In the Forest of Truths
Imagine you are walking through a dense forest. The light falls through thick crowns in sharply cut shadows, and everything seems to be in motion. You smell the scent of mosses, of rotting leaves and damp earth, and with no particular destination in mind, you walk deeper and deeper into this forest.
Now imagine that every tree you encounter on this walk, whether old or young, small or large, represents the human belief in a particular truth. Here is the grove of the Christian truths, and there, without the beginning and the end being distinguishable in any way, it merges smoothly and is interspersed with the trees of the Jewish, the Muslim, the pagan, etc. truths. Truth-trees everywhere in this sprawling, majestic, wild forest.
And so, we keep on walking through the forest of truths. Occasionally we stop, look at a tree from close up, the patterns of its bark, the strength of its trunk, and how it branches out with crown and roots into the neighbouring trees. Here or there, we discover two trees that appear to be completely intertwined, yet bear entirely different flowers…
As in every expedition, we enlarge the perimeter of the world we know with every step we take in the forest of truths. What is important in an expedition, however, is not to lose perspective: No matter how beautiful, impressive, even powerful or magical individual trees may appear to us in the forest of truths, we never forget that they would be nothing without the rest of the forest. Only together can they grow, thrive and sustain themselves in eternal diversity and change.
Now let us imagine that there are other living beings roaming this forest besides ourselves. Unknown beings they are, finding their ways among these trees, glades, and groves. Most humans never meet these presences eye to eye. Instead, most humans recognise them only by the traces they leave on the trees of human truths: A hollowed-out knothole, the bark of a trunk stripped of moss and torn open, young twigs bitten off, a deeply dug cave among the roots. Truths show the traces of the beings that once inhabited them. And truths, like trees, are deeply conditioned and shaped by the life that flows around and through them…
Now you must know, most people roam the forest of truths to choose as quickly as possible a pleasant tree under which to rest. They become settlers in the shade of this tree; they have found their truth and bind themselves to it with their own hearts and roots.
As magicians, however, we roam the forest of truths with the firm intention of never settling down. More than that, we create our path in this forest not searching for even more, even larger, or even more magnificent trees, but searching for those presences that move among them. The marks they leave on the trees merely serve as markers for us to follow the paths of these beings…
Sometimes, on the best of our days or nights, we catch a glimpse of these presences living with us in the forest of truths. Just like them, we live nomadic yet bound to certain recurring paths in the vastness of this forest. Like these invisible beings, we return to certain trees, allow them to anchor our orientation, and experience moments of confusion and distress when age brings them down. Some of these trees give us nourishment, the barks of others appear poisonous; often during our lives their effects seem to interchange.
As magicians in the forest of truths, we are not hunters. We do not shoot or kill game. We walk and search for presences, and on our paths we understand that we ourselves are such a presence… We all create this forest together, and without us, it would be nothing but desert. Likewise, we understand that the way we move through this forest attracts different types and beings of presences, which then accompany us for a while on our paths. Anyone who first enters the forest of truths feels alone and somewhat lost here. Only after years of wandering do most of us come to the realisation that we are actually never alone. Quite the contrary: usually a whole hoard of presences moves with us, and their presence colours and conditions how we see the trees around us. Their shadows pass overhead, their scent mingles with the trees, and their thoughts mingle with ours.
Life in the forest of truths is as diverse as the trees within it. To preserve it and become a living part of it, we have understood that there are three things in particular for as nomadic magicians to consider:
A settled human in the forest of truths quickly turns toxic to their environment. They begin to forget the very idea of the forest as a hive, that life is only possible in messy compounds, and, instead, they begin to fight for resources for their tree…
Our ability to understand not just one tree, but the forest as an ecosystem, is a direct function of how much we can refrain from the human instinct to judge everything. Observe not judge is the magician’s motto in the forest of truths.
And despite the majestic size and power of some of the old trees in this forest, we have learned never to delude ourselves that even one of them can last forever. Every tree dies and will eventually fall. Then it will be overgrown by new life, decomposed by fungi, and become the soil for future truths.
What always remains, never fades as long as we walk these paths, is the surging, proliferating, magical life that roams this forest and sustains it. Nothing exists here without the wandering of the presences — most of which we recognise only after years of wandering in the shadows of these trees. Indeed, the calm, immovable tranquility of the trees is symbiotically united with its very apparent opposite: the effervescent meandering of presences that surrounds and weaves through them.
May we all succeed in this exercise. May we all remain light-footed in the forest of truths. May we all become good rangers among our brethren presences. As tiny as the meaning of each one of us is, as powerful and mighty it is as a wandering species.