Human emotional life is almost entirely contingent on conceptual representations of the world.  Most of the time, we are not responding to what is actually happening but to these conceptual representations, which are our own creation.

Romantic bonds, in particular, fuel very elaborate and powerful conceptual imagery of the social landscape in which we move.  This mental landscape exists in the form of sensory imagery, including visual, spatial and tactile imagery.  We imagine how close or far apart we are from someone, how connected.  We imagine the state of others and how they affect us, whether they are good or bad, useful or harmful, cozy or aversive, admirable or disdainful, significant or irrelevant.

These imaginary scenes are a stand-in for the actual world, a stand-in we usually take to be the world.  Conceptual representations of romantic relationships form a map of reality, and although we know that “the map is not the territory,” we can spend our whole lives living in the map without realizing that we are just looking at a map.

I once dreamed that I was standing in a wedding dress that was slowly fading from existence.  In my dream, a dear friend and lover said, “Almost marry me.”  Then I woke up.  When I told him about the dream, he said, “Well, we are a lot like a married couple.”

I took his hand in mine and, sounding serious, said, “My answer is… almost yes.”

“You’re almost a smart ass,” he laughed.

What faded in my dream was neither a hope nor an aspect of our relationship.  The only thing that faded was my map, or rather, the act of mapmaking itself.

Every conversation gets woven into our mental map.  Every interaction updates it slightly, or dramatically.  In one moment, a vivid landscape could be obliterated by a single unkind word from a lover or by an unanticipated break up.  In another moment, the entire landscape could shift as an object of affection returns your love.  Whatever the case, we are tossed and turned, at the whim of these geological events.  Nothing is permanent on the surface.  Everything is in flux.  Continents rise up from the ocean and soon sink again.

When you look at the map, see a map.  What would happen if you saw reality directly?  If you try to answer that question, you will probably create a mental image of the actual territory, the “real world,” and imagine looking at that instead.  Nope.  Still the map.

This is a perspective shift akin to that evoked by an optical illusion. The moment a thought arises in which you are contemplating someone, manipulating them in your imagination, carrying on conversations with them, beholding them in your mind’s eye, and visualizing where you stand in relation to them, even the movement of your relationship from past to future, all of these things… look at the thought and realize that you are looking at a map.  A thought.  An awareness.

A thought is a thought.  The thought of someone is not that someone.

To get a sense of what this shift feels like, look at the screen displaying these words and see just a screen with just words.  You are sitting in a chair or reclining, your eyes filled with the light of a monitor framed by metal and plastic, and the only thing in front of you is a collection of black and white shapes.  Notice how different this feels than when you are immersed in reading the text.  Now do the same thing with your mental imagery of the world and your relationships, especially the representations floating in the back of your mind that feel like direct perceptions of reality.

“Errors like straws upon the surface flow:
Who would search for pearls must dive below.”
~ John Dryden

My almost-husband helped me to see past the conceptual landscape in the realm of romantic love.  The ingredient that seemed to catalyze this chemical reaction in my soul was his grace.  Seeing past the surface.  Seeing the core.  Not constraining the reality of the present to the illusions of the past.

Moving below the surface, loving unconditionally, we find the unnameable, that which does not change, the still universal suchness.  Take this suchness, rather than your concepts of it, to have and to hold.