Circling and Making Maps

I really identified with the desire the know what it feels like to be someone else that Malcolm Ocean describes in this post.

The inner lives of other people seem like the great mysteries that demand exploration, like the Poles used to be, or the Amazon, like outer space is now. Except more mysterious than that because the details of what the Poles are like or what another galaxy is like are available to us, more and more available as tehnology gets better. But I'm not looking for what another person is like, but what it is like to be them, to think with their neural pathways, to feel with their automatized emotions, to use their habitual ways of paying attention.

This attempt to know what another consciousness experiences is what circling is about. I wondered if Malcolm Ocean did any circling at Burning Man because I know circling happens there and his language seems to overlap heavily with the way circlers talk. And the point of circling is to listen and to watch and to encourage communication that lets people get inside someone else's world.

Circlers have this wonderful phrase "the water you swim in" that refers to all the things about your own conscious experience that just seem like the way everything always is, the way water must feel to a fish. And it is that habitualized, automatized world, the water we swim in, that it feels so impossble and so appealing to understand.

I think intimacy might be having a map that corresponds more closely than most people's map to the territory of someone's inner life. The map is necessarily worse than those old maps of some barely explored continent, but with intimacy, the continent is vaguely the right shape and some coast lines are distinct from constant exploration, though others are still barely seen and mapped with distortion.

And circling is when you show your map to the person whose territory you are mapping and say, "Tell me how to make this map better." And they are amazed that anyone could have seen this detail so clearly and equally amazed that this other detail could have been so wrong. And they try to describe to the mapmaker how they see and what they feel. And both mapmaker and territory benefit because the mapmaker gets a better map and a steadier hand for drawing borders and a set of tools to elicit the information he needs. And the territory sees that the terrain of his inner life is rich and interesting and valuable to someone else, that each rock or tree or spring always taken for granted as necessary and given and ordinary is actually unique, and his own view of the territory clears, no longer murky and misty--he opens his eyes, focuses hard, and sees the inner world around him distinctly.