The Map Maker and Direct Experience
El cartógrafo y la experiencia directa
A student describes a joyful meditation in which the body seemed to dissolve into playful, dancing fragments, and asks how to bring that quality of peace into daily life.
The Map Maker and Direct Experience
A student describes a joyful meditation in which the body seemed to dissolve into playful, dancing fragments, and asks how to bring that quality of peace into daily life.
It was a very strange experience. The beautiful thing near the ending was that I felt as if I were in the air, so joyful. Parts of my body started becoming separate, playing and going back together. I can't fully understand it, but I'm just trying to approximate what happened to me. I found two centers, one in the head and one in the chest, with different colors and intensity, and there was a nice unity between them. I thought: how can I use this for my difficult times, for my fear? How can I learn from this peace, from this beautiful thing that is me, and include the parts that felt split? It was beautiful because I could see it, and the next step is to be more conscious of it and believe that it's real. If you have something for me, that would be great.
When you say "split," what do you mean?
Parts of the body. Different parts, but they were dancing together, playing. I would try to touch them and then one or two parts would play together and then come back. It was a very short film, a brief image.
I'm curious because you say "the next step." Are you talking about uniting those parts?
After I noticed the colors in my head and my chest, they were so interactive that I thought, why can't I use this in my real world, in daily life?
But are you saying that they feel split and you want them to not be split?
No, no, no. It was a play. They were playing. But it was very different. Strange.
The map maker
I'm asking a few questions just to understand what you're describing. I think what you're describing touches on a very foundational aspect of thinking. The mind, from a very young age, learns what I call the "map maker." It is constantly making a map out of everything we experience. It says: the body is here, the room is there, books are there, the computer is here. This is constant, and we don't realize that this is thinking.
When we do a meditation like the one we just did, we enter a form of functioning that changes the way the brain is working. It deactivates this map-making process. In a sense, you gently bring the filter down, removing a layer from how we experience reality, and you get an opportunity to experience reality more directly. It is the same kind of shift that happens with psychedelics. In meditation, you can do it as well.
The contraction of constant mapping
When that map-making is constant, it feels like a contraction. What I think you're describing is the way in which, for you in that moment, in that meditation, the map maker deactivated to some degree. Everything felt like a dance: your arm is over there, parts are playing. And you're wondering, "How can I live like this more?"
Yes.
And that longing makes sense, because the nature of that experience is a lot more pleasant. There is a lot more satisfaction in experiencing reality directly and not through the map maker.