web of Truth

The web of Truth is one. Our path in Life is an exploration of the one web, which we all share, and to which neither of us holds the one preferred version or perspective - we simply all explore the paths and shapes and branches of which this web is composed.

A consciousness traverses the paths via its own experience, and through it is able to taste, to feel the uniqueness of each point in the web through its own filters and understanding.

Experience alone, however, is not by itself sufficient to know a branch, to learn from it, to integrate it into the growing consciousness. Integration into one's own tree of knowledge can occur only by paying attention, by applying its awareness to the experience being felt. Awareness is the light that shines upon the truth so it may be seen clearly. It can reveal new paths til then unknown.

Awareness lights up what is true, and will also reveal the misunderstandings we had adopted in our tree of knowledge, the illusions we've had in our psyche. Like a flame it can burn fears, assumptions, and incongruencies one has adopted as one stumbled through life while distracted or unfocused. By earnest application of attention onto the moment, the book of Truth can read clear before us, and in a manner of cleansing, it can help us dispel the unclear paths, the false shortcuts, and the illusory dangers we once believed.

I surmise that one's particular tree of knowledge connects between its nodes and its branches with varying degrees of clarity, of knowledge. Well-learned paths are bright and known, while other paths are fuzzier, dimmer, or even intentionally blocked.

This leads me to think that a person's tree of knowledge is likely composed of multiple, even of a multitude of tree mostly disconnected from each other, even kept in this manner as a form of self-protection, or because the distinct concepts are believed to be incompatible with one another. Thus we perhaps reject parts of ourselves. We isolate the nodes and branches deemed unworthy, and move our awareness out of it. Still a part of us, it resides in our subconscious, rejected and alive.

And I surmise it is attention, yet again, which can avail such disconnection within ourselves. In times when we find ourselves in a rejected part of us, not wanting to be here, feeling discomfort at the pain, the shame, the rage, the fear, the jealousy, at the unworthiness that somehow resides in this section of our tree, we need not panic. We need not avoid it, we need not flee.

We can instead realize where we are, accept the discomfort being felt, and pay attention. We let attention light our surroundings, and explore exactly what is happening.

Those fiends and evils that roam this dark section, shine your light upon them. Who are they truly? Are they willing enemies who live within you, yearning to damage and destroy you, for which you isolated them in a dark cave? Keep watching them. Know them to the root. Those dark dreary corners filled with fright - are those not simply old cobwebs flourishing in neglect?

And those faces threatening you, mocking you, reminding you of your failure, of your shame, look closer. Are they not reflections of your own pain and desires, which grow in horror and grossness in line with your own fear? And those voices, stabbing directly into your pain - are they not the echoes of your own frightened cries as they bounce around in this hall of mirrors you hardly have gotten to know?

Shine then, your light, on those corners in you that hurt, that prickle like a long-stuck thorn. Uncover that dark shame, so long in hiding, who has felt your own rejection all this time. Flee not from the raging giant imprisoned by your own throat. All these monsters carry messages for us, and they are only as frightful as we believe them to be. Listen to their messages. Pay attention.

Shine your light in your dungeons. Make it shine into the swamp's mire, uncover your warts, your shames, your mistakes. And as you see the truth of each of these corners once-thought dark, you may just find you can move, in calm and grace, onto a state of peace, a section of us thought to be much less dark. Via attention we may find a connection between our dark and light sections, by which we realize they were simply a single whole part of the unending web of Truth we continue to explore.