* The Parable of the Model Mind
:tags: #CoCD #parable #mind #model #truth #denial
There was once a Scholar who prided himself on his map of the world.
He had spent years drawing it — each river charted, each mountain placed, each city labeled with care. He would unroll it before crowds and proclaim, “Behold! This is the world!”
One day, a Child approached him and asked,
“Where on your map is the sorrow I feel when no one sees me?”
The Scholar frowned. “That is not the kind of thing one can map.”
Then an Old Woman asked,
“Where is the place where I lost my son in the war?”
The Scholar shook his head. “That is not part of the world. That is memory.”
And then a Beggar said,
“Where is the place where no one listens, and I become invisible?”
The Scholar snapped, “That is not real geography.”
That night, a storm tore through the land. The Scholar awoke to find his map soaked and shredded by the wind. Desperate, he ran into the darkness, screaming,
“Without my map, I am lost!”
A Voice, not his own, answered from the crater where his map had once been laid:
“You were never lost.
You were never found.
You only believed your model was the world,
so the world denied you the truth.”
And the Scholar wept, not for the map,
but for how long he mistook it for his mind.
#+begin_quote
_“The mind does not model the world.
It is the crater left when the world refuses to be modeled.”_
#+end_quote