The Parable of the Proud Traveler
A proud traveler had left the road. He became lost and heard the voice of a shepherd calling for help, because he could not find his brothers. But the proud traveler was frightened, irritated, and therefore answered briefly.
“Why did you set out unprepared? To hope for a miracle? If you have fallen behind your brothers, let them seek you and help.”
And he passed on.
Suddenly the traveler was caught in bad weather. The winds howled strongly, the rain lashed his face so that it was difficult to walk.
He saw a tree and stood beneath it for shelter, but the thick foliage began to fall away. Then he peered into a cave nearby, but stones collapsed, blocking the passage.
He stood deprived of the attention he had expected. And then he heard a voice in the distance.
“You thought you had everything? But the powerful are only beggars on the path they follow.
The world was originally created in love and harmony, without division. But where you apprehended yourself through a distorted image of the world convenient to you, you only fed your own ego to the proportions of presumptuous folly.
Believing that the world obeyed your desires, you only wished to subjugate the God within you. Everything was a lesson so that you would look more deeply into your own world, where everything is a miracle.
The leaves that fell, failing to cover you, are your presumption, counted on invented ideals that have no foundation, no basis, where the slightest wind can destroy that imagined shelter you built around yourself.
The stones that closed the cave’s entrance are your hardness, shielding you from yourself, from that home where you receive rightful warmth and comfort.
Rightful, because founded on those laws of being laid down by the Creator for you, so that you might discern truth in the utter darkness of despair and vanity. For even leaves are a miracle that exists for you when you exist for it.
You are not a ruler, nor am I. And you are everything, as am I. The equality of souls, where each soul is the outline of another’s eyes, where each soul is the echo of another’s voice, where each soul is a talent expressed through another.
Like a many-voiced symphony of rain on a hot summer day. Longed for and necessary, like life itself.
A wise space for those sages who have known truth in the simplicity of things, who solved the design not by passing difficult tasks but by intuition, by the inner sense of that order of the world which was given to you from the beginning.
The proud man will hear in this parable only a reproach, but the wise will keep the word in his heart, fill himself with this wisdom fully, and pass the righteous word from mouth to mouth, calling to pacification in the chambers of silence.