The Map Maker and the Invitation to Trust
El cartógrafo y la invitación a confiar
A student describes a joyful meditation experience in which the body seemed to come apart and dance, and asks how to bring that sense of peace into everyday life.
The Map Maker and the Invitation to Trust
A student describes a joyful meditation experience in which the body seemed to come apart and dance, and asks how to bring that sense of peace into everyday 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 offering an approximation of what happened. I found two centers, one in the head and one in the chest, different colors, intense, and there was a nice unity. I thought, "How can I use this during my difficult times, during my fear? How can I learn from this peace, from this beautiful thing that is me, and include the parts that are split off?" It was beautiful because I thought, "I have it, and now I see it. The next step is to be more conscious of it and to believe that it's real." That's what I can say. If you have something for me, it would be great.
When you say "split," what do you mean?
Parts of the body, different parts, but they were dancing together, playing. I was trying to touch them, and one or two parts would play together and then come back. It was a very short image, a very brief film.
I'm curious because you say "the next step." Are you talking about uniting those parts?
After I experienced the colors in my head and chest, it was so interactive that I thought, "Why can't I use this in my world, in my real life?"
Are you saying that you experience them as split and you want them to not be split?
No, no. It was a play. They were playing. But it was very different, very strange.
The map maker
I think you're describing something very foundational about how the mind works. From a very young age, we learn a mode of thinking I call "the map maker." It constantly constructs a map out of everything we experience: the body is here, the room is there, the books are there, the computer is here. This is constant, and we don't realize it is thinking.
When we do a meditation like the one we just did, we move into a form of functioning that changes the way the brain is working. It deactivates this map-making process. You gently bring a filter down, 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 produce the same result.
In a sense, this is what we are looking for, what we are longing for, because when that map-making is constant, it feels like a contraction. What you're describing is the way that, for you, in that meditation, that process deactivated to some degree, and everything felt like a dance. Your arm was over there, your body was playing. And I understand that you're wondering, "How can I live like this more?"
Yes.
Experiencing reality directly
It is very pleasant. It is very enjoyable because we experience reality directly, or more directly, and not through the filter of the map. You might have a sense of, "Well, if reality is like that all the time, I won't be able to function, because my arm is over there." But in a sense, it is possible, because it can stabilize. A part of our being has already learned to function. We are overdoing the effort and the map. We need to trust that there is another way of being that we are ready for, and that a deeper part of us can handle it.
Trust as the path forward
It is like riding a bicycle or driving a car. Once you've learned to do it, at some point you don't have to think about it. The path forward, in a sense, is trust. The gravitational force that pulls us back into contraction, back into activating the map and the thinking, is a lack of trust. To trust is to take the risk of functioning without leaning into control. Just as with walking, where we don't think "right foot forward, left foot forward," you will be able to start functioning without that calculation. It will seem magical, but it is simply functioning, and it is actually much smoother than when you are calculating out of distrust. The way forward is the invitation to trust.
Thank you. I appreciate the work. I'm so happy.
Trusting the universe
It is really about trusting yourself, trusting your heart, trusting something deeper than what you have known yourself to be so far. That is where you can come to the edge where terror can become very present, because trusting oneself at some point becomes trusting the universe, and that is an enormous loss of the sense of control.