After 16 months of deep studies and podcasting of Dante’s Paradise and Purgatory, it’s hard to remember exactly how several aspects of philosophy and theology used to be experienced by the mind before we started the whole journey. The learning has in itself created a change and expansion that is hard to grasp fully, yet. Maybe it’s even a transformation, in parts.
Once the deeper symbolic reading becomes natural and gradually more automatic, the inner landscape of experience is changed almost permanently it seems. One still retains the original way of reading, but that becomes more like one part of something much bigger, that changes the nature of the original boundaries. The relationship to the story in itself becomes increasingly altered in deep and only partly conscious ways – though some of it is clearly felt without an easy way of articulating exactly how.
Maybe some of what Dante is doing is providing a deeper spiritual nutrition in poetic form, that stimulates and grows part of the unconscious mind through the embedded wisdom and beauty in his poetry. One item after another is examined and elaborated, as we go through the journey. And then afterwards, the world looks and feels different. There is more deep and substance everywhere!