DIALOGUE ON THE PATH OF INITIATION

The Life and Thought of Karlfried Graf Durckheim

by Alphonse Goettmann

Translated by

Theodore and Rebecca Nottingham
tednottingham@hotmail.com

Translated from the original French:

Dialogue sur the Chemin Initiatique

Copyright 1998

Table of Contents

Foreword by George Maloney, S.J.

Introduction by Alphonse Goettmann

I ........................."I HAVE CALLED YOU BY YOUR NAME"

II.........................THE GREATNESS AND DECADENCE OF HUMANITY

III........................EARTH AND SKY: OUR DOUBLE ORIGIN

IV.........................THE QUALITIES OF THE FIVE SENSES: WINDOWS ON THE INVISIBLE

V..........................FROM DEATH TO LIFE: THE BREAK-THROUGH OF BEING

VI........................."THE WAY, THE TRUTH, THE LIFE".

VII........................TOWARD A NEW ART OF LIVING

VIII.......................SHADOWS AND LIGHTS ON THE WAY.

IX..........................CROSS OF CHRIST OR RED CROSS?

X............................"MASTER, WHERE DO YOU LIVE?"

XI..........................."I WILL BETROTH YOU TO ME FOR EVER"

FOREWORD

by

George Maloney, S.J.

To say that we modern human beings are confused and without a center or a ground for our being is to repeat cliches already overworked in the literature of existentialism. Still we see our world exploding and expanding with a frightening degree of complexity and multiplicity. A helpless atom, we are bombarded by myriads of material creations, all threatening to destroy our oneness-in-being. I believe we can divide all modern human beings into two groups. One group lives predominantly as prisoners of the tangible, fast-moving world around them. A world of multiplicty that produces ever increasing levels of anxiety due to meaningless existence through a lack of inner harmony holds the first group in captivity to an objective consciousness. In this perspective such human beings are the center and goal of their value system, their motivation and moving force behind their thoughts, words, and deeds.

The other class of human beings, always in past and present history representing a minority, looks beyond material existence and continually strives to attain an inner maturity toward their true self. This is a process that demands death to any lower level of self-absorption in order to rise by transformation to a higher consciousness of one's "essential" or true nature in Absolute Being. This growth neither depends on nor provides an increase in worldly knowledge, skill and possessions, but aims at closer contact with supra-worldly Being. This requires a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is based on a special kind of experience, penetrates the mystery of Being, and bears within itself the way that leads to Being. It is, as Dr. Karlfried Graf Durckheim calls it, "initiatory" knowledge.

To "initiate" means to open the way to the mystery of one's true nature in union with the inner Center that knows no circumference, Being itself. I am deeply honored to write a foreword to this book: Dialogue on the Path of Initiation. It has only been recently that I have discovered the masterful teachings of Dr. Durckheim. It was primarily my reading of this present work that gave me in summary fashion the depth and great extent of this outstanding German philosopher, psychotherapist and spiritual guide's personal development as a human being and as an outstanding believing Christian. Since then I have read avidly some of his other works, especially those translated into English: Hara: The Vital Center of Man; The Call for the Master; The Way of Transformation; and Zen and Us. Much like Father Alphonse Goettmann, the French Orthodox priest who, in this work, acts not as a mere interviewer but moreso as a true disciple, I too can humbly say with him that in my life there was a "before and an after Durckheim." Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity of personally meeting Dr. Durckheim before his death in 1988 at the age of ninety-two.

A TRUE MASTER

Yet I feel through his writings, especially this present work which first opened me up to his teachings, that I have found a true master. It was not so much that I discovered some new, esoteric teachings. Rather it was a great Amen! as I was strengthened in my own Christian path to seek even more ardently and humbly to live the heart spirituality that came to me through years of study, teaching, and writing about this early Eastern Christian approach to the triune indwelling Life. I have rarely met a modern pilgrim and seeker of the Divine Life as Durckheim who integrated the best of Eastern and Western Christianity and also exposed the treasure of the Holy Spirit working in the Eastern non-Christian religions, especially Buddhism. Dr. Durckheim believed that all human beings in their "essential" or true nature possess in themselves an innate primal knowledge and conscience that can be brought to consciousness.

The truth embodied in it lives in the Great Tradition, itself timeless, running through all places and all times. We meet it in the enlightened knowledge of great sages and masters, and as the kernel of the creation myths and salvific longings of all the great religions. He is a modern John the Baptist who is calling not only those of the Judeo-Christian background to encounter the triune community of Divine Life forming the core of all human beings' true selves, but also those who search honestly to encounter God's Spirit of perfect Love in the events of their daily living. Vatican Council II in its degree on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions confirms Dr. Durckheim's basic orientation.

INITIATION AND TRANSFORMATION

In this present work and running through all his other published works, Durckheim leads his readers along the two paths of initiation and transformation. The path of initiation is a continued process, but begins with a new awakening of one's essential or true nature grounded in experiencing Being as the center of life. The goal of such initiation is to achieve a new structure whose every shift and ripple lets the Absolute show through. Experience of the Divine always remains a gift and a grace from Ultimate Being and there is nothing we can do to bring such experience about. Yet the way to transformation demands the cross of inner discipline and inner attentiveness to achieve a state of mind and being that is a sign of the conscious level of union with Life already realized.

This path of initiation means sacrificing everything that prevents us from serving the Absolute and unconditionally accepting everything that helps us to do so. The spirituality and transformative process along which Durckheim guides anyone who wishes to follow his teaching is not for the dilettante or for one who seeks some exotic way of transformation without the cross. Here is a solid teacher in the traditions of the monks of the desert in early Christianity, of Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, but also in the tradition of the advaita tradition of Eastern religions. It is a joy for me to know that the writings and the person of Dr. Karlfried Graf Durckheim are beginning with this present volume to circulate in America. He has often repeated in his writings the truth commonly taught in all true religions: that once the disciple has made contact experientially with the Inner Master, he/she will then discover the outside master to lead one farther. I hope and pray that the readers of this book will discover that master as I have in Karlfried Graf Durckheim.

INTRODUCTION

by Alphonse Goettmann

This book was born in Rutte, a village suspended a thousand meters in altitude above the hills and pinetrees of the Black Forest. In a chalet buried in the forest lived a man who consecrated his life to respond to the eternal question placed before humanity: "Who am I?" His name is Karlfried Graf Durckheim. And though he died in December of 1988, his message will illuminate the hearts of men and women for generations. I have known Graf Durckheim for many years and this testimonial is the expression of a slow maturation and of profound experience which we both wish to share with those who are also in search of the essential. In my life there was a "before and after Durckheim". Born into the Catholic Church, I sought my true self for a long time both as a human being and as a Christian, desperately pulled toward the call of the Gospel: "Come, follow me."

I read hundreds of books, but I did not find. I frequented different seminaries, but I did not find. I threw myself into prayer, action, politics, but I did not find...Like the psalmist, I cried out my despair to God. That is when I met Graf Durckheim, like the veiled Pilgrim on the road to Emmaus. It was an explosion within me, an eruption...I fell from my horse like Paul on the road to Damascus and the scales fell from my eyes. Graf Durckheim was for me "THE" master who made it possible to discover the only true Master, Jesus-Christ! It was the great turning point of my life. Through contact with him and through his teaching, I became conscious of the fact that I was desperatly searching outside of myself for that which I carried deep within. I had in fact found what I was seeking, but too intellectually! Everything was there, but in the form of rational inventory, tests and strategies. I stood before a locked door.

Graf Durckheim was the key which opened the door to experience; my "knowledge" became Life, intelligence descended into the "heart", the Word became flesh within in the great vivifying movement of the Spirit toward the unique Source of all Life which is the Father. Now I was discovering experientially the divine Trinity confessed mentally for so many years! From that moment on, the door was wide open. It opened onto a space which gave birth to all the experiences which shook my life afterwards: in particular, it led to a radically different understanding of the Bible and of the Tradition which made it possible to rediscover the Fathers of the Church and I progressively rooted myself in Orthodoxy. After meeting Rachel, our path led us to ask for the sacrament of Love and the exercise of the priesthood at the heart of the Orthodox Church of France.

That is where we ceaselessly discover with amazement that Graf Durckheim's fundamental intuition joins with the very core of the biblical message and can deepen in the Church through contemplative prayer, mystical theology, the divine liturgy and life in community. We cannot "put the light under a bushel"! It is impossible in the midst of such an experience! One of the first fruits was the creation of "Bethanie", a center of Hesychast meditation which is founded on the teaching of Graf Durckheim. Here, in the soil of experience and encounter, the desire to make known to a wider circle the powerful call which Graf Durckheim addresses to humanity. That is how this dialogue was born. On a beautiful morning in June, my wife and I took the road to Rutte. The old sage was awaiting us. What grace, what joy to speak with him for days and hours on end!

We found in his workplace that climate of mystery and serenity which had already seized us upon arriving in the village. But how to describe Graf Durckheim? Can words translate his extraordinary force and this ageless youth, his fiery temperament, his look at once full of tenderness and yet piercing you to your depths, his often overwhelming smile which illuminated his face, his voice in turn melodious and passionate, his bursts of laughter and his humor...No text could ever render the essence of this encounter! Thank you, Graf Durckheim, for the marvelous time spend at your side, thank you for the wealth which you communicated to us, thank you for what you did not say but which the intimacy of your presence revealed to us, thank you for the love which you gave us and which will always be alive within us....

I

"I HAVE CALLED YOU BY YOUR NAME"

(Isaiah 43:1)

ALPHONSE GOETTMANN: Graf Durckheim, every time we meet is a great event for me. If I am today a free and happy man, it is because of you. My life has become a Journey thanks to the extraordinary impetus you have given me. I would like to ask you what are the events which have awakened within you the message that you haved shared for so many years and which has transformed my existence and that of so many others?

GRAF DURCKHEIM: Well, that is a big question! I believe it started very early. Certain impressions of my youth had a deep effect on my life. It goes back to my early childhood. I underwent experiences which were filled with that quality which we call numinous. This is a very particular atmosphere. According to C.G. Jung, the reality which manifests itself in this numinous quality is the basis of all religion. I believe that this word "numinous" has given European psychology another awareness of human nature, touching the very center of the human spirit, the source of our potential and inherent development. It is precisely the awakening of this core, which we could name inner transcendence, which constitutes the heart of all my work; the awakening of this core and, of course, the experiencing of it.

The openness of my soul toward this inner center occured in early childhood. Many other extraordinary moments followed in my life and reinforced this part of myself. In these special experiences, I was touched by a profound reality which allowed me to understand that they were not a matter of feeling or belief, but of a reality much more real than the one which we consider to be the only reality. We believe that the only reality is the one of time and space and, for Descartes, nothing is real except that which can be inscribed in preconceived concepts. But this is only the envelop of something wholly other which hides the reality of our depths. It is this other reality which has profoundly touched me at each stage of my life from childhood onward, through the war years on the front and the encounter with death, to the overwhelming and definitive experience which showed me the beyond which is both hidden and manifested at the same time...Eventually these were no longer particular experiences, but a kind of perpetual contact, a state which came and went. It is not possible to be permanently open to this reality, but there does come a time when we always feel the call to turn toward its depths.

A.G.: This is then the atmosphere in which your life unfolded. Can you recall for us more precisely the important events which made such a blossoming possible?

G.D.: My first experience goes back to the age of a year and a half. It touched me so deeply that I have never forgotten it! I was in the arms of my nurse who was taking me into the mortuary room where my grandmother lay. The atmosphere was striking: the presence of death, the silence and the darkness of the room, an intense aroma of wax...I felt both attracted toward the bed and frightened, repulsed...It all had a quality of wonder and horror. I felt for the first time the unity of fascination and terror, those two qualities which always characterize the experience of the numinous. Then, a little later, I remember exactly certain sensorial qualities which greatly touched and impressed me: the aroma from the wood of a little house in which were located my sandbox toys...The smell of wood heated by the sun, I can still smell it today, as soon as I speak of it...Or the smell of wet sand in which I played, the sound of a stream beneath a bridge we often crossed; I would lean on the rail to look at it and listen...

There was also the crack of the whip, because I had a nice one when I was five years old; its sound made me feel bigger. It was a very powerful sensorial quality! And I well understand Teilhard de Chardin when he says that his first experience of God was a piece of iron which he held in his hand. That was God...There, in the quality of the metal! The great mystery touches us when we receive sensorial qualities directly. One of the marvelous gifts of my childhood which overwhelms me to this day, and orients my work, is precisely this fascination with mystery. In the village church of my birthplace, my parents had a "box seat" from which we could see into the sacristy and follow closely all that was occuring on the altar. I understood nothing, but I felt infinitely! I was on my knees, I looked...I listened without understanding...The aroma of the incense, the songs, the lovely gestures of the priest in his wonderful vestments, the ring of the bells, the light of the candles, the crowd in prayer...all this combination of colors, smells and sounds plunged me into a mysterious atmosphere. Something was happening...something very great, very deep. You see, it is neither images nor thoughts which count in liturgy, but attitude. One must be in an attitude of surrender, then something new can be born and develop within us. It was precisely because the Mass was incomprehensible to me, but charged with mystery, that it held me breathless: the truth is in the ungraspable.

A.G.: The "ungraspable"...This word like many others, "indescribable, invisible, ineffable"...is found at the heart of the Orthodox liturgy and invites us to an adoration beyond all useless and impossible reasoning. True faith is found in a disposition of the heart in which the mysteries speak without going through the grinder of reason...This experience of mystery has so impregnated you that you speak of it spontaneously in liturgical and hymnic terms. It has always accompanied you on the path of your faith and you have helped so many others to understand that there is maturity in faith only through experience. In this sense, you are the "master of novices" for many Christians, including many monks, who are nevertheless professionals in this area. But this is a big subject which we will return to later. After a childhood rich in experiences, I believe your adolescence was marked by the war of 1914-1918.

G.D.: Yes! I was barely eighteen years old when I went into the army. There I was harshly confronted with death which profoundly anchored the experience of transcendence in my life. I remember...It was on the front...The first dead man I saw was a Frenchman in red trousers on the side of the road...In the wide open and fixed eyes of the corpse, I encountered a sort of dreadful sneering which both attracted me and urged me to run away, held me back and chased me along the road until finally, free and relieved, I had the sensation of rediscovering life as never before. Suddenly, life was no longer something obvious, but a supernatural fullness on the terrifying backdrop of non-life.

Death became my daily companion throughout the war. Especially during the battle of Verdun, under a frightful fireworks and in a landscape of craters which was a chaotic cemetery covered with pieces of human bodies...I was never a hero, I was always afraid when I was alone, but as an officer, I never had any difficulty doing my duty when I was responsible for my men...Each time I left an area threatened by death, there rose in me a mighty gratefulness for being alive and feeling myself alive. I was at the front for forty-six months, not only in France, but in Serbia, Italy, Romania...I was lucky enough to never fire a shot, I never even took out my revolver, and I was spared from having to kill anyone. Nor was I ever wounded, though bullets went through my shirt and my coat. I truly had a guardian angel! It is in this atmosphere that life as such took on a numinous character for me. I discovered at the same time that it was in facing death that we step forward toward true life. That experience was later a part of my teaching: by accepting death, we discover and receive life which is beyond life and death, LIFE in capitals.

A.G.: As a priest, I have had the opportunity of accompanying hundreds of dying people to their birth in heaven. Some roared in rebellion or terror, others, who had understood how to "die" during their lifetime, received death with a sovereign freedom. I saw a very sick person make a champagne toast with his family to celebrate the event. It was not a reconciliation with death which, for the Christian, always remains the enemy to be destroyed, but the revelation of the true life which is the Christ himself. It is the joyful hymn of Easter Night: "Christ is resurrected from the dead, through death has he vanquished death, to those in tombs has he given life."

G.D.: After the destruction of 1918, the great question which animated seeking souls was the question of the new man. A decisive experience caused me not to make of this question a simple duty in this era of reconstruction, but to put it at the center of my life. What I lived then I have called the great experience of Being...I was twenty-four, and found myself in the workshop of the painter Willi Geiger in Munich. My future wife, Madame von Hattinberg, was sitting on the table, and next to her was a book...I can still see it now. I opened this book and read out loud the eleventh verse of the Tao-Teh-Ching of Lao Tzu: "Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub, It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges, We make a vessel from a lump of clay, It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. We make the doors and windows for a room; But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable. Thus, while the tangible has advantages, It is the intangible that makes it useful."

And suddenly It happened! I was listening and lightning went through me. The veil was torn asunder, I was awake! I had just experienced "It." Everything existed and nothing existed. Another Reality had broken through this world. I myself existed and did not exist...I was seized, enchanted, someplace else and yet here, happy and deprived of feeling, far away and at the same time deeply rooted in things. The reality which surrounded me was suddenly shaped by two poles: one which was the immediately visible and the other an invisible which was the essence of that which I was seeing. I truly saw Being... In German we would say with Heidegger: "das Sein in Seienden." I saw Being in that which is. And That touched me so deeply that I had the feeling of no longer being entirely myself. I felt that I was filled with something extraordinary, immense, which filled me with joy and at the same time plunged me into a great silence. I remained in this state for nearly twenty-four hours.

That very evening, we were invited by friends to listen to a famous pianist. I was kneeling in a corner of the room still gripped by this experience. And I believe it has never really left me. I had not yet understood what this was all about. But from that moment on, there was always something else in my life, something which surrounded me, filled me and pushed me forward. I was ceaselessly directed by a kind of inexplicable yearning and promise...It is still with me today. But at the time I did not realize that this was a call and the birth of a new consciousness. These are things which I discovered much later, but that is when I was carried in this direction. It also gave me a certain courage to live, a certain innocence in relating to things and people. There was suddenly another reality there, an angelic one, which surrounded me from that moment on.

A. G.: Do you consider this incredible event as the most decisive one in your life?

G. D.: Absolutely! On the level of my spiritual development, this was certainly the turning point whose importance I only became aware of much later. At that time, we had formed with my wife and another couple what we called the "Quatuor." It was in the twenties and we had already begun a certain practice: the daily examination of our consciousness, exercises of inner silence and meditation; my first "Zazen."

A. G.: This experience which marked you so decisively is testified to in every era of humanity. It is the moment when man feels his divine spark. After such a "jarring" there is a time when we can only be still and adore. Then the desire to know rises within us, to know those who through the ages have drunk at the same Source and have been enlightened by the same Fire. Can you tell us what "wood you warmed yourself with?"

G. D.: The attitude of conversion which gnawed at me from then on oriented me in a certain direction through everything I came across. It is not surprising that, in this context, Meister Eckhart created such an explosion within me. I could not put down his "Treatises and Sermons" which I perceived as an echo of the divine music I had just heard. I recognize in Eckhart my master, the master. I met him through my friend Ferdinand Weinhandel, a member of the "Quatuor," at Munich around 1920. I am not an expert of Eckhart in the scientific sense, nor a theologian. But we can only approach him if we eliminate the conceptual consciousness. There is such a power which comes out of all he says! That immense simplicity with which he speaks of God, the examples he gives, the problems he raises...There reigns in everything he says a certain atmosphere, the reality of the essential, the Real in the silence of the beyond, audible only to those who have ears to hear...You know that he was hounded, condemned as a heretic, and that to this day the Church denounces Meister Eckhart. I myself could have been a victim like him...A Jesuit Father whom I know very well has written a review of my book "Meditating-How and Why."

He tried to be faithful to it, but he attacked me by saying why the book is not good for Christians and that there is a great gulf that he believes I must fill. I answered him point by point to show him that he had not understood me and that I felt as though I was in Eckhart's situation, attacked and misunderstood by the Church. In his attack, Father Wulf said that if there is an experience of the divine reality, it is because God is the cause of it. But I suggest that it is not possible to approach God through categories of causality and rational concepts. We cannot apply existential categories to the Wholly Other, to the Transcendent! With the experiences of Meister Eckhart, I place myself on an entirely different level, on absolutely solid ground, on an unshakeable reality, the source, the deepest call which truly forms the center of the human being. But this requires a poverty of spirit which invites us to a complete letting go in order to make possible the birth of God in our being.

A. G.: I believe it would be fascinating to see, and I am tempted to make such a study, how through Meister Eckhart, who is your principle source, you place yourself in the great currents of the Orthodox Tradition of the early times. For Eckhart, alone in the Middle Ages with Tauler and Ruysbroeck, has his roots in the theology of Deny the Areopagite who was a beacon for all of Christian mysticism. Eckhart is dionysian in his soul. And this theology has the same approach to the divine as you do. Denys the Areopagite, a direct disciple of the Apostles, invites us, in order to unite with God, to renounce all rational thinking, all sensible or intelligible objects, all that is and all that is not. For God surpasses all being and all science, He is unknowable by nature and "because of this unknowableness," says the Areopagite, we can only unite with Him beyond all intelligence." We could cite many others such as Clement of Alexandria, Basil, Gregory of Nazanzium, Ireaneus, Maximus the Confessor, and in the sixteenth century, Gregory of Palamas who places us face to face with that mystery where there is only silence and adoration. For them there is no theology outside of experience; the true theologian is the one who accepts to change, to become a new man through a radical transformation which they call deification. And such a theologian calls every Christian to do the same. Returning to Meister Eckhart, was he the only great encounter for you?

G. D.: The most powerful, yes. But there was also the encounter with Buddhism through a book by Grimm which greatly impressed me. Then I read Nietzsche with passion: his "Zarathustra"; that whole book is a eulogy to essential being. There was also Rilke, a friend of my wife's, and Else Lasker- Schuler the famous Jewish poet; Elizabeth Schmidt-Pauly, another poet; the great theologian Guardini, the painter Paul Klee and all those with whom I found the same melody on different chords. And the question was already rising within me: was not the great experience of Eckhart, LaoTzu, Buddha, the same one?

A. G.: How did this inner consciousness and the experience of the beyond cohabitate with the university system which you frequented at that time and which saw human beings as intellectual quotients, in oppostion to all your convictions and research?

G. D.: After years of philosophical studies in Munich, I emigrated with my friends of "Quatuor" to Kiel where I developed the intellectual instruments necessary for my future work. We lived in community and followed courses together at the University. I branched off from philosophy to psychology to learn the psychological foundations of the philosophy of values. But what a disappointment! Psychology had little to do with the maturation or the new image of man. I wondered how that which is qualitative in people could be expressed quantitatively, and my aversion to numbers and statistics in psychological research has never left me. Of course, in psychology as in medicine, man can be treated as an object by quantitative methods. But what was to be gained there as a student of human consciousness? A wholistic understanding of human beings is not integrated in the formation of the doctor, the priest, the educator, and often, the psychologist. It is not without worry that I see university psychology develop in the direction of natural sciences, whatever may be the esteem in which their objective knowledge is held.

Depth psychology must always fight for its right to be, not to speak of an initiatic teaching on being. After I received my doctorate in 1923 and married Madame Enja von Hattinberg, I remained another two semesters as assistant in the Institute of Psychology at Kiel until this activity became too narrow. I was then faced with the choice of continuing my studies or going to Italy for a time. My decision was made after hearing one day at Marbourgh, one after the other, the very summits of philosophy: Heidegger, Hartman, Heiler, Rudolf Otto and Natorp. The result: a rejection of all universities and taking up the road toward Freedom! I devoted a part of my stay in Italy to the visit of museums, to painting and drawing. But that time was especially marked by work on the philosophy of Unity. I was completely fascinated by the reality and the problem which never left me: a Unity which holds everything and which, in an inner Order, gives birth to forms. It was in this way that the mystery of Transcendent Being rose in my conceptual consciousness; much later, I perceived it in its trinitarian impetus and under its three aspects: Fullness, Order and Unity.

These works incited my old teacher, Felix Krueger, to name me assistant at the Institute of Psychology at Leipzig in 1925. Krueger was at the origin of the Ganzheitpsychologie, taking man as a whole and not as a conglomeration of faculties. Entering for the first time in the Institute, I was completely flustered at the sight of their equipment. I had to be near quantitative psychology for many years, which always focused my aim, and I was continually animated by my secret discovery. Also, in my teaching and seminars, I sought not so much to communicate knowledge but to awaken inner experiences which seemed fundamental to me. I was one of the first to deal with Klages, Freud, Adler and Jung. Already at this period, the essence of all science of man seemed to me to be the qualitative experience of his depth. This conviction dominated all my teaching and only intensified when I was named professor of psychology at the Academy of Breslau in 1931.

A. G.: You just mentioned C. G. Jung. Did you ever meet him?

G. D.: It was his absence during an international congress of psychology that caused me to go visit him. Like many others, I was scandalized because he had not been invited. Meeting him made a deep impression on me...I can see him still coming toward me, a pipe in his mouth, like a mountain approaching me...I said to him: "Mister Jung, I learned in Japan that when one encounters a Master, one has the right to ask a very simple question." And he replied with his Swiss accent: "Well, what do you want to know?" "Can you tell me what is an archetype?" He laughed, for he was the one who had introduced the term in psychology. But since he had suggested half a dozen definitions, I was curious to know which one he would give me. At that moment, he answered: "Pattern of behavior." By that he meant a predisposition of our behavior rather than the result of a habit. In these last twenty years, the work of C. J. Jung and of his disciple Erich Neumann have greatly enriched me. Their theory of "self" corresponds to my concept of essential being. For them the true self is the integration of the deep self with the existential one, which alone gives birth to the person. This is what struck me: C. J. Jung has opened the way to initiation. Unfortunately, the Jungians have not continued it!

A. G.: And did you have any encounters with Heidegger who lived in a little village next to yours?

G. D.: Yes, in the years 1949-50, when I returned from Japan. I had already sent him my little book on Japan and its culture of silence. This book inspired him to look into Japanese philosophy, but he told me that to speak of a philosophy, one had to speak the language of the philosophers. Later, I met the philosopher Spranger who asked me: "You lived at Todtmoos, near the Nichts, the Emptiness?" (Heidegger is the philosopher of Emptiness). "Yes," I answered and repeated the words of Heidegger, that to approach a philosophy one had to understand the language of the philosopher. "Oh," Spranger said, "that is a very dangerous statement on the lips of a philosopher whose language we do not understand at all!" I met Heidegger again twenty years later, when Suzuki, the eighty year old prophet of Zen visited me and wanted to see him. It was an encounter of a man of the word with a man, who, as a Zen Master, is certain that in opening our mouth we are already lying! For only silence contains truth. These are some anecdotes on Heidegger, but he never had any influence on my work.

A. G.: Returning to your encounter with Christianity through Meister Eckhart, it is impossible to avoid the question of its supreme Source, the Bible. We are born with that Book. Unfortunately, the bad catechisms have reduced it to an intellectual study! But for the "sages," the Bible has introduced into history the secret dynamism which has animated them for milleniums: personhood and freedom. In that sense, it continues to be a true ferment in this world. But there are keys missing for deciphering it. All the schools of exegesis and hermeneutics, the "materialist" and "structural" readings, are scientific and mental, leaving the Bible closed and its wisdom silent. The only criteria which open it to its spiritual meaning are the ones of those who see: the experience of illumination of the Spirit. In this sense, your work is profoundly biblical and reiterates the invitation of Jesus: "Come and See!", a path of experience and not of knowledge alone.

G. D.: Yes, that is the reason why saint John especially attracts me. I read and reread him a great deal. It is the Gospel of depth. I find in him that which makes religion understandable. During the war, I carried in my backpack the New Testament which my mother had given me. I still have it...It was there, always accompanying me, but I only read it in moments of distress and suffering, repeating sentences or psalms to myself. I know very little of the Old Testament; what always interested me was the experience of those who wrote it, the patriarchs and the prophets. The concept which the Jews hold of God comes out of the experience of their guides, from the way in which they heard the reality of the beyond becomes words within them. This is true of all religions. Every image of divinity is originally an extraordinary and overwhelming experience without images which is both frightening and vibrant with joy. They place us on another level. But later, the experience is projected on the screen of the self and takes the shape of a picture which, through the conceptual spirit, is transformed into something or someone, and now understood as cause of this experience when it is actually its consequence!

A. G.: There is only one step from this process to ideology, dogma, sects and religions.

G. D.: This is the very temptation of man, his pride! We must never step out of being rooted in experience. That is why the Gospel of Saint John is the Bible for me. He is the model of the man called to have the experience of Christ living within him under the urging of the inner Spirit: "I tell you the truth; it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you." Today, the Christ would say: "Do not project everything on me, go see for yourselves, that is where you will find the Spirit of truth who will teach you what I cannot give you now..."

We should take with particular seriousness the parable of the vine and its branches where Christ says: "Abide in me as I in you..." That is when we enter into this profound reality to which Jesus refers when he affirms that "before Abraham was, I Am." This is not a misunderstanding, but a reference to a reality beyond time and space which is not merely a privilege of the Christian; it is the same reality spoken of by the Zen master when he asks what face you had before your parents were born. He is not questioning you on your previous incarnation, but speaks of the reality within which is beyond all other realities.

A. G.: God seems to always speak the same language to all people in every age, the language of the fire of Pentecost. It is received and interpreted differently according to traditions. Unfortunately, Christians believe they have a monopoly on it and do not think that it is the same God who is "all in all" as saint Paul says. Did not the early Christians, to their great surprise, see the Holy Spirit fall also on pagans? On the other hand, we are witnessing today a current which throws our tradition overboard. We see Westerners wearing the yellow tunic with shaved heads, neglecting the giants of their own past, awaiting "enlightenment" while sitting at the feet of a guru. Can these extremes not be linked? The Fathers of the Church saw the manifestation of the Word in every truth, wherever it appeared. Jung, who studied Zen and Yoga, insisted that their oriental form did not work for us. His profound intuition was that the West would have its own Yoga, built on the foundations of Christianity. In this context, you are a pioneer in the West. You lived under the sign of the experience of Meister Eckhart and his tradition, and you were prepared to recognize in the great oriental tradition a wisdom which had certain points in common with Christian mysticism. What was the influence of India on your work?

G. D.: India did not influence my development. I went there for the first time in 1974 at the invitation of the Minister of Health, guided by my friend Dhingra. What struck me was that at the heart of all that poverty I never saw a sad face. The way in which those people live poverty, suffering and death without complaining gives cause to wonder. It is astonishing to hear: "If it is our Karma to live in this misery, we must not try too hard to get out of it, for it is only in accepting our pain that we will have the opportunity to be reborn on other level." This is a religious attitude which is unbearable to the Westerner!

A. G.: I admire the realization which their great saints have reached in such unacceptable conditions.

G. D.: Yes! I met beings who made possible some rather extraordinary experiences for me. I think of Ma Ananda Moy. I had the opportunity to come near to her alone in a room rarely opened to strangers. I had been asked beforehand, as is the custom, what question I wanted to ask her. "None! I would simply like to meditate near her for awhile." And that is what happened...Ma was sitting facing me, a bit elevated, and an unutterable love emanated from her, especially when she placed her hands on my head...I felt an intense, remarkable heat, but nothing miraculous. It was extremely beautiful and touching. She left me with a deep sensation of intensity and fullness. Ma Ananda Moy was so good as to tell me that this time it was she who had received the spiritual gift given by the master to the disciple either by touch or through the offering of fruits and presents, and she told me that it was something of the Christ which had come toward her.

With her faculties of perception, she had recognized in her experience Another than Krishna... When I left her, Ma told me these words: "Don't forget that the drop can know that it is in the ocean, but rarely realizes that the entire ocean is in her." That is something to contemplate... I also had a face to face with a sage of one hundred and six who lived in a cave by the Ganges, in the little Benares where stands the ashram of Swami Shivananda, who died several years ago. But the old sage was not there, and I only found his wife and a cow because had gone to Delhi that day. I really wanted to meet him and Dhelhi is a very big city. But with the help of a good friend, I was able to find him. He was beginning a session with some thirty people squeezed into a little room.

He sang in a great voice, and the others answered: "Krishna save me, take away my vanity!" At the end, he saw that there was a European among them and asked me if I had a particular desire. "Yes," I said, "I would like to sit next to the master and meditate eye to eye." He accepted very graciously, looking at me with his magnificent blue eyes, his face radiant with power. It is a very profound experience to have before you a true master and to hold his gaze. I received very much at that moment. Finally, a third encounter also impressed me a great deal. It was with an Australian who was meditating on a hill near the ashram of Shivananda.

We could see him from far away, he was very large, with an extraodinary radiance! He had written a poem which expressed his situation and which my friend Dhingra translated for me: "He was an artist and God took away his hands; he was a singer and God took away his voice; he only had his feet and he spoke with his feet." Yes, this man was like the sun! He invited us to meet him the next day in his little home with several other Australian disciples. We sang together, side by side. When we were about to leave, he looked at me in silence...and I was pierced by the ray of light which in that instant erupted from his eyes: a ray of luminous love... These are three great saints whom I met in India, living witnesses filled with the divine essence from which emanates the Breath which reveals the presence of Being.

A. G.: Listening to you, I have the feeling of communing with something immense which has come among us. We are left without words, with a impression of vertigo... But the time has come to ask you when and how Zen entered your life?

G. D.: In Japan! When I was sent there in 1937 with a particular mission which I had chosen: to study the spiritual background of Japanese education. As soon as I arrived at the embassy, an old man came to greet me. I did not know him "Suzuki," he stated. He was the famous Suzuki who was here to meet a certain Mister Durckheim arriving from Germany to undertake certain studies. Suzuki is one of the greatest contemporary Zen Masters. I questioned him immediately on the different stages of Zen. He named the first two, and I added the next three. Then he exclaimed: "Where did you learn this?" "In the teaching of Meister Eckhart!" "I must read him again..." (though he knew him well already). The second important encounter was with my Master of archery.

One day, a friend introduced me to him. He was a man with huge black eyes, and a little beard. He was sitting on the ground and asked me my impressions of these first months spent in Japan. He soon interrupted me and said: "That's completely superficial!" "I am aware of that, but how do I go deeper?" "You must dig in certain areas, then the periphery of the circle will have gained in depth. That is the purpose of archery..." "I have little time, a tiny garden and no Master..." "You need one hour a day, three meters of space and I will be your Master." We started two days later. That is how I came to understand Zen as exercise. You know that the disciple of archery shoots for three years on a target of straw of one meter in diameter, at three meters in distance. This is of course an inner exercise which has nothing to do with the fact of hitting an exterior target. Then I met a friend who taught me sitting in zazen.

It is under these circumstances that I discovered Zen. I would see Suzuki from time to time. He later came to see me at Todtmoos. It was in 1954 and I had just received a telegram of the Protestant Academy of Munich asking me to do a conference on oriental wisdom. I took advantage of his presence to ask him: "Master, could you tell me in a few words what oriental wisdom is?" He smiled and said: "Western knowledge looks outside, Eastern knowledge looks within." I said to myself: "That is not such a great answer..." Then he continued: "But if you look within the way you look without, you make of the within a without." That is an extraordinary statement! It reveals the whole drama of western psychology which looks within the way we look without, making of the within a without, that is, an object. And life disappears... Then I understood that all truth is to be discovered with this wisdom, and my conclusion was: learn to look without the way you ought to look within. This discovery has brought a great deal to my life and to my work. It joins with the wonderful verse from Novalis: "Every visible surface has an invisible depth raised to a state of mystery."

A. G.: That is how you gained the conviction that western man has forgotten an entire side of himself. In proposing Zazen to the West, the meditative sitting particular to Zen, you are revealing a universal wisdom, an opportunity for transformation and for fundamental freedom. You offer an experience accessible to people of all countries and of all times. Only a unified human being can fully become conscious of his participation with the divine. And each person names this Transcendence according to his religious consciousness and experience. In Zen, it would be "the nature of Buddha," in Hinduism "the Atman," in Christianity "the divine Trinity" revealed by the Christ in the Spirit.

G. D.: The Westerner has no method for experiencing this ultimate reality. Zazen, which is the primary way of living Zen through exercise, opens a Path in the desert of our current abstraction to allow us to advance toward our true maturity. What interests me in Zazen is that without theory or introduction, we enter directly into exercise. Everyone is offered the possibility of sitting anchored in the "Hara" -- their center of gravity -- entering into a posture which puts them into the reality they are after. But it is accessible on only one condition: emptiness. I insist on the importance of this emptiness which is so often misunderstood in the West. It is not a matter of throwing oneself into nothingness, but of getting rid of all concepts, all images. To become, as we say in Christianity, the Virgin cup, to free oneself so that the Spirit can come over us and give birth to life. It is the emptiness of all things which becomes the threshold for the experience of the All. It is only the absence of the multiple which opens the door to the experience of Fullness. Zazen is a preparation for this openness of our being.

A. G.: This openness is a state of virginity and the realization of the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven...Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," as well as the call to leave everything which resonates throughout the Bible, from Abraham to the rich young man: "Go, sell all you have..." To be absolutely nothing is to be everything. Perfect poverty is found only when perfect emptiness is perfect fullness. It is also the "innocence of paradise" toward which the Fathers of the Desert strived and of which the staretz Zozima became the spokesman in "The Brothers Karamazov." But can we be at the same time a Japanese sage and a Father of the desert?

G. D.: I would say that we should not take the words "East - West" in their geographic meaning. The best picture is man and woman. Man is not only man or woman. She is in him, and he is in her, and to the extent that man does not develop his feminine side and vice-versa, he does not become a man but a robot! If the West wants to remain human, it will have to take seriously the oriental within it, and it is only to the extent that the Easterners integrate something of this particularly masculine force of the West that they will be able to survive. We can then say that the interest we Westerners now have for the East comes from the fact that the Eastern within us has begun to awaken and says to us: "Listen, my dear, if you do not accept me you will die of suffocation in the highrises and the concrete which you build with your rational spirit!"

A. G.: Your work allows the reciprocal integration of the East and the West within us. It is a sign of hope and new birth for our time...

II

THE GREATNESS AND DECADENCE OF HUMANITY

ALPHONSE GOETTMANN: Before entering into the details of your message, can you tell us in a few words what is the core of your teaching?

GRAF DURCKHEIM: I would answer: it is taking seriously the double origin of human beings, the "celestial" one and the "earthly" one. The West has forgotten this in relegating the "celestial" one to the realm of faith and believing that only the "earthly" one can be the object of experience and practice. The West has frustrated persons in their spiritual development. Yet the celestial origin of humanity is our essential being, that which participates with Divine Being and can become conscious of It in specific experiences. We are citizens of two worlds: an "existential" one which is a conditioned reality, limited by time and space, and an "essential" one unconditioned and beyond time and space, accessible only to our inner consciousness and inacessible to our powers.

The destiny of man is to become the one who can witness to the transcendent Reality at the very heart of existence. To achieve this, we must first learn to take seriously the experiences through which, in privileged moments, Being touches us and calls to us. This is the fundamental meaning of all spiritual exercise as I understand it: to open ourselves to our essential being through experiences which manifest it and to enter upon a way of living which allows us to witness to Being in daily life. It seems to me that the time has come in which the West awakens to an experience of Being and to a practice of the Way which is not merely a privilege of the East but an opportunity for a living religion.

A. G.: The greatness and decadence of man! A cry of warning and at the same time a song of hope. This is the summary of your message. We must recognize that man today is sick. He has adapted himself to the world to such an extent that the best of himself is faced with a dead-end. The mastery of the sciences, technology and organization have made him a captive of this "earthly" world while his deeper reality, the "celestial" one, is beyond the space and time in which he has closed himself. Yet this beyond is nowhere else than in himself. "The Kingdom of God is within you," says the Gospel.

G. D.: 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.

A. G.: It is the source of unhappiness, longing and inexplicable suffering, the cause of many illnesses and psychic disturbances, the very loss of the meaning of life. But this is the result of a story which is as old as humanity!

G. D.: Old and more than ever contemporary! We are speaking of original sin. Man wants to become god by his own means and to do so he eats the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. He says: "I am I," or worse yet: "I want to remain what I am." And this begins very early on, around the age of three, when the child says for the first time: "What is that?" This is where the undifferentiated unity with the divine within is broken and man progressively settles into the separate autonomy of his ego.

A. G.: He distinguishes the good from the bad, as the Bible says, and falls into opposites, fabricating an ideology in which he projects himself. Having cut himself off from Life which is beyond dualism, he tears apart the image of God which inhabits him, and creates his behavior according to his own image.

G. D.: This is the sin which stops life and has no limits. By fastening himself to something both outside and within himself, man suddenly places himself in a static reality opposed to the Life which knows no limit. He confines himself to the petrified universe of concepts, thoughts, and Kant's famous categories: time, space, identity, and causality. From this objectifying consciousness, he places himself outside of the primary reality, the true Life. Then "death becomes the wages of sin" in the sense that man puts himself on another plane and turns his back on his original country, finding himself in exile. At the same time, death appears to him as a frightening response for those who live sheltered from the very things which would give them true security.

A. G.: I smile in remembering the little parable of the beetle who meets up with a centipede: "How do you do it?" asks the beetle, "how do you lift your hundred and twenty-seventh foot at the right moment and move the eight hundred and fifty-ninth without ever making a mistake?" The centipede, surprised by such a question, begins to reflect upon it. And he finds himself paralyzed, unable to move forward. A monk of the seventh century, saint Andrew of Creete, said that "man is idolatrous of himself." This is one of the best definitions of our original downfall. He has turned the power which oriented him toward his essential Being, which is at the very depths of his human nature, toward his little self. And in doing so, he separates himself from his Source of Life and leads an existence that runs counter to his nature. He lives in a lie and constantly represses his thirst for his true Self. His life is a death and all that he does is polluted at the onset. He disintegrates himself and the universe along with him. This is original sin. We experience such inner alienation every day. But we have the capacity to transform this state of death into a state of resurrection. Metamorphosis is possible, this is the goal of all your work!

G. D.: In the end, human beings always remain children of paradise.

A. G.: God never ceases to call out "Adam, where are you?" in the depths of the human heart.

G. D.: 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 his 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.

A. G.: Like Moses before the Burning Bush, we suspect His Presence, but we will not recognize it until we have, like him, taken off the sandles of our self. Don't you think that this is the most important duty of human beings in our time? G. D.: Yes, today the most important question deals with the rediscovery of the essential self. It is a matter of liberating the Holy Spirit within us and taking original sin seriously, not as past history, but as the only sin which we never cease to commit. It is vital to rediscover the unconditioned within the conditioned. Man's suffering comes from being a stranger to himself. That is his deepest agony.

A. G.: His most personal and most universal pain.

G. D.: Exactly! For sin has become collective, the result being that civilization in the West has developed only one pole of the human being and has sacrificed the other. Yet man is always called to a double mission: to recognize and master the world in which he lives, for which he needs efficiency, but at the same time to mature on the inner path which is vital to this fulfillment. The fruit of this maturity is seen in a person who is transparent to his essential being which he expresses in his daily life. It is a fact that western civilization has completely neglected this aspect of our nature.

Today, man has no place in education. It begins at school: everything is organized, the child has no creative freedom; very early on he must be careful to make good grades under the threat of not being allowed into college. The little child who is a bit slow, a dreamer, who leans over his work in an almost meditative way, doesn't have a chance. Only the sharp kid, the quick one, is worthy of interest. University training, in medicine for example, does not give any course on the human being. Everything deals with the body. Most of the doctors of our day base their knowledge on physiology, at best on psychology. A famous German surgeon once said: "In all my operations I have never encountered a soul!" But things are changing. In super-modern hospitals there is someone who is on the way and who is beginning to inhibit this approach: the patient!! He alone holds personal desires which do not go along with the organization of "teams" who have cut man into pieces requiring specialists.

No one is caring for the whole human being. It is the same for the life of the State: it is a fishnet of laws, commands, ordinances and organizations which leave very little freedom to man. Man's freedom is reduced to the freedom to accept non-freedom, which is not quite the project God has in mind for humanity! It is strange that even the Church has not been spared. It has also become an organization from which the theologians, men of science, have evacuated all mysticism.

A. G.: Eckhart is condemned as a heretic, Francis of Assissi constrained to a rule, John of the Cross thrown in prison, Joan of Arc burned alive...Louis Cognet, professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, said that one could write a fascinating book on the miseries inflicted upon the mystics by the ecclesiastical authorities! But theology only became a science in the Middle Ages and the break was consummated by the Renaissance. Yet the Orthodox tradition never clearly distinguished between mysticism and theology, between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma upheld by the Church. The aim which constantly dominated the thought of the Greek Fathers was deification or union with God to which all Christians are called. Theology served that purpose only. It was not a domain of diplomas nor a career for university professions, but an invitation to mystical experience. The old tradition of the Church gave the name "theologian" to three sacred writers: saint John, the most mystical of the four evangelists, saint Gregory of Nazanzium, author of contemplative poems, and saint Simeon, singer of union with God.

G. D.: This is the true meaning of theology which must remain a path of initiation; by "initiation" I mean an opening of the door to mystery. The two poles of this path need to be developed in the West: one is the experience of initiation which deserves this name only to the extent that man feels himself touched by essential being and called to this development which makes him whole; and the other pole which is the means of achieving this transformation. I repeat that the most important issue of our time for western man is the abandoning of this vision of life unilaterally directed toward the mastering of the world, of life in time and space. We must understand that life has meaning only as a witness to essence, to the whole of life which is the Word, the inner, universal Christ present in each one of us and in all things. Unfortunately, education, including what is found in seminaries, derails man from his spiritual path and from true fulfillment.

A. G.: It is important to become conscious of the fact that no new structure, no revolution will change man: a new world can only be born from a new man. The younger generations feel this very clearly now. We are witnessing a colossal disconnection with political action, especially in the U.S.A., and a wild but promising rush toward the soul. May of 1968 was the last effort to recuperate through political means that which was in fact a suffocating cry for being. The hippies were already precursors, then drugs and now the stampede methods of liberation which confirm this hypothesis. At the very heart of the Church, beyond the deviations we've mentioned, there is now the beginning of a return to the source.

G. D.: That is because we are realizing that it is the mystical tradition which touches the fundamental truth. Certainly, it is not capable of building planes and conquering space, but man's true conquest is first and foremost himself. Man today is no longer the man of modern times, but the man of new times. We are in the era of the Holy Spirit. There was first the age of the Father, then that of the Son, and now we are entering into the age of the Spirit where man is becoming independent through the discovery of the Divine within himself. This is utterly new!

A. G.: Andre Malraux, who was an agnostic, was also a prophet of the times to come. "The twenty-first century," he said, "will be a spiritual century or will not be at all." Could you elaborate on that?

G. D.: The age of the Father is that of man submitting to orders, to the laws of the Father God, the reign of the Father which has been more or less the way of the Catholic Church. Then came the age of the Son which was no longer submission to the orders of the Father, but awakening to Love. The Father-Policeman who frightens us becomes the Father-Love revealed by the Son, so that from being slaves we become sons of God in freedom. We are entering today into the times announced by the Christ Himself: "I will not leave you desolate...The Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things." It is the discovery of the Spirit within us which characterizes our time; it seems to me that this transcendence reunites and reconciles the opposites.

If the Spirit, the great Third One of the Holy Trinity, is the One who assures the unity of the Father and of the Son, he also expresses absolute unity in absolute diversity. This immense creative power, which is beyond opposites and the diversity of life, is our own inner transcendence. As soon as it awakens within us, it transports us to another level which is above good and evil. For example, the Christ's requirement of loving one's enemy: the rational self cannot do it, we know this only too well, for it is against our nature; now, we can obey this command on the transcendental plane. I believe that thee are always two ways of understanding the words of Christ: one exterior and rational, the other inner, experiential and transformative. It seems to me that the Christ has always sought to awaken within us that transcendental plane which is above good and evil. This is strongly stated in the commandment: "You will love your neighbor as yourself." For the natural mind, "as yourself" presupposes loving oneself a great deal and making a little effort to love the other in the same way. This is an explanation which is both natural and moral. But the Christ wanted to say something utterly different, it seems to me: "Love the other as if he were yourself," that is, find in the other your own essential Being, the Christ. There is only one essence, and I believe that, as soon as the spiritual or transcendent eye opens within us, we can see in the other what we are in our essence.

Then there is a true encounter between two beings rooted in their essential being, an encounter of essence to essence, an encounter with the Christ. That is why Jesus said: "If two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them." It is He who speaks in all three!

A. G.: Because we have so often understood the words of Christ from the outside, our relationships are superficial and the true encounter between two people is very rare. One closes off the other in his role. The doctor only sees in the patient a case, the professor sees in the student an intellectual quotient, the boss sees in the worker a money-making factor. The useful and the functional dominate our encounters most of the time, including our most intimate relationships.

G. D.: It is precisely this existential plane which the Christ invites us to transcend. Then our attitudes change completely. Let us take medicine from the examples you have just mentioned. The doctor examines a patient. He enters into his problem and little by little it is no longer the illness which he focuses on but the patient himself. Now he finds himself face to face with a human being, on another level, not that of medicine but of therapy. The encounter deepens more and more, there is no longer superior and inferior, but two persons who meet in equality and truth, beyond the existential shell. Then a third one is manifested in the encounter...the Great Third One who now conducts the dialogue, and it is through His Presence that problems become rooted in another Source in order to resolve the difficulties.

A. G.: In the name of this very experience, some rare doctors today dare to say to their patients: "It is I who care for you, but Another who heals you." What extraordinary change would take place if this way of living relationships entered into families, couples, communities, schools, politics!

III

EARTH AND SKY: OUR DOUBLE ORIGIN

ALPHONSE GOETTMANN: You have just expressed a new image of man, breaking through the usual structures of thought. You disrobe him of all his external securities to create a path toward a personal and authentic experience of the intimate meaning of life. You cry "Down with the masks!" The hour of the Person has come! At the heart of this tragic comedy in which modern man lives, you propose your own anthropology. Can you expand on that?

GRAF DURCKHEIM: There are two kinds of anthropologies. The one of the universities which study the evolution of man since his origins to the arrival of today's conceptual consciousness. It sees man as an objective reality composed of three poles: the body, the soul and the spirit. There we find his gifts and faculties as well as the different stages of his growth, so well described by Jean Gebser: the magic stage, the mythic stage, the mental stage, etc. But that vision does not look at man who suffers, who seeks joy, pleasure, happiness. We don't find there the one who seeks a meaning to his life, who loves or hates, who wants to live or kill. The inner man does not exist...The question of the being and becoming of a human being escapes them.

My anthropology sees man as a being conscious of himself, suffering first of all from not being what he is in reality. This is the man who has overdeveloped his existential self and one day must learn to transcend it in order to rediscover his deeper self. We could say that man evolves through three kinds of "self": --the "little self" who only sees power, security, prestige, knowledge. --the "existential self" which goes much further; it wants to give itself to a cause, to a work, to a community, to a person. It can go beyond egocentrism, and that is where it becomes, in my opinion, a human being. --finally what I call the "essential self," the true "I" of the individual and of humanity.

A. G.: What is the "essential self"?

G. D.: It is the core of man through which he participates in the supernatural reality of the divine universal Spirit. The essential Being is the absolute within man, the source of his freedom where the Divine expresses Itself through an individual and particular form in the world of space and time. Each man should be able to say with Saint Paul: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me"; for the experience of essential Being is the experience of Christ present within us, and the unity which is accomplished in that moment must be felt like that of "the vine and its branches." For me then, anthropology begins with the conscious being, it is an anthropology of the person. I would add to this conception the law which man carries within and of which Christ speaks when he says: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light."

This sentence is valid for every living thing: within the flower is its life, its path, and its truth. It is the same for man; in his essential core, he contains his life and his truth which only realize themselves to the extent that this essential core becomes the law of his evolution. In other words: the original image of man is his innate path. The path which a flower takes from the seed to the blossom and finally toward the fruit is the reality of the inner image put to work. It is the path which has a sequence of preordained stages already contained in the seed whose movement is the life of the flower and its truth. It is therefore the law of becoming which is the path, and the right path is the truth of being and of life. Therefore, when Christ says: I am this or that, he is saying something which is a universal Law. Becoming aware of this universal Principle launches us very far into the depths of the consciousness which we have of ourselves.

A. G.: This consciousness which we have of ourselves finally ends in the experience of an Absolute. Only then do we discover the face of Christ as our inner Center. Without this experience we fall into myth in which we repeat what we learned in books and classrooms.

G. D.: We do not have a lived, experiential consciousness. On this subject, when Christ said: "No one comes to the Father but by me," the Christian gives it an easy intellectual meaning based on concepts, objectifying it and seeking Christ on the outside through who knows what sort of imagination. While in reality Christ invites man to leave the horizon of his existential self, to plunge into his essential Being which is the Christ himself in order to encounter the Father with him and in him.

A. G.: The Origin, the inner Source.

G. D.: This is the Reality in which we feel ourselves alive and protected, and discover Love. This takes nothing away from the belief of the one who "has yet no ears to understand," as Christ says. Without an inner ear, we are limited in our spiritual development to belief, until the day when we break through the walls of this consciousness and find ourselves suddenly on another level; then the ear of faith opens up.

A. G.: The tragedy is that belief is simply intellectual and therefore does not transform the person.

G. D.: No! It does not transform. Belief allows one to become a good man, in an ethical sense, as the pharisees did.

A. G.: It is moral.

G. D.: That's right. It is the result of a little tradition which has formed beings in the accepted manner. Loyalty to experience has become submission to a framework of life and to a ensemble of laws imposed by the community of which we are a part.

A. G.: That kind of Christianity has only exchanged one law for another. Many believers still live in the structures established by Moses, merely making of Jesus a better legislator. In that case, I would not even speak of community, which suggests precisely an inner dynamism of faith, but of collectivity where the behavior of each person is thought out, anticipated, organized from the outside and which leads only to socio-political action instead of transforming experience.

G. D.: When we see how many Christians identify themselves with this belief...in particular the religious orders! They have a feeling of guilt, and are afraid of being condemned to who knows what if they take the liberty of letting go once and for all of the huge weight of formulations learned since their youth and have confidence in the inner voice they hear within. I received a letter the other day from a older sister superior who wrote: "I am happy to have finally found within me the permission to seek out the divine reality which inhabits me and to find that bit by bit the plaster is falling!"

What is this plaster if not a belief dictated by the Church? Neumann, the successor of C. G. Jung, has written a book on "depth psychology and the new ethic" in which he speaks of good and evil and of conscience: the man who is part of a community, having it in his system, carries its presence in the consciousness he has of good and evil. Belonging to his community reduces the member to a consciousness of laws and virtues. His membership status represents the life of the community present within him. The voice of conscience in the member of the community is the presence of the community in the member. A. G.: Concerning this subject, we seem to be at a great turning point among philosophers, sociologists, and scientists. Friedmann took a risk forty years ago when he said: "We cannot spiritualize, and therefore save this world, without a return to the individual, an effort of the self coming from the inner man." Today, the echo of this statement is being heard everywhere.

G. D.: Our time requires a mighty leap from us! Indeed, the psychologist Neumann says the same thing. With what audacity he incites us to listen to the "still, small voice" which sometimes whispers to us to do something completely different than what is anticipated by the community, at the risk of wounding it, and perhaps even leaving it; the courage to say "No!" and to feel oneself fundamentally free. At that moment, this "small voice" represents the presence of Being. There is the relative consciousness which is filled with the requirements of the community and there is the absolute consciousness which is the expression of Being and which requires at certain moments a rejection of what the community demands. It is striking to see Christ say to the young man who wanted to join him after having buried his father: "Let the dead bury the dead!" What a scandal! Christ requires from this man a behavior which is absolutely impossible in the law of the Jewish tradition, according to which the burial of the dead was a sacred duty. By following Christ, the young man betrayed his community.

A. G.: Christ turns the established order upside down with his invectives against the Pharisees and overwhelms our consciousness in order to put us face to face with the absolute. Some of his words are, as he said himself, like a "sword" which cuts into that which is dearest to us: "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." This is inhuman and impossible for the "relative consciousness" of which you are speaking!

G. D.: It exists...I lived it...Returning from the war of 1914-1918, after four years on the front, I found Germany in a curious situation. All the traditions were threatened with communism which was a great danger at the time. With the remainder of the loyal soldiers, we became little regiments off to combat the communists. As an officer, I had formed one of these regiments and had prepared the offensive. And then one night, I awoke and heard the "small voice" say to me: "You will no longer be a soldier, that time is finished, you will not got out with your regiment!" This voice resonated with such certainty that no contradiction was possible. This was an absolutely impossible situation for an officer! I was bound by my oath as a soldier and now I was called by another voice to betray it...I went to my superior and told him: "I will not go out, I will stay here, there is nothing to be done. I will no longer be a soldier!" I had the good fortune to find myself before a colonel at whose side I had fought at the front during very dangerous moments.

He knew me and knew that it was not fear which led me but an obedience to something absolute within me. He looked at me deeply and allowed me to be true to myself. But he could have reacted differently! One year later, I had a second experience of this absolute consciousness. As the oldest son, I was to inherit the family property at Steingaden, which included the castle and the lands of the Durckheim counts. I was going through a period of doubt and, one morning, I awoke with this unshakeable certainty: "You must not become a proprietor, your path is somewhere else!" Confronting this new awareness was the old tradition of my family which was also dear to me. Above all there were the deep links which united me with my father to whom I could not cause such pain, and with my birthplace to which I was attached with all the fibers of my being.

But once again, there was no doubt, the absolute consciousness had spoken and I had to tear up these links and follow my own Path! This absolute consciousness is an eruption of the creative and transcendent force which inhabits us. It is a weapon against all external requirements, liberating us from all conformism, taboos, morals and traditional practices imposed on us by beliefs and placing us under the imperatives of our inner conscience. We are on new ground which has nothing, absolutely nothing in common with the old world. Everything is different and yet familiar for the one who enters into it: his behavior, his relationships, his way of knowing, the quality and purpose of all that he touches or apprehends. He has removed the blinders of a closed world to enter into the vast domain of freedom, where to live is to blow up all the security systems and eventually disobey the established order, even abandon all superficial relationships which inhibit the contact with Being...It is the first step of the return from exil. "His kingdom is not of this world," and for such a person everything is movement, eruption, permanent revolution. There is never any ending or arrival. The awakened man can only put up with systems if they move and bring about change, and he fights all that blocks the future. The path toward Being is always dangerous, surprising, unexpected for all, beginning with the one who travels upon it.

A. G.: My wife and I have also undertaken that path. We were torn between the moral laws, the criticisms "that's not good!" or "that is not done!" or "You are not allowed!", surounded by misunderstanding on all sides, and the powerful call emanating from an entirely different consciousness. But nothing could still "the small voice" which was always present within us nor our determination to follow it to the end.

G. D.: Is that how you found your Path?

A. G.: Yes! A Path which led to the Orthodox Church of France at the heart of which we can live our faith in the fullness of its biblical, patristic, and liturgical roots.

G. D.: I knew the founder of the Orthodox Church of France,

Monseigneur Jean de Saint Denys. When I met him, I felt that here was a whole other tradition with something tremendous to be discovered! Monseigneur Jean was full of humor, with such communicative laughter. A prodigious radiance emanated from him along with a rare force.

A. G.: We consider him as one of the greatest theologians of our time, not an abstract theologian but one always in touch with the supernatural world, both a genius and a visionary. His intuition was that the restoration of primitive Orthodoxy in the West would undoubtedly be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. Is not the hope of all true ecumenism found in the rediscovery of the great Tradition common to all Christian confessions? I must tell you how grateful I am to you for opening me so powerfully onto this path through your presence and your teaching.

G. D.: It was Christ who came to reveal that we are not the servants of a distant God and subjected to an external potentate, but the children of a Father called to awaken to those living waters of the divine Spirit within our essence.

A. G.: We have just made concrete the "small voice" through exceptional examples, but what is it in daily life?

G. D.: He who has "ears to hear" can perceive it in every moment in the smallest of circumstances. For example: we feel the need to meditate, to dive into our inner depths, and at the same time there is a letter to write to someone who is suffering. The two require our presence and we can distinguish between the call of being and the call of existence...What to do? We decide to meditate, and suddenly another center is manifested in relation to which we feel responsible for the decision we have just made. Perhaps it is this center which says: "This time you would have done better to write that letter and respond to the requirement of existence rather than to the requirement of your essential being." There is this "I" whose consciousness is above essential and existential being as a source called to unify this polarity within us. It is the mysterious "I", of which no psychology has ever spoken, which distinguishes between essential and existential being and admits or refuses the impulse coming from one or the other. The one who takes up the path of initiation develops inner antennaes which allow him to receive the least intonation of this small voice and to follow it.

IV

THE QUALITIES OF THE FIVE SENSES:

WINDOWS ON THE INVISIBLE

ALPHONSE GOETTMANN: Persons progressively discover themselves under many facets in the course of their existence. There are the everyday visible things, and those which are less so and which sometimes seem strange or mysterious to us. The first are palpable and fall under the senses, but the second are much less evident. Do we not risk to speak too quickly, to name that which we do not know and to fall into a belief we have not verified? My question is: what allows you to affirm that there is an essential being? What are the proofs if any, and how do they manifest it?

GRAF DURCKHEIM: That is a central question! My whole teaching turns around this affirmation that there is an essential being. But this is not an exterior reality. Rather it is a reality within us which we can experience. It would be ridiculous to deny the world and to call it imagination as some religious philosophies do in order to say that there is only the inner reality. That is certainly not the case! But the world in which man finds himself is the world of humanity, that is to say, we perceive all that surrounds us in reference to what we are. A Russian philosopher stated that to see movement in the cinema we need nineteen frames per second. These seconds are pulse beats. Let us imagine then a being whose pulse beats a thousand times faster, and another whose pulse beats a thousand times slower.

For the first, that which seems to us like rapid movement hardly moves at all, and for the second, that which seems to hardly move rushes by. So the world as we see it is entirely a function of the structure of human consciousness. We look at things believing that they are as they appear to us, while in actuality they are only the result of how our consciousness sees them: a fly for example has an entirely different sensibility than ours! We are lost when we attempt to reflect on reality without considering the human filter. There are two ways of considering the existence of man: --The first is the one of science which speaks of an objective reality of which they can say something to the extent that they eliminate the human experience. It is an objective reality which can be proved because it is there, external, in time and space. In Paris there is a river which is called the Seine, that is an objective reality that can be seen. This is the reality of science which can be known through an external experience. --Then there is the inner reality which we experience internally: joy, pain, suffering, pleasure...It is the reality of feelings which are subjective only for science and of which it is suspicious. But there are great differences in this reality which man experiences internally.

On the one hand there are the experiences which are part of the natural man, such as his instincts, desires, and faculties which are part of whole field of natural experiences both external and internal. But on the other hand, man is capable of feeling from time to time something exceptional in relation to all that has been mentioned, something extraordinary, outside of the ordinary. This is a reality which apparently transcends the frontiers of normal human perception on all levels, a transcendent reality. As in the sciences there must be the "consensus omnium," everyone's consensus on the results obtained and the possibility for all to recognize it, so in the domain of the transcendent the inverse is true: the circle of those who "know" diminishes...

A. G.: Are we not witnessing today a great turnaround? After the conquest of space, will we not try to conquer transcendence?

G. D.: Our era is occupied with two kinds of transcendence. The first represents extraoridnary capacities or powers which allow man to go beyond the normal frontiers of what he knows how to do, such as telepathy for example. Soviet materialism wanted nothing to do with this until the day when an officer was able, from his submarine, to converse with an astronaut. Things changed! The experts on telepathy were brought in. We know today that a mother rabbit in America is strongly shaken when a thousand kilometers away in Europe, one of its babies is killed. We also know that plants react to the spiritual attitude of the person who cares for them. We have photographed the aura of certain plants, a living reality sensitive to the love of the people who surround them. In all that is living, there are apparently connections and, if we know how to witness to them consciously, we can acquire transcendent gifts and all these phenomena which are called "psychic." But this is a matter of an external transcendence, something which transcends man's normal view of the exterior. He can do things beyond the normal.

We have done it with memory, for instance, when we can remember our birth and even the moment of conception. There is in France a whole team of psychotherapists who heal with the help of this method. In Germany, we practice the therapy of reincarnation where one's previous lives are uncovered. This is all very interesting but has nothing to do with the second kind of transcendence which aims at the development of the whole man as a human and spiritual being, which in other words aims at deification. We speak so much today of the expansion of consciousness.

It is as though we had opened an enormous calyx toward the infinite, expanding it always further. But I have the impression that a contrary movement must be added: to descend further and further toward the place where there is nothing and perhaps there we will discover a grain of sand which represents the only thing that counts...It is very simple! "One thing is necessary," these are the words of Christ which are becoming of great importance again today when man is trying to do extraordinary thin