Plain text Obsidian Zettelkasten

 

"Whenever he read something , he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side ( Schmidt 2013 , 170 ) . These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip - box . In a second step , shortly after , he would look at his brief notes and think about their relevance for his own thinking and writing . He then would turn to the main slip - box and write his ideas , comments and thoughts on new pieces of paper , using only one for each idea and restricting himself to one side of the paper , to make it easier to read them later without having to take them out of the box . He kept them usually brief enough to make one idea fit on a single sheet , but would sometimes add another note to extend a thought" -Sonke Ahrens, on Luhmann's Zettelkasten, in How To Take Smart Notes

Obsidian Vault with Citations plugin, Zotero Bibliography with ZoteroObsidianCitations plugin and Better Bibtex, exporting to OneDrive, Pandoc and Papaja export to APA paper with formatted Bibliography via RStudio. This allows for the formatting to be entirely abstracted away from the plain text itself: instead of agonizing over different journal preferences for style, it is all done in one fell swoop, including not only journal articles but the writing of entire books too. PDFs especially books can be temporarily imported into Zotero and then have their notes extracted to retain the page number, and Kindle application can export with page numbers too. 

Markdown is the basis of this plain text formatting that is a kind of 'html lite' doing in-line formatting as plain text. Ultimately the idea for RStudio is especially important for open sourcing scientific publications where you can build this web of interdependencies from experimental results that automatically update, ala Jupyter Notebooks. Of course that means that maybe your written analysis and conclusions are not accurate any longer if the interlinked data is changed! Overall, this is very similar to the vision of an idea called the memex as outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, also prior to hypertext systems. 

And this is in keeping with Stephen Kosslyn's principles of online learning: Deep Processing with cognitive load, Chunking, Associations, Dual Coding with images, Deliberate Practice, especially using an external constructivist scaffolding for associations in the bi-directional link of a digital zettelkasten. “Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught,” writes Dr. Sönke Ahrens in his book. That's the promise of the memex today, a kind of pathfinding through intricate trails of thought, collecting and organizing and binding as a research explorer.

This is further enhanced with the killer app for mobile sync in mindmapping in Obsidian: Excalidraw for Visual PKM (personal knowledge management). With a good sprinkling of Zotero integration. This lets you add wiki links to visually drawn maps on any tablet and even use a phone to embed pictures from other places like textbooks: full fidelity capture.

In the sense of dual-coding, here is an image of the process:

A cosmic awakening

About five years ago at the age of 31-32, in mid-Feb 2017, I had an amazing legitimate worldview-changing experience following a deep dive soul-call with ishvara pranidhana and prapatti/saranagati (surrender) of pranahuti with ekagra (flinging one's self at the feet of divine compassion in surrender, opening up to the influence of grace). Since then I learned many technical and experience-authenticating consciousness terms from Yoga, especially Kriya and Raja as presented by Paramahansa Yogananda. The following was after several months of asceticism (tapasya austerity especially giving up alcohol) and interest in the Triadic Dimensional Distinction Vortical Paradigm and Sri Yukteswar's The Holy Science (I hadn't read much of Yogananda at that point), and just naturally in keeping with cursory interest in Patangali's Eight Fold Path, though I hadn't studied it deeply, at least not in this lifetime. I was also living about a block away from a SRF meditation center, but I didn't find that out until later. I had also moved recently, following a dream.

I awoke in a state of mental and sensory interiorization (pratyahara and yogic wakeful sleep, one pointedness), aware hearing my squishy heart beat and blood circulation only, awake but body asleep with eyes closed (jagrat sushupti) watching the body breath in and out with tranquil ocean breath (ujjayi pranayama) while centered somewhere in the midbrain, possibly medulla or looking at ajna. I felt an indescribably subtle spiral-like sensation like crawling ants in the coccyx muladhara chakra. This feeling and energy (kundalini) rose in the spinal sushumna (brahma nadi) until I didn't feel it. My awareness descended to heart (hridaya/guha or Amrita Nadi) quite near the anahata chakra, when I became aware of being guided. The presence cradled with hands some sort of vital spark or flame (agni, hamsa, psychic fire, or puran purush) from my heart area (amrita nadi extension of sushumna) with great attention and spirited it away behind me, perhaps weighing or inspecting the flame (esoteric achievement fire?). The presence untied the (chit jada) knot (granthi) of Vishnu with close inspection, and I felt the knot untie and hang at my sides. Soon in both ears but mostly on the right I spontaneously experienced the joyful, faithful sound of the vibration of all creation (Aum/Omkar vibration) and felt a profound and curious oneness with the sublime sound and silence, eking and trailing to a very subtle fineness of resonance. Then, guided, my focus went to the breath which stopped spontaneously (kevali khumbaka pranayama) and my focus came back to the point between the eyebrows, where the upswelling kundalini energy gathered and mentally pushed toward the spiritual third eye (kutastha) but was rebuffed. I intuitively reproduced the action, merging with the supreme brahman through a sproinging astral tunnel, the stargate. I left the physical body spiritually (kaivalya? mahasamadhi? phowa/utkranti? videhamukti/paramukta) and traveled through an opposing wall into my living room, ending up immediately wide awake with unblinking eyes wide open with unbreathing lucid awareness, either still on Earth or the nearest Astral Plane. I felt whole and centered and balanced, with slight positivity but mostly calm centered clarity/neutrality, as if I was introduced to myself and pure super-consciousness samadhi (turiya) as a tensegrity of strength, sweetness, simplicity and truth (satchitananda nondualism), with an insight into my true self (atman, svarupa, sahaja), with perfect understanding (pratyaya absortion). My last thought (manolaya) during this travel into the sacred quiescent silence of the universe (mouna) was a question, "How old?" and I took up a monad position in my meditation chair with the guide. I was picked up and moved into a different chair in the room, but did not feel anything. I perfectly beheld (I am near-sighted in this writing body's waking consciousness, darshan) a radiant celestial being (siddha, astral satguru, guardian angel) of pure clear self-luminous conscious white-shining light essence (sambkogakaya or astral body?, deva, quintessential starfire, tejas, prakasa) with darkened eyes only, and very subtly perceived larger to smaller stacked backbone discs of clear light (causal body?), radiating divine twinkling love and wisdom (santosha?), and a decidedly male, possibly Germanic and definitely Christ-like impression of logic which I intuited (pratibha) immediately. I concentrated (samyama) the silent age query on him and intuitively sensed the answer was beyond my ken (greater than thousands of years maybe always forever, measureless presence) and I could sense his positive regard/interest blissful joy qualia directly. I then did not have a similar impression gauging/intuiting a mundane wall in my apartment, but I was open to the infinite. An invisible structured download of vortical informational distinctions/insights or helical energy came propagating/whirling/trickling like a constellation of glittering jewel-packets (distinction network of breadth/depth) in my left visual field from him (high frequency yogic lineage dharma transmission? pranahuti, Shaktipat sampradaya, sankranti) and I received/apprehended/acquired it (hyper-dimensional compartments? attunement). He then took me by the shoulders and summoned some kind of cosmic Source, towering over me inspirationally (mahashaktipat mouna diksha initiation? transfer of merit? Brahmasamsparsha) in what I interpreted later as an exhortation of either unbounded christ-/cosmic-consciousness or infused growth transformation potential or flying to the astral world or another kind of transmission/initiation like responsibility (guru-shishta sambandha tradition). He did a torrential-plasma flipturn in mid-air, disappearing in the direction of my physical body (parakaya pravesha vijnana?) and at that very thought of body-mind identity my eyes closed naturally (vyutthana). Reflecting on it now, I note that an astral cord was not present when I looked in the direction of my physical body. I woke up whole and healthy the next day, and the divine feeling of the moment’s drop of Brahmic bliss has peacefully lightened my heart forever since. May it do the same for you.