Sorry I intended that for the ‘I am not the person I used to be’ thread…

but than maybe… I can draw it back to Zen…

The map is drawn on paper.
The territory is walked on foot.
The coin in memory has already landed.
The coin in the present is forever in the air.

Zen is the practice of stepping off the paper and back onto the earth, reclaiming the living reality before language comes in to divide it into this or that. What follows is a reflection on the quantum spin, the limits of language, and why staying present is our only safeguard in the age of artificial intelligence…

I know I sometimes play the fool, using words to point toward the limitations of words. Yet I keep returning to this theme because it feels increasingly important.

Human societies have always depended on maps. Language itself is a map. Laws are maps. Religions are maps. Scientific theories are maps. For centuries we have navigated reality through symbols and concepts, and for the most part it has worked remarkably well, though perhaps at a cost…

Yet every map carries a hidden danger when we begin to forget that it is a map. That point that often goes unnoticed where the words we use to express the complicated, wonderous.. and yes horrific begin to write an define us…

What fascinates me about the age of Large Language Models is that we have now created the ultimate map-maker!

An AI does not inhabit the territory. It does not experience the wind beneath the spinning coin. It does not know uncertainty, grief, wonder, love, or presence. It knows only patterns left behind in language. It studies billions of landed coins and becomes extraordinarily skilled at predicting where the next one is likely to fall.

In this sense, an LLM is a mirror held up to humanity’s accumulated past. It is built from recorded memories, inherited definitions, historical categories, and the countless stories we have told about ourselves. It is what makes it so useful.

The danger arises when we forget the difference between the map and the territory.

The danger is not AI., it is the moment we forgot that landed coins are not the whole story. For centuries we have taken snapshots of reality, called them truth, and then built identities around them. We have always been tempted to let yesterday’s labels define today’s possibilities.

An algorithm simply reflects this tendency back to us. If I allow it to define my feelings, my identity, my limitations, or my possibilities, I allow the language of yesterday to author tomorrow. The map begins drawing the map-maker.

When people become trapped in rigid either-or thinking, they become predictable. Successful or failure. Good or bad. Heads or tails. Once life is reduced to fixed labels, our responses become increasingly scripted. Ironically, the more tightly we cling to old definitions, the more machine-like we become.

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the image of the spinning coin.

The landed coin matters. We need names, labels, categories, and descriptions. We need language to communicate with one another and we need maps to navigate the world. The problem is not that coins land. The problem is forgetting that the landing is only a moment.

Every label is a snapshot, not an identity.
Every definition captures something real, but never the whole.
Every map points toward the territory, yet can never contain it.

Those moments of awakening, when we step out of memory and return to direct experience, remind us of something that no map can fully describe. We are simultaneously the observer and the observed, the map-maker and the territory, the coin and the spinning.

An AI can generate endless maps. It can reflect humanity’s accumulated knowledge with astonishing skill. But it cannot inhabit the living immediacy from which all maps arise.

Each time we return to that living present, we reclaim something essential. We remember that language is a tool, not a prison. A guide, not a destiny.

And perhaps that is the real task in the age of AI is to learn how to use ever more powerful maps without forgetting the uncharted territory of being alive…

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
and a simple warning:
Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself…

Zen teaches that words are only a finger pointing at the moon.

Most of our lives are spent cataloging landed coins—naming, labeling, and filing away the past into static concepts of “good” or “bad,” “Heads” or “Tails.” But Zen reminds us that reality lives only in the spin.

Though this began as an accidental detour into a Zen thread, perhaps it isn’t an accident at all. In an era where algorithms now draft our maps for us, returning to the unmapped immediacy of the present moment may be the most essential Zen practice left to us… 🙂 🙏

I’ve been reading Matt Haig – The Midnight Train – and reminded of this conversation. I feel he captures the grief of these moments…

There were many deaths in life…
A person, it seemed to the Ghost now, died in stages. And so it was particularly poignant to see himself at a young age. To come was the death of youth, of ideals. Of connection, friendships, principles, love. And these were often just choices. Choices that had seemed right at the time, in the moment, but when you got to the end, to the very last death, you looked back and realized all the lost versions that you left along the way. He missed, right than, the person he had once been. And the goodness that had existed inside him, as natural as the green in grass.

The forwardness of life was a problem, thought the Ghost.
If days could be scattered all over, so on Monday you were forty and on Thursday you were nine and on Wednesday you were eighty-one, that would be more helpful. You would know the fleeting nature of things, realize how many versions of ourselves a lifetime contained. It would make life’s beauty so abundantly clear. The way a sunset was so beguiling because it tells us that every day eventually sinks into night.

Latter in a dialog between Wilber and Charlie: “Reality is always moving,” said Charlie… “Everything is particles and particles aren’t still. They move around in a wave. The quantum wave function… This is physics.”
Wilber watched Charlie take a shilling from his pocket. “See this. When it’s in the air it could land either side up. So it is both heads and tails.” He flicked it and it landed on the stained purple carpet… Queen facing up. “Heads,” Wilber said… “Yeah, but listen, Wibo, with life the coin is always spinning in the air in the present and it has always landed in the past… We are the spinning coin… reality is a spinning coin… It contains many things… The existence of tragedy in your life does not mean that your whole life has to be that way. You’re the spinning coin…” — Matt Haig, The Midnight Train

I like that, the moment the coin lands and is labeled and so defined it becomes the past… and it is here we forget the present, and allow the either or to define us…

We are map-makers by nature. From early childhood, we attempt to chart the wilderness of human experience, drawing neat boundaries around raw emotion and labeling every event that meets us. Yet, in our impulse to categorize, we fall into a fundamental trap: as map-makers, we tend to live only at the exact moment the coin lands. We freeze the outcome, stamp it with a definitive label—Heads OR Tails, triumph OR tragedy—and then set up camp inside that frozen definition.

When we live this way, we inhabit memory rather than presence. We mistake our static maps for the living territory, forgetting that every line we draw is merely a historical record of where the coin used to be. We lock ourselves into past triumphs or past heartbreaks, convinced that a single outcome on the carpet defines the entire landscape of who we are.

The wisdom of the Tao lies in the realization that the map-maker is also part of the territory. We are not detached cartographers standing safely outside of life, observing a series of coin flips from a distance; we are the motion. We are the air, the spin, and the superposition of possibilities unfolding right now. To view life through this lens is to remember that the coin is perpetually in mid-air—always spinning, always active, and holding both Heads AND Tails simultaneously in the vivid present.

Every time we “return”… every time we let go of our rigid labels, step out of memory, and drop our insistence on fixed outcomes… we wake up to this truth. We stop defining ourselves by where the coin landed yesterday, and instead step into the dynamic rhythm of the now. In that moment of awakening, the map-maker becomes transparent to the territory, and we realize that we are the Tao itself, waking up to its own endless, spinning potential.

Beautifully put, Thomas.

It reminds me of something I’ve been pondering over recently: We are map-makers by nature. The Tao is the realization that the map-maker is also part of the territory. Every time we “return,” we are the Tao waking up to itself.

I wonder if true free will is what happens in that space where the self dissolves and becomes transparent to the territory. It’s only when we drop back down onto the grid of the map that we look back and call it destiny.

Thomas, your insight into the second arrow is beautiful, but notice the subtle trap in your closing words: “Just got to let it go,” “I still work on myself,” and especially, “easier said than

I felt the sting of the third arrow hidden right there in those words…

The phrase “easier said than done” is a room that language builds to trap us. It implies there is a massive mountain of physical effort required to reach peace turn a concept of non-action into a grueling chore. But the work that requires no work is simply realization. The moment you realize your hand is on a hot stove, you don’t say, “Taking my hand off is easier said than done.” The realization is the opening of the hand.

When we say it is hard, notice our words harden into concepts. The ego happily hides inside that spiritual struggle, pretending it is going to fix a mind that isn’t actually broken. We don’t do letting go; we stop carrying the arrow.

There is a profound cosmic irony here: it is never the raw experience of life that traps us, but the language we use to describe it. Reality is fluid like water, but language freezes it into ice. I’ve found that avoiding this funny sad trap of language, that noticing words like ‘just’ and ‘easer said’ and holding them lightly… has helped the fire go out.

Master Shuzan held up his short bamboo staff before his students and said: “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now, what do you call it?”

A monk asked Master Nansen, “Is there a teaching that has not been given to the people?
“Nansen replied: “It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not a thing.”

Master Kyogen said: “Zen is like a man hanging from the branch of a tree by his teeth over a precipice. His hands cannot grasp a bough, his feet cannot reach a limb. Someone stands beneath the tree and asks him: ‘Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?’ (What is the ultimate truth of Zen?) If the man does not answer, he fails his duty. If he opens his mouth to answer, he falls to his death. What should he do?

The Wordless space before thoughts and labels are created… my own response to the koans – is to hold words lightly..

Our thoughts arrive wearing borrowed cloths, speaking in languages we never chose.
Long before we awaken, words are already dreaming us.

Once every word was alive, A spark. A gesture toward the unsayable.
But images harden and we begin mistaking the map for the mountain,
the symbol for the pulse beneath it.
We wonder inside these rooms of language believing they are the world…

Language rises as mist, before the mind wakes.
Words form and dissolve: shadows toughing light.
Thoughts builds its small rooms, naming each wall “me”
Yet in silence between breaths, seer is seeing…
Concepts loosen, Transparency returns.
Language, released from definition, become a gesture…
A leaf on a river, moving always, needing no name.

And the arrows, fall to the ground, in silence…

Hi Caroline,
Thank you for having the courage to express your experience so honestly, and for inviting us to share what we feel.

“I am not the person I used to be”… that is a phrase I’ve sat with many times myself, sometimes in grief and sometimes in quiet gratitude…

In my own life, when I feel like the landmarks I relied on are gone, I tend to panic, feeling as though the entire landscape beneath me has been destroyed. It has taken a lot of time (a lot) to realize that even when my old ways of navigating life messiness break down, the ground beneath my feet is still there… During that lasted experience wondering about the person I am I wrote in my journal: We are map-makers by nature. The Tao (Way) is the realization that the map-maker is also part of the territory. Every time we “return”, whether through a lifetime work or a moment of “seeing”, we are the Tao waking up to itself…. I’m not always able to lean into that, but sometimes…

Richard Wagamese wrote something about life’s friction that has meant a lot to me when things feel torn apart:

life is sometimes hard. There are challenges. there are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man, I sought to avoid pain and difficulty and only caused myself more of the same. These days, I choose to face life head-on and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the hard times are the friction that shaves off the worn and tired bits. The more I travel head-on, the more I am shaped, and the things that no longer work or are unnecessary drop away. It’s a good way to travel. I believe eventually I will wear away all resistance, until all that’s left of me is light. – Embers

“I arc across the sky of my life…” I love that image even though… well something to aim for… and I wonder if anything is really lost in that light…

I don’t have answers for the weight you’re carrying, but I really appreciate you sharing where you are at.