The Map is Not the Territory - On the Path to Loch Humphrey

The holy man goes into the hills in solitude. When he returns to men, he teaches them what the Great Mystery has bidden him to tell.

Sioux Indian


The hills call me this morning... every morning I have a fanfare of fells from my living room window..

As they collect the dawn, the Campsie Fells (beyond science and knowledge) prostrate themselves in reverence to the presence of the Sun...

This morning I decide to brave the more gentle (but no less majestic) Kilpatrick hills to the west... and the path to Loch Humphrey just behind the Kilpatrick braes.

By tube (from Cessnock), train (from Partick) and foot (from Kilpatrick) it is a mere 2 hours (going slowly with plenty of pauses to take in those wide estuarine views) from door to loch. I am always amazed at how near this remoteness is.

And it is remote! Up here, away from the prying eyes of the city, the music of the landscape resounds so deeply that all that comes back is silence. A few travellers are met along the way, a few nods of the head, a couple of buzzards calling out:

'wheeeueuuuuu.....

.....wheeeeueuuuuu....

                         ....here ah'm ur....

....here ah'm ur....'

'Clyde & Cloud' [11th December 2012]

The solitude is exquisite, so exquisite that the 4 odd hours between leaving Kilpatrick train station and returning to it seem to pass in an instant. One has become, in accordance with the moment, and in accordance with being fully present, extemporaneous. Escorting this is a feeling of continuity and fluency, not of time (since we are 'now' outwith it), but of space. Within this spaciousness (what I like to call 'the splendid vastness of the uncontained Mind') there is a feeling of what can only be described as an 'ineluctable inextricability' (that governs all things and non-things). One is now, as a passenger on the train of the unconscious-consciousness, united with the land. Territory and organism melt into each other. No distinction can now be made. Equally, it could be said that they dissipate into a state of 'emptiness', an emptiness that is absolutely awake. The consequence of this experience is the profound assurance that Paradise is a reality.

 [Looking east across Loch Humphrey towards the Campsie Fells in the distance]


The territory of thought, much like that of land, needs to be mapped, needs to be ‘thought out’, so that one might proceed into pure Spontaneity, and the realm of the unthinking. 'Reality cannot be equated with the nature of consciousness,' writes Raimond Panikkar in Invisible Harmony.

The best way to map out thought, to think out thinking, is to move right through it.

Reality may well be subjective in the words of Kierkegaard, but it is also an activity. You need to work at it, travel it, travail it. Thus, the event of 'Glasgow' itself becomes an activity. Left to its own devices Glasgow, as any other place, is merely a dictionarily defined 'city' - on the move, however, it shapeshifts with one's consciousness. Thus, when I'm in Warsaw I am warsaw; when I'm in Glasgow I am glasgow. The map is not the territory - I am.

[From the Kilpatrick Braes looking east. At this height everything moves slowly...]

As I approach the end of the path returning towards Kilpatrick Railway Station, a young lad on his mountain bike wheelies past. I find him at his car another hundred yards or so down.

'Not brave enough to leave the car at home?' I cheekily venture.

He removes his pigtailed Tibetan hood, 'Sorry?'

I repeat it.

'Not if I'm coming from Glasgow' he says.

I move on, and think to myself how limited Glasgow has become in some people's heads. For me these hills, whether Kilpatrick or Campsie, Renfrewshire or Inverclyde, have always been 'Glasgow'. Always will be. Sure, they're hardly in the city-centre, but that's not such a bad thing. Indeed, I might cheekily venture that these hills, fells and moors are more central to Glasgow than any city-centre. To paraphrase the American anthropololgist Edward Twitchell Hall, 'The heart of the self extends far beyond the boundaries of the body'.