A Tibetan student was practicing meditation in his cell when a spider descended from the ceiling and hung suspended in front of him.
It slowly spun around, attached to the end of its web, until the novice tried to catch it, at which point it raced back up to the ceiling in a second.
Every day for a week the student's meditation was disturbed by the spider. It even seemed that it was getting bigger, that it was becoming more adventurous, and sometimes tried to swing back and forth in front of him, with all its legs spread wide.
"This spider is bothering me," thought the novice, "and making fun of me. I'll catch it one day, I know will!"
He became so upset that he went to ask the advice of his Spiritual Master.
I hid a knife in my sleeve while I was meditating," he said. "I wanted to kill the spider when it came down, but I didn't succeed. It disappeared the moment I thought about catching it."
"Replace your knife with a piece of chalk," the Master replied, "and make a cross on the spider's back each time it disturbs your meditation. Come back and see me in a week."
A week later the novice returned to his Master's cell and knelt down before him, his head lowered.
"Lift your robe and look at yourself," the Master instructed.
To his great surprise, the novice saw a big X drawn on his own chest.
This short parable may seem absurd, and yet it contains a profound truth.
The spider that disturbed the novice during his meditation was his own bad conscience, which always surfaces when we are most relaxed. And what do we do? We accuse it of trying to harm us, we say that it is someone else, we seek a threatening monster to fight with. But the monster, the spider, is our own self.
We have to be able to look at ourselves objectively in order to overcome our worries, before they assume a form that we have not chosen.
"Know thyself!"
Author & Source Unknown
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