey in Paradiso is completed, which also confirms and shows a deeper point: the infinitely recursive wealth of insight once the soul is purgated and starting to align more with the Divine Light, and the patterns of Reality.

The “eye” of the spiritual process comes with a sense of instability, and the need for a full withdrawal of illumination on the soul.

From the opening of Purg X:13-16

E questo fece i nostri passi scarsi,
tanto che pria lo scemo de la luna
rigiunse al letto suo per ricorcarsi, 
che noi fossimo fuor di quella cruna;

The literal meaning: “And this made our steps short, so much that first the receding of the moon reached again its bed to lie down again, than we were outside of this eye.”

The depth here is profound. It describes the birth of the spiritual process for the soul. As the Pilgrim and Virgil have entered the gate of Purgatory (as spiritual process), the path is swinging back and forth, indicating disorientation, and with Virgil’s advice that they need a bit of skill/art to navigate this.

A key learning is this: it will be a destabilizing experience at first, and, a necessary threshold is the complete withdrawal of the current Divine illumination on your soul, the shining of the moon. The moon must wane completely, the reset must be a full one. That, is what is needed before they are outside of the “eye”, the biblical image for spiritual initiation in many ways.

So in terms of the whole Divine Comedy, this is the description of the soul’s reflection withdrawing, and the consciousness in a “wavy” state, before they find themselves on a deserted and empty plain. A kind of total nothingness.

This is the entrance.

Why the portal to the Good Life can be hard to find.

Here is the opening of Canto X in Purgatory:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta 
che ‘l mal amor de l’anime disusa, 
perché fa parer dritta la via torta

Literally: Then we were inside the threshold of the gate, that bad loves of the soul leaves in “disuse”, because they make the twisted path already seem right.

So Dante makes a big point in the opening tercet here: many people will never start the process of correcting internal distortions and twisted apprehensions of the world – not because of avoidance or reluctance to admit this, but because everything will seem fine. The twisted filters on the world are thus not like the “funny mirrors” where you clearly can see the misrepresentation of reality, but they are largely not detectable in themselves. The twisted road will seem straight.

Meaning: introspection for “flaws” is thus partly impossible to do directly. Aiming for the Good and for Virtue, in Humility, and starting a process, is what will heal and clear up the perceptions and experience of the world. That, and finding a good guide.

A new journey starts once again today, with Trina – as a returning subscriber!

The opening is such a beautiful and timeless reminder of the basics: humility, an open mind, start connecting with something transcendent again. And more concretely here, start rationally discerning Virtue. In that way the connecting and “bridging” process starts automatically.

A long time subscriber Juan is right at the Gate after 3 months today, entering the Purgatory Proper this morning.

Now the work starts, and no turning back.