On why spiritual practice is not about finding peace, but about learning to be broken open.
There is a idea about spiritual practice that is so widely held it has become a status quo. That the point is to arrive somewhere stable. Somewhere nothing can touch you. That meditation, prayer, inner work, all of it is building toward that kind of invisible armour.
Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim spent his life arguing the opposite.
“Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring.”
Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim
What Practice Is Not For
The aim of spiritual practice, Dürckheim writes, is not to develop an attitude that allows a person to reach a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him.
That’s the version we are sold. The version that makes practice sound like a long project of becoming unbothered. Of rising above. Of getting to the place where difficulty slides off you.
But that is not liberation. That is a more sophisticated form of avoidance. Or a spiritual bypass.
What Practice Is Actually For
Practice, in Dürckheim’s understanding, should teach a person to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken, and battered. To dare to let go of the futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, a comfortable life.
Because it is in doing battle with the forces that oppose us that we find what waits beyond the world of opposites.
This is not a call to seek suffering for its own sake. That has a root in victimism. It is a recognition that the indestructible part of us, the part that is beyond annihilation, can only be confirmed through contact with annihilation. You cannot know what cannot be destroyed until you have stood in the fire long enough to discover what remains.
The Demons from the Unconscious
Dürckheim says something that I find particularly striking about meditation. That when we are willing to face what arises, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons that arise from the unconscious.
By Welcoming them.
This is a completely different practice from what most of us are taught. Most of us learned to use inner work as a shield. Breathe until the feeling passes. Anchor to something steady. Return to calm.
There is a place for that. But Dürckheim is pointing at something beyond it. The kind of practice that doesn’t protect you from what arises but puts you in full contact with it, and trusts that the contact itself is what transforms.
Only If We Venture Through
Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with our Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.
Repeatedly. Again and again. Each time the ground gives way. Each time something we were sure of stops being sure. Each time we are broken open by grief, by failure, by the depth of our own fear.
Each time, an opportunity to discover what does not break.
The more we learn to confront what threatens us with isolation and dissolution, the more the depths of what Dürckheim calls the Ground of Being are revealed. The more the possibilities of new life open.
That is the dignity of daring. Not courage in the absence of fear. Willingness to go through anyway, and to find, on the other side, something that was always there but could only be known this way.