The Map is not the Terrain

Most of my blog entries come from conversations I am in where the message I write seems particularly clear to me. I don't usually post the other people's messages unless I have their agreement, although I sometimes paraphrase them to give the reader some idea what I am speaking in response to. This is a response to a discussion on 'Firstprinciplesgroup' on Yahoo.

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I agree somewhat, but the map is not the terrain. A belief, any
belief, is not the same as pure experience. Science finds that out
daily, and scientists, most of them, do go on experience first, maps
last.

If a map be vague enough, purely symbolic with many concepts which
relate to nothing experienced, and a person clings to the map's
'truth', then they stumble over and over again. If they cast away the
map and simply adapt to their experiences, they discover and can cope
with each new experience without limitations that exist only on their map.

Reality is so much more than any conceptual map can contain, having
one can be more of a handicap in survival than an asset.

In communicating with words, we pass maps, filled with symbols which
may or may not have the same meanings. If I say, "My toe hurts." then
the person I am speaking to must have had the experience of their toe
hurting to relate that statement to, or they cannot understand the
statement. They then try to fit other pains they have experienced to
that statement, gaining some meaning from it. But if they have no
toes, or have never had pain, they are as a birth blind person
listening to descriptions of color. All languages are conceptual, even
math, and only the experience from experiments can clean the GIGO
(garbage in/garbage out) out of math produced maps.

The greatest, ultimate, complete experience a human can have cannot be
described in words at all. This is the meaning of "Those who know
don't say, and those who say don't know." It can only be pointed at.

A conceptual map, a 'belief system', a communicated 'understanding'
cannot give actual knowledge of anything, because only experience can
give knowledge of Truth. At best, a conceptual map, a 'belief system',
or a communicated 'understanding' can only point to the experience, so
the person can know it exists, at least in the map of the speaker.
Concepts in their essence, can have no truth within them, and since
the imagination can produce vast cosmologies with concepts, anything
can come from maps made from concepts.

Fortunately, what people do is often totally different than the maps
they tell others they go by. What they do counts, what they believe is
almost irrelevant, having almost nothing to do with their actions.

All the conceptual creations, at best, are like having a map of one
square inch of New York City. The individual who has the map thinks
all of the city is just on that map, and even if that map is 100%
accurate, the city a foot away can be so different than the map, it
makes using the map purely futile, and even produce bad, even horrible
results.

The world is full of one inch conceptual maps, and the result is the
extrapolation of the greater world from those one inch maps, and great
harm comes from it. Religious and political fanatics run up against
terrain that does not fit their one inch map, and they seek to impose
their map upon everyone by violence and agony.

Yet, if none had a map, they would simply adapt to the next inch, and
the inch after that, based not on map making, but on experience.
Without a map, they could surf life and know the real thing.

The Universe is far more than we THINK it is. WE are far more than we
can THINK we are. But if we give up thinking, and simply perceive, be
aware, we can know Universe as it is.

And to show I have no problem with the love neighbor principle, etc,
this is what I have observed:

When we perceive reality cleanly, we find that our neighbor, all the
people on the planet, ARE OURSELVES. It's only when it comes from a
conceptual map which has only the meanings the tiny idiot translator
called the 'ego' uses that this becomes a matter of interpretation and
debate.