The Raw Sensation and the Map
La sensación cruda y el mapa
A gentle exploration of the difference between our direct, raw sensory experience and the mental maps we layer on top of it.
The Raw Sensation and the Map
Bring awareness to the body.
You can have your eyes closed or eyes open.
Notice what the mind is doing.
There's no effort needed to do anything.
And if you notice you're trying to do something,
if you notice you're making some effort,
if you're noticing discomfort,
none of that has to change.
Noticing is always effortless.
Effortless awareness
In an effortless ocean,
we're swimming in the depths,
we attach to the waves.
The waves are the discomfort,
the tensions,
the struggles.
Whatever notices the discomfort,
whatever notices the struggle,
that which is aware of it
is always effortless.
And that part of us is so profound that we forget it.
We overlook it.
Take it for granted.
But that's the door to the kingdom.
It could be so obvious that we'd think, that can't be it.
So we try to find what we're looking for somewhere else.
We just can't believe it's already here.
We just can't believe that nothing is missing.
What is missing now?
So you can gently play with that question.
What is missing now?
And most likely that's going to release a beautiful machine
of thinking and imagination.
Imagination is going to provide all the beautiful reasons
why this moment is not enough.
So seductive.
So compelling.
And so one way to start piercing through this
is to be able to recognize that veil for what it is.
And just experiment
not buying into those stories.
The veil is always present.
The key is to know that it's a veil.
Two levels of reality
So you could say there are two levels of reality.
One is the raw reality of perception,
and the other is the veil of imagination and map making.
And it's a beautiful thing, this map making.
It doesn't have to stop.
All that is needed is
just to know the difference,
at deeper and deeper levels of reality.
So in this moment,
you're experiencing raw sensation and perception,
and then there's map making, imagination.
Exploring the feet
So again, if you put your attention to your feet,
you can pick one, the right or the left,
and notice: how did you know what I meant when I said feet?
That's a map.
And the sensation of the feet, or the foot,
what does it taste like?
What is that experience?
That's the raw sensation.
Now, if you look closely,
what you would call a foot right now
is some space,
some undefined space.
What is it? Tingling sensations?
Extremely undefined.
A sense of aliveness and sensation.
It moves and it changes without a definite shape.
But if you think of it as a foot,
you allow the contour, with what you know it looks like.
You can see in your mind where the toes are,
where the skin ends,
the color of the skin,
the shape, where the bones might be,
where there's flesh.
But all of that is imagination, map making.
The direct raw experience of the foot is mystery.
It's a mysterious sensation in space,
and even the notion of space is a map.
So just take a few moments to contemplate that
and explore the difference between the raw sensation
and the knowing through memory and maps.
The knowing of a newborn
The raw sensation is the experience of a newborn child.
When we were born,
we had absolutely no idea,
no understanding
of what the world of raw sensation was.
Completely unformed, no boundaries or edges,
no inside or outside,
no me and you,
no past or present or future.
That experience, that form of knowing, is not lost.
It's right here right now,
which has made a lot of maps
and then started living more and more in the world of maps.
Where does the foot end?
If you go to the raw experience of your foot,
can you tell where your foot ends and the rest of the space begins?
Can you find that edge in the raw sensation,
or do you find it just because you know,
through memory, through maps?
In the raw sensation you don't even know there's a foot.
All you know is a direct experience
of tingling sensations
diffused in the open space of awareness.
No edges.
No clear contours.
You can explore that space,
this constant aliveness,
constant moving, tingling.
Exploring the hand
Explore the space of your right hand.
Notice that as soon as I said hand,
you most likely see the image of a hand
overlaid where you have the sensation of a hand,
the raw experience of the hand.
Sound and sensation
Sustaining space.
Also hear sounds, the sound of my voice.
You can put your attention to the world of sound, the dimension of sound.
Then you can go back to the dimension of sensation, body sensation.
Just explore going back and forth between sound and body sensation.
And everything you hear,
notice how there's just the raw experience of sound,
and then there's a knowing of what they are.
That's a human voice.
It's male.
English words.
The understanding of that is in the world of map making.
And as you explore this,
just discerning what is raw sensation
and what is mind and imagination,
that's all that is needed.
You can start to see
the world of imagination and mind
is much, much smaller.
Where am I?
Bring your attention to your face.
As we move our attention up to our chest and our head and our face,
we tend to get closer to the space that we call I.
You get closer to the sensations
that we define as the center of me,
where I am located.
There's an experience of I, of being,
and we attach it to a sensation,
a subset of our experience.
Then you can explore the question:
where am I, in your current experience?
The space of the awareness that I am.
Is there a sense of being located?
A sense of "I am here and I am not there."
So this is me in this bubble, in this space,
and those sensations, perceptions, sounds,
all the rest is out there, not me.
Looking for the boundary
If you have that experience,
very playfully, look for that boundary.
What is that?
What I locate as "me here"
and that "not me there."
Where does one begin and the other end?
Just play with a thought, a possibility, a hypothesis,
that there is no such line, boundary, separation.
Not in the raw experience.
It only exists in your imagination.
It only exists in your maps.
Beautiful, practical, useful maps.
And that's fine.
None of that needs to change or stop.
Just one tiny shift.
One small confusion makes all the difference:
believing that those maps, in the world of imagination, are reality.
That line, boundary, separation;
this part of experience is me, inside of me,
the rest is outside.
Just one simple confusion, just the belief
that that is absolutely true.
Just as in geography,
when we walk to the border between countries,
we find nothing there.
Empty space, alive
When you look for that line, that edge,
where I end and the rest begins,
there's just empty space.
Alive, full of sensation,
fully unknowable,
full of mystery,
exquisitely intimate.
The whole universe of your experience inside of you,
so intimate.
The closer you get,
it might bring up some fear, some pain.
You get close to that.
Softly, gently.
You might start discovering
that it is what you've always been looking for.
It was never lost, just overlooked.
Intimate,
infinitely alive,
so close you can't move away from it.
No one hearing
There is no one hearing sounds.
There is just sound, sounding.
The space where sensations and perceptions appear
starts to dissolve into the sensations and perceptions.
The universe is so intimately close,
there's no room for me even.
Fears, emotions, pains arise.
They're just all part of the universe that is me.