Consciousness accelerates complexity
toward incomprehensible density.
We Atmanauts need an atlas
for exploring Ourself as we
spelunk the essential.
Why? Somewhat apocryphally, Abe Lincoln tamed the disorder of his Springfield law office with a pile of papers labeled “If you can’t find it anywhere else, look here.” Trying to find a common thread in the research that increasingly consumes me has left me wanting just such an envelope. But, hey, it’s 2019, why not make it a website? This is an atlas for those who ask “Why‽” Do you remember your first question?
Delightfully often, when I’ve combed the web for help designing, developing, and publishing sites, apps, I land on someone’s “How I Made This” post on their custom blog. That, or on StackOverflow, or on a Github issue, or increasingly these days on DEV. So this one goes out to all those paid it forward and lent me a hand. It still feels like nothing short of a miracle to publish a new site.
Science doesn’t insist that we discard our beliefs, only that we construct them falsifiably, subject them to empirical scrutiny, and serve them with a side of well-documented reproducibility. Still, many, if not all, scientists find—at some point before they give up the ghost—that science has not been enough to explain the wonder of existence, the splendor of the cosmos, the problem of life. Nevertheless some spend their careers mired in nihilistic illusionment, searching for meaning everywhere but at its source, inadvertently misinforming each other and the hoi polloi.
The path for anyone begins at the same point: Ourself. Some call this common self the Atman. This is as suitable a name as any, seeing as we know so little about it. From this common origin our paths diverge in every direction imaginable, but our senses limit our perception, so there are only so many ways to travel, only so many walks of life. Yet they all lead back to the origin.
What is this all about? And what the devil is an atmanaut? Well, that depends on what an atman is, doesn’t it, and if you ask your friendly neighborhood Buddhist, you might get a puzzling answer. “Atman? Oh, that’s nothing. It seems like it’s there, but it’s not. It’s just an illusion.” Who moves my hands? Who is asking all these questions? Who can tell the truth from a lie?
Atmanaut Spelunk the essential. This is: A hugo-powered static site using the chakra theme, ready to link up with a Forestry.io CMS, and auto-deployable on now.sh. TODO scour hugo docs and try out features load fonts with app, not from Google Fonts retina and responsive images with @media queries do a layout with yoga.layout refresh color palette: chakras, soulstones refactor sass to css with postcss make layout mobile friendly debug auto-deploy with Forestry and now+github structure metadata for tags in archetypes flesh out tagging system for asidebar and posts learn how to direct link to other posts; document below style summaries: timestamps, titles, etc.