The man who, being really 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 man exposes himself 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 (spiritual) 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, broken and battered – that is
to say, it should enable him to dare to let go his futile hankering after harmony,
surcease from 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 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 unconscious, 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 man learns whole-heartedly to confront the world 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.

~The Way of Transformation by Karlfried Gras von Durkheim