The Map is not the Territory
The Map is Not the Territory. I would purport in these six words alone, we have a powerful paradigm toward achieving peace.
People hold different maps of reality in their heads. And just like regular maps, our maps contain points of interests connected by routes and byways, rivers and oceans.
In our heads are many ideas and thoughts connected by values, beliefs, experiences, and all else that help shape the way we think, speak, and behave.
The need to survive. Just like a regular map drawn based on observation, so the maps within our heads are influenced by our observations of the world around us. Our observations, in turn, come from our senses of which the five most overt are our eyes, our noses, our hands, our ears, and our tongues. We see, smell, feel, hear, and taste the world around us. And the data that we receive from our senses gets filtered by our past experiences, beliefs, and values to help us create meaning.
The meanings we create are intrinsically connected to our need to survive. Whether an event is perceived as a threat or not, we then choose a response that we deem most appropriate at that particular point in time.
All these – observing, making meaning, choosing a response – happen in just the minutest fraction of a second. We are hardly even consciously aware of it.
Every day, this process is replayed several times from the time we first step out of our beds to the time when we sink back into them. Actually, even when we are asleep, our senses are still at work. They never truly stop because, again, we have an intrinsic need to survive.
We are different, and yet the same. Obviously, people live in different parts of the world and would therefore be in wonderfully varied environments. A child living in Fiji would be exposed to different things relative to a child living in Argentina.
We do not even need to get that far. Just think of yourself now and at each person around you. We all grew up in different places with different people, and would therefore have been exposed to different things and different experiences that all helped to shape the way we perceive and process and decide. Even siblings within the same family would have experienced different facets of their parents’ personalities at different environments or contexts.
Subsequently, two people can see the same event and both may have two different processes and responses to it. The clincher is, though they have different views about it, they may both be right. And most of the time, they are.
In fact, we may even say that given the exact same history and experiences and genetics and all else that helps mold a person, we would be thinking, speaking, and behaving the exact same way as the next person to any event that comes along. In this way, no one then is ever truly wrong.
And so we don’t judge. All this, of course, does not eliminate a person’s responsibility for his or her actions. We have laws – moral or juridical – to decide the degree of offensiveness of someone’s behavior.
As individual human beings though, it seldom helps to be judgmental. Being judgmental presupposes that people should know better. We hold them to a rigid, well-defined, boxed-in context that is all in our head. Ah, but then the map is not the territory, remember? People hold different maps and therefore are functioning the best that they can at any particular moment.
Rather, we accept.
NLP Marin, the home of Maharlika NLP’s lead instructors, sums up a beautiful, doable approach to living, quite humbly and elegantly: Honoring What Is, Embracing What Can be.
Fully understanding and appreciating a person’s map is a wonderful gift we can all offer to anybody. Starting with square one, we believe each person (and experience) is worthy of love and respect, with no strings or conditions attached.
To help someone means we intentionally step into their experience, to understand how their map was created and how it functions. We rely on their map instead of imposing our own. In so doing, we can better appreciate their external behavior. And with that understanding and acceptance, we may even go a step further to help them along the path of healing and growth if they so wish. What a breath of fresh air that would be – for us and for them.
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