Chevalia, The Way of the Horse, Book One, Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

The Constructed World and the Forgotten Real

If presence were the natural state in which we remained throughout our lives, we would have little need to rediscover it. Children sometimes reveal glimpses of it while running freely through a field, watching clouds without urgency, or resting quietly with an animal. In those moments, experience has not yet been completely divided into the categories through which adults so often perceive it. Life is immediate.

As we grow, something begins to change. The mind gathers structure. Identity takes form. We learn categories and judgments, obligations and expectations. We learn what is considered successful, acceptable, valuable, beautiful, useful, normal, and true. Belief systems take root. Competition enters. We begin measuring ourselves against standards we did not create and may never have consciously chosen.

None of this is entirely wrong. Language, memory, reason, culture, and social structures have given humanity extraordinary capacities. They allow us to preserve knowledge, communicate across generations, create art and music, build communities, solve complex problems, and contemplate existence itself. The difficulty arises when the structures through which we interpret reality become confused with reality itself.

Direct experience is gradually filtered through what we have been taught to believe about it. Instead of encountering what is before us, we increasingly encounter our ideas about it. The world becomes something to interpret, categorize, measure, manage, and possess. Nature becomes a resource, land becomes property, and water becomes a commodity. Forests are measured according to what can be extracted from them. Animals are too often valued according to their usefulness, performance, productivity, monetary worth, or willingness to comply with human expectations. Even human beings begin to measure one another in much the same way.

We assign worth through achievement, status, wealth, productivity, obedience, appearance, ownership, and social identity. Gradually, the intrinsic value of life becomes obscured beneath systems created to organize it.

Perhaps what is becoming increasingly visible in our own time is the impermanence of many of those systems and the narratives that sustain them. Structures that once appeared definitive are beginning to dismantle before us. What was presented as fixed no longer necessarily holds. What appeared permanent reveals itself as temporary.

For me, this raises a deeper question about the nature of truth. What is true must be able to withstand the passage of time. It cannot depend entirely upon a particular culture, institution, authority, or moment in history for its existence. The deeper truths I have come to recognize are not confined by time, space, or dimension. They remain true regardless of the narratives humanity builds around them.

Life is sacred before a system declares it so. A horse is a sovereign being whether a culture regards the horse as companion, property, commodity, athlete, transportation, or something else entirely. A tree possesses its living integrity before anyone assigns a monetary value to its timber. Water remains essential to life regardless of who claims ownership of it. Our intrinsic worth does not appear and disappear according to the changing standards by which society decides to measure us.

Narratives can change. Systems can dismantle. What one era declares definitive may not survive into another. Truth must be deeper than that.

This is one of the distinctions I have become increasingly interested in: the difference between what humanity constructs and what remains when the construction falls away. The Tao does not require our agreement in order to be the Tao. Nature does not wait for humanity to define its laws before living through them. Life existed before our institutions, our economies, our hierarchies, and our definitions of ownership, and it will continue beyond them.

Perhaps the dismantling of what once appeared permanent gives us an opportunity to see this more clearly. When the narrative no longer holds, we are invited to look beneath it and ask: What remains? What was true before we named it? What will remain true when the names have changed?

This is where my attention turns.

I do not believe our constructed relationship with existence is our natural one. The ancient Taoist sages recognized the danger of moving too far from the inherent order of life. The Tao Te Ching describes what happens when direct alignment with the Tao is lost and human beings begin creating structures to replace what no longer arises naturally:

“When the great Tao is forgotten,Kindness and morality arise.When wisdom and intelligence are born,The great pretense begins.

When there is no peace within the family,Filial piety and devotion arise.When the country is confused and in chaos,Loyal ministers appear.”

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18

I do not read this as a rejection of kindness, morality, wisdom, or social responsibility. I understand it as a warning about what happens when the living source of these qualities has been forgotten. Once harmony is no longer experienced inwardly, we attempt to recreate it externally through rules, identities, institutions, and systems of control. The structure can eventually become more important than the life it was meant to serve.

We can know everything about the classification of a tree and never know the experience of sitting beneath one in silence. We can study the physiology and behavior of a horse while remaining almost entirely unaware of the being before us. We can accumulate enormous amounts of information about the natural world while losing our felt relationship with it.

The Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote:

“Withdraw into yourself and look.”

— Plotinus, Enneads, I.6

That invitation points in a direction very different from the one encouraged by much of modern life. We are continually drawn outward: more information, more stimulation, more consumption, more comparison. We accumulate identities to maintain and increasingly sophisticated ways to display them. Technology has greatly expanded what human beings can know and accomplish, yet access to information is not the same thing as wisdom, and connection through technology is not necessarily communion.

The constructed world becomes particularly convincing because everyone around us appears to be participating in it. We inherit assumptions about what life is and then build our lives within them. We are taught that land can belong to us, though the earth existed long before our arrival and will remain after we leave. We are taught to speak of water, forests, animals, food, and even time as resources. We learn to regard nature as something surrounding humanity rather than something humanity belongs to.

Eventually we may forget the simplest truth of all: we are nature.

The air entering our lungs is not separate from the atmosphere surrounding us. The water moving through our bodies is part of the same water that moves through clouds, rivers, soil, plants, and animals. Our food comes from the earth. Our bodies return to it. No philosophy is required for this relationship to exist. Yet the mind can construct an extraordinary sense of separation within a reality that remains deeply interconnected.

This is part of what I mean by the forgotten real.

I am not suggesting that we abandon civilization, language, technology, reason, or the structures necessary for people to live together. I am asking something more fundamental: Can we remember that these things are human constructions and not mistake them for the whole of reality?

A map can be useful without becoming the land. A name can identify a horse without containing the horse. A legal document can define ownership without creating the life of the forest, river, animal, or human being to which the concept is applied. There is a reality prior to our descriptions of it.

Living among horses continually returned me to that reality. They did not allow my theories to substitute for the encounter itself. Whatever I believed I knew about a particular horse had to remain open to who that horse was in the present moment. The horse before me was never merely a breed, an age, a sex, a pedigree, a training history, a diagnosis, a monetary value, or a role. Those descriptions could contain useful information, but none of them contained the being.

This distinction changed the way I began to understand sovereignty. Every being arrives with an existence that precedes our use for it. A horse does not acquire worth because it can be ridden. A tree does not acquire worth when its wood can be sold. Water does not become sacred only when someone owns the land through which it passes. A human being does not become worthy through productivity, obedience, wealth, status, or another person’s approval.

Life has value before we assign value to it.

This does not remove responsibility from relationship; it deepens it. Sovereignty does not mean isolation or freedom from all consequence. We live in relationship with one another, and relationship requires boundaries, care, responsibility, mutual respect, and an awareness of how our choices affect other lives.

What changes is the premise. Instead of dominion, there can be stewardship. Instead of possession defining relationship, there can be participation. Instead of asking only what another being can provide for us, we can begin asking what it means to live well together. I have come to think of this as being stewards of the Tao.

We do not own the intelligence that gives rise to a seed, turns it toward the sun, fills a river, forms a forest, creates the body of a horse, or brings our own bodies into being. We participate in it.

When we forget this, life becomes increasingly transactional. We begin to believe that almost everything must be earned, purchased, controlled, or granted by an outside authority, including qualities that belong intrinsically to our being. Peace becomes conditional. Freedom becomes conditional. Worth becomes conditional. Even love can become conditional.

Yet the horse knows nothing of the résumé by which we justify our existence.

This may be one reason living among horses can be so disruptive to the constructed self. The horse keeps bringing the encounter back to what is actually present. The titles fall away. The social performance becomes irrelevant. What remains is the quality of the meeting.

The previous chapter explored what can become perceptible within that meeting: resonance, energetic awareness, and what I call the Field of Presence. But the deeper question now becomes why such a return feels necessary at all. Why did we become so estranged from something so fundamental?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to create representations of reality and then inhabit those representations as though they were reality itself. We create identities and forget that we created them. We create systems and eventually serve them. We name the world and begin mistaking the names for the things themselves. We construct a self and spend enormous energy protecting it.

Then, occasionally, something interrupts the structure: a loss, a moment of awe, silence, love, or an animal who does not respond to the person we are pretending to be. For an instant, the familiar interpretation falls away and direct experience returns.

This is why awakening, as I have come to understand it, feels less like acquiring something and more like remembering. What is real has not disappeared. The Field of Presence has not gone anywhere. Nature has not withdrawn from us. We have become absorbed in layers of interpretation that make the living reality beneath them increasingly difficult to perceive.

Once we begin to recognize those layers, another question naturally arises. If the identity constructed by the mind is not the whole of what we are, what is aware of that identity? What is aware of thought? What is present when thought becomes still?

And what is this consciousness through which every experience of the constructed world and the living world alike becomes known?