"Those who,
being really on the way, fall upon hard times in the world will
not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers refuge and comfort
and
encourages the old self to survive. Rather they will seek out someone
who will
faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves, so that they
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 we expose ourselves over and
over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible arise
within us.
In this lies the dignity of daring.
Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows
us to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein
nothing can ever trouble us.
On the contrary,
practice should teach us to let
ourselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken, and
battered--that is to say, it should enable us to dare to let go our
futile hankering after
harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that
we may
discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose us, that which
awaits us
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 we learn wholeheartedly to confront the world that
threatens us
with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed
and
possibilities of new life and Becoming opened."
from The Way of Transformation by Karlfried Durckheim
