When I began this writing project, I had planned to share some experiences and perspectives which challenge our everyday perceptions of reality. This is, of course, a big deal—to think that the table in front of you might not be solid, that distances you cross to go to the grocery store might not exist in any meaningful way, and that even time might be questionable. Most people dismiss such thoughts out of hand.
Our senses report a reality we can see, touch, and interact with. Furthermore, it seems that you and I have a largely similar experience when we look at that table and rap our knuckles on it. Scientists can measure its size, mass, and conductivity—and those results hold in a desert, on a mountain, or in my living room. We have good reason to accept this “consensus reality”, and our day-to-day experience works very hard to convince us it’s real.
I deal with what’s real every day. In my “day job” I look at a bunch of numbers, assess probabilities, and use rigorous statistics to understand certain aspects of the universe. This work then involves taking risk and dealing with the consequences. “Magical thinking” is the kiss of death for traders in financial markets—we deal with structured bets that collapse to a concrete outcome at some point. Scientific thinking and methodology are tools I rely upon every day.
And, yet, there’s something else. There are hints of something beyond the edge of the map, and these hints are everything. See, if the map is right, it does not allow for compromise. The map says a few things that are non-negotiable:
Only matter and energy exist, nothing more.
Every event has a physical cause.
There is no such thing as meaning or value—the universe is indifferent and any such ideas are human constructions.
Whatever the human mind perceives can only come in through the senses1.
The map itself says the system is closed—the map fully explains everything. There is nothing outside, beyond, above, or below the map. The map may be wrong in some of its details, but this will be corrected over time with better observation and refinement.
This is a very strong claim. In fact, it’s so strong, it’s brittle. It only takes one piece of evidence showing that there is something beyond the map to call the whole map into question. This is a topic for another day—I’m quite convinced that evidence exists, I’ve experienced some of it firsthand, but writing about it must be done carefully.
What I want to do today is to challenge us—both you and I—to think about maps with precision. It’s far too easy to be dismissive and to say something like, “Of course the map is wrong. There obviously is meaning in the Universe/God created the universe and God is not on the map/I had a precognitive dream where I saw something that played out exactly as I expected.” We must be more careful than that. Nothing is obvious here.
What we are talking about is the domain of ontology2. Ontological claims deal with what is, questions about reality itself. These are some of the biggest claims we can make.
The materialists, who believe that there is nothing at all beyond matter and energy, have built a consistent map. This map says that there’s not even anything possible beyond matter and energy. This is one map.
There are other maps. But as I’ve looked at them, I’ve become aware of something: a person’s perception of reality (and the ontological claims that follow) reflects that person’s training, background, and expectations. It’s one thing to say that our perceptions and experiences are personal, but it is dangerous to expand this to sweeping claims about “what is”. Can we rely on any map at all? How would we know?
Let me share some vignettes of map makers. Some of these will be more familiar to some readers than others:
Today’s neuroscientists propose a map of reality that looks out on the materialist map, but sees everything through electrochemical brain circuits—a map of neuro-machinery and nearly mechanistic consequences, and nothing more.
Bob Monroe was a famous consciousness researcher from the 1970s who experienced travel out of his body. He laid a foundation for other first-hand explorers, and wrote several books detailing the reality he encountered. This reality is highly structured with numerical labels that reflect his background as an engineer, and also include extensive “schools” where souls are educated outside of the human body. It’s impossible to read his work without being constantly reminded of his perspective as an engineer.
Tom Campbell is a physicist who has written an interesting set of books called My Big TOE (Theory of Everything). His map includes a “Larger Consciousness System” (LCS) and individuated units of consciousness. Reading Tom Campbell, one cannot help but see constant reminders of a map maker who imprinted emerging database technologies of the late 20th century. On his map, one goes into a trance and queries that LCS exactly as one would a database—these reminders are constant in his work, which also features ideas of entropy and computational mechanics.
The various incarnations of simulation theory popular among the Silicon Valley tech people clearly reflect a computational mindset and background. These people work with computers and naturally have created a theory that literally everything is a computation! There are such obvious issues here that are never really considered. First, this idea could not have existed even fifty years ago. It rests on computer games and simulations that we just figured out—unlikely to reflect the underlying substrate of reality itself, no? Furthermore, all these ideas are simply repackaging of older “spiritual” ideas, sanitized for the computer age by replacing spirits with logic gates and circuits. The winking eye of God is now a power light on a big server somewhere in the cosmos. This, of course, reflects the map maker as computer scientist.
Carl Jung supposedly saw everything through psychological dynamics, archetypes, and manifestations of the collective unconscious. I say “supposedly” because the thinkers who came after him worked hard to make us believe this what he was saying, that he was a scientist, when, he in fact claimed his insights came from contact with discarnate intelligences and alchemical forces. More on that another time.
Aleister Crowley, the self-styled “wickedest man in England” saw a map of reality that reflected his training in medieval esoterica: structured hierarchies of angels and demons, correspondences between physical and non-physical realities, and ways to manipulate these for effect.
Ken Wilber has an “integral theory” that’s simply a business consultant’s org chart, reflecting everything into quadrants and nested organizational layers.
Whitley Strieber, for many decades, saw everything as a reflection of UAP and ET interaction with humans. He began to wonder if these experiences (shared by others) were so incongruous to consensus reality that everyone else’s map was wrong. Maybe this experience was the “real behind what seems to be real.” If I read him correctly today, his map is changing toward there being something even behind the ET experience. (This, by the way, is what a good map maker does. When something doesn’t fit, revise the map.)
Religious thinkers from various traditions see a reality that, not surprisingly, confirms the beliefs of their religion. In fact, if this does not happen, that thinker is usually surgically removed from the lineage. Meister Eckhart stands as an interesting exception to this rule—his perception of the immanence of God (i.e., the presence of God in the manifest world as opposed to Him being fully transcendent and apart from “dirty” physical matter) almost got him excommunicated or worse. An interesting exercise is to ask for opinions of him in a Christian discussion forum today. You’ll usually be told (if you are talking to an educated group that is aware of his existence) that he was a heretic and should be avoided. Some map users work hard to protect the map as-is. For them, maybe there is no territory beyond the map. Joan of Arc, of course, did not fare so well.
And, guess what, the materialist map? These thinkers are profoundly influenced and structured by the Enlightenment: rationalism rules and empiricism provides the only reasonable standards. The Industrial Revolution casts a long shadow. Almost everything can be explained by cause and effect; the Universe and everything in it can be reduced to mechanistic principles. It’s all machines. In fact, it’s machines, all the way down3.
So, maps are tricky. Map makers aren’t to be trusted.
What’s the real message here? Perhaps, humility and a constant reminder about the limits of our knowing. When we think we understand the territory, perhaps we’re only touching the Illusion. Perhaps there’s another illusion behind the illusion.
Maps certainly are not to be trusted, and neither are we. We need to keep this in mind as we go forward, you and I.
Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. – Aquinas via John Locke. “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”, which says the mind is a blank slate before it receives sensory experience, and all knowledge comes from sensory experience. Later thinkers (Leibniz especially) pushed against this with “nisi ipse intellectus” (“except the intellect itself”).
As of 2025 it’s become very common in certain circles and certain kinds of podcasts to throw philosophical words around. These words are useful because they do a lot of work—they pack meaning and operations in tight, precise packages. But they are often a barrier to understanding and can be used as a virtue signal. You might hear a phrase such as, “Ontology is the participatory framing of Being that discloses the affordances of reality within the horizon of relevance, while epistemology constitutes the recursive negotiation of those affordances through the dialectic of sense-making and justification; teleology, in turn, orients this negotiation toward purposive trajectories…” on a podcast, but you won’t read it here. I will try to always define terms when they are first used in one of these essays.
In case you miss the reference, there’s a famous story attributed to several scientists: after a lecture on the orbital mechanics of the solar system, a lady raised her hand and said, “This, Sir, is rubbish. The earth is a flat plate on the back of a tortoise.”
“And what, pray tell, is the tortoise standing on?”
“A turtle. Which is standing on another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down.”
Greatly enjoying these. I can relate, as I had a Kensho moment years ago, and it set me off on a similar journey-by no means complete, which is actually not a bad thing.
This resonated with me deeply. The way you frame maps as reflections of their makers reminds me that none of us really escape our training, our metaphors, or the era we live in. Even when we’re trying to see clearly, we end up sketching the world in the language we know best.
What intrigues me is the tension between humility and necessity. We know our maps are illusions — and yet we must still walk by them, cross rivers with them, raise children under them. A map may be partial, even brittle, but it still guides the next step. I sometimes wonder whether the truest stance is to carry multiple maps at once, knowing each is flawed, and let the friction between them keep us awake.
Your piece also reminded me of something I learned years ago from Ed Swanstrom when studying knowledge management — the idea of meta-systems, structures that include within themselves a way of self-assessing and self-correcting. It makes me wonder: do we also need meta-maps? Maps that don’t just chart the terrain, but also contain within them the tools to test, revise, and sometimes discard themselves. That seems like the kind of humility that can still guide action.
Thanks for this essay — it opens a wide door, and I look forward to seeing where you take it next.