Inner-Outer Mapmaking
If you want to start making outer connections, start making inner connections. If you want to get more coherent pictures of the world, pictures that are more intelligible, clearer, in better focus, and even if you want to have a better chance of knowing where to point your inner camera at the stuff “out there” and when to press the shutter, then bring your focus to your own being. The more coherent our inner worlds, the more coherent our pictures of the world can be. It’s all about building connections, within and between.
Having a halfway decent picture of the world to navigate by can be pretty helpful. For example, getting from one end of the room to the other without running into walls, furniture or unexpected obstructions can be a lot easier if we have a reasonably accurate picture of what’s out there. But it’s important to recognize that vision as we commonly think of it may not be needed at all. So when I write about “pictures” and use other visual metaphors, be aware that these are only metaphors. There are other ways of knowing, other ways of mapping and navigating the world.
All of them, whether it’s echolocation among bats and cetaceans or an inner vision that has nothing to do with the eyes, rely on building up a level of inner coherence and the successful integration of inner and outer worlds. Break up the coherence of what we think of as the “inner world” or the connection between the inner world and what we call the “outer world,” and suddenly the picture starts to lose value in successful navigation and decision-making. We run into things we’d rather not. Start making the connections, and suddenly a better, clearer and more useful picture of the world can start to emerge, enabling us to navigate toward more desirable conditions for living.
In some ways, that’s the purpose of these writings. The tagline of my Substack channel reads: “Experimental prose exploring inner worlds, outer worlds, and the connections between them.” What I’m describing in the current essay is part of the reason why this is worth doing. Whether or not I share the writings that I produce toward this end, my own inner world is clarifying through my writing and the connection between it and my outer world is strengthened. I inhabit the world differently. And I’m not just thinking. I’m feeling, too. And I’m checking my perceptions. I’m seeing what holding a particular way of seeing and mode of being that comes with it does to my experience. All of these are critical to the inner picture-making process.
Cut a 5x7 photo of your friend into half-inch squares, and you will probably not recognize it anymore. Cut up a map of your home state with a pair of scissors and then try to use it to find your way to the next state to see what’s going on there, and you’ll probably find that it’s not so useful of a map anymore. The mind that gets scrambled with drugs, chronic poor nutrition or stress, emotional trauma, and/or physical pain or injury gets the same results. This is why all of these methods are used in torture: Destroying the inner capacity to make a coherent picture of the world sets the stage for the imposition of a new picture.
Speaking of torture, the people of the United States used to be strongly against it. In our collective moral mapping of human behaviors, torture was understood to be wrong, always and unequivocally, and “un-American”. What happened? My assessment: Hundreds of millions of cases of the media-induced equivalent of closed head injuries. A lot of people got hit over the head so many times that their moral compass stopped working. The last few decades read to me as if the goal has been to institutionalize torture, and the means to do so was to institute other, more broadly implemented torture programs. These are subtler perhaps, but they seem to be getting the job done.
And please understand, in making these connections, I’m not trying to trivialize torture or traumatic brain injury of the type that may follow from a physical concussion, for example. I worked with a TBI student early in my teaching career. He’d been injured in a car crash. I was gentle. I greeted him when he came into my classroom and sat down even though no class was scheduled. We’d talk a little. Then I walked him to his real classes. I found others to help him if I couldn’t help him myself.
However, emotional trauma can scramble a person just as effectively as a forehead hitting a dashboard. In my teaching career I found this was a lot more common, too, with 75% of my students in one instructional setting having personal histories that included rape and molestation. And of course these are physically traumatic experiences as well. I’ve seen up close and personal what that level of pain does to people, how it can render human beings unable to concentrate or focus, unable to be present and engaged, unable to remember, unable to take in new information. Often defensive, incoherent, fighting among themselves, unable to contain or adequately process their pain and sometimes lashing out and projecting it onto others, after four years of seeing this on a daily basis, my heart was breaking. It was starting to traumatize me. I decided to move on.
Heaven help me, but I’m seeing it again, all over the place, and this time I can’t just find a new place to teach. Different traumas this time, different perpetrators, but similar results: it’s been harder and harder for people to build a coherent picture of the world. People stop remembering because they find that it’s less painful if they forget. People don’t want to contemplate the level of abuse they’ve suffered because it instantly adds to the trauma they are already carrying. People stay scrambled because it helps soften the systemic impact. People also sometimes get defensive, project their pain, lose their reasoning ability, act out…
I’ve seen all this before. Just not on this scale. It’s gotta be healed, though, and it’s gonna take time.