How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think
by Lion Kimbro
--- This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. ---
TOC:
* Introduction I. Materials II. General Principles III. Intra-Subject Architecture IV. Extra-Subject Architecture V. Theory of Notebooks VI. The Question of Computers VII. Getting Started * Acronyms
---------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION ----------------------------------------
This book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think for as long as you like.
Whether that's good or not, I don't know- keeping a map of all your thoughts has a "freezing" effect on the mind. It takes a lot of (albeit pleasurable) work, but produces nothing but SIGHT.
If you do the things described in this book, you will be *IMMOBILIZED* for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen&paper w/ you. When you do not have pen&paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in "The Memory Book". You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.
YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you'll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your milage may vary.
You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it's not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work- you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a "structural integrity" to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of notekeeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)
For all of this immobility, this freezing, for all of these negative effects, *why on Earth* would anyone want to do this?
Because of the INCREDIBLE CLARITY that comes with it. It may feel like, doing this, that for the first time in your life, you REALLY have a CLEAR IDEA of what kinds of thoughts are going through your head. You'll really understand your ideas. And you'll also see connections that you were never consciously aware of before. You'll see a structure and a pattern in your life. You're goals and psychology will become clearer to you. You'll be clearer too about what you do NOT understand.
It is like taking a microscope to your brain. You'll see the little thoughts moving around, *literally*, as you walk them through the maps you discover within yourself.
You'll see what you care about, quite clearly. You'll be familiar with your mental terrain. Incredible clarity. Addictive clarity. Vast clarity. Extraordinary clarity.
You will Love it, if you are anything like me. It will feel natural and free; There will be a freedom within your mind. You'll create astonishing things, and you'll find great tools that will help you in your life after you are immobilized.
Or at least, *it will seem that way*.
Time will tell whether such an experience has been useful to me or not. I still do not know, and will not know for some time now.
The experience is very much a modern version of the "walkabout". Except for instead of going out there somewhere in the world, you hole up in your mind.
Is it useful? I still don't know.
Thus it is with great hesitation that I present for the public this work on notebooks. (That is, my notebook technique.)
I want to digress and say something here as well:
I am astonished that there isn't a field of study of notebooks. I have searched on the net, and while I have found a page here and there on some type of notebook method, it is almost ALWAYS one of the following two things:
1) The Diary A bunch of entrees, chronologically based, maybe with a TOC, in which a person keeps a record of their thoughts. aka "The Journal".
2) The Category Bins A bunch of notes, stuffed into category bins, maybe 2 or 3 levels deep.
That's IT. In all the world, people have only been putting their notes in the above two ways.
Sure, there are a few others, but people aren't