THE PERSON WHO, BEING REALLY on the way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers them refuge and comfort and encourages their old self to survive. Rather, that person will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him or her 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 person exposes his or her self over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within themselves. In this lies the dignity of daring.

Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows a person to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him. On the contrary, practice should teach them to let themselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered – that is to say, it should enable them to dare to let go of their futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that they may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose them, that which awaits them beyond a 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 subconscious – 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 person learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens them with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.

KARLFRIED GRAF VON DURKHEIM from "The Way of Transformation"