How self-examination creates the changes reading can’t
Q: Should I devote myself to reading books?
A: You can if you want. But it’s unlikely to produce the effect you hope for.
Q: Certain people are always talking about the benefits of reading ‘great books.’ Something about the way they talk doesn’t sit easily with me.
A: I see.
Q: It’s something about the way they speak about the books. Phrases thrown around about “a conversation with the greatest minds in history.” I detect the signs of a fantastical rumour. Like village talk of a city of gold whose riches transform lives.
A: Very perceptive of you. The problem is not with books per se, but about the attitude of the person reading them. Specifically, their level of receptivity and hunger to understand what is written. You’re correct to be suspicious of thrown-around phrases: they suggest that the books are being used to serve a particular image. The person feels highly cultivated for having read Seneca or Dostoevsky. And that feeling of being cultivated guarantees that the person will continue to walk in the same old circles, never having transformed, though the stage design may have changed.
Q: Is there a more effective path to transforming oneself?
A: Presuming it’s what a person really wants, unmediated self-examination is more effective. Because it deals with the relevant subject matter directly.
Q: The subject matter of one’s own mind?
A: Yes.
Q: And if I wanted to go down that path, what should I be looking for?
A: The repeated patterns of your mind. What satisfies it, what distracts and disturbs it. The games it likes to play. The identities it likes to wear.
Q: How will I know what is a genuine pattern and what is imaginary? Is it really possible that a mind can understand itself?
A: If it arises in Awareness, it can be understood.
Q: So ‘The Mind’ is something distinct from pure Awareness, and this difference is a separation which permits observation and therefore understanding.
A: I will have to reflect on that.
(Long pause).
Q: There are works of literature in which the mind’s favorite games are revealed as games.
A: Certainly true. To the extent that they cause a moment of recognition they are highly valuable. But the minute you decide “literature is where I go to see the game revealed” you are screwed. You will start to identify as The One Who Knows It’s a Game and you will lose your sensitivity to the mind’s irregular movements and its ever-changing disguises.
Better to observe yourself directly. Better to constantly refine the purity of your examination. And if along the way a book provides a tailwind, then so be it .
But the study that will take you the furthest is the honest exploration of what you most deeply and enduringly want.