The Map Is Not The Journey

The words we have at our disposal are quite often beneath the task to sufficiently capture who we are. Not only do they strain under the weight of using them to try and convey our nature one to another; we struggle to fully grasp the depth and breadth of our own being even with self reflection. Sometimes our words are worse than inadequate, they can serve as an outright delusion – a ghost that appears real, but has no substance. Once the ghosts made of words are made real on a wave of belief, they can trap us in a prison of false reality. Though our nature is such that we hunger to share ourselves intimately one to another; that which we are able to share is throttled by the delusions embedded in the symbols we use as fuel for the vehicle we use to journey to that place of intimacy.

We do things for reasons we do not understand. We then perform posthumous verbal autopsies on those behavioral expressions – as if these verbal arrows we sling at our past behaviors explains their causes – they do not. Our words are a map, but often to an unreal place, and we easily confuse the map with the journey – the symbol for the reality.

 So deep is our tendency some of us buzz around like a bee, pollinating the human flowers on our social landscape with words – impregnating them with our position. We then falsely using that belief we have cultivated as sufficient evidence that what we have said is real. In effect, our deceit has turned on us. Our true self is a vast sea of behaviors – the totality of which cannot be carried on the winds of words. It is possible the vision of our full nature is out of reach through our verbal lens.

Some of us ride glistening waves of words as if they are literal stand ins for reality, but they more often bear a resemblance to emotional steam venting from the much deeper super-heated undercurrents that move a thin skin of tectonic plates on the surface of our being. We bow to the polite fiction that our identity can be encapsulated in this thin skin of behaviors we project to the world, when in reality what we show is an extruded crusty distortion of the vastness that lies beneath the surface.

In light of the fact that we so easily conflate the superficial artifacts we adorn ourselves with for the whole picture, we should recognize that understanding ourselves is no easy task. The broken relationship with our personal identity we so commonly grow in verbal soils laced with assumption can render us a blind navigator and a spectator in our own lives. It has been said the unexamined life is not worth living. It is quite possible the unexamined life is not able to be lived at all. How can we have lived if we have never encountered our self, much less anyone else? Have we lived if we have only encountered the false gods we conjured up as a band aid over our loneliness? – A cold comforter in an otherwise unbearable world.

Our words can conjure a false reality that cripples our capacity to engage in the authentic intimate relationships we need for a fulfilled life. This visionary strangulation, fostered on a wave of words, chokes off the vital social nourishment we need. We sink beneath the waves and drown in our own delusion, starving for intimacy, gasping for air with the only tool at our disposal, the same words we drown in.

Those of us taken by the undertow of abstractions fade to the shadowy depths of a life of passionate distraction rather than genuine substance. We may still pretend to search for and move toward a purpose in life, but we have in reality settled for lies that consume our time and never render the nourishing fruit of clarity.

A few of us that get the brief opportunity to recognize the gods to whom we have genuflected our whole lives. From that perch of clarity we realize how false they are and try to warn those who have yet to waste their lives in service of them. This effort typically comes at a time when we have little more opportunity to cease the day and cultivate something meaningful. We spill this wise counsel of experience on those yet in the midst of the storm and they cannot heed our wisdom because they cannot hear it over the din of their own delusion.

One of the most important goals we can set in life is to discover our self – to become aware of the steering mechanisms that drive our experience – and from this awareness – to forge a rudder to point our vessel toward a place of fulfillment. If we are not diligent we will have passed from cradle to grave having never participated in our own lives except perhaps as a commentator, because we were lost in a storm of our own little words.

Biology is The Song The Cosmos Sings

The behavioral characteristics of biological structures rhyme. From the relatively simple single celled organism, to the entire biosphere there is an echo of form and function on widening scales. Behavioral characteristics at one level in the structure ebb and flow in a wave pattern at other levels.

Each cell inside our body has a skin in the form of a semi porous selective membrane. The membrane is geared to sense, communicate and negotiate relationships with the internal and external environment. These relationships are aligned under such purposes as sensing and responding to the environment, communicating with neighboring cells, letting in nutrients, expelling waste and defending against pathogens that might disrupt the function of the cellular system. The larger organs in our body have these same principles of form and function embedded in them. The external parts of our body including everything from skin, eyes, ears, anus, hands follow the same principles of form and function expressed at the cellular and organ level. The structural ideas reflected at the core are echoed in a rhyming pattern throughout our biological system. We are, in effect, a song written in the fabric of space-time and matter-energy.

If we widen the lens, this same rhyming aspect of form and function echoes outward beyond a single organism. A species develops a skin. Human communication itself is largely based on abstract membranes we call words that form the effect of a skin around a concept. Tribalism is the description of a cultural body that is also an ideological, ritualistic and sometimes geographic or resource driven skin. Expansionism and assimilation is the same principle as eating and digesting external resources. Religion, government, business, and professions as well as academic disciplines also develop this same skin like attribute within their structure.

Of course skin is just one of the many form and function aspects of a biological system that are echoed on many scales. The point here is not to outline all of them, but to describe the rhyming process itself and use it as a platform to gain some insight into ourselves. If we turn our eye toward understanding our nature with any degree of accuracy we must concede that we are far more a reflection – an echo – of the form and function of nature. The more we understand the depths of that communication made to and through the cosmos, the more able we are to navigate with intention through the waters she defines.

The Key to an Intentional Life

There is a fungus that infects ants and manipulates their thought and behavior patterns.¹ Infected ants are rewired by the fungus to change their basic behavioral nature. The rewiring shifts the ants behavior from a role that supports the sustainability of the ant community they depend on for life to instead devote their lives to ideas planted in their head by the fungus. They are now compelled to go on a journey into the forest in search of a place that best serves the purposes of the fungus.

The fungus overlord that has taken over the life of the ant drives them to find a spot suited perfectly to itself under a leaf at an appropriate level off the forest floor. The ant is then driven to attach itself to a major vein on the underside of that leaf where it starves and dies as it is slowly devoured by the fungus it served and sacrificed its life for. The fungus then pops a fruiting body out of the ants dead skull to litter the forest floor with more spores to spread itself to other ants.

The notions that we encounter in our lives that inform us who we are can be a powerful current that steers us much like the fungus steers the life of the ant. Some of these notions come from the inside – who we are without outside influences – what we might aspire or want to be. Some are from the outside – roles that others have planted into us by virtue of whatever prejudicial arrows they happen to carry in their behavioral quiver. Can we forge an intentional live in the midst of currents such as these? It can be difficult. Like the fungus, ideas installed from the outside in can seem like they are our own. Some of us hold ideas about money or other cultural institutions that we will sacrifice our lives for – not because we believe in them, but because we have been infected by them.

One of the necessary ingredients to forge an intentional life is a healthy bit of skepticism about the ideas we hold as our own. These things we think about our self – who we are – may be installed from the outside in, not born from the inside out. Sifting through the pile can be a difficult task. We develop momentum in terms of identity. What we become accustomed to thinking about ourselves becomes harder to see from a different perspective. The longer we hold on to ideas and behave as if these notions are our own, the more we see them as who we are.

Searching oneself honestly and then choosing to be aligned with being the person we choose to be, rather than quietly accepting the roles cast on us by social pressures can be quite a challenge. But it is a necessary one if we don’t want to to be driven to go where the cultural winds take us and end up under whatever leaf it decides is our fate. There is a Lebanese proverb that says; “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” Each of us must decide if we’re going to be part of the caravan that moves on – making things happen, of one of the dogs that barks out commentary about those happenings.

1

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis