Hello folks,

Here is another brilliant passage from Karlfried Durckheim, excerpted from The Path of Initiation, that touches upon the core of our existence, and our reason for Being. I read something of the same vein last night from Brother Jesus, who emphasized the tendency we have to get carried away by our “worldly self.” And that is a good, reassuring sign: there is consistency here between these two sages.

Happy reading!

Excerpt from The Path of Initiation
An Introduction to the life and thought of Karlfried Graf Durckheim
Father Alphonse Goettmann

At the moment when man believes he has reached his summits, blinded by success and the promise of his capacities for the future, he has actually never been further away from the truth of life and from his personal maturity. His “worldly self” has seduced him to the extent that he considers it the only source of consciousness, even objective consciousness. This is why that self is the creator of the great inner schism. The unity of being is broken: the emphasis is unilaterally placed on the exterior, rational pole and smothers the deeper reality, thereby separating us from Being.

Page 34

But we “do not have ears to hear.” Propelled by his ideas, he only hears the God of the philosophers and closes the door to Being which continues to call him and search for him. Yet original sin is also the original opportunity for humanity, that which allows us to become conscious of the Divine. The goal of life is to recover this deep awareness, for there is no human maturity without the fusion of these two poles. The union of man with his depths, through which he awakens to Being and lets It manifest through his existence, is the axis around which our whole life should gravitate. Without that, there is no real education, nor serious medicine, and all fields seeking to deal with human nature are doomed to failure.

Only this union of the existential self with the essential self, dealing with the whole of man, carries him to full maturity and bears fruits, the first and most important of which is to be able to say “I am” in the full meaning of the word. From this becoming of the “I” and its full blossoming depends the relationship between man and the world, man and himself, man and Transcendence. At the beginning and at the end, at the origin and in the development of all life is found this transcendent “I am.” At the heart of all that is, man secretly senses this great “I Am” from which comes and to which returns all of life. Each being is called to realize in his own way this divine “I am” which seeks to express itself in modalities as varied and diverse as are all creatures of the universe.

Pages 36-37