“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.
The short answer is: there is no clear evidence that Karlfried Graf Dürckheim ever publicly and explicitly renounced Nazism in the way many postwar Germans did. However, there is evidence that he later acknowledged serious errors in his earlier political involvement and that his worldview changed profoundly after the war.
The historical picture is complicated:
What is undisputed
Dürckheim was not merely a passive bystander. Before and during the war he:
Many modern scholars describe him as a significant Nazi propagandist rather than simply someone who happened to live under the regime.
After the war
Following his imprisonment by the Americans in Japan, Dürckheim increasingly interpreted his life through the lens of spiritual transformation, Zen practice, and what he later called “initiatic therapy.” He spoke of his imprisonment as a turning point and a kind of spiritual rebirth.
His later followers and institutions associated with him state that he regretted some of his earlier views and admitted mistakes rooted in ideological thinking. One source connected with the Dürckheim tradition quotes him as saying:
“I was not a Nazi, but I was not an anti-Nazi either.”
and says he later regretted earlier errors.
Why the controversy remains
Critics argue that:
As a result, historians continue to debate whether his later spirituality represented a genuine repudiation of Nazism or whether he never fully grappled with the implications of his earlier commitments.
For someone interested in Dürckheim as a spiritual teacher, I think the most balanced conclusion is:
Yes, his later life appears to have moved far away from Nazi ideology. But no, there is no well-known public statement in which he unequivocally renounced Nazism and accepted responsibility in the explicit way that many people today would expect.
This question has become especially important because Dürckheim’s spiritual teachings remain influential, and many students wrestle with how to separate the value of those teachings from the troubling realities of his political past.
Hello Chris,
Thank you very much for this important and valuable addition to my post. It is crucial that readers be aware of Dürckheim’s ideology and political positions prior to the Second World War.
As you said,
“This question has become especially important because Dürckheim’s spiritual teachings remain influential and many students wrestle with how to separate the value of those teachings from the troubling realities of his political past.”
Thank you also for giving me the opportunity to revisit a post I published twelve years ago, on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was perhaps neither chance nor coincidence, for everyone needs, at some point in their life, to reflect on the forces contending within us—even if the dark forces dwelling inside many of us do not necessarily lead to planetary destruction, as we have experienced time and again.
That said, I never really connected with Dürckheim’s teachings. November 2014 may have marked an encounter with a new spiritual master, but he left only a light, fleeting breeze upon my psyche. Once and for all.
Have a lovely weekend & merci beaucoup! Une fois de plus