The Uninterestingness of Maps
Adventuring your way into spiritual learnings
Hey readers,
I recently started a book club with a few friends to invite more critical inquiry into the books we read. The first on the docket was Aldous Huxley’s Island. Immediately, I found it to be a delectable read, satiating my hunger for resonant content that speaks to this part of me searching for answers.
I’m still only halfway but the last chapter was one I instinctually had to put the book down every few minutes to pause and reflect, sitting on what I just read. It was as if I could feel these new ideas sprouting up and felt compelled to give them the sunlight and water they needed to mature.
This spontaneous generative energy gave rise to a childlike giddiness to explore them even further. What better way then out loud to a small but growing audience online…
Weekly Wonderings and Wisdom
Without ruining or boring you with too many details - the chapter entails a wise doctor bringing the protagonist to a coming-of-age ceremony for the youth where they consume a light dose of magic mushrooms to glean insight into the nature of reality. During the ceremony, the doctor guides the adolescents through the journey involving various religious and symbolic teachings.
I couldn’t help but feel a certain Truth1to them that resonated on a deeper level from my own lived experience while also intuiting them to be True in a more universal sense. My innate urge when I come across what feels like an inherent Truth that provides insight into leading a better life is to want to share them with those around me. If it ignited this spark in me, surely it would do the same for others?
But then I started to practically envision individual friends or family members reading this, seeing passages like:
Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It's his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval isa thousand million light-years.
In picturing the conversation after I foresaw eyes glazing over, blank stares, and cheeky remarks about about the woo woo nature of it all. The reality is, to most people, this amounts to mindless drivel. Fancy words for hippies. And despite having a dramatically different reaction myself – I don’t entirely disagree.
When it comes to any spiritual teachings, fundamental lessons about reality - any words, stories, or symbols used to convey the message, should not be confused with the message itself, which is often something you have to experience yourself.
Imagine your friend returns from a camping trip to Yellowstone with raving reviews. Curious to get a taste for what it was like, you inquire further. He takes out his map and walks you through his trip – pointing out where he started, guiding you through the trails he took, milestones he passed, campsites he stayed. You listen intently, doing your best to recreate the experience in your head.
By the end you feel you have a strong intellectual understanding of what a trip to Yellowstone entails being able to grasp what the terrain looks like, the type of wildlife you’d encounter, etc. But having never gone yourself, the depth of your understanding is inherently limited.
Meanwhile, another friend who’s gone before is grinning ear to ear listening to the recap, evidently moved by the stories as he daydreams, getting brought back to his own experience.
That’s me reading Huxley. It’s not his map he’s showing me that’s eliciting this reaction but my prior lived experience that’s stirred from it. I’m not intimately familiar with most of what is being talked about in this ceremony, the stories, the meaning behind the symbology. I don’t know Shiva-Nataraja. But there are parts of it I do know, that I draw on from things I’ve done, ways I’ve felt.
Take lila, the cosmic play, something I’ve come across numerous times. The idea being that reality as we know it is a theater for the higher powers. This material world we live in is a play, a stage for us to act out the non-reality of an illusory, dualistic existence where we are separate from everyone and everything around us.
Now this isn’t just an interesting concept to me. It’s a relatable experience where in various practices like deep meditation, breathwork, plant medicine I’ve felt a dissolution of ego, an indescribable unity with all around me such that I start to feel that the “normal” world around me is somewhat theatrical.
And so, it’s not just the precise substance of what Huxley writes about that makes this a compelling read for me, it’s the relatable experience I’ve had that leads me to reminisce, examining my experience more closely, learning from others interpretations, challenging prior assumptions, ultimately making this the worthwhile, delectable read that it is for me.
But without having done any of this work, had I not put in the time and effort to experience any of that, I’d be looking at a map with lines and squiggles of a place I’d never been to before, listening to someone tell me about their camping trip.
Thought of the week
I think about this a lot.
I’ve seen Truth spelled out with a capital T that emphasizes it being an inalienable fact of life enough times now that I now read a simple “truth” as missing those qualities it almost feels like it could be “false.”