Maps of Meaning
Being as an anchor in the midst of collapse
When we say we encounter reality, what we really mean is that we are interacting with our own perceptions. We create meaning out of experience and experience out of meaning.
Meaning is not merely an intellectual phenomenon - it is emotional and instinctual as well. In fact, meaning operates on all three planes of the body, the heart, and the mind. My dog does not possess much of an intellect. But he does possess emotions and instinct. At 6 pm every evening, he sits right in front of me, gives a short bark and stares intently. To his body, 6 pm means ‘dinner’. And if I don’t respond, he gets confused and attempts to get my attention as if to say,
“Don’t you understand?”
My dog doesn’t have a mind that ruminates on the past and future or has self-referential thoughts. But he still has a certain map of the world. A map that says: “This is a friend”, “this is a stranger”, “now its dinner time”, “now its time for a walk”.
And when reality appears to conflict with the map in some way - i.e. a friend ignores him, his dinner doesn’t arrive… he becomes agitated, confused, even depressed. In other words, he suffers. Expectation, anticipation, predictability - these are hardwired into his body and instinct.
Meaning is not merely an intellectual phenomenon. It is emotional. It is sensory.
When my daughters were born, I felt a flood of emotion - a love I had never felt before. And it has never waned after all these years. It is not a love that is intellectual. It is a form of meaning that is being made at the level of the heart. One that divides my world into those who I love with an unexplainable depth and those who I don’t.
Yet, even beyond the emotional level, my body is making meaning simply through its sensory perceptions. The experience of the color red is a form of meaning. There is no such color ‘out there’ in the world - only wavelengths of light. The experience of sound is a form of meaning - for what we call ‘sound’ is a simulation created through the detection of subtle air pressure waves. Sweet, salty, bitter - these experiences are forms of meaning as well.
What we call ‘experience’ then is just the aggregate effect of reality filtering through these maps of meaning. Thus, what we are truly experiencing is a three-dimensional matrix of meaning created by the body, heart and mind - which we call ‘reality’. And often we have no reason to question this matrix except when it appears to glitch.
Complaint, frustration, resistance, suffering - these are actually self-preservation mechanisms. When reality unfolds in a way that challenges our maps - rather than revise our maps, we push back on reality instead. We say “this should not be” as if the glitch is somewhere else other than in our own way of perceiving. But when pushing back is repeatedly unsuccessful we are often forced to question our own perception. This often takes the form of investigating a cherished belief, or questioning a long-held opinion.
Those periods of extended disillusionment that we often refer to as “the dark night of the soul” are periods of dismantling and reassembling our maps. Rewiring our minds to perceive things differently - with more yield in certain aspects of our experience and less rigidity and clinging to expectation.
Yet, often most of this reassembling happens at the level of the intellect. It is mostly psychological. It relates to beliefs, opinions, self-identity and such areas of experience which is why so many therapeutic models both mainstream and alternative are focused at the level of the conscious mind.
Yet, many ancient spiritual disciplines and wisdom paths have long known that the matrix of meaning that we inhabit is not merely mental. It is emotional and physical as well. It is one thing to lose your ideological bearings. But imagine losing your emotional and even physical bearings? Imagine waking up one day and seeing your children as strangers. Imagine looking out at the world and seeing the trees as red and the sky as green. Or being disgusted by the smell of food and salivating at the scent of rotting corpses?
It’s precisely to these depths that these ancient schools were willing to investigate. They recognized that intellectual meaning although highly dominant in our predominantly left-brain driven societies - was nevertheless the most superficial layer of meaning. The mere epidermis of the matrix. To go into the heart of the matrix - one had to descend deeper, risking one’s sanity. For all the dark nights of the soul one may have experienced, there are darker nights still that lie beyond the threshold of the known.
And yet a descent into that matrix of meaning is impossible if one is not anchored to something immovable. This is why this is called a spiritual investigation. Because being is that anchor.
Until there is an unshakeable recognition of this fundamental isness of experience - the fundamental amness of awareness - any venture into the matrix will be experienced as feeling lost. Yet, when this recognition is stabilized, grounded in a way that feels unshakeable - the descent can commence. Until then, one’s only feeling will be of being helplessly tossed around by circumstance and clinging to some experience of peace or calm for respite.
This is why most of what constitutes ‘spirituality’ today is not about anchoring in being but about buffering against circumstances. We are more preoccupied with generating ideal circumstances - both external and internal - than with truly inquiring into the substructure of our own perceptions. We want to transcend suffering - not to descend into it. We want to escape the beast - not enter its belly willingly.
Anchoring in being is what the Buddha did as he sat beneath the Bodhi tree before he began his descent. And through his descent he encountered all the forms of meaning his mind was making - the preferences, the prejudices, the desires, the aversions. And deeper still into the meaning-making of the heart - his loves, his fears, his passions, his anxieties. And then deeper still into the meaning-making of his body - his sensory perceptions, his instincts for self-preservation, his morbid fear of annihilation. Each visited him to test his anchoring in the isness, and each could not sway him.
His enlightenment then was not a freedom from the matrix but a clear perception of it through and through. And a recognition that the impermanence of the world was none other than the impermanence of perception, of meaning. And suffering was a feature of that matrix, not a bug. One that protected the matrix any time the matrix was threatened - by reasserting its version of reality as truer than what-is.
Suffering is merely the price we pay for the privilege of inhabiting a personalized reality.
The grief of loss is the price we pay for the privilege of love. The pain of injustice and evil is the price we pay for the privilege of inhabiting an ethical and moral life. There is no evil in the animal kingdom because there is no framework of ethics there.
Meaning creates diversity of experience, but it also introduces more friction points with reality. In other words, the more diverse our meaning, the more diverse our suffering.
