The Map and the Mystery
El mapa y el misterio
A student reflects on the paradox of stillness and the pull of daily life, leading to a conversation about how mental interpretation constructs our sense of reality, and why the fall into that construction may itself be necessary and even desired.
The Map and the Mystery
A student reflects on the paradox of stillness and the pull of daily life, leading to a conversation about how mental interpretation constructs our sense of reality, and why the fall into that construction may itself be necessary and even desired.
The paradoxical side of the person who feels he should be going to work, the thought that there's someone who needs to do something, and then this stillness of nothing. Those two sides of the same coin, but no coin in between: that's really present here.
Yes. The trick is when we take that knowledge, which is of the mind, and treat it as something more real than it is. I'm using the word "knowledge" here as a reference to mental understanding. When we take that mental understanding to be more real, when it becomes a true thing rather than just a map, that's where the trouble begins.
Do you mean that as a belief?
When the map becomes the territory
That's exactly what a belief is. If you say, "I am me and I have to go to work," that's functional. It has a place. But when that becomes closer to an absolute reality than just a map of how this mystery moves and unfolds, then we are believing in a representation, in an interpretation. A belief is a collapsing into an interpretation. The mind provides a map; the map is an interpretation. When we take that interpretation to be the reality, it starts to reinforce the illusion of solidification: "This is reality, I am a body, this is what I am," more than this open mystery. That's a sign we are buying into the map as reality. It is experienced as a contraction. You could say that's the Christian original sin: biting from the fruit of knowledge and falling from the garden.
It also gave the sense that if there was someone who needed to go to work, that introduced a concept of time. Something over there rather than something over here gave the spaciousness of time, space, and matter.
Exactly. That is how time, space, and matter are constructed in our experience. And it's very practical and useful. Again, the trick is when we begin to live as though that construction is the reality. Direct present sensation and perception become a background afterthought, and the mental interpretation becomes the foreground, becomes "the real." The more we do that, the more we are collapsed into what ultimately doesn't feel good.
The necessary fall
This is all really about an unnecessary collapsing and contracting, but in a sense it is necessary for everything else to exist. It is necessary for a child to learn how to create a map. There is going to be an unavoidable identification. After a process, we start to move beyond that, though we don't exactly go back. As Jesus said, "Be as a child," but it's actually a transcending of that form of functioning.
The difference between a newborn and somebody who has to some degree awakened is that a newborn cannot operate with a map at all.
Right, like stepping out of the way of moving vehicles, or going to the toilet by yourself. It would be a messy world.
We see this in the animal world. Animals can develop a map to some degree, but I don't believe they have developed enough to transcend it. It's hard to know, but that transcendence seems more available in humans because it requires a further development to be able to disidentify. I bring in the animal world because we're talking about newborns, who are closer to a state of pure being and perception. In the animal world, that level of functioning can be sufficient. But something further is available to us. And this transcending (though the word points to attaining or achieving) actually has a side that is much more about allowing and letting go.
I often think about the difference between dogs and humans. Things happen to both dogs and humans, but dogs don't have a story about it. Dogs have the inability to create a story. Humans have the ability for story-making, storytelling, and also story-believing, which is when the story becomes more real than raw experience.
Is that where "suffer the little children to come unto me" comes from? I've always thought of it as the empty child: as you grow older you suffer, and at the end you go back to nothing. I got that from what you're describing here, the difference between a newborn and a slightly awakened person. There's that path of suffering from the newborn to death. Before I came to any kind of spiritual understanding, I would have thought that verse was about children who died young, who suffered in accidents and went to God. That's a very different view from how I see it now.
The beauty of the fall
It includes all of that. My perspective is that there is a need to eat from the fruit of knowledge, to fall from heaven. It's not only a need; it's a want. There is something very beautiful in the falling from the garden. There's a deep desire and longing in us to experience that. But at some point, suffering grows, and it becomes sufficient for us to want to return home. Since we're in a Biblical moment, the story of the prodigal son is exactly that to me.
It's interesting about the Bible. "As thou shalt give, so thou shalt receive." There are many things in it that never used to mean anything to me. I'm not a religious person at all, but these phrases come to mind now, and I think: give love, receive love. There's only one thing. If giving and receiving are the same, there's a oneness about it. I've never thought of the Bible as such a practical tool before. The heaven that Jesus pointed to is the one that's already here. The fiction tends to point to it after death, by following some rules in a book. That's the problem.
What no description can touch
I'm having the same experience. I've never been religious, and yet all religions have things that speak to me. I can't really say it's the same heaven he was pointing to, but it seems a lot like it. It's hard to know, because it's so mysterious that no description of it can touch it. Somebody else describing it always carries an unknown layer of interpretation. It may not be in the description of heaven; it's more in the recognition of what suffering is, and what its absence feels like. It seems like the absence of suffering in existence.
It seems indescribable. An empty flow, just being. Beyond words.