"The most beautiful thing we can experience
is the mystery."
Albert Einstein
Awesome!
"Just as persons who are being initiated into
the Mysteries throng together at the outset amid tumult and shouting,
and jostle against one another, but when the holy rites are being
performed and disclosed the people are immediately attentive in awe
and silence, so too at the beginning of philosophy: about its portals
also you will see great tumult and taking of boldness, as some
boorishly and violently try to jostle their way towards the repute it
bestows; but he who has succeeded in getting inside, and has seen a
great light, as though a shrine were opened, adopts another bearing
of silence and amazement, and 'humble and orderly attends upon reason
as upon god."
C. Kerenyi, Eleusis, Archetypal Image of
Mother & Daughter (from Plutarch)
The Way of
Transformation
from the Book "The way of
Transformation" by Karlfried Graf von Durchheim
The man who, being really on the Way, falls
upon hard times in the world and 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 extant 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 practice is not to develop a 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
wholeheartedly to confront the world that threatens him with the
isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed
and the the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.
Demeter presiding over an initiation rite in the Eleusinian
Mysteries
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