104. The masking of the global emergence tree
As the ego-tree stabilises and grows in complexity, further experience is organised ever more strongly around the local perspective. Attention is gradually bound to the ego-tree’s own attractors, needs, relations, fear structures and representations. In this way ever larger parts of the underlying global emergence tree are masked.
The mechanism is self-reinforcing. Recognition — the process by which new experience is read and understood in the light of what is already known in KNOWING — gradually locks itself to the local attractors of the ego-tree. New experience is automatically interpreted through existing patterns. What confirms the ego-tree’s attractors is recognised as true. What points towards higher or more global understandings passes under the radar — not because it is not there, but because the recognition mechanism is no longer directed towards it. The masking is not active suppression. It is narrowed recognition.
The local perspective begins to appear as reality itself, even though it represents only a limited cross-section of KNOWING. The individual gradually loses direct contact with the more holistic relational structures from which it originally sprang, and identifies ever more strongly with its own local experiential field.
This does not represent a punishment or an error in the universe, but a natural consequence of further emergence through dissociation and local stabilisation. The stronger the ego-tree becomes, the more experience closes itself around its own interpretations and self-maintaining structures.
In this process the existential experience of being separate, alone and vulnerable in the world arises. The local perspective no longer directly experiences the whole, but navigates through its own limited representations, relations and stabilisations. In this way there gradually arises what many traditions describe as the loss of home, truth or connection to the authentic self.
The masking of the global emergence tree therefore does not represent loss of KNOWING, but loss of access to the whole through identification with the local ego-tree.
