Napkin Learning

Always be “Aware” of everything you are doing.

— Alan Watts

The World As Self (Part 2)

In case you need motivation for reading this article, its about sharpening your awareness and curiosity. Awareness, especially if you are doing technical work, is important because tiny glitches in code can cause hours, if not even days of debugging. So that’s one aspect, but in general awareness and curiosity is the key to bringing about joy and inspiration from your own work.

I spend a considerable portion of my day read technical documentation and code. So I’m “Experimenting” with various way of “Stimulating” myself into grasping concepts so that I can retain them more effectively.

Side Note. After writing this article and experimenting with energy focus I realized that it really is very important for me to squeeze my index finger together with my thumb when I start something (And then as necessary) as we often see people do when meditating and sometimes I have to do this quite hard in order to anchor myself. I have the type of mind that loves being able to go off into every possible tangent, so this also helps me “Funnel” that “creative energy”. I think chewing gum and also be a different way of doing this. More below.

What I really wanted to know before I started writing this article is “How do I structure this piece by piece so that it is fun to play around with it in my mind?”.

And I’ve started asking myself to illustrate at least mentally what it is I’m covering on a “Mental” napkin for myself such that I have a “Visual / Sensual” grasp of the material.

When I do this I take my eyes off the actual content that I’m learning such that I have to work it out from visual memory. As I do this to make things more interesting and fun I project code or concepts visually onto the wall, onto the floor, onto different types of surfaces in order to make the whole thing more interesting. I also play with color in my visualization.

What are the simple details and what process do they fit into or what is the detail and what is the context that it fits into? Or more “Meta Physically” where am I and what am I doing here? How do I feel my way around in this mentally using my mind only?

It’s a little bit like viewing every detail as a new place that you are visiting and figuring the place out.

I feel like it’s a nice way to boost my own confidence as far as putting myself in command of material goes. Another thing I like doing asking myself how I would explain this to someone if they came up to me and asked me “How do I do X?”.

So here’s an example. Lets take this sentence (And this is a bit “Involved” … really the process can be a lot simpler than this — Squeeze the thumb and the index finger and here we go… :) ).

When displaying the SVG graphic in a browser the viewport and the view box may not have the same aspect ratio (Width to height ratio) and in this case the preserveAspectRatio attribute of the <svg< element can be used to control the rendering of the image.

So that has a number of concepts in it. Lets list them.

• Viewport: This is essentially the width and height of the graphic and could be specified like this in svg <svg width="100" height="100" …>. It’s important to get clear on this right away, because normally the viewport means the entire browser window.
• The view box is similar to the viewport , but it may use different units to create an SVG specific area to paint in when SVG does not specify units on a dimension. So for example we could have a viewbox 0 0 10 10 and a 100px by 100px viewport . So in this case each unit inside the viewbox would be 10 pixels since the width and height of the viewbox and viewbox have the same aspect ratio.

So these concepts are fairly easy to draw out on a napkin and if I were teaching this to someone or to myself this is where I would start and now we have a base to build on for understanding how the preserveAspectRatio property works.

I feel like vector graphics and web development is a particular rich field for doing meta learning, since it’s easy to visualize concepts and map the visualization into code. Feel that neuro plasticity working!!

When I take this approach with code I either write the code out by hand directly or at least “Mentally with my fingers” on my MacBook mousepad.

So essentially by using hand motion I’m massaging details into my mind.

In addition to anchoring me to a “Point of exploration” (Imagine hanging off the cliff of a mountain and looking out with some rope to secure yourself) this helps me feel out and develop a visual picture of the code fits into the big picture.

If I feel like I need to ground myself to what I’m doing I also do it by pushing my thumb and my index finger together. This helps me resist jumping into a “Distraction”. By very subtly direction my energy I get full control over it. It sort of “Completes the circuit”.

As I start “Seeing” how the code is written I move from using my finger motion to “Feel” out the code structure to simply visualizing it.

If I switch to pure visualization I still keep me hand on the trackpad with my index finger pressing against my thumb in order to stay anchored.

You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.

Alan Watts

One neat thing about that is that it helps me “Pause” and reflect on what else “Goes with”, or the context of, the particular segment of code that I’m focusing on. I find that this is crucial when exploring advanced concepts as it removes “Blocking”. In other words as I start to crystallize the piece, that activity frees up space for further understanding.

In other words, the average person cannot think through a problem involving more than three variables without a pencil in (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/veil-of-thoughts) his hand.

— Alan Watts

I love that Alan Watts points that out because keeping more than 3 variables solidly in mind is tricky, but taking a single variable and exploring how it fits into the context of a process that we’ve memorized or are in the process of understanding is quite doable.

We’ve been doing this naturally since birth and in a certain way before birth, all though we were not really “Aware” of that, unless of course you felt that the entire process (All of the energy). Then you were. We’ve leave that exploration for another article.

I greatly enjoy having a solid grasp and clearly seeing all the pieces of the design as it they were a lego block design that I have crystallized, and memorizing the details clears my mind and helps me see the big picture.

Summary

Back in the olden days when writing Chinese characters with ink and a brush a very exact amount of pressure had to be applied in order to give continuity and smoothness to the structure. So the “Artists” developed a sort of “Natural flow / Sensual connection / Tuning ” with what they were expressing.

And I find that this approach applies to code especially because I need to take my eyes off of what I’m reading and go through it in my mind while while also using hand motion to “Expand” the concepts on a napkin such that I’m mentally feeling my way through it. The end goal of this being the ability to apply advanced concepts to other contexts / settings. To be able to reach into my “Mental Coding Bag” and grab the right tool for the job and having that be just as simple as making toast is a nice feeling to have.

And until now I’ve resisted this type of memorization because there’s always cut and paste and I know the concepts in general, but in a certain “Sense” that is liking driving at high speeds through water with a blunt nosed boat. Here’s a little bit more on that.

So what happens is this: the teacher of Zen constantly throws curves at his students and puts them in dilemma situations where they have to act immediately. One of the things, of course, (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/way-beyond-seeking) that you mustn’t do is rush, because rush is a form of hesitation. When a person rushes to get a train he starts to fall over his own feet, see? So it really holds him up. It’s like trying to drive at high speed through the water with a blunt-nosed boat. That’s rush. But now, what he’s trying to get is a kind of a smooth, unhesitating, flowing action that is the response to the challenge. And it must be done in what is called another use of this word mu. This is called wuxin in Chinese or mushin in Japanese. And this word, nyen, is composed of the character meaning “now” (無) and the character meaning “mind-heart:” xin (心), and so has the meaning of “a thought” — but, especially for us, it is well translated by the psychological term “blocking.” “You’re blocking,” you say to someone when they hesitate, when they dither, when they stop to choose. So the attitude of mushin or wuxin is the unblocked mind, where it doesn’t hesitate ever. Just as the river doesn’t hesitate when it flows, and just when you clap your hands the sound comes out without hesitation, and when the moon rises the water doesn’t wait to reflect it, it reflects it instantly. So that instant reflection — or it’s a kind of resonance — is what is looked for as a response of the individual to his environment. And he does this to the degree that he knows himself to be one with his environment. Then his capacity for response increases in according to the way in which he feels that he is simply all of a piece with it, and not something that is in it, and with a barrier around him through which messages have to get, and then those decisions have to be made up and sent out. So then, you could say that a kind of extremely subtle sensory awareness has to be developed between the individual and his environment so that he feels it out.

— Alan Watts

Alan Watts also has some interesting thoughts about how we go about our education shared here.

Education for Non-Entity

I created my own developer center so I can lookup anything I need quite easily and I’ve had the attitude that “OK I simplified the concepts, created a minimal example, wrote the article, put it in the developer center, good enough” .

Firefly Semantics Developer Center

But there’s a professional level of skill that can be applied and then there’s the “Michelangelo” level of skill. Why not go all the way?

In Iron Man 2 Tony Stark does something like this while discovering a new element using Jarvis to “Project” what he’s working with and he explores it and refines it with his hands and we can mentally do this with our own inate ability and imagination.

Neuro plasticity is an interesting concept and I think it could also viewed as the ability to explore details “Visually” on a purely mental level.

I’ve noticed that now that I’ve been working like this for a while, it has a lot of common with shaping wet clay into something. I don’t always get it right on the first try, but I have an infinite amount of wet clay to work with.

And when working with clay it’s only the area that my fingers are touching that is receiving my “Spotlight Consciousness” attention, even though my “Floodlight” consciousness is keeping in mind the end result.

Naturally allowing the “Floodlight” consciousness to stream while I’m using the “Spotlight” consciousness is what makes the entire thing stimulating.

Now, in the same way, I’ve often said life is a drama, and a drama is a deception. It’s a big act. When you peel an onion, and you don’t really understand the nature of an onion, you might look for the pit in the center, like any ordinary fruit has. But the onion doesn’t have a center. It’s all skins. And so, when you get right down, there’s nothing but a bunch of skins. You say, “Well, that was kind of disappointing.” But, of (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-4) course, you have to understand that the skins were the part that you eat.

Related Concepts

Naturally it helps having ones energy tuned to the point where the creative fosset is always “On”.

Does our Education System Cause Blocking?

Two Step Approach to High Energy and Focus

The Power of the Simplest Possible Example

Reality, Art, and Illusion

First of all, the foundation of the word is the Sanskrit root mātṛ, and that has as its original meaning (so far as we can trace it back) the idea of measuring or laying out the foundations for a building. And you can see how, from that root mātṛ, we derive many, many words through Greek and Latin in the English (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/.../document/reality-art-illusion) language connected with measurement: “metric,” “meter,” “matrix,” “matter” — as in the saying: “does it matter?” Does it measure up to anything? And so, fundamental to the concept of the world illusion is, then, the idea of measurement, of equating the realities of the physical world with certain systems of numbering — whether it be so many spans of the hand, so many feet, so many paces, so many bongs on a drum, or whatever you got to be your regular model, your regular system. For the whole idea of measurement is to find an equation between the physical world and something regular, that is to say, with a ruler.

— Alan Watts

Gurdjieff played the same game, in a different way. He said, “The most important thing is self-remembering. Always, at every moment, be aware of what you’re doing. Watch yourself, constantly, and never, never be absent-minded.” So, all day, you know, when you pick up the piece of paper, you realize, “I am picking up this piece of paper, and I’m opening it inside,” and so on. And I know I’m doing it this way, so I’m not asleep. Ordinary people, you know, pick up a piece of paper and… [laughter]. In this way, we’re really picking up the piece of paper. So all these people are doing this, you know, watching (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-10) all the time. Now, where do they land up?

— Alan Watts