The Map and the Territory
El mapa y el territorio
A student asks about the shift from conceptual mapping to direct experience, and the teacher clarifies that the practice is simply noticing the difference between raw sensation and thought about sensation.
The Map and the Territory
A student asks about the shift from conceptual mapping to direct experience, and the teacher clarifies that the practice is simply noticing the difference between raw sensation and thought about sensation.
So when you say there's a flip toward more of an experience rather than the mapping, how does that work?
You won't necessarily notice that flip. For some people it happens really clearly and suddenly, but it's not that important. It might be something you start to notice over time: the map-making starts to become a vague afterthought. It starts to become less of something in the foreground.
The simplicity of the practice
The practice is really, really simple. It's just to notice the difference between the two, and to notice it not intellectually. Intellectually, everybody already knows that there's a sound and there's a thought about the sound. But what matters is to actually, in the moment you hear a sound and notice the thought about the sound, see the two as different.
How thought replaces experience
Usually what happens is there's a sound, then there's a thought about the sound, and we forget about the real sound. What becomes the real thing is the thought of it. So in the mind, it's as though there was a bird singing and a car passing, but the real, raw experience becomes an afterthought. It gets numbed out and blurry. What we're trying to do is turn that right side up. What's really happening is this experiencing of raw sensation and perception, and there are some vague thoughts about it. When perception is primary, those thoughts become much more functional. The mind only does things that are practical or functional. Otherwise it just goes idle.
So my idea of pushing beyond the space is just my mind trying to map out something?
Yes, you're trying to map out a direction, how you can get somewhere. What we're doing here is actually not going anywhere. It's not changing what's happening in any way. You can't really get anywhere. For the purpose of what we're here for, there isn't a getting anywhere. It's just understanding more and more deeply the present moment and what's happening at any given moment.
Because it's already supposed to be here.
No need for faith
Yes. You don't have to believe anything. There's no need for faith. Think of it as a scientific exploration. Take the hypothesis that there's something here, always present, and you don't have to go anywhere to get it. It's all about understanding what the reality in the present moment really is.
The scientific exploration begins simply: there's raw sensation and there's thinking about it. What's more real? Once the raw sensation becomes obviously more real, there's another exploration, more subtle. There's raw sensation of your environment and your body, and there's that which is aware of what appears. So the question becomes: you hear a sound. What is hearing the sound?