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THE
WAY OF
TRANSFORMATION
The man who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard
times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who
offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive.
Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help
him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass
courageously through it, thus making of it a "raft that leads to the
far shore." Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over
again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him.
In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to
develop an attitude which allows a man to acquire a state of harmony and
peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him. On the contrary, practice
should teach him to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted,
broken and battered – that is to say, it should enable him to dare to
let go his futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a
comfortable life in order that he may discover, in doing battle with the
forces that oppose him, that which awaits him beyond the world of
opposites. The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face
life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this
is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and
welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious – a process very
different from the practice of concentration on some object as a
protection against such forces. Only if we venture repeatedly through
zones of annihilation, can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond
annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns
whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with isolation,
the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the
possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.
From the book
The Way of Transformation
by Karlfried Graf von Durckheim
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