Say you’re walking through Death Valley, trying to find your way back to the highway. Luckily you’ve got a good paper map.

As you walk, you scan the territory around you for landmarks. You see some large-scale details: hills, rock formations, and gullies. Also some minute ones: pebbles, gangly plants, trails through the dust where snakes have been.

These smaller details would never appear on a map, because they’re not conducive to navigation, yet they are certainly part of the territory, as are lizards, birds, forgotten stone arrowheads, the bleached bones of cattle, and the fossils of Mesozoic squid.

At least right now, you too are a part of the territory, along with your clothing and boots, canteen, Tilley hat, and California highways department map of Death Valley.

When you look at a map, it appears at a glance that the territory is inside the map. This map contains the whole of Death Valley National Park — every stretch of its highways, every point of interest, both gas stations, and a handful of residential hamlets. You hold the whole expanse in your hands. You’re in there somewhere, presumably south of the line that says Highway 190.  

But you’re not in there. You’re out here. Lift your head up: you’re in the territory, in the baking sun, a speck between horizons – and so is your map. There’s never been anything but territory, in fact, and any maps present are just another part of said territory.

Humans love maps so much that we often get this relationship backwards. We spend most of our lives poring over maps of various kinds, situating ourselves and other objects on them. A business’s ledger, as one example, is a kind of map – numbers in spreadsheet cells represent in-person transactions, crates of product, brick-and-mortar realities of all kinds. This sort of mapping is very powerful. A ledger can allow you to see at a glance a business’s total financial position; it would be physically impossible to see at once all of the warehouses, stock, employees, and purchases represented in that ledger’s figures.

Even a movie is a map. We’re watching symbols that represent some hypothetical territory. Actors, pretending to be other people, are filmed doing things that aren’t actually happening. When we watch the footage of this pretending, ideally we believe momentarily that it’s not pretending. We see Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. We feel like he’s actually being mind-controlled by Thuggee cultists, and perhaps if Short Round pleads to him adorably enough he’ll become himself again.

When my cat watches Platoon with me, she’s seeing figures that perhaps resemble mice or dogs to her, and sometimes she is fooled by that and hops up in front of the screen. But she’s missing the whole point of the movie – she’s not seeing the United States locked in a tragic conflict that will end with a famous helicopter evacuation of the Saigon embassy, of which countless documentaries will be made, replaying images tourists will recall with genuine grief when they visit the Veterans Memorial in Washington. Zoey the cat just has no idea what I’m seeing here. She has no idea what’s going on in the world at all!

But I’ve got it backwards. My cat is much more firmly attuned to the territory than I am. As a human, I get lost in maps for fun and by accident, pretending I’m a cowboy or a Victorian courtier, or assembling a view of the whole world from Substacks and news products. The cat is always sniffing the territory, studying it, rubbing her face on it.

Humans can only do all this mapping and symbol-mongering because we evolved the ability to hallucinate stuff we’re not presently sensing. We can summon to mind images of territories that exist elsewhere or even nowhere. Money we haven’t earned yet. Predators we’ve never encountered. Disappointments we haven’t suffered yet. Futures that are possible, or even impossible.

This ability has allowed us to build cities, establish moral codes, and go to the moon, but it also presents a huge liability: confusion about what’s there and what’s merely being thought about.

One problem with living from maps upon maps upon maps is that eventually we don’t know what the hell is going on. Life is filled maddening contradictions – one map says a thing is true, another says it’s not – and trying to live in the impossible world you believe is somehow depicted in those maps can be hell.

You can easily have the thought, for example, that you simply can’t get sick right now. You have too much to do and too many people depend on you. I can’t get sick! This thought seems absolutely true.

Then you have another thought: I can get sick. Oh no! That’s also true! I can get sick! *And* I can’t get sick! What a horrible place to be, this land of pure contradiction, of infernal rock and hard place. A horrible territory to live in!

Of course, the contents of your thoughts are map, not territory. Territories do not contradict themselves. The actual territory is that you are sitting in a room, undergoing the mental spasms of thinking, imagining you are in this hellish territory in which things that must not be true are definitely true.

Thinking is certainly useful, but since it amounts to using hallucinations as references to live by, we inevitably confuse real for hypothetical, and life becomes a bad trip for a while.

There’s no way to completely avoid this sort of confusion: we need to conflate map and territory, at least a bit, in order to get what the map is about. We’re able to enjoy the movie only if we believe, at least momentarily, that Indiana Jones is real. We’re able to “see” a business only if we believe that the spreadsheet numbers somehow are warehouses full of inventory.

The only defense is to practice seeing the map (thinking) as just another feature of the territory, like your highways map is a physical thing in the desert. Thoughts themselves – hallucinatory mental spasms — are real phenomena you experience, just like sounds and smells. What they depict is not being experienced. When you’re having a thought about your boss getting mad at you, you’re experiencing a thought, not your boss. You still might feel real shame and fear though.

A person can intentionally practice seeing thoughts for what they are: momentary images or words, appearing seemingly in front of or inside your head – fleeting apparitions which can trigger alarm, relief, or other emotions and bodily processes.

When you can see a thought for what it is, even just occasionally, they loosen their hold on your mind, and don’t as easily drag you into stressful fake hells.

How to Become Aware of a Thought

Basically, thoughts can be categorized as either mental image or mental talk. You either “see” or “hear” something that suggests some phenomenon that isn’t actually here.

Think of Paris. Think of an apple. Think of the groove to Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust.

When you do, you’re sensing something. A real phenomenon. While some people don’t feel like they “see” mental images, or “hear” mental talk, you at least get some kind of impression of the thing, a mental whiff of Eiffel Tower or an electric bassline.

Thought is just another sense experience, and although it’s very subtle and quick, you can notice it, like you can notice a bird zip by the window.

Try this when you have a few minutes:

Sit with your eyes closed, and wait for the next thought. Wait for the appearance of any sight or sound in the mind – an image, a bit of a song, any appearance tugging at your attention – and just note it. If it’s visual, say the word “see” to yourself. If it’s auditory, say the word “hear” to yourself. If it’s more of a feeling, say the word “feel” to yourself. If you don’t know, just use any of these labels. Then just watch, listen, or feel the thought go.

All you’re doing is noting that a thought occurred, and you’re giving it a simple label; the label helps you stay aware as a thought, a momentary sense experience. That’s it — you’ve seen a thought for what it is, without confusing it for its subject matter. You recognized a map as a map.

Then just repeat the process. Wait for the next thought, and just note it and label it. Do all this in a relaxed, matter-of-fact way. You just want to notice the thought, as a thought, in any way at all.

Most thoughts only happen for an instant, and they aren’t very vivid. It might just be a flash of an image, or an indistinct feeling of something happening elsewhere. By the time you say the label, it will probably have dissipated or turned to something else. It takes only a few seconds to note a thought like this.

If you get caught up in subject matter, or confused about what’s happening, just drop it and start again: wait for the next thought.

Doing this practice a few minutes a day might give you the sense that thought — that life, seemingly — is “loosening” a bit. Thinking may begin to feel more local, smaller, less sticky, less liable to explode into more thinking. You may begin to see a given thought as a momentary eddy, a little swirl of smoke here in the room with you, rather than a real, honking thing out there in “the world.”

It turns out thoughts themselves are very tiny, just small specks of territory, like a little paper map held in the hands, in the midst of a landscape too vast to fathom.

***

Goodbye 2024! End of Year Sale!

2024 is over, and I’m going to go meditate in the woods for a week, but before that I’m having a sale. Two things to know:

1. I’m offering the Mindful Bundle again. This is all of my mindfulness products (two courses and three ebooks) for the silly-low price of $79 USD. That’s less than Camp Calm by itself.

Learning just one of the techniques available in the Bundle can get you on the path for life. Maybe I’ll see you on retreat one day.

[Get the Mindful Bundle Now]

2. How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged is on sale right now. If I may suggest a humble New Year’s goal: double your productivity in 2025. Learn the Block method in about an hour, then start crushing your to-do list.

You have to use the following link to get the sale price: [Get HTDT now]

What is the Mindful Bundle? | What is How to Do Things?

***