“The map is not the territory” is a phrase I first heard as a teenager when a good friend lent me his Robert Anton Wilson books. Taking the common understanding of “map” at it’s most literal, it’s obvious enough: a map of the city is not the city. Unpacking it as a metaphor, as usually intended: our understanding of a thing (any thing) is not the same as the thing itself.

And importantly, in both cases, alternative maps are almost always available. Any thing, any concept, can be understood in a number of different ways that are all perfectly true and accurate, if only for a given purpose. In the classic example, navigating the city of London with a map of the London Underground is a fantastic way to get around London when using the London Underground. But probably not such a fantastic choice when walking, driving, or catching a bus.

Similarly, while looking at our world through a materialist lense can be entirely useful in order to maintain ourselves in this material world, having a spiritual understanding of the same territory is certainly no less valuable.

Often problems arise when we conflate understandings, get our maps wrong, or cling to one perhaps outdated idea above all others. Demanding the London Taxi driver take the route we know to be true from our map of the London Underground, straight through that next building and straight on into the river. Or that all there is to have from art, poetry, music, or spiritual practice is inherently less-than, perhaps not worth our time, unless and until we find a way to utilise it for material gain.

Notwithstanding, while there are plenty of good and useful maps and ideas for our world, any wrong or misused map, such as the London Underground map to navigate through traffic, or a map of nations to assign a persons worth, can be useless and even dangerous, sometimes maliciously so. Alongside an open-hearted understanding that “different opinions are available”, so to speak, we need to remain aware and able to identify the opinions which share a truth and a positive value, and to resist those which do not.

Politics as a whole can be another useful example here. Nation states, ethnicity, cultural backgrounds, can all be useful maps at times to better understand our world, but whichever one we might be using it’s always important to remember that it’s just a map. It’s a way of simplifying in order to understand. The subject of our observation itself is always more nuanced, and often has many more ways in which it can be understood.