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 purgatorial 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 he 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 the fixated nature of a 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 ones stagnated and cryogenically preserved in suspended animation soul and it's this frozenness at the center of Hell that first must be thought 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 produced karmic backlash and suffering you know we talked 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 recognize from the get-go that all your beliefs are false but otherwise they have to be tested in the arena of karma so the various realms and circles of hell that Dante describes are very easily brought into correspondence and congruence with the various let's say levels of chakra one and the first assemblage point in chakra two in the second assemblage point etc but the hell realm itself is is not able to be left behind until one has come to the very conscious recognition that one cannot trust one's own beliefs it's it's this hubris this narcissism of believing one's story and of refusing to back off or consider that other stories might have equal validity as well as equal invalidity so that one can begin to play with these various stories and not be stuck in one position and unable to be considerate of other positions as having their own equal right to being a reality tunnel that does not have to correspond with one's own but the wisest of the wise of course get out of all the tunnel visions and refuse to harbor any beliefs certainly no beliefs about the other no judgments about the other but are willing to walk in the others moccasins long enough to understand why the other might have a belief that seems very strange and incompatible with one's reality which if done without prejudice and without considering it outlandish or in some way peripheral to a more central truth then one can always find in it and trace back through anyone's belief a path that leads directly to the absolute so there are wormholes to get out of the inferno without having to go through a long stretch of purgatory this is basically what at the point I want to get across that although Dante thought that these three realms were to be traversed in linear succession in fact everyone is always in all three realms simultaneously at least so long as there is an ego that is functioning Yuriko its natural habitat is the inferno it actually likes the inferno it gets enjoying it out if it's suffering the others suffering the the vengeance and self-righteousness and the overcoming the negative projections of the other at this time is affirming the negative self attacks that come from within one's own mind all of that brew of constant self immersion in a dual lies conscious made of the ego and superego figures in in relationships that vary from envy and hatred to desire and lust and and demonic imitation of jouissance --is that that dare to go beyond the the point of no return and flirt with death and madness it's this urge this impulse for the intensity that only jouissance can bring that can overcome the boredom and the despair and the nihilism of the ego for a moment and sparks it into some kind of pseudo living semblance because of its being threatened through its own actions with annihilation from the other because it cannot bear to annihilate its own delusion and so the hell realm is self-perpetuating as a punishment for being in the hell realm one perpetuates one being in hell Brom however once the realization at has taken you beyond that level and there is a clear understanding that you want to get out of Dodge and dodge the bullets of the hell realm that are constantly being shot at you and by you that you want peace instead of war within and without then the purification of the false belief systems that underlie the karmic repetitions of patterns of self defeat and of sadomasochistic engagement with the other that produces evermore bondage and guilt and shame and the weight of of sin and failure and defeat and all of those melodramatic elements that the ego loves to have to deal with so that it can eventually prove it can do the impossible by overcoming these tremendous obstacles and finally like Sisyphus get that stone up the hill and keep it there but no it will always roll back down once again so it's this game that the ego likes to play that prolongs it's delusional lifespan but a point comes when the game loses its taste and the the taste of purification becomes a far more interesting diet and the the letting go of all of the the beliefs that have burdened one with that sense of of being crucified and tied down to the wheel of birth and rebirth and like prometheus having your liver eaten out by the crow or the Raven I forget what bird they used but it wasn't a very fun picnic he was on for stealing fire from the gods but why steal the fire when it belongs to you you know and why go through all of this demonic phase of the hero's journey in order to prove after all that there is a spark of goodness and divinity within you or to try to disprove it once again and again in order to prolong again the engagement with the battle of light and dark that creates so much intensity of emotion and produces a life that has always lived at the highest strong possible vibrational frequency of chaos not of the frequency of bliss but of at the edge of chaos where at any moment one can have a meltdown a breakdown a breakthrough a liberation or a total demise into the quicksand of Maya from which one can never come out and it's this undecidability of one's fate that keeps one interested in one's life and otherwise the ego would be totally meaningless and and it's pointless existence would become all too obvious so at the Purgatorio level it becomes much more interesting to learn about the ego to become a master of Eagle adji and to get your PhD in studies of perversion and psychosis and neurosis and understand you know what you've been doing in vacation land for the last number of years and so once you start to vacate that hell realm and get to know it from a distance and you can only know it from a distance then the the distancing itself morphs into wisdom and power because you're no longer directly within the gravitational field of the ego and now you're being pulled by the soul toward the higher levels of consciousness and as that pull of both the epistemically and the upper death drive take over and the upper debt Drive I should add at this point that your debt to your own divinity your own Buddha nature your own Shiva hood that has been waiting for you to reach the zero point once again and let go of all these oscillations of consciousness should I shouldn't she loves me she loves me not I want this I hate this all of these dualities that the ego constantly bizzy's its mind with when all of that finally lets go and one knows what peace feels like and the expansion that comes with stopping all the rumination on the shoulds and should't and the whys and wherefores and the self damnation of the consciousnesses own recognition of its masturbatory thought patterns the purification amounts to the de rata cessation of the symbolic functions of mind so that they can be sublimated from their contamination with a power drive and sex drive and a security drive and a drive for for rebellion against the law the evil law that is itself crime incarnate which is true at the ego level it is in Kali Yuga and so one can always justify the rebellion but the rebellion itself is the commission of the same crime as one is complaining about one is only envious that some people have the power to order executions in Iraq or other places where as you can only perhaps give a tiny insult to someone in a local space situation you know how petty Haly we want the big crimes you know so the the ego is always wanting more power so it can act more criminally and with more self-righteous justification get vengeance for all the ways one was mistreated in one's own child but once there is a purification of this through a recognition that the logic of reality itself has required one to go through these processes as a result of the balancing of karmic forces that this is part of the perfection of the the explicate order that must balance all the accounts even though you may not realize that you owe something the Karma itself will show that and in the acceptance of what is without hating God for putting you through whatever trauma it was that really you asked for and that you had to experience in order to learn something of great importance one finally let's go of the demand for special treatment by God and one begins to earn one's way through the cosmic hierarchies and defiles of the labyrinth in order to make one's way to freedom and it's this recognition that everything that is good must be earned it can't be discovered or robbed from another or gained by gambling efforts or done through any other shortcuts and it's this that then keeps the soul honest in the the gradual trek up the mountain of truth to Paradiso and it's here when the mind through that purgatory process will have been purged of all of its beliefs all of its opinions all of its judgments all of its projections and one will end up with shown your mind not to use it in a personal way but the mind must be emptied the mind must become that zero point of total openness that can come pain in a paradoxical synthesis all possible reality tunnels and all possible versions and permutations of the grand delusion that every ego is subject to and by being willing to accept them all fully radically without proving them wrong and a lesser and inaccurate and and and without creating suffering for the other or for one's own ego a core bodily existence then the that emptiness can then finally be filled with the blissful presence of that supreme intelligence that was always who you really are but that you had to learn the hard way by recognizing what horror it is to have forgotten who you are and what you are so that you would never forget again and thus give yourself the gift of liberation from having to go around this wheel of rebirth another time so the Paradiso is the emptiness that is always already present behind the fluctuating ego torment it's always there and the booty that is the hinge between these two levels of reality that functions as the the purgation mechanism is always recognizing the inauthenticity of the ego and the enjoyment of its negativity and of its attempts to gain power and gain prestige and gain all of the other adorations that one didn't get in childhood that are always once again squashed inevitably right so the phallus is only there to be castrated it has no other function and it's only when one has finally let go of that attempt to to prove whatever it is that one needed to prove in order to to accept oneself as being worthy of entering the gates of paradise that finally will have to be less let go as the last mythical barrier that one uses in order not to merge back into the infinite consciousness which means the death of the ego and so before one enters the the Paradiso there is a grief a grieving process that one has to go through the the Vairagya a state is a state of dispassion but it's a state of the grief of having lost one's right to passion and and it's that that most people don't go through because the loss of passion is far too threatening to the egos existence that literally makes up the fibers of the egos nature and even the the nature of the soul that in its su tropic trajectory from one life to another is seeking to have have a life with maximal intensity of experience in order to be able to to learn the most and to discover what are the limits if any both of degradation and of divinization they are they are both laid out with equal interest for the ego and it's the inability to decide between the two and the final grief of having to let go of the intensity of the the sensory dimension of existence that is the death of the ego that allows the rebirth in the paradise of the real self so we go through this journey in time slowly or quickly but that is only at the level of appearance because we are always already in Paradiso it's simply a matter of overcoming our having forgotten that in order to have the intensity of experience because you can't have them both if you have the realization fully of the Bliss of the self then there will be nothing left to enjoy the experience of the intensity of hatred and lust and attachment and all of that so the the choice that must be made to let go of the the demonic enjoyment in order to enter the angelic and the the luminous ocean of Buddha nature and lose one's individual specificity and particularity that one defends with such intensity of love for the ego and the more that the ego suffers the more one loves it because nobody else loves it and so you have made that one object of desire for which you can be consistently a supporter and it's finally the letting go of that that that leads to the paradise that then will redream itself as an actual world and a new cycle of time will begin and yet nothing has really happened at all but the holographic pixels will look different to those who have bodily forms that are still contained within the holographic field but the field is an empty field a field is only light the pixels have no mass no reality other than your own subjective perception you project the world you don't discover it but having forgotten that you are projecting it you discover again the truth that you are not actually in the world or of it but that that world is within you as your own dream and it's when that realization comes and through the dispassion for the course of the dream and the passion for the awakening from the dream have reached a tipping point such that the awakening is unstoppable that the dream itself then morphs from a nightmare into a beautiful emergence of the archetypal beauty and goodness and delight of creation itself that is inherent in our hearts waiting to blossom once again so all of that as a preamble to say that because you're already Buddha and you're already the god self you don't need to struggle you don't need to make this a difficult melodramatic work of overcoming impossible obstacles but if you choose to do that take responsibility for the choice and and know that it is a choice and get to understand why you would be making such a choice and once you have understood that you do have the power to make a different choice at any moment then the the clarity of the real situation that you face the real scales in which your soul is being weighed have to do only with your own preference for hell or heaven and once it's clear which you prefer then it's that which will appear but you can't keep a hell realm identity and be admitted into heaven so if you have an identification with an ego that would not fit in very well in heavenly circles then you might want to change your costume in order to get past the guards st. Peter looks very carefully and if you're if you're dressed properly you know and have the right attitude you're in because it's your home and you belong there and but otherwise there will be a repulsive anti magnetic force that will keep you from getting to the gate so I hope that's good news to people that you're not victims and that whatever traumatic residues you're holding on to are simply souvenirs that you treasure too highly to let go of but have no force field of their own that attacks you from some independent self standing demon that has it in for you and it's also true that in every moment a change happens in the sense that the you who appears in one moment is not necessarily the same you that appeared in the last moment and that's what you don't have control over okay because the ego has become so complex with so many different dissociated threads of consciousness with different faiths has Matic desires for different scenarios to have to to encounter and deal with one never knows which one is going to be activating the pixels in the next moment of the of the waveform shifting and oscillating through time and in each one a different aspect of oneself can become apparent and others will go into eclipse so there is no consistency of self appearance as well as of world appearance and it's this lack of consistency that if it's not recognized as being part of the process of the the film of reality moving forward with its indeterminacy principle fully operating then one has no capacity to keep a central through line regardless of the kind of ego or the kind of emotions or the kind of signifiers that happen to be appearing in your mind at any moment but when you know you are the pure awareness of those mental contents and not defined by the mental contents then you remain changeless throughout the inconsistency of mental action and reaction and you remain able to discharge the the negative effects and symptoms without creating suffering for yourself or others and simply through the refusal to believe in any of these impulses and thought-forms they become extinguished and you are liberated from them without having to do anything without any struggle to struggle is already to enter into identity with what you are struggling with rather than recognizing it as a dream from which you have awakened so that's the easy path and there's no need to make it difficult that's all I have to say about it before I go on with other elements of our satsang tonight does anyone have any questions about this no I knew it oh you of course you're gonna have questions well bipolar personality which I know you said ever you got it what is happening is one flipping from Hell realm to some thank you it always surprises me how minuscule the difference can be from day to day okay so mine and maybe phenomena plane things were a little bit different I mean it got an extra hours sleep and this person was nice it's me oh yeah there's those silly things that can make a huge difference from the fearing state yeah you're right absolutely sure the ego is ridiculous but it's good that you realize that that it's it's flipping and oscillating from one assemblage point to the other you have no control over it from within the ego it's from one minute to the next you'll be a happy person or very angry or unhappy or sleepy or whatever and you just watch these changes happening without any way to control it you can't control it until you understand what are the thoughts that are underlying each of those appearances and recognize that they're based on false beliefs when once you choose not to believe them any more than their symptoms that are the states of effects that arise we'll stop and though and what will remain will be the highest level that has the fewest of those negative beliefs and then you'll see that even those beliefs are holding you back from going to even higher states of happiness and then you can trade those in also until you're finally willing to be free of all beliefs and then that's that's when you know what paradise is saying that the easy path is watching as the projections arise let's say and just faith that the stupidness will continue but you won't be able you won't be identified with it but it will continue well let's say it'll continue but you will enjoy it you'll see that you the sense of humor that God has put into this whole ridiculous scenario that you're in and by beginning to laugh at it and not taking it seriously then you have shifted your relationship to it and you will no longer entertain those ridiculous situations because you know you're not stupid and you know you don't deserve to be in that right but as long as you believe oh that's my fate and you know and I need to do this and have this and write that whole hysterical desperation to try to get something that doesn't exist will continue to function but once you recognize it to be delusion and you can laugh at the delusion you are halfway out of it and when you ask well who is it who's aware of the delusion then you will find a being of truth who is laughing and who is already able to extinguish the reappearance of those events so so it only repeats so long as you still have something to learn from it and you you until you have fully decided to let go of holding whatever opinion or belief it is that has caused that to have to appear and once you're willing to let that go fully and completely then you're free now ultimately you let wanna let go of the I thought itself not any of these other incrustations on it and then you're free of the whole shebang at once right that's the quick way but even if you peel away some of these other more peripheral beliefs that create occasional suffering and torment and all of that you that freedom is comes with extra willpower to be able to go even let go of even more of the falseness that was constituting a sense of certainty that you were holding on to and you have to be willing to be in the unknown and be okay with that in order to be free of having a repetition of the past occur again yeah they're all judgements but some judgments are judgments about a person you know or about a situation other beliefs may may be about yourself and what you're capable of or right whatever that you may not even know you're holding as a belief because they're just so normalized and usually subconscious that you just assume that's me right but it's not you it's a belief about you and that belief makes you never able to know you as you really are all you can know once you have beliefs about yourself all you will ever know is those beliefs and whatever happens in your world will be a self-fulfilling prophecy that proves those beliefs are true but it will also create karma that will show you that the belief isn't really true because it's creating an unhappiness that is caused by a conflict created by that belief and then when you realize you don't want to be in conflict then by pulling off that belief out of the situation suddenly there's harmony right and and then the the yin-yang can start to dance together instead of trying to destroy each other you said something on ones of purification amounts to the cessation power mm-hmm well let's see the problem when society went bad is when people were appointed to positions like Pope or priest or judge or governor or president or prime minister who were getting off on the power that those physicians gave them and then they were no longer acting in those positions from a place of the responsibilities of higher consciousness to remain neutral and detached and able to to function with disinterest in the outcomes and instead there was a narcissistic enjoyment of the prestige and the everything that goes with the holding of a symbolic office or a symbolic position in a society or a community or whatever and and the the the gradual increase of the perversion of of one's thought patterns because the mind itself your language is learned in an erotic context and so every thought within the ego has a certain erotic core to it that that is an underlying desire that this thought is going to gain some kind of satisfaction in at least a proxy form of jouissance of what would be a sexual act of some kind right and so because that's always there at a subconscious level you have a totally corrupt government you have totally corrupt Royals in written you have totally corrupt you know judges in the judicial systems so the everything the the priests are pedophiles right we know all of these things but how did this happen it happened when the the consciousness fell to that level that it needed a constant jouissance and then contaminated all the social functions that had previously been sacred and made them profane and simply instruments of sadomasochistic enjoyment develops with this erotic subtext or whatever what is what does that mean at the level of what that one is learning it like how does that because it's not explicitly erotic or what does that mean oh yeah it is I think when you are learning language from your parents you're seeing them enjoying punishing you enjoying you know fighting with each other enjoying seducing you're flirting all the things that are going on you're a little kid and you see your parents having parties getting drunk doing things that are orgy like and who knows but these days some very grotesque things happen that children have to witness right and so what happens to the legitimacy of authority then of those who should be the upholders of the law right who are themselves committing crimes against their own humanity and and inflicting this on the children so these kinds of traumas that are created by the parents and by the extended family and and then by the the whole social system that permits it in schools all that bullying and and all of the other horrors that people have to go through in childhood create a defensive errata cessation both in imitation of it and as a way to avoid and gain the upper hand in a kind of bondage and discipline sort of approach to relationships where you're either the one on top or the one down and and you will use one strategy or another to keep control of the situation but all of it is fueled by a constant flow of jouissance that you can deny because oh that's not what you met you were only you know speaking with plausible deniability about things that had to do is let's say real one situations of a neutral sort but there's nothing neutral and in any of the egos attitude toward reality and so the more you become aware of that then the more horrified and but and the more able to purify those delinquencies that go unnoticed otherwise to create karmic blowback you started off to the teaching by saying that you were talking to this structure at the end or the infernal purgatorio and Paradiso in the central myth of Western culture what would be the central mythos Eastern well there there's several of them but I think that the Mahabharata is probably the the one that is most in use as the basis of the the journey of consciousness in India at least and in China it's it's the mythical system built around Taoism right and the whole the recognition that was there in in East Asia of the underlying nothingness that supports an appearance that has no foundation so their myth is is much closer to the emptiness that is the truth of all of this that appears as simply the imagination without basis in any objective reality that becomes objectified through forgetfulness by the ego so in the East they're always remembering it but what happened in the East the tragedy that happened to Taoism is that the Dow of course is it cannot be named right but the Dow is what determines let's say the equivalent in the judeo-christian mode of the the tree of good and evil right the knowledge of good and evil the Dow will tell you what is right to do what is wrong what is good what is evil but for every one there's going to be a different Dow then as soon as you get into the Dow as determining what is right and wrong you have already lost the truth of the Dow you have moved from the tree of life to this tree that of duality and so Taoism itself although it was expressly intended to keep non duality as the the paradigm became a multiplicity of different non dualities between which you couldn't choose so you have the Dow of pool and the Dow of Business and right there's all these books you write Dowell of and go to Amazon there's probably a thousand books right so so everybody's got their own stick of a Dow that they're selling and and the the purity of that original concept has been lost the same way in in India the understanding of brockman became lost and then you have all of these gods you know that are representations of aspects of them but now positive eyes as ego ideals rather than as the the transcendence of evil I don't know if it's my imagination or it's just a series of circumstances that have occurred these past weeks since our retreat or maybe the teachings of the retreat that have created the awareness it's not it's in there or maybe there is a real what I have experienced I guess is the word is like an acceleration of this when you said that the flickering of the the hologram is kind of the lack of consistency of constancy I mean it just what what is today 18 or something it's been two weeks since we finished our retreat exactly today and the coming back into whatever we call a normal life in let's say a phenomenal plane no such thing anymore if something happened I don't know if everyone feels it or is it just me it's like a disaster everything is totally chaotic you speak to people back in Kali Yuga that people say some something one time and then the opposite and then you just I mean we're in the verge of World War 3 the day after we came back from the retreat it's yes it's wait well I I've been talking about that for a long time not news I have awakened to it it's always been there I'm just Lucca seeing it now but I also feel that something is accepted of course it is it's exponentially accelerating yes yes and that will continue so that's why I'm saying fasten your seat belts yeah you if you get in srimad that's what i feel is you get entrained by this is the current that is unstoppable of madness of complete and consistency incoherence amendment like you you're just you're just gonna be taking my hmm no its objective yeah of course every ego is unraveling now life is becoming unmanageable for them they can't deal with their own karma and they there's a lack of willpower or a lack of clarity a lack of love and a lack of of any access to truth beyond the egos delusion so that it the wheels are coming off of everybody's stick and everybody's engine of of intention and and people are falling by the wayside and more suicides and murders and mass murders and and and insanity writ large across the planet and that will continue until Mad Max shows up in person so I don't don't think things will get better not not until we've gone through the singularity but yes your you're not mad for recognizing that yes you know it's you know so that's why I want to say and maybe thank you very much so I can work with everyone everyone can work with me or at least understand at which point I might be projecting not this time I'm an expert on creating stars yeah great I think you can use that expertise in very productive ways but you need to enjoy it with a sense of humor and recognize all of these delusions as delusions and by not buying into them and being able to laugh at them the ego will gradually morph into becoming a vessel of this higher intelligence that sees through its game and and purifies it through the very emanation of love for the ego that you hate or that hates itself right it's the the unconditional love and acceptance of the very ego that feels unlovable is its own healing but that love has to come from within not from another and it's always wanting to get it from another but making sure the other actually dumps you or insults you in some way so that you're crushed and all of that so the the the the the love that heals has to come from your own heart for the ego and it's that love that will dissolve it back into its higher nature a soul and then s pure spirit but love is the medicine that you have to give to yourself and I would administer it many times a day okay I appreciate your honesty I chose your greatness and you have the sword of truth you will be the one who conquers these delusions and shows the way for others to do the same what's the difference between anxiety and fear well fear is about a specific object or a situation anxiety is general right so you can't escape it and it ultimately comes down to the egos knowledge of its own delusional nature and that it can't trust itself for what it thinks or or anything or anyone because it has delusional projections on everyone and so it's in a total state of the terror of a complete meltdown but if it melts down it's actually a blessing because then your real self will appear [Music] you

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Keywords: shunyamurti, spiritual teacher, sat yoga, ashram costa rica, spiritual retreat costa rica, silent retreat costa rica, meditation teacher costa rica, eckhart tolle, Wayne Dyer, Ramana Maharshi, Mooji, Meister Eckhart, Tara Brach, Jaggi Vasudev, Sadhguru, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Carl Jung, nonduality teaching, Advaita Vedanta, ego death, science and nonduality, dante, dante's inferno, The Hero's Journey, myth, Western Culture, karma, Jacques Lacan

Id: cCmodWx54mw

Length: 55min 45sec (3345 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020