RecApp

Milen Ivanov • 19 April 2020
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The purpose of this article is to describe the concept of a piece of software, called RecApp, for making a recaping list.

The technique of recapitulation is revealed in Volume 1 of Toltec Teachings by Théun Mares.

The technique consists of recalling all events of one's life. At set-up a list of those events is done and this is the purpose of the RecApp.

The general concept is shown on the picture below. There the parallelograms represent events. The events are connected by arrows into threads. An arrow from event A to event B would mean that A in some way caused B. There are two threads on the picture: red and blue. As seen, an event may belong to more than one thread.

It stands to reason that one event may cause several others. This is also shown on the picture.

Another relationship that exists between events is that one may be a repetition in some form of another, though not caused by the latter; a deja vu of sorts. This is not shown on the picture for the sake of simplicity.

RecApp should be able to visualise nicely all these relationships.

As for the individual event, the way of assigning a time-stamp to it is by either:

  • exact date, if possible; or,
  • interval of dates between which the event lies; or,
  • just pointing before/after which events the one in question should be.

RecApp should be able to then put the events into sequence.

graph

Technical Specification: Data

Here we outline the structure of the data; the visualisation to be specified later on.

There are three main concepts:

  • events,
  • relationships, or links between events, and
  • threads.

An event is a single event to be recapitulated at one session. It is identified by unique number and has several attributes listed below.

A link connect couple of events. It has a description, which is - technically - some text.

A thread is a set of several events, linked or not. It has a title and a description of the common theme, as well as the general lesson learned after the recapitulation of the whole thread.

The language of implementation Java Script.

All classes are each time serialised (that is, put on the disc) as json files. In this way the events can be written in plain text editor.

Event Class

The event class will have the following fields.

  • id:
  • The unique number which identifies the event.
  • title:
  • Title which will be shown in e.g. threads. So, it has to be concise yet informative. But technically it is just a text.
  • description:
  • Detailed description of the event, but from what can be gathered before the actual recapitulation. So, this should be filled during the making of the recaping list.
  • date:
  • The date of the event, if that can be recalled. The date can be an interval, e.g. 1981 means from January 1st until December 1981; Mar-May 1986 means what most people would guess it does.
  • before:
  • The event is before some other events or dates. So, the values of this field are several dates (which resolve to the earliest, of course) and several events.
  • after:
  • Similar to the above.
  • related_to:
  • Here we have several links.
  • recapitulation_date:
  • The date when the event was recapitulated.
  • recapitulation_notes:
  • Detailed account of what has been recalled during the formal recapitulation session, including e.g
    • the details recalled,
    • the emotions experienced,
    • persons involved,
    • the perceptions involved,
    • possible not-doings,
    • lesson learned in a nutshell,
    • etc.
    These will be accumulated from the fields of the interface, so it should be a flexible class in itself; to be able to evolve with experience.