Might this Life Actually Be,
The Purgatory of Our
Previous Incarceration
In My Experience, I've Visited the Depths of Hell, but also Risen into the Sunlight of the Spirit. Etty provides a Perspective on this inquiry.
Etty Hillesum
One moment it is Hitler, the next it is Ivan the Terrible; one moment it is Inquisition and the next war, pestilence, earthquake, or famine. Ultimately what matters most is to bear the pain, to cope with it, and to keep a small corner of one's soul unsullied, come what may.
What if we have it backwards — not "what happens after we die" but *this* is what's already happening after something prior ended?
If this framing is true — even as a working hypothesis — several things shift:
Nothing is wasted. Every difficult relationship, every recurring wound, every moment of stuckness is *exactly* the material you're here to metabolize. There's no wrong turn, only unfinished business.
Awakening isn't escape — it's completion. The goal isn't to get *out* of this realm but to become so transparent within it that the light passes through without distortion.
Death may not be the exit we imagine. If we carry unresolved patterns, the Tibetan and Vedantic traditions agree: we reconstitute around them. The realm continues. Different scenery, same curriculum.
Catherine of Genoa's Radical Inversion
The 15th century mystic Catherine of Genoa wrote the most startling text in this tradition: *Treatise on Purgatory*. Her core claim:
Purgatory isn't a location or a procedure. It's the experience of reality finally getting all the way through to you.
The walls were always only on the soul's side - come down not by force but by the soul's own increasing willingness to be seen.
If this life is purgatorial in nature, Catherine's framework becomes extraordinarily useful: Our blockages aren't obstacles to spiritual life. They *are* our spiritual life- the precise shape of the contraction that needs expanding. The anxious attachment, the defended heart, the compulsive pattern these aren't embarrassing failures. They're the specific curriculum assigned to this particular soul.
The question she implicitly asks each of us: *Have you glimpsed enough of what you truly are to want the purification, even when it burns?*
Catherine uses an image of extraordinary precision. The soul is like gold covered in rust — not damaged gold, not lesser gold, but *obscured* gold. The fire of divine love doesn't create the gold. It doesn't judge the rust. It simply *burns at the temperature required to remove it*.
That willingness not achievemnent, just willingness
-may be the real threshold.
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