Restoring my E-Chi - Part 1: Splitting of an Electronic Soul

Today, I decided I had had enough of an overly busy "virtual life." The tools that we created to simplify our lives have actually complicated it badly. So after a conversation with my pal Jaguar who reminded that I spend too much time "helping" people, and that he, too, is cutting on things and people that waste his time, I decided to do something about it.

I draw up a list of major time-consumers of my "virtual" life on one leaf of my diary. On the opposite side, I wrote solutions. Well, some things and people just have to go. I am closing down some IMs - and devising old-fashioned ways to getting in touch with people. It's by the phone for those in the city; and an occasional call or mail for those abroad. Strangers are welcome to read my blog - on which I am disabling comments as part of my drastic time-saving measures - and enlighten or endarken themselves. If they agree with me, they have nothing more to say. If they disagree, I have nothing more to listen.

After all, I didn't build my life out of a blundering accident - I think through what I do - so thank you, half-baked free advisers, but you are worth as much as I
pay for your services!

Frankly, it was time for this action.

Elicit

I am checking out a new service called "Elicit" for publishing blogs. It lets one blog off-line from the desktop, and then post by connecting to the Internet. If one is "online" while using Elicit, then it can help search flickr and wikipedia, amongst other stuff - for creating a knowledgeable blog post.

Elicit offers a free trial for thirty days. I like them.

Downloaded it from this really silly sounding place: Bingo Bango Software.

This line here is an update. I am checking how updates work: do they create a new post, or edit the old oen?

How to make notes in non-fiction reading

An easy guide on how to take notes and group important information while reading non-fiction.

The Story
Five years ago, I opened "A Brief History of Time," physicist Stephen Hawking's classic treatise on Time, with a great deal of excitement.

Intuition suggested that I devise a method to understand the book. I developed this brief annotation guide which helps me classify my thinking. Works very well most most non-fiction.


Key:
(!) Important/ Info
(Check mark) Fact
(?) Question
(\) Idea
(u) Understanding
( ) Anything else

A Quest for Beauty...

I have been, since long, in the quest of the beautiful design of life, and now I feel I have reached a certain point where I can look back and say: "I have been a seeker of the truth."

A Vision
I have always had a vision of a world where people of varied languages, ethnicities, talents, and tastes are doing their best, enjoying their rights, giving back to the world, and are oriented towards a common, larger direction. I see all people in a large circle, holding hands, with their glowing faces turned upwards.

And this strange vision has been driving most of my work in this life.


A Quest to Understand Art
This is a personal quest that began not with the arts, but with science, and progressed through fields as varied as business and technology. I learned about Einstein's general theory of relativity and the theories of time and space as a child; and spent the teen years discussing theories with my brother - an able math-minded person.

Last year, I designed the People-Centered Model of Business (PC-MOB) (read blog; download paper) which puts humans at the center of the "universe" of business. I put "belief system" at the top/ start of the cycle of human behavior.

Belief determines everything. However, I saw that the model lacked dimensions, and that perhaps belief (or the lack/distortion of it) must be at the center; around which everything revolves. Anyhow, belief is a very strong determinant of the shape and actions of the human society... and the PC-MOB shows this dynamic in action.

Recently, I have been learning the Sufi concept of cosmology. And very recently, I have turned my attention towards art.

Art is tricky; in the words of John Bielenberg, the art scene (globally) is dominated by "postmodernist nonsense."

Divine Art Movement - a new way of understanding art
I have been searching for a new approach to arts as part of my project on a new thinking about everything - a general theory of everything - an integrated approach towards being, with humans at the center. Now I've learned they call it "cosmology."

Why do I seek? Because this is an eternal human quest. Besides, I have found life so disintegrated by fragmented beliefs, that it is my mission to have a coherent system of life that weaves humanity together, and weaves humanity into its larger context.

Through the Divine Art movement, I hope to bring a new understanding to what art is, and what good is it to humanity. There is a lot to explore; and I am already excited by discovering that there are indeed many like-minded souls out there.


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The Divine Art Movement
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Prophecy

Divine Art: the icon

More about the Divine Art Movement.

I have talked to some artists online and off-line about the idea; it has sparked interest... more to follow.

This is the icon I drew; but I am already thinking of replacing it with a diagram by Keith Critchlow that shows creation in action.

The Divine Art Icon
See it on Flickr
Join the Divine Art Movement community @ Flickr

I am excited to discover that my idea has serious potential, both philosophically, and as a strong trend in the art world. Today I discovered an exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery, Cosmologies, "an exhibition which explores the wide ranging strategies used to depict notions of 'the universal.'"

A brief history of my (very private) quest, as I wrote in a letter to Sushma Sabnis today:

"I have been wondering and wondering about this approach towards arts - calling it everything from Islamic art to spiritual art to humanist art - but none of these titles got it. I have actually been trying to find art that shows how people of various faiths, times, and geographies understand their place in the Universe - especially with reference to the Divine. The problem was that I could not exactly define what I was looking for."

Now I think I have found something.