The act of reading is often seen as an activity of acquisition, of acquiring knowledge or information or whatever meaning reveals itself through text.
This is not correct.
Reading is not an activity of “filling up”.
Reading is a process of change. Reading is the process of being transformed.
When you read, you become.
It matters less the contents you collect on this journey. Whether the exact facts stick with you matters less than the impressions they leave you with, and mold you to be.
Reading changes you. It changes your mind, the way you think, the way you process the experiential world. A book of any kind imports a narrative structure for filtering and perceiving the world. It literally molds the internal precepts which govern experience, by imposing a narrative, by infusing the psychic framework with new or updated assumptions, connected and associated with existing assumptions, acting as nodes in the artifice that regulates being, complete with constellations of unconscious beliefs, programmed into our being to allow us to adapt to present experience, and make sense of the world.
Reading is not collecting.
Reading is becoming.
Reading should change you. Change your mind, your thoughts, your feelings, your perception.
Every book should change the way you look at the world.
Collecting information is not why reading is powerful and valuable. Powerful in that you can alter the contents of your being, and leverage different perceptions and modes of thinking to alter outcomes that align with desires, goals, ideals.
William Dare 