The Virtual and the Actual

The map and the terrain aren’t congruous. The map superimposes longitudinal and latitudinal lines over a magisterial globe that is actually devoid of them. The map demarcates landmasses and landforms into territories, states, nations, countries, so on, so forth. When we investigate the actual terrain, we can’t find the dividing lines anywhere. But we certainly do believe in them. Hell, we have constructed wars out of dividing lines. This ultimately means we have been deceived by the power of the virtual, or that which we wholeheartedly wish was real.

Like the cartographer who superimposes lines over the expansive, indeterminate lands, the mental mapmaker does the same thing with words. The mental mapmaker weaves a web of “self-understanding” and “self-interest” over a world that is dynamically elusive and elusively dynamic. The web attempts to capture the world, but, in reality, it only captures an infinitesimal fraction of the world. This fraction is then reified—it becomes internalized and is incorporated into the flow of the mentalscape. This fraction of the world, this fragment caught by the sly web, is also like a brick that helps construct the foundation of the rational soul. Furthermore, this foundation is augmented by compartments and furnishings which do nothing but separate man and woman from the dynamic elusiveness of nature. The abode of estrangement is the ego, or that which we wish was real.

“That which we wish was real” dominates the road of technological progress, and further exacerbates the malaise of the contemporary, collective psyche. It is the dividing line that puts otherness—wild nature, the dynamism of the cosmos—on the other side of the existential fence. But like lines on a map, it isn’t real from the perspective of the terrain. The terrain alone is real.

When we accept what is real in us, we no longer allow the mental mapmaker to spin webs of deceptiveness, dread, misunderstanding, negativity, and misanthropy. We no longer try to net the wind. We’re no longer beguiled by the sleight-of-hand of the virtual. We simply abide in what is our actual nature. “That which we wish was real” is jettisoned for a new paradigm.