No living creature could survive in its environment without some kind of a map. We use mainly a visual map, dogs a scent map, bats an auditory map. We also use our other senses to give us partial maps. And the brain coordinates the various sense maps and makes rational decisions on how to navigate and make a living. We all get a sense of beauty from our sensual maps, and derive our joy of living from them.

We say we love “Nature”. Yet all we know are Nature’s maps. Like Plato’s sage, we see (hear, smell, touch, taste) only the two-dimensional shadow on the cave wall. A shadow of what7 Of the Real Thing that casts the shadow, the thingin-itself in multiple dimensions of which we receive our navigational maps.

Only when we dig very deep in the physical sciences do we get an inkling of what lies beyond our cave. When we zoom in on the very small, do we get an inkling of the quantum world, and beyond that the micro-string world. No wonder that we find it very weird – we can have no experience of it through any of our sense maps. Only mathematical maps (models) can help us to navigate. Only when we zoom out to the very large (in space and time), do we get an inkling of cosmology, of beginnings and distant futures of the universe. This too is weird, in different ways. We don’t even know how to put together the very small and the very large, though there are hints that they are quite intimately connected.

Is cosmology and the quantum world the Thing-in Itself? Probably not, only the first layer in the boundary between our maps and the territory. Bohm spoke about the quantum world being enfolded in the deeper reality, and unfolded back out of it. Mystics perceive a reality which they cannot even describe in words. As in Cantor’s mathematics of infinite sets, there are always infinities beyond infinities ad infinitum. There are dimensions beyond dimensions (maybe only up to 26). There is Beauty beyond beauty, Truth beyond truth.

THAT, my friend, is the Territory. Meanwhile, let us enjoy our maps, and a little bit beyond.

What is lacking to make this a religion, is love. We are immersed in divine love, but like fish in the ocean, we discuss the existence of the Ocean.