When pure feeling is corrupted by the intellect, there is mediocrity. That is what most of us are doing. Our lives are mediocre because we are always calculating, asking ourselves whether it is worthwhile, what profit we will get, not only in the world of money, but also in the so-called spiritual world – "If I do this, will I get that?"
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Patterns and habits repeat across realms. I've found myself asking this question multiple times. In fact, when I attempted meditation seriously for the first time last year, that was one of the first questions I put across to someone who had been doing it for years. My second question was on the timeline for enlightenment. Thankfully, he just laughed and let me off on both counts.
To make knowledge practical we must convert it into rules of operation. We must pass from knowing what is the case to knowing what to do about it if we wish to get somewhere.
– Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren from "How to read a book"
Almost every book I read is practical in nature. But what I've gotten out of these practical books is rather limited simply because I have not converted them into rules of operation.
Simply ensuring that a practical book needs to be applied has limited the amount of reading and multiplied the amount of learning and outcomes in my reading process.
You were taught that reading is extraction.
– Verlyn Klinkenborg
Reading out loud, reading for pleasure, reading and finding the not-meaning in books, going with the rhythm, imagining the world being built - there are so many pleasures to reading as one gets more skilled at it.
As a kid, fiction was something I devoured. But theoretical books and well, any non-fiction book was data and information to be extracted. But wow. Reading can be so much more than that. How much more is something I feel I've just started to scrape the surface of.
Thanks for reading.