I remember, years ago (back when I was a personal development junkie) listening to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and hearing him say (but not fully understanding):
“The map is not the territory.”
…and then trying to get my head round what a principle was, and a paradigm and what was the difference between a personality and a character, and values and beliefs and ethics. And trying to remember all these definitions, and what they meant I should do.
There was a lot of figuring out to do, back then. And it all felt really hard.
These days it’s much simpler, and as a consequence, life is much easier.
Giles P Croft
As for the quote, what he’s pointing to is what I’ve said many, many times: that we’re not experiencing reality directly. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever can. Nobody ever will.
We have a human-limited aperture, called our senses, through which we get a teeny tiny, unique-to-us picture of it. As Alan Watts said: