anamnesis

The wars have receded, rebuilding the land, a few minor skirmishes to mop up. Before the next wars. Some preparation to do with the planning mind, but mostly it is about the spirit. Facing what is, adapting with resourcefulness and skill, utilizing experience. Knowing when to rest, be silent and consolidate for a moment before fiercely re-engaging. Keeping a clarity in the present to monitor traitorous thoughts and sabotaging emotion. Not in order to suppress or escape them, but to meet them head-on with acid inquiry: how are you beneficial? what purpose do you serve?  The minor harpies slink away from this scrutiny, they had nothing to offer but abrasions to the soul. The big ones, the gremlins, were once important, perhaps. But now they are old records with broken logic and tired solutions to problems that exist only in the past. They act as if they have paid their dues to stay, and I should be grateful for their insults and slander, and act betrayed when I lock them out in the cold,

Yesterday I played with gephi . I extracted my 'social graph' from facebook (gimme! mine!) and loaded it with gephi on my desktop. Gephi is a tool to explore the connections between things ---any things--- in order to gain insight about what their relationships may mean. Kind of like a scope or lens into what isn't really visual in an immediate sense ---but maybe should be. Network models can reveal patterns in social interactions, viruses, forest fires, terrorist cells, galaxies, bees, banking, cancer, aids, basically anywhere 2 or more things interact. Or even one thing by itself, if it's hard up. So kind of a useful approach I think. The view into my modest (meager?) social net paints a curious picture based on interaction with content on my wall. Like, hey, there are no connections between your professional and family relations? And, we've spotted a few 'bridge' people between a couple of hubs that may have a foot in both worlds. (btw, I turned off

Coursera is offering a course this month called Know Thyself . From the outline, I think it will miss its mark. The course starts with ancient Greece, from the origins of  the phrase, carved above a temple in Delphi. It's an eclectic survey of various threads woven into the expression, from philosophy, to psychotherapy, neuroscience and even a tip of the hat towards Buddhism and Zen. The fundamental flaw in the approach, from the syllabus and the intro, and the reason I opted not to enroll, is that it appears to be researching the 'properties' of the self...i.e. what it is in abstract. With some titillating asides about the adaptive unconscious and the neuroscience tropes about how we aren't aware of many facets of our own 'selves' along with a little trolling from buddhism and zen thrown in to question whether a self actually even exists. Gasp! (A point of view various scientific dogmas would whole heartedly approve because of its seemingly immaterial nature