How to browse a retreat - Rob Burbea's Digital Garden

### Entry page - Open a new tab in your browser and go to "https://publish.obsidian.md/rob-burbea". - The first page which opens is "Retreats". ### Browsing a retreat On this page, there is a section there is a section "Retreats and series of talks". The name of **Retreat pages** start with the year, e.g. ""**2007** Lovingkindness and Compassion As a Path to Awakening". 👉 Click on that link. You are now on the retreat page. Each retreat has its own folder in the list on the left, with standard subfolders: - _PDF_. Here you find the source PDF files, each with a transcript as created and distributed by the [[Rob Burbea Transcription Project]] - _Transcripts_. For this Digital Garden the PDF files have been translated into web pages, commonly known in the context of the Garden as "the transcripts". Transcript page contents are exactly the same as the PDF, but they are organised in a way that allows the Garden to link to paragraphs and keywords. - _Talks_. We don't want to put too much additional information on the transcript pages - - it should be easy to read them, without getting distracted. On the other hand, there sometimes _are_ notes, admonitions, or links to other parts of Rob's work, as well as audio links to a particular paragraphs. All this is made available on a _talk_ page. - _Lists_. Most of the talks also have an associated plain list of paragraph descriptions. This allows for a quick overview over the content of the talk. For the [[2020 Vajra Music]] retreat, there is also a [[Vajra Music Exercises (Pádraig)|practice guide]]. Over the coming months we'll add more guides. They'll be made available on the respective retreat pages like the one above. ### Browsing a talk In the section “Talks” you find the talks in the series. 👉 Click on the first one, “Samadhi in Metta Practice”. This takes you to the **talk page** for this talk. Talk pages all have the same structure: - _Navigation_. On the top of the page you see arrows which help you move serially through the talks. - _Series_. Most of the talks have been held as part of retreats. You can also access the retreat overview page using the 🡅 in the navigation. - _Transcript_. Here you find the transcript itself, in raw format adapted from the PDF. - _Transcript PDF_. That's the source PDF file. - _Audio link_ to the whole talk on [[Dharma Seed]] ### The "Index" section 👉 Scroll down to the "Index" section. Certain keywords, word combination, idioms and phrases are marked as "index entry". For each transcript paragraph, the first occurance of such a term is turned into a link to the term's page, like [[energy body]]. Further occurrences are not marked, to have a less cluttered reading experience. Still the all occurrences are counted, as the "Index" section on top of a talk page shows. Here you'll find all terms, together with the total number of occurrences across all transcript paragraphs, starting with the term occuring most often. This can give you a quick overview over which parts of Rob's "semantic network" are covered in this talk. ### Working with paragraphs on the talk page 👉 Assuming you are on the talk page, scroll down to the section “Paragraphs”. ![[help1.png]] The “Why we need Samadhi” is a header we put into the talk to make the structure of the talk more evident. Some of the headers have been taken over from the [[Rob Burbea Transcription Project]]. “We need a sense of deep nourishment” is a one-liner we've added as a description of what Rob talks about in paragraph 2-2 of the transcript. - In that paragraph, there are 3 keywords, thereof “Cultivation” 2 times. The count here goes into the overall count for "Cultivation" in the "Index" section. - Clicking on the > starts the audio player at 5:35, which is the second of the Dharmaseed audio where Rob says what is transcribed in paragraph 2-2. ### The "plain list" of paragraphs You can also get a quick overview over the whole talk. 👉 Let's assume you are still on the talk page "Samadhi in Metta Practice". Now go to the beginning of the “Paragraphs” section and click on “plain list”. The Digital Garden now shows a page named “Samadhi in Metta Practice **–**“, i.e. ending with a dash. Here you find all paragraph descriptions below each other, without keywords, audio player, quotes, or other comments. It should now be possible to get a good sense about the content of talk in a couple of minutes, by just reading the one-liners If you hover on any of the descriptions, the preview takes you to that description on the talk page. Let’s say you are in the plain list, with the mouse pointer on the “We need a sense of deep nourishment” description (the example from above). Now move the mouse quickly to the popup window and then hover over the 2-2: ![[help2.png]] You can therefore get a quick overview over the flow of the talk, and take a look at comments or press the audio player, or look at the respective transcript paragraph – all from the “plain list”. ### Browsing the talk transcript Following the example, you should see a link to “0122 Samadhi in Metta Practice”. This is the **transcript page**. Transcripts start with 4 numbers, month and day. In this example, Rob held the dharma talk on 2007-01-22. 👉 Now click on the link to the transcript. The Digital Garden opens the page which has the actual transcript. What you see is a close representation of the original transcript PDF. The small numbers left to each paragraph are the PDF page and the paragraph number on the page. “3-2” is the 3rd page in the PDF, 2nd full paragraph (i.e. not counting ones which began on the previous page). The words and idioms in blue color are links to keywords. 👉 Go to the paragraph 2-2 and hover with the mouse the small 2-2. A small link symbol appears. Move the mouse to the link symbol (the one pointed to by the “copy link” info): ![[help3.png]] - If you now left-click with the mouse on the link, the Digital Garden copies the link to this paragraph onto the clipboard. I’ve just done this, and I paste the link to the following line... - [https://publish.obsidian.md/rob-burbea/2007+Lovingkindness+and+Compassion+As+a+Path+to+Awakening/Transcripts/0122+Samadhi+in+Metta+Practice#2-2](https://publish.obsidian.md/rob-burbea/2007+Lovingkindness+and+Compassion+As+a+Path+to+Awakening/Transcripts/0122+Samadhi+in+Metta+Practice#2-2) - When you click that link, the Digital Garden will open directly at this position, i.e. without the need to go via “Retreat” > “2007 Lovingkindness...” > “Samadhi in Metta Practice” (the talk page) > “0122 Samadhi in Metta Practice” (the transcript page) - The link chain only appears when you hover with the mouse over an element which supports this copy-to-clipboard functionality. All transcript paragraphs, headers anywhere and also the paragraph one-liners on the talk pages have this feature enabled. - This can be helpful if you are e.g. trying to merge a couple of paragraphs across different talks - - something that will be necessary because we have some duplication of themes in the list of talks. - You could then bookmark in your browser those positions, or have a Google Doc or Word Document with the links, or whatever makes sense to you. ### Peeking back onto the talk page from the transcript Sometimes you want to read the transcript like you would the PDF. You can still access the description and related info for a particular paragraph, though. This can be helpful for a number of reasons: - For many paragraphs, the summary on the talk page has an audio player which plays back the recording at exactly the right timestamp. Many yogis have found it very helpful to listen to Rob's voice _and_ reading the transcript at the same time. - The summary has also a short description for each paragraph. This can help you to orient yourself more quickly. - On the transcript page important keywords and idioms are available as links. Further occurences of a keyword and its synonyms are not marked, though; only the first occurance is a link which takes you to the index entry. On the talk page you'll find counts of those occurences. This gives you additional recap information without the need to need to read the paragraph on the transcript page. - Lastly, there might be further explanations, comments and crossreferences to other parts of the Digital Garden. Rob often refers to other talks, and many concepts are covered in more than one place in the overall talk database. Checking the info on the talk page can help you move more closely to Rob's thinking along his "semantic network". 👉 Let’s say you are on the transcript page “0122 Samadhi in Metta Practice”. Now scroll down to the paragraph 2-2 and hover with the mouse over the fullstop at the end of the paragraph. This is what you’ll see: ![[help4.png]] You can move the mouse quickly in this preview and click on any link there, including the > of the audio player. The Digital Garden will take you to the talk page when you click on the link behind then “.”