If you want to explore yourself, consider how you see the world. Like any explorer, you will either follow or make a map; it could be a physical map or a mental map. The latter is the focus of or the background for many of these essays. We are mental cartographers. Our map-making helps us make sense of our world, enabling us to see the relationships of its components both to one another and to us personally. We always identify ourselves in a place full of relationships—never in nowhere.
If you look at a wall map, you’ll notice that it is a distorted representation. That distortion is a product of turning a round world into a flat image. You have the same difficulty if you try to piece the peelings of an orange into a continuous unit with no gaps or try to cut a tennis ball into pieces that fit uninterruptedly into a two-dimensional object. To counter the necessary distortions that occur, cartographers use projections. You can think of a projection as an image cast by a central round light bulb or a cylindrical fluorescent light that lies in the middle of a glass globe. The light casts the outlines of continents onto a flat screen. Depending on the position of the screen, the projection distorts different parts of the continental outlines. Where the screen touches the globe’s surface—where it lies tangent to the curve—the flat map is very accurate, but greater separation of the screen’s edges from the globe mean greater distortion. That’s why in the common Mercator projection Greenland looks on a flat map to be almost the size of South America, and Antarctica looks like the largest continent. In short, projections distort, and mental projections distort similarly.
Distortion in mental maps largely occurs because attitude and emotion dominate much of who we are. As children in school, for example, we sit in class beneath standing teachers. We tend to couple their authority and their relative position (standing vs. sitting) into a projection that adds to the physical stature of teachers. Meeting those teachers later and after becoming adults, we can be startled by a smaller physical reality than our young minds imagined. The process of remapping reveals, also, that our early projections of places also differ from our current perspectives. We replace the old distortions with both corrections and new and different distortions.
It is important to remember that we mentally map in the contexts not only of attitude and emotion but also in the contexts of memory and knowledge both true and false. Mental mapping is a complex process, and that’s the reason that we have so much difficulty “knowing ourselves.” We aren’t always aware of the influences under which we map. Nevertheless, we continue to search for Self as a one very important relationship in a world of relationships: Objects to objects, people to objects, and people to people.
In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki notes that catching life “as it flows” is the “idea” of Zen. In light of that definition, a daily altering of personal cognitive maps is a kind of Zen. For most people reared in Western Culture daily life entails, to speak tautologically, living daily, but probably few westerners would, like Bodhidharma, say they did not know who they were or argue that doing nothing is doing something. Westerners like defining themselves by doing things. But my guess is that regardless of one’s being from the Occident or the Orient, every person draws mental maps that always include memory, reasoning, emotion, and attitude.
Suzuki explains that Zen is both “a discipline and an experience which is dependent on no explanation.” In the West, we like explanations. It’s the legacy of logic and formalism and of people like Rene Descartes and the rationalists like Denis Diderot. Westerners pride themselves on ostensible reasoning from cool mathematical analyses of character types to foolish rationalization. Diderot wrote an interesting comment: “To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”
You might wonder how that statement applies. Recall that on some maps of about a half millennium ago, the cartographers would write “Here there be dragons” for regions as yet un-surveyed. In their minds, unexplored regions held some dangerous mystery; they had no places, objects, or people to relate to one another. Maps are explanations of the components of the world; we can even map intangible components like beliefs and attitudes.
Mapping means putting things next to other things, seeing relationships. Humans can’t prevent themselves from doing this. Except in those suffering from damaged parahippocamal gyri, cognitive mapping is a natural and indispensible part of being a motile life-form. Regardless of what Suzuki and others might write or say, they themselves map relationships and use those relationships to explain the world. Even if a Zen monk sees a pebble fall from a cliff and believes that in the falling some mystic aspect of being has revealed itself to him, he also does what we do in the West: He sees spatial and temporal relationships, and he maps the occurrence in the framework of a personal geography.
We can’t get around our distortions. In fact, we sometimes use them for better understanding. Cartographers who work with demographics often show distorted shapes in cartograms to reveal some endemic component of place. For example, if we were to map countries by population, India and China would dominate all other continental areas. If we were to map states by age, the geographically tiny New England states would be disproportionately large because Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire have populations with a high average age. Our mental maps are also cartograms. Those images of towering teachers we mapped in our youth are examples.
It’s my contention that you can best know yourself and can best find inner peace by examining your mental maps and by understanding how your personal cartograms relate to the external world. In doing so you will have to acknowledge that cognitive maps are not products of disembodied reason, statistical computation, or mathematical quantification. You will not uncover the geography of your life through a set of logical proofs regardless of all the statistical patterns, quantified analyses, and enumerated fashionable life patterns proclaimed by experts. Mental maps are infused with attitudes derived from personal histories and culturally inculcated patterns. When you understand better the underlying motivations for and processes of mental mapping, you will see that your maps record who you are and how you understand and deal with people and places. Cognitive maps reveal character: Knowing your personal maps and how you derived them means knowing yourself.
If what you map reflects the world as it is, you’ll live effectively. The trick for you is not to impose patterns where none exist or to think that all projections are equally good at representing the world.
If you look at a wall map, you’ll notice that it is a distorted representation. That distortion is a product of turning a round world into a flat image. You have the same difficulty if you try to piece the peelings of an orange into a continuous unit with no gaps or try to cut a tennis ball into pieces that fit uninterruptedly into a two-dimensional object. To counter the necessary distortions that occur, cartographers use projections. You can think of a projection as an image cast by a central round light bulb or a cylindrical fluorescent light that lies in the middle of a glass globe. The light casts the outlines of continents onto a flat screen. Depending on the position of the screen, the projection distorts different parts of the continental outlines. Where the screen touches the globe’s surface—where it lies tangent to the curve—the flat map is very accurate, but greater separation of the screen’s edges from the globe mean greater distortion. That’s why in the common Mercator projection Greenland looks on a flat map to be almost the size of South America, and Antarctica looks like the largest continent. In short, projections distort, and mental projections distort similarly.
Distortion in mental maps largely occurs because attitude and emotion dominate much of who we are. As children in school, for example, we sit in class beneath standing teachers. We tend to couple their authority and their relative position (standing vs. sitting) into a projection that adds to the physical stature of teachers. Meeting those teachers later and after becoming adults, we can be startled by a smaller physical reality than our young minds imagined. The process of remapping reveals, also, that our early projections of places also differ from our current perspectives. We replace the old distortions with both corrections and new and different distortions.
It is important to remember that we mentally map in the contexts not only of attitude and emotion but also in the contexts of memory and knowledge both true and false. Mental mapping is a complex process, and that’s the reason that we have so much difficulty “knowing ourselves.” We aren’t always aware of the influences under which we map. Nevertheless, we continue to search for Self as a one very important relationship in a world of relationships: Objects to objects, people to objects, and people to people.
In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki notes that catching life “as it flows” is the “idea” of Zen. In light of that definition, a daily altering of personal cognitive maps is a kind of Zen. For most people reared in Western Culture daily life entails, to speak tautologically, living daily, but probably few westerners would, like Bodhidharma, say they did not know who they were or argue that doing nothing is doing something. Westerners like defining themselves by doing things. But my guess is that regardless of one’s being from the Occident or the Orient, every person draws mental maps that always include memory, reasoning, emotion, and attitude.
Suzuki explains that Zen is both “a discipline and an experience which is dependent on no explanation.” In the West, we like explanations. It’s the legacy of logic and formalism and of people like Rene Descartes and the rationalists like Denis Diderot. Westerners pride themselves on ostensible reasoning from cool mathematical analyses of character types to foolish rationalization. Diderot wrote an interesting comment: “To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”
You might wonder how that statement applies. Recall that on some maps of about a half millennium ago, the cartographers would write “Here there be dragons” for regions as yet un-surveyed. In their minds, unexplored regions held some dangerous mystery; they had no places, objects, or people to relate to one another. Maps are explanations of the components of the world; we can even map intangible components like beliefs and attitudes.
Mapping means putting things next to other things, seeing relationships. Humans can’t prevent themselves from doing this. Except in those suffering from damaged parahippocamal gyri, cognitive mapping is a natural and indispensible part of being a motile life-form. Regardless of what Suzuki and others might write or say, they themselves map relationships and use those relationships to explain the world. Even if a Zen monk sees a pebble fall from a cliff and believes that in the falling some mystic aspect of being has revealed itself to him, he also does what we do in the West: He sees spatial and temporal relationships, and he maps the occurrence in the framework of a personal geography.
We can’t get around our distortions. In fact, we sometimes use them for better understanding. Cartographers who work with demographics often show distorted shapes in cartograms to reveal some endemic component of place. For example, if we were to map countries by population, India and China would dominate all other continental areas. If we were to map states by age, the geographically tiny New England states would be disproportionately large because Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire have populations with a high average age. Our mental maps are also cartograms. Those images of towering teachers we mapped in our youth are examples.
It’s my contention that you can best know yourself and can best find inner peace by examining your mental maps and by understanding how your personal cartograms relate to the external world. In doing so you will have to acknowledge that cognitive maps are not products of disembodied reason, statistical computation, or mathematical quantification. You will not uncover the geography of your life through a set of logical proofs regardless of all the statistical patterns, quantified analyses, and enumerated fashionable life patterns proclaimed by experts. Mental maps are infused with attitudes derived from personal histories and culturally inculcated patterns. When you understand better the underlying motivations for and processes of mental mapping, you will see that your maps record who you are and how you understand and deal with people and places. Cognitive maps reveal character: Knowing your personal maps and how you derived them means knowing yourself.
If what you map reflects the world as it is, you’ll live effectively. The trick for you is not to impose patterns where none exist or to think that all projections are equally good at representing the world.
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