looking within

“I would see D.T. Suzuki from time to time. He later came to see me at Todtmoos. It was in 1954 and I had just received a telegram from 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 aught to look within. It joins the wonderful verse from Novalis: “Every visible surface has an invisible depth raised to a state of mystery.”

—Alphonse Goettmann, Dialogue on The Path of Initiation: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim (New York, NY: Globe Press Books, 1991), p. 23

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