Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection — Living in Theory

Jack Owicki
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Palo Alto, CA

My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
Which God or nature hath assigned.
– Sir Edward Dyer, late 16th. Century

One day last month I was out hiking in unfamiliar countryside with friends, and we had only a very rudimentary map. I didn’t worry that we would get seriously lost, but I wasn’t certain that we would be able to find the right trails without some trial and error. I commented to my companions that I wished we had a good topographic map.

One of them said to me, “Why do you think we need that?” I said something about the map making it easier to navigate our route.

This story seems eminently unimportant and forgettable. But in the weeks since then I’ve thought about it several times. A more accurate response to my friend’s question might have been, “I want a decent map because I want to know where I am.” And where indeed was I? I think that’s a deeper question than it seems on the surface.

One answer is that I was standing in a clearing on a sunny afternoon, amidst colorful spring wildflowers, the scent of alder, and the sound of the wind through the trees. And that’s a good answer.

But it wasn’t enough for me. With an adequate map, I could locate myself at a particular point along a journey, in relation to its beginning and end. In relation to the last hill climbed and the next bend in the trail. In short, I would have placed myself within a coherent, if somewhat abstract, model of the world around me.

I’m always filtering my experience through models that try to make some sort of sense of life. It’s as though I live in two worlds, or, more accurately, the same world apprehended directly by my senses and indirectly as patterns created by my mind. I suppose everyone does the same thing to one degree or another.

People have been thinking deeply about these kinds of things for a long time. Plato taught the existence of ideals that have a deeper reality than the objects of our senses, which are only shadows on a cave wall. Aristotle emphasized the world as reported in a straightforward fashion by the senses.

More recently, something similar has surfaced in theories of personality types. Carl Jung talked about the way people receive and process information. Some, he said, are sensing types, tending to rely on their sensory impressions of the external world. Others are primarily intuitive, and obtain information largely from introspection and paying attention to the mind’s eye.

I’d like to close with a parable that I heard for the first time this year, in fact twice from apparently independent sources. Maybe somebody’s trying to tell me something. Strikingly, the parable begins the same as did the story with which I opened this reflection.

A man was out hiking in unfamiliar countryside. As he came to the top of a small hill he saw a stream ahead of him. Looking at the map he was carrying, he saw that it did not show a stream. He looked back and forth between the stream and the map. “Well, I guess there’s really no stream there,” he said to himself, and he walked on.

That parable strikes uncomfortably close to home for me. So let me change it a bit to make it more to my liking. A man was walking through the desert. As he came to the top of a sand dune, he saw a lake shimmering in the distance. Looking at the map he was carrying, he saw that it did not show a lake. He looked back and forth between the lake and the map. “Well, I guess there’s really no lake there,” he said to himself. “It’s just a mirage.” And he continued on his journey.

I don’t know why I have such a need for mental maps of life, the universe, and everything. I don’t particularly think it’s a bad thing, or that I’m disengaged from the immediacy of experience. But it does cause me to wonder about the nature of reality.