---

The Origins of Human-Direction Mapping

If Your World Falls Apart, Where Can You Find Guidance? (long version)

Article version: September 1, 2022

Timothy Corwen :: Human-Direction Mapmaker :: tcorwen@humandirectionmap.com

When faced by a crisis, we have several choices of where we seek protection and help. These lie on a spectrum from an omniscient and omnipotent God (assuming one exists), to the great forces of the State (socialism), to family or community care, to the patronage of someone with the power to help us, to the insight and example of someone wiser than ourselves, and finally, to the strength and resilience we may find within our own person. It is to the last of these, the thinking-for-oneself approach, that this website is largely devoted, because help from others can be in short supply – even God may be unresponsive – and often such support fails to be based on any understanding who we are and comes at the cost of our independence and of our self-determination and growth.

So, where do we find guidance when our world falls apart, when everything disintegrates around us, leading to a fracture in our circumstances, in our daily routines and social networks, even our cultural autopilot? Such fractures are sometimes an unmitigated disaster, but they can also be an opportunity to see what is really happening around us (including who our real friends are) and what fresh solutions there might be to our problems, what new avenues for development we might pursue. Indeed, as we shall see, learning to generate for ourselves such fractures in our customary thinking and acting is an essential part of creativity and growth, both as individuals and as groups. This website is devoted to uncovering how it is that some original thinkers, inventors, artists, and survivors benefit greatly from such fractures in their reality. What is their method? And what part does human-direction mapping (HDM) play in all of this?

My own discovery of the basic method for making the best use of fractured realities, started when I left my US Midwest liberal arts college in my third year to take up a classical studies program in Athens, Greece. That move led to a threefold fracture: First, it involved relocating to a new place (always a challenge in itself). Second, and even more challenging, was the need to adjust to a new language and radically different culture. And finally, I arrived in Greece shortly after the fall of a military junta and the reintroduction of democracy, with Greek society in turmoil, recovering from tyranny, not quite ready to embrace democracy. Just going for a walk through the streets of central Athens to go to class could involve sudden encounters with violent street protests.

Even when there was no riot underway, however, Greece had a culture where shoving someone in a public space was regarded as wholesome social contact (something I found deeply unsettling), while maintaining a physical distance was regarded as aloofness and a sign of contempt for others – for example, a trip to the post office to mail a letter home was often fraught with conflict, with people pushing and shouting in the long lines. Further, not arriving on time (or at all) for a scheduled meeting was seen as a natural and perfectly reasonable response to the daily cycle of life’s constant changes. Work always came much behind family and friends, football and politics – and hard work was regarded as a failure of intelligence and a sign of weakness of character, not as a virtuous pathway to success as I had been taught from childhood.

So over the years that followed, returning repeatedly for ever-longer stays in Greece and trying each time to adapt, I was forced to examine and move on from each of the conventional approaches to guidance in life that society offered, until I uncovered the basic method that has been used by creative and resilient individuals throughout history.

Eight Conventional Approaches to Guidance in Life: Their Strengths and Limitations

What, then, were the approaches to guidance in life that I found unhelpful? In conventional society, we have eight basic approaches available, and both while in Athens facing the threefold fracture of my life, and before and after, I have explored each of these – in many cases, repeatedly.

Conventional Approach 1. Relegation

The first approach is one that starts from childhood: relegation, where we let someone else decide for us. We do what we are told. In my own case, like any child, I was advised to do what my parents or teachers told me was best for me and others. And yet, part of growing up is thinking for yourself, and I soon outgrew this approach.

Conventional Approach 2. Sheltering in a Group

Closely related to relegation is a second approach – sheltering in a group and going where it goes. This was in fact a common approach taken by my fellow Americans living in Greece (and by expats from many other countries). They would form an American club, whether informally or formally, and spend as much time as possible in that American microcosm, and when something needed to be done in the wider, Greek community, they would act as the other members of the group did. So if someone found a good dentist who understood American preferences (tooth whitening, e.g., was something the Greeks didn't understand the importance of), everyone in the group would go to that dentist, and so on.

But I wanted to learn new ways of doing things and immerse myself in the local culture, not pretend I had never left my country of origin, so this approach was not the solution for me.

Conventional Approach 3. Imitation of Others

Outgrowing relegation of decision-making, whether individually or as part of a group, does not necessarily mean, however, becoming indifferent to guidance from those around one; the third approach is a related but more responsible one: imitation, or following the inspiration and example of a personal mentor or a great figure in history. This is undoubtedly an important source of guidance and one not to be dismissed lightly. But I never found a suitable model to imitate. And many of us are not lucky enough (perhaps we are a bit odd) to find someone to fill this role, or if we do, they may inspire and give us direction at work, let's say, but not in other aspects of our life.

Back to Contents for this article

Conventional Approach 4: Be Guided by Feelings

The fourth approach to guidance in life is one that, like sheltering in a group, has seen a remarkable resurgence in popularity in recent years: be guided by your feelings. In this view, thought or evidence is not required, because what you feel is the best guide to what is real for you and what you should do. But feelings come and go, and being guided by them makes you extremely vulnerable to manipulation by tyrants, bullies, and group hysteria (e.g., on Twitter). So it is for good reason that the ancient Greek and other philosophers throughout the centuries have argued forcefully that allowing oneself to be ruled by one’s emotions is not a wise approach. In my case, being swept up in the febrile emotions of a Greece demonstration and hurling a brick at the American embassy would not have helped me understand things more clearly.

Conventional Approach 5: Follow Assert and Urge

The fifth option for guidance in life involves something more stable and capable of supporting us in persevering against public fashions and mass hysteria, and in the face of otherwise overwhelming crises: follow assert and urge. As the term indicates, this usually has two parts: an assertion and something we are told to do as a result of it. Often one or the other of these is left unexpressed. We are told, for example, that “you only live once, so make every moment count,” but that can also take the form simply of “seize the day.” Or the maxim “more was lost in the war” carries with it the implied urge to keep a current difficulty in perspective because it can not be as bad as what people went through during the war. But assert and urge, while it can help with instant motivation and perspective at critical times, lacks much substantiation. It does not help us to understand.

Conventional Approach 6: Tips and Techniques

There is more thought in, and usually some evidence behind, the sixth approach: tips and techniques, which is favored by self-help books, for example. One classic self-help guide for making friends advises you to become genuinely interested in them, smile, recite their name, be a good listener, talk in terms of the other person’s interests, and make them feel important (Carnegie, 1936). But, while this is good advice in general, some people may take advantage of your interest, and part of being a good friend to them may also be knowing where and how to set boundaries, insisting they show some interest in you as well and respect your worth (for more on this, see my book The Worth of a Person). Thus, the tips-and-techniques approach, focused as it normally is on addressing specific challenges, tends to give a fragmented view of one’s life, and good advice in one aspect of one’s work or personal life may contradict good advice in another, and there is no way in this approach to reconcile such contradictions or to get an overall sense of who we are. And perhaps more to the point, there was no self-help guide to living in Greece that I ever found (that reached below the level of a tourist guide).

One subcategory of tips and techniques is an approach promoted and offered by many psychologists: psychological adjustments. This involves adjustments to one's thoughts, feelings, and behavior that are meant to make you a more resilient and happier person. And indeed these can be very helpful. Many people spend years with a therapist working through such tweaks: recognizing the effects of this or that influence on them (especially from childhood) and reacting to those more in one way, less in another; in general, thinking and feeling more in one way and less in another; acting like this and not like that. These adjustments can be very positive, indeed sometimes life-changing, but they do not in themselves help you understand the world at large, and there is a danger that you become so focused on trying to make yourself perfect, that you don't see what others are up to.

Conventional Approach 7: Religion

With the seventh conventional approach, the fragmentation we find in both assert and urge and tips and techniques leads us directly to the most systematically organized and widely proselytized source of guidance of all: religion. This involves being led by a divinity, acting in accord with a sacred reality that transcends the mundane limits and frustrations of everyday life. You can, depending on the religion, follow its guidance through either the mediation of a priestly caste or direct communication with the divinity, generally helped by sacred books and specified rituals, which are conducted by those priests and/or by you yourself as a believer. Whenever you have a question regarding what to do, you consult your priest (or equivalent person), open the relevant divine texts, or attempt to communicate directly with the divinity. When it works for someone, belief in and being guided by the divinity can be one of the strongest forces possible to make you a better person and give your life meaning. But it also depends entirely on your experiencing the presence of the divinity in your life, and I (as is true for many others) have simply never encountered that presence. Furthermore, even devote believers can find religious guidance to be somewhat cryptic at times; sometimes we just have to think for ourselves.

Back to Contents for this article

Conventional Approach 8: Follow the Science

The eighth and last of the conventional approaches to guidance in life is follow the science, because science is based on facts (data) collected (generally as numbers), which are formulated into an equation, algorithm, or theory, which in turn is then constantly tested, refined, perhaps verified or refuted. So if you have a question about how to understand and approach something in your life, you apply the scientific method to the situation involved, or you look at the scientific research and the equations, algorithms, or theories that have resulted from that, and act accordingly.

One problem with science is that research is extremely expensive and time-consuming to conduct, and the results are often inconclusive. In Athens, for example, I might have staged a series of recorded observations in my visits to the post office, gathering data on the frequency of confrontations and the antecedent conditions, and perhaps myself trying different approaches on each visit to work out which approach was best. But this would have been a time-consuming exercise, attempts to assign the requisite numbers to my experience would have been problematic, and the entire exercise would probably have been inconclusive. Of course, I could perhaps have tried to avoid the need to do my own research by consulting the scientific literature. But if I had, I would have found nothing that was very helpful for this particular issue (as I later discovered).

Science when it works out is our most reliable approach to gaining knowledge about the world, but it is best suited for situations where large volumes of data can be collected, or precise measurements in a controlled setting can be taken. Scientists refer to individual cases as “anecdotal” and (what are worse) unusual individuals as “outliers”; the problem for me is that most of my life has been anecdotal, and more often than not, I have been an outlier – something that was especially true for my time in Greece.

Back to Contents for this article

A Basic Method for Dealing With Fractures in Life

If none of the eight conventional approaches to guidance was of much help to me in dealing with my shattered life in Athens, what was the approach I finally discovered, and how did I reach it? I found myself returning to the time before Aristotelian logic dominated how we think (the need to return to the pre-Socratic thinkers was a suggestion put forward by the Existentialist philosophers I was reading at the time). In particular, I needed to return to the basic, underlying faculties of thought: awareness cluster-gathering, fracture, suspension (lifting ideas and feelings and holding them suspended in my thoughts), jostling of ideas and feelings, clear- and vague-sensing, and pattern formulation (for the details of these, see the article “How to Think Creatively,” currently in preparation).

What I managed to clarify was something I decided to call the map-and-engage method, which is a cycle of eight stages:

Stage 1: Gather as much information as feasible regarding the challenge or opportunity involved. Try to look around and get other ideas, see what others do, what works and what does not, and find related images, feelings, verbal strands of argument and description, and so on.

Stage 2: Assemble a working cluster of those relevant or related images, ideas, feelings, and other entities in your awareness. In other words, when the time comes, collect your thoughts.

Stage 3: Fracture and lift as appropriate the entities in your awareness (lift them up out of their normal identities and patterns, if required and if that has not already been done by fractured circumstances). This is a crucial stage that involves shaking things loose from their normal settings and descriptions, leading not to an infinite chaos of thought or indeterminacy, but to a range of possibilities not previously considered. For example, if I am thinking about a group of friends, I might think of Sally as someone who is always efficient and practical. But if I shake that image of her loose, what other possibilities might there be? Some things will be not Sally, but there will be a range of possible variations in her character that I might find if I look for them.

Stage 4: Hold suspended and jostle both the vague and clear elements of your thoughts. This involves making use of a basic faculty of thought: mental sensing, whether of clear or vague entities, through which, one bounces several entities of awareness off against each other and senses their being similar or dissimilar, close or distant, and congenial or antipathetic. In clear-sensing, the entities are clear, but they may need to be redefined and repositioned. In vague-sensing, this process is similar to (the same as?) the experience of having a word “on the tip of your tongue,” and mulling it over, feeling what it is not and what it is like, leaving it to clear itself up, and then suddenly being able to see what it is. As a result of that jostling and sensing, the entities of the awareness cluster of one's thoughts become clearer, both in terms of their characteristics and their relations to each other.

Stage 5: Lay down and render a map of the situation, finding a clear and stable pattern in which each element is identified. As the work of suspending and jostling continues, one moves toward the emergence of a clear picture, where the pattern of the entities you are considering can be laid down as a map, perhaps only tentatively. This stage is often completed by rendering your new understanding in some medium of notation or expression, perhaps just as a sketch on the back of an envelope, an entry in a journal, or even a published illustration or other creative work.

Stage 6: Check for completeness, consistency, and coherency, looking at the rendered version of the map or creative work and trying to make sure there are no remaining missing parts, that everything fits together without excessive contradictions or internal conflicts.

Stage 7: Test the map by using it to engage the relevant domain of experience, checking for responsive contact – that is, looking for indications that the map is putting you in touch with that reality in your life in a way that gives you an accurate picture of it and some ability to control it or position yourself effectively with regard to what was happening there. In the case of a creative work, does the work come to life when exhibited or presented, and do viewers or the audience respond to it?

Stage 8: Further verification involves seeking other sources of confirmation, usually by trying the map in similar or related aspects of your experience (something I refer to as multiangulation) to see if it gives you responsive contact there as well.

Back to Contents for this article

Crazy Bicycle Analogy

One analogy for the stages of the map-and-engage method, which may help to clarify it, is that of a crazy bicycle one is trying to ride in heavy fog. This is a bicycle with many possible pedals, some clearly seen, others only vaguely visible in the fog; some of which will only be shadows, while others, even if I can reach them, will only spin uselessly. One or two of the apparent pedals, when I find, recognize, and put my foot on them, will actually give me some control and move me forward.

At the same time, there are several apparent handlebars, but only one of those is real. The others are simply crossbars to support baskets of emotion or misconceptions. These different features I then try to find, get a grip on, and make use of to move me forward out of the fog into a new territory not previously visited.

Translating that analogy into the stages in the map-and-engage cycle, I first take a look to establish what I can or cannot see (Stage 1: gather), then pull together those impressions and any initial contacts and get on the bike (Stage 2: assemble). The stage of fracture and lift means giving up my support from the ground by lifting my foot off and pushing forward on the bike. Then with Stage 4 (hold suspended and jostle), I try to keep moving forward while I look for and try to grasp the handlebars, not the crossbars, and identify and reach actual pedals with my feet. That process, if successful (depending on my skills and how difficult this bicycle is) leads to Stage 5 (settling of a map) and my finding my balance and moving forward out of the fog. Once out in the clear and pedaling along with a good grip on the handlebars, I look around to see if I've actually come out in a place that is what I wanted, and I watch to see whether as its terrain varies on the road ahead, I can in fact maintain my balance on the bike and keep up my continuing progress.

Back to Contents for this article

Applying the Map-and-Engage Method in Everyday Life

My discovery of this method was not some Damascene conversion that fundamentally and immediately changed my life and my beliefs. Rather it began in a small way by helping me to find spots of order in the midst of the chaos that was my life in Athens and in other aspects of my life. It enabled me to begin to address little things like going to a Greek post office and facing all of the pushing that went on there. It was only much later that I gradually saw how the same method could be extended to answering some of the bigger questions in my life, such as where and how to find a sense of worth and of purpose and meaning in life.

A visit to the post office in Athens, then, was one of the places where I first discovered and learned to apply the map-and-engage method. As I struggled to keep my position in line and send my letters, I began to practice the first stage: gathering information. In fact, I had no choice but to do so, because every encounter was eventful, and because they were eventful, I could not help myself but think about what was happening, thus frequently assembling a working cluster of impressions, thoughts, and feelings (Stage 2). And because my normal assumptions and ways of doing things were completely wrong, it was easy to go on from that to Stage 3: Much of the work of fracture was done for me, because of the fact that all of my normal ideas about how to act in a public place were shattered by the shear turmoil and my frustration. Lift, the second part of that third stage, was easy because I didn't have a settled view anyway; it was all new to me.

So for a long time, I repeatedly returned to holding suspended and jostling the impressions, ideas, and feelings I had gathered, assembled, fractured (largely done for me), and lifted. One intriguing outcome I saw quite often was two people arguing violently, and then afterwards as they left the post office seeming to become best friends. And one day, I was astonished to have someone shove me out of his way in the line, only to recognize him as the British painter John Craxton. What was that about? Over the course of months extending into several years, I bounced these different entities of my thoughts off against each other to try to find a pattern.

Then I made the acquaintance of a couple who were accustomed to having violent quarrels, followed by passionate reconciliations, which was apparently what was keeping their relationship alive. Because I was still holding my ideas about behavior in the post office suspended, I was able to bring in that image and bounce it off what I had seen and felt over the years, until I finally reached Stage 5 and a map I could lay down (which I spelled out in my journal): I realized that Greeks pushed in public spaces because it gave them a sense of social connection, and Craxton's actions reflected not his having descended into incivility, but his having absorbed this local cultural dynamic. The people in the Greek post office were acting in a milder way like couples who fight and make up to avoid an emotional vacuum and to renew the intensity of feelings in their relationship.

But could I verify that map, using it to engage the reality it depicted? I tested it (Stage 6) by looking to see if it facilitated responsive contact with other people in the post office. I tried on one occasion, for example, to respond with a bit of banter when a little old lady dressed all in black pushed me from behind. And I did indeed find responsive contact facilitated by my map, because she responded with repartee and a warmth of fellow-feeling that confirmed my new understanding. And over the years that followed, I found my interpretation held true in other settings (Stage 7): One afternoon in a nearly empty movie theater, a couple came in, sat directly behind me, and then the man asked me to move my head because I was blocking his view. Instead of getting exasperated and pointing out that there were only six seats occupied in the entire cinema, and he could easily have sat somewhere not behind me, I smiled and told him not to be an idiot but to sit somewhere else, and he got up quite happy with the contact and moved to another seat.

And there I was, a Midwestern American boy who had learned how to deal with this one small aspect of a foreign culture, and done so not by imposing my own cultural principles, but by thinking and mapping, engaging the reality, and finding responsive contact.

Back to Contents for this article

Do We Have to Rethink Everything From Scratch Each Time?

All of these stages of the map-and-engage method seem rather complicated to have to go through each time we face a nonroutine situation. Often with a fractured reality, the pressure of our disorientation will push us into and perhaps through the cycle. But where we don't face a crisis, do we really have to make the effort each time? In practice, part of our gaining experience in life is building up our own map registry of things we have encountered and worked out in the past using the map-and-engage method (perhaps not with the best understanding of what we are doing, indeed often without realizing it). Furthermore, it is possible to build more general map registries for use by others and to share those, or adopt the maps made by others. But there was one further challenge in all of this, one that has come to characterize all too much of modern life: the fracture of my person. And in my own case there in Athens, my newly discovered approach to dealing with public services in Greece (including post offices), while useful in its own right, introduced a fracture in my person: banter and inefficiency in attaining services was not part of who I was - or who I thought I was until then - namely, a person who valued efficiency and a more subdued approach to public contacts. How was I to reconcile those?

Back to Contents for this article

Healing a Fragmented Self

As challenging as fractured realities can be, the fracturing of my person – of who I am, what I am about, where I am seeking to go with life – presents an even greater source of unhappiness, for it strikes at the very heart of my existence. How might I apply the map-and-engage method to resolve not only fractures in my circumstances, but the fragmentation of my self? What I found over the years that followed my early Greek experiences was that such an approach would require a good understanding of the structure of the self and the features and dynamics of our experience.

So, while many of the maps we include in our map registry will be situation maps, like that I developed for dealing specifically with visits to a Greek post office or other public space, the same method often needs to be applied to the more fundamental issues of who we are and where we are going. Human-direction mapping is just such an endeavor to apply the map-and-engage method to the features and dynamics of how we direct ourselves in life and the directions we take, including all of the possibilities for anyone to choose from. This website and my books on human-direction mapping are devoted to clarifying the map-and engage method and broadening and deepening a registry of human-direction maps, including those features of my person that will sometimes need to be lifted and held suspended so I can jostle all of my ideas and feelings about myself into a renewed, coherent sense of myself (see soon the article “Healing a Fragmented Self,” which is in preparation).

Further Circuiting to Related Topics on This Website and Elsewhere

We all use the basic map-and-engage method to some extent, generally without recognizing the fact, but the most innovative and original thinkers, such as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, do so with a highly advanced set of skills. In particular, they show a remarkable capacity to gather and hold a cluster of inklings, hunches, perceptions, images, ideas, and feelings – jostling and vague-sensing them, perhaps for long periods of time – in Berners-Lee's development of the World Wide Web, for decades (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 3). The question of how we can each develop these skills will be addressed in the next article of this website (“How to Think Creatively,” currently in preparation; see also Johnson, 2010), which is to be the first article in a brief tour of the major features and dynamics of a basic human-direction map.

Further, to see an example of how this method has been applied to the different layers of worth in a person and how to advance those in concert, see my book The Worth of a Person; while for the question of what is needed for individuals and groups to adopt and maintain environmentally sustainable ways of life, see The Environment-Sustaining Person.

Sources

Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web. Harper Business.

Carnegie, D. (1936). How to win friends and influence people. Simon and Schuster.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. Henry Holt.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation. Penguin.

Back to Contents for this article

---

Addendum: The Map-and-Engage Method Used by a Great Composer

William James, in his work The Principles of Psychology, gives the following example of the creative process, which clearly involves at least the early stages of the map-and-engage method: “Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and crumbs of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind; then the soul getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, 'and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession – the way it must come later – but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once'” (James, 1890, ftn 232, p. 290).

---

URL for this page: https://humandirectionmap.com/hdmw-origins.html

© 2017-2022 by Timothy Corwen.

(GDPR: This site does not use cookies; your visit will not be recorded by me.)