“The person who, being truly 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 a person exposes himself willingly 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, broke and battered–that is to say, it should enable him to dare to let go his futile hankering after harmony, sure ease of 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 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 objects as a protection against such forces. Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation, can our contact with what is Divine, with what is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.”
“The more a person learns wholeheartedly to confront a world and way of living 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 for him.”
Karlfried Graf Durckheim, “The Way of Transformation,” pp. 107-8
Feel free to check his biography at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlfried_Graf_D%C3%BCrckheim
Nurturing the Gift of Seeking 
Alors, te voilà plongé dans ces écrits… merci Gilles et belle fête de Thanksgiving
Merci chère Elisabeth. Très beau weekend a toi! Nous avons du soleil aujourd’hui.
“only when we know our own darkness well can we be present to the darkness in others” Yes!
It makes “spiritual sense,” Earth Angel, doesn’t it!?
Yes it does “I call it “spiritual integration”!
It is “surcease” from pain.