The Map and the Ocean
El mapa y el océano
A meditation exploring how the mind maps and divides experience, and what opens when we look beyond those familiar boundaries.
The Map and the Ocean
Arriving together
You can have your eyes open or closed.
There's a sense of joining,
where right now in this moment we're not alone,
in the sense that there's an intention
to connect to this group.
So there's going to be, in some way, something
that we can point to or name as a collective field.
And it'll have a particular flavor for you.
Just notice that.
That's just the context we're in.
Bring a curiosity to how that feels for you.
You might notice something, or not; that might not be happening for you.
We want to attune to subtleties of our experience.
You might notice there's a certain quality of presence.
It's a little different when you're alone.
Sensing the body and its location
Bring to your attention
the senses and experiences
that come from what you would call physical body.
Notice that experience is happening
in a certain kind of location.
And point your attention to it.
And notice how this sense of location requires a subtle kind of thinking
to map out your experience and say the body is in this location.
Within my experience, the body is in this location.
You notice the sounds, any sound you can pick up, my voice or background noises.
Notice how instantly, as soon as the sound is noticed,
the subtle form of thinking,
the mind,
maps it out and places it in a location.
Watching the mind at work
We're not trying to stop thinking,
we're not trying to change anything of what is happening.
Right now we're just interested in understanding how our mind works.
Not an intellectual understanding,
rather to see it in action.
Like a magician, we want to see it perform a trick over and over
so that we can understand how it's functioning.
It's a very subtle mechanism that
in previous meditations I described as the mapmaker.
A form of thinking that structures our reality.
Very useful.
The map and the territory
We confuse the map with the territory.
If I were to describe the territory, it would be one field, infinite,
mystery,
sensations, perceptions, sounds, thoughts, emotions, all happening in the same space.
It's really a bit of a map, because what is sound,
what is sight,
how to distinguish them: it's a form of thought.
Prior to thought,
sound and sight are not distinguishable.
It's like seeing a painting with two colors.
You can have the experience of raw perception,
and then there's that subtle layer of thinking that turns it into two colors.
The more we look at the map,
the further away we get from the territory.
Location is only existent on the map.
No separating anything, like waves in an ocean,
nowhere to set a line to separate one wave from another.
Even the mind and the mapmaking and thoughts and emotions are part of the ocean.
It's one more kind of wave mixing around with everything else.
Inside and outside
When you hear a sound,
are they really in different spaces?
Something inside and the other outside.
Inside and outside of what?
Where do you draw that line
in your actual, direct, current experience?
Where is the line?
It couldn't be more accurate to say,
describing your current experience,
everything you're experiencing,
absolutely everything is outside of you, or everything is inside of you.
Where is your boundary?
Where do you end?
Every experience you have of you happens in the same space
in which you experience everything else that you call not you.
The mystery of choosing
Consider now: choose a finger of your hand.
Choose a hand.
For example, the index finger of the right hand.
Focus on the sensation of that finger.
Decide to very gently move it.
Start moving it.
Stop moving it.
Explore that.
Where is that choice coming from?
It feels so intimate.
But there also is something really mysterious;
in a sense the choice is happening,
coming out of the void,
a mysterious place.
How different is that movement,
that choice,
from a wave crashing on a beach shore?
It could possibly be an inevitable consequence of the Big Bang.
So the experience of choosing is also just happening.
The experience of "I just chose,"
like another sound or sensation,
something just happening.
The ocean playing at being a wave
What if where we are is the ocean choosing
to feel like it's only one of the waves?
Imagine that.
What an amazing journey for the ocean,
to play with the experience of only being one wave.
How it rises,
crashes with others,
picks up a surfer.
Living, experiencing the journey.
What if this wave could simultaneously know
that it is the ocean?
Would something have to change?
Would it have to merge with the ocean?
Would it have to do something?
Achieve something?
Maybe just, at most, remember.
Returning to your experience
Okay, your current experience.
Notice that what you call a wave is your body, your mind.
Let's see if maybe it's a better map.
Everything that you're experiencing is the totality of that ocean,
but it's an infinite ocean.
You've learned to draw a line
inside of the ocean of your total experience.
You draw a line
and call a tiny portion of it I, me, mine.
Notice how tight that feels.
What opens when you loosen the map
You start moving from believing that the map is reality
to the actual experience,
direct contact with reality.
Permeable.
Light.
Practical.
Everything will appear to be in the same space.
Inner and outer will blur.
Things will feel more alive,
full of mystery,
unknown,
unpredictable,
radiant.
The dullest moments will be full of a tingling sensation of aliveness,
substantial, electric.
What I'm describing is real.
We always just overlook it,
narrowing attention to the map.
No listener, no breather
If you're able to look more closely:
for example, when hearing a sound,
we abstract the sense of subject, or I, which hears.
That is part of the map.
When there is a sound, there is just a sound.
A ripple in infinite space.
Not a sound there and I here, listening.
Sensation of breathing.
There isn't, in reality, the I which is the subject of breathing.
Just breathing.
What you feel to be the experiencer is just another ripple,
just happening in the same space as sights and sounds.
Improving our maps
We need maps.
Very useful.
We can improve them.
Refine them.
When they're very inaccurate, they will create problems.
We have maps of the physical world and we improve them.
We learn that the sun doesn't orbit around the earth.
On a similar scale,
there is a social map that we adopt,
one that explains what we are.
Not only is it flawed,
but we believe ourselves to be that map.
A society was attached to the earth being the center of the universe.
So we are attached to our maps.
The biggest step to seeing how we can be free
is to see how we don't want to be free.
That turns things on its head,
because now we cannot play victims,
cannot blame anything.