Way of Transformation/Das

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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 a friend that offers him refuge and comfort

and encourages the 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 suffering and pass courageously through

it,

thus making of it a "raft that leads to the far shore."

 

Only to the extent that a 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 of 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 have the courage to face life,

and to encounter all that is 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 when 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 destruction and isolation,

the more the depths of the Ground of Being is revealed,

and possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.

 

by Karlfried Graf von

Durckheim