Imagine you’re on the outside bend of a river bank. As you stand upon it, you see the center of the river flowing rapidly by. Every few moments, you may get the glimpse of something in the river, as it quickly passes by, but before you can make sense of it, it is gone.
As you move your gaze closer to you, you see the slower edge of the riverbank and a few things flowing by within it. Due to their slower speed in the river, you actually have the time to make sense of them in greater detail.
Finally as you move your gaze even closer to you, you see the sediment from the river washing up along the outer bend of the river, creating a place upon which you can stand upon. Upon this spot, you see an object that has washed up upon the shore and you can actually walk around it, gaining a way to fully make sense of it in a way you couldn’t before.
What I’ve described here is what I’m want to create with my site.
In effect, most people posting on social media are like the fast flowing river. Other people read it and if they’re lucky, they gain a glimpse of something.
People posting on blogs are like the outer, slower edge of the river. The posts are slower, less frequent, and allow you to gain a glimpse of something larger.
People who write books are like the bank of the river. They fully give you to time and space to walk around something and fully understand it as a whole.
The problem with these approaches is that they are being kept separate, instead of being integrated as a whole process and framework for exploring and discovering life. When they do work together, I believe that’s when we gain the capacity to understand life in a much deeper way.
Here’s another way of looking at it that revealed itself to me when I read Dave Gray’s book Liminal Thinking. It was Dave describing how surface beliefs often relate back to a deeper governing belief, that forms the cornerstone of your identity that you stand upon.
Pema Chödrön describes this deeper state of being as an awakened mind. In effect, when you still the mind, its muddiness or fog clears and you can descend into its depths of yourself, like climbing a mountain towards the center of the earth or more aptly towards the center of your Self.
In vertical development, it’s an evolved state and stage of being where one sees within, around, and below all things.
What I’ve realized is that I spend most of my time at the base and middle heights of this mountain, trying to find my way up it and occasionally getting a glimpse from the top but then I lose my footing and fall back down.
What I feel like I need to do is to build up the base so that I get a surer footing at the middle heights. And then build up the middle heights, so that I get a surer footing for standing at the top.
To put this another way, my daily activities swarm around superficial activities coming across news articles and papers that I find that relate to my life’s work. I extract quotes from these articles and papers which help me to understand patterns and over time I can see relationships between the patterns.
But when these build up to allow me to get to the top and see the bigger picture, it’s not a solid footing enough to allow me to fully stop and look down the mountain to see how everything connects up in the opposite way.
So what I want is something that shows at least three perspectives. Many superficial perspectives from daily notes that I create from articles and papers. A fewer midpoint perspectives from my journal. And an upper bigger picture perspective from my like a living book perspective, that is being created from my explorations and discover as a whole.
But just as a said above, the flow or perspective of the process can’t just be one way.
It’s not about just seeing how the daily notes link to midpoint journal perspectives which lead to the upper bigger picture.
I need to be able to stand at the upper point and see how things link up backwards, connecting up, and making sense.
In effect, these higher points are effectively principles for life. So I can have a place where I can relay these points of vantage and wisdom on my site and then the person reading them can “walk down the mountain,” seeing the substructure underneath them and how they all connect up to their daily life at the base of the mountain (by reading the daily notes that relate to them).