Proverbs 22:5 Meaning Thorns and Snares Are in the Path

The thorns and snares are not laid across a road by an enemy but grown by the mind that walks in crookedness, the mind still committed to attack and to guarding its grievances. Fear builds its own obstacles and then feels caught by them, so that every trap the ego meets is one it set while insisting the danger came from elsewhere. To keep the soul is simply to keep watch over what the mind holds dear, to refuse the crooked way and let each thought be handed to love before it can tangle into suffering.

Then the road clears, not because the world was tamed, but because the mind stopped weaving snares for itself. Distance from the thorns was never travelled. It was chosen, the moment attack was set down.

Thorns and snares: the obstacles fear grows across its own path, the traps the mind sets while believing they were laid by another Way of the froward: the crooked course of a mind still committed to attack, where every step meets what it made