We keep telling ourselves “the map is not the territory”. Call it a map, model, or internal representation, translation table – same deal.
Here’s one of the more attractive and enduring maps, it’s undergone many changes over the years. Here’s how it looked in 1915.
The straight lines bear no relation to the real train lines, nor the streets above.
It has always been very useful, and the real value of a map is its function.
Since maps are useful, every time a teacher presents a new map of consciousness, we’re attracted to how it can help us as a practical guide. However, any map is a construct that tells you more about its design parameters than reality.
We develop our energy as well as our skills by practice. There’s obviously a need to clear, balance and strengthen, then raise the vibration of our energy. A map is useful if it helps us do that.
There’s a small Buddhist book entitled That Which You Are Seeking Is Causing You To Seek. Essentially, your true nature, basic self-cognizing wakefulness, your Buddha nature within, is what leads you to seek enlightenment and realization.
Tarot card readers may use cards and their symbolism – all of which changes radically with each different deck. Carole Travis-Henikoff in Passings: Death, Dying and Unexplained Phenomena, says of her grandmother:
“When a client wished to see the future, Caroline read the Tarot cards or her astrological charts as a consulting physician reads an X-Ray. I don’t think she needed cards or physical props to tell someone what only they knew or what the future held for them. I believe she used those standard props, knowing that to simply sit across from someone and tell them what she could discern made her seem too powerful, hence too frightening. Thus she softened her innate knowledge and powers of observation with props in order to soothe her clients.”
With a pendulum, it’s been acknowledged for many years that the movement comes from the dowser, not the pendulum itself. The pendulum is an antenna. There’s an awareness that’s not fully conscious, and we train our sensitivity and strengthen the ability through focusing our attention. As people, we’re capable of extraordinarily fine energetic distinctions.
In any kind of energy or spiritual design, we focus on the energy in a very similar way, through our attention, to develop in ourselves whatever is the intention of the design. The properties of the design are inherent to it, but the power of the benefit comes from our intention to allow the energy of the design to work to its maximum.
The design is an antenna. We may be making the designs work, by our intention and by embodying the energies. When we’re looking for changes with the pendulum, we’re feeling an energetic pull. For the same reasons, where a pendulum is emitting energy through its tip, the design is informing the specific energy: if we make the pendulum move, we may also be doing the emitting – especially when it’s just a little bit of blu-tack on the end of a thread, which can work just as well as an expernsive design.
When I’m tuning in to the energy at the center of a circle, of a mandala, or the Chartres labyrinth, and enhancing my awareness every time I maintain contact with that energy, it’s still something coming from within “me” – meaning “a very porous bubble of indeterminate size, open-system in constant energy and information exchange with everything else “. This centering, awareness energy is the energy of awakening. The drive – or pull – towards enlightenment or liberation is also coming from within each of us. If we could directly, consciously and deliberately access, generate and enhance that energy within us, it could propel us in the right “direction” much, much more easily.
Say you want to strengthen and open your heart chakra. You get some image or symbol of the heart chakra, visualize it, and perhaps use some hand and arm movements. The real effect comes from (maintaining) the intention.
As ‘open energy systems in constant exchange of energy and information with our environments’, on a large or very small scale, such as gems and stones, we certainly are absorbing the information we need. People also get to the point where they have embodied that energy/information. In developing and strengthening these abilities, embodying them more and more in every aspect of our being and our lives, we eventually recognize they really are inherently part of us, and part of our true being. This is an aspect of coming home to ourselves. We have it all within ourselves, all along and all the time – and we not separate from the world around us, and we are also drawing on its energy and information all the time.
We are not the props we use, nor the need to use them. While we may use any kind of symbol such as a mandala for meditation, we are not that mandala, we are not the external representation. We are awakened by doing meditation and transformative work, but in the end it is awakening, and being awakened by, something inside us.
This is a major reason why each of us has to “work it out for ourselves”, and why each of us has to develop our own map.
© Malcolm Fraser 2022. All rights reserved.
