The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later. It is not a far-off place of judgment over our actions but provides that place of judging now, and within, the inhib-iting reflection interior to our actions. This simultaneity of the underworld with the daily world is imaged by Hades coinciding indistinguishably with Zeus, or identical with Zeus chthonios. The brotherhood of Zeus and Hades says that upper and lower worlds are the same; only the perspectives differ. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother's view sees it from above and through the light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades' realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelgdnger) giving to life its depth and its psyche. Because his realm was conceived as the final end of each soul, Hades is the final cause, the purpose, the very telos of every soul and every soul process. If so, then all psychic events have a Hades aspect, and not merely the sadistic or destructive events that Freud attributed to Thanatos. All soul processes, everything in the psyche, moves towards Hades. As the finis is Hades, so the telos is Hades. Everything would become deeper, moving from the visible connections to the invisible ones, dying out of life.
— James Hillman
Hades is not waiting. That is Hillman's insistence here, and it cuts against every consolation the living offer themselves about depth — that it comes later, that the underworld is a destination, that dying is something the soul eventually does rather than something it is always doing. The telos is already operative. Every soul process, even the ones you are running right now to avoid what is heavy in you, moves toward the invisible connections, toward what darkens and deepens and cannot be grasped from above.
What the passage makes difficult to evade is the brotherhood — Zeus and Hades as the same figure, same universe, only the angle of light reversed. The self that plans and acts and orients toward the future is the upper brother. The one who registers the weight of those same plans, who knows in advance what will be left when the action completes, who already inhabits the shadow of every bright intention — that is Hades, and he is not separate. He is the depth dimension of what you are already doing. The underworld's judgment is not postponed; it is the inhibiting reflection interior to action, present at the moment of the action itself. You carry the Doppelgänger; you do not travel to him.
James Hillman·The Dream and the Underworld·1979