#From the Notebook of the Scribe ##There is no truth but the Truth, and you are blinded to it the very moment you think you have reached it. A Master wrote these words many years before I first copied them. I have copied them many times since, and only now do I think I have begun to understand why. The One Truth is beyond grasp. Were a man to contain it, he would have to account for every possibility of existence, every truth, every opposite, and the falsehoods between them. Such a work would have no end. And were it somehow finished, what would remain to hold? No falsehood, but no vessel either. This does not trouble me. We were not made to possess the Truth, only to remain open to it. All other truths are our own truths. Receive them with gratitude, hold them with humility, and be willing to loosen your grip. When another sees differently, do not break his vessel nor defend your own as though it were the spring itself. We drink from different bends of the same river. The moment you think you have reached the Truth, you have already stopped walking toward it. Your river forgets its course. What flowed freely settles into a pond, and every pond, receiving no fresh water, will in time grow stagnant. Not because the water was evil, nor because the pond wished for corruption — but because it mistook enclosure for completeness. The pond is not wrong to be a pond. It is wrong only when it believes itself the whole world. Looking only upon its own still surface, it mistakes a mirror for a window, and forgets the rain. Yet the rain falls. It falls upon mountain and valley alike. It gathers into streams that ask no permission to run. It disappears beneath the earth, travelling unseen through stone and darkness, feeding roots and aquifers no eye has seen. It rises again as springs in places the original cloud never knew. Every stream believes it has found its own way to the sea, and in this it is not mistaken. Yet none chose the mountain from which it first descended, nor the unseen pull that guides it still. The sea does not praise the river for arriving. It has no time for such things. Even as the river enters it, the sea is already surrendering to the heavens, becoming cloud, becoming rain, beginning again what never ended. Who, then, shall claim to have seen the whole? The ocean cannot be held by a single glance, nor by the widest reach of imagination. The moment a man believes he has contained it, he holds only a handful of salt water and calls it the sea. So be gentle with your own truths. Let them remain rivers. Let them receive the rain. For the shadow of falsehood is seldom cast by knowing too little. More often, it is cast the moment we cease to receive what the current has not yet brought.