In the Hero's Journey, the Ordeal is the central life-or-death crisis in which the Hero faces their most difficult challenge/their greatest fear, and experience a "death." Their "death" shows the journey on the brink of failture, keeping the audience in suspense. Only through this "death" can the Hero experience the Resurrection that gives them insight to help bring them to the end of their journey. At this stage the Hero may experience death unto themselves, witness death, or cause it.
Siddhartha "felt disgust"1 with himself during his Ordeal. For the last 20 years, he spent all his time in the "well upholstered hell"1 with Kamala and Kamaswami, leading him to forget all the teachings with the Samanas and Govinda. In this "moment of complete hopelessness and despair, that most extreme moment"1 he was "completely filled with a desire to let himself go and be submerged in the water."1 He felt empty1, and believed "he was at the end."1 Siddhartha experiences a "death" within himself, in which he believes he can never reach enlightenment, his main goal, after all the time he spent in the Ordinary World once again. As the audience watches this internal struggle of whether or not he will kill himself, the audience is kept in suspence seeing how Siddhartha could fail his journey. Siddhartha's Ordeal is what leads him to become resurrected. Siddhartha goes through his darkest hour. Right after he became addicted to money, gambling, and women in Samsara, he stops by a river that he once crossed on his journey. There at the river he becomes full of thoughts of regret and remorse over how he had spent the last 20 years of his life, and that he had forgotten his only good qualities. He wants to drown himself in the river, however just as he is about to kill himself, he hears the Brahmin word of "perfection" om, and is reborn.
Siddhartha remains at stream-enterer or below, as he is enthralled with the death of his Self and his physical vessel, lustful desires, despair, and material desires.
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