Beautifully Broken Issue #21: How Deep Reading Can Save The World (& Your Life)
Beautifully Broken Issue #21: How Deep Reading Can Save The World (& Your Life)
IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Happy Saturday! Welcome to the new, compact format of Beautifully Broken.
IDEAS: How Deep Reading Can Save the World (& Your Life)
Reading—there’s nothing else like it. If technology will ever be able to mimic the experience of reading there’s no sign so far that it’s even remotely close. We’ve come to take reading for granted without really stopping to think about the magical operation taking place.
Imagine Lee Child and Dan Brown books filling the shelves of airport bookstores. Maybe the same shop sells chocolates, newspapers, posters for tourists? A book in this context is just another product on a shelf, like Coca-Cola or an umbrella but in fact it’s infinitely more mysterious and powerful.
When you sit and read a physical book a portal opens in the mind like a meditation, a gateway between the writer and the reader.
The earliest written story is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Over four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia a writer transmitted a story of a mythological hero from his mind onto clay tablets via cuneform marks and readers were able to translate those marks into words that formed picutres in their mind. Today we can read (in translation) the same story and experience the thoughts of that person four thousand years later, from their mind directly into ours.
What can virtual reality offer that’s better than that? An excitation of the senses? So what? No sensual experience can improve upon a mind-to-mind link. As Stephen King says in his book On Writing, the relationship between writer and reader is a form of telepathy, the writer creates images in the reader’s mind. But in fact, it’s even better than that, even more profound.
Imagine that telepathy did exist. What would that mean? Listening to someone’s conscious thoughts as their mind races about?
Oh shit I forgot to pay that bill? I’ll be late for the meeting! It’s dress up day for the kids at school! I hate my job.
I don’t think that’s what we mean or hope for when we talk about telepathy. We imagine the miracle of someone understanding us completely, for who we are, our pain and suffering, our pleasures and insights, all the barriers to human communication removed until we see ourselves clearly and in turn are truly seen and understood.
Most suffering and conflict in the world arises from a breakdown in human communication. We’re either too caught up in our own suffering to communicate effectively or, in the moments when we’re not and can express something profound, those around us are too caught up in their suffering to listen and understand. So for a start, as a minimum, reading slows things down. It forces the writer to articulate their thoughts and feelings more clearly and gives the reader the opportunity to absorb and consider what’s been written.
I’m fifty years old now. I’ve been reading since very young and started practicing meditation and self reflection when I was eighteen. With time and maturity I’ve become aware that you can observe yourself when you read (the observer becomes observed by a deeper mind). From this perspective I can assess my state of mind in the reading process. I say to myself when I become aware of it: You’re reading too fast, you’re skimming, you’re anxious. The transmission, the interface between your mind and the author’s mind is disrupted. There’s too much noise and not enough signal. Slow down, relax, fine tune the station. Don’t miss the gift of this precious connection.
And when a writer is writing what are they transmitting?
The relationship is not one of telepathic transmitter to receiver because the writer themselves enters into a trancelike state, opens their own mind portal to listen and receive. They transcribe, they’re tuned into something. They’re not dictating, at least not in the best of writing. They’re rebroadcasting something from the depths of the mind, the place in us that is connected to what WB Yeates calls the Spiritus Mundi or what Jung called the collective unconscious.
This writing can transform your life, your consciousness. It’s spiritual, moving beyond the constraints of the physical world, to create a new world infused with meaning.
So please find a book and dive into the magic space. An audiobook is better than nothing but when you’re listening to it you’re often doing something else too – driving, working, exercising. Deep reading, clear signal, requires more than a consumption mindset. Sit with the physical artefact of the book in a quiet space. A clear connection requires relaxation. Only in stillness does the mind to mind portal between writer and reader clearly establish itself and our superpower is properly exercised. Then, the shared space of a new world is created, a creative meeting outside of time and space. How can you ever feel alone? Your favorite writer, living or dead, is there for you in a way they aren’t for anyone else in their lives. They’re waiting to connect in this timeless space anytime you choose to read.
And what if you’re rusty, caught up in digital distraction, or never really managed to develop reading to the point where it was anything other than the mind scanning words on a page for comprehension (surface reading, like swimming atop the sea, misses all the beauty and life below)?
You’ve got to put the time in to recharge your superpower. Ten minutes minimum per day, preferably twenty. Set a timer, just like when you start out with meditation practice. Sit with the process long enough, with as relaxed a mind as possible, until the flow of surface level thoughts slows and stops interrupting the reading process. Then the mind can start to open, images appear, feelings stir, we can really listen internally, and an intimate relationship begins.
HEADLINE FICTION #7: Otherworld Faery Teaches Children: Books Have Souls
Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!) :)
ART TO MEDITATE UPON
Book Transforming Itself into Nude Woman by Salvador Dalí (1940, oil on canvas)
Commentary: A major theme is Dali's work is transformation. What mysterious process is at work when we read? One mind comes into contact with another, is it similar to when two humans come together in sexual union? Is a new consciousness born of this union or even the seed of a new consciousness?
WISDOM OF OTHERS: Autobiographical Notes by Jorge Luis Borges, from The New Yorker, 1970
Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortunately. My father was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible. Though he was very proud of his English ancestry, he used to joke about it, saying with feigned perplexity, “After all, what are the English?! Just a pack of German agricultural laborers.” His idols were Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. As a reader, he had two interests. First, books on metaphysics and psychology (Berkeley, Hume, Royce, and William James). Second, literature and books about the East (Lane, Burton, and Payne). It was he who revealed the power of poetry to me—the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English now, my mother tells me, I take on his very voice. He also, without my being aware of it, gave me my first lessons in philosophy. When I was still quite young, he showed me, with the aid of a chessboard, the paradoxes of Zeno—Achilles and the tortoise, the unmoving flight of the arrow, the impossibility of motion. Later, without mentioning Berkeley’s name, he did his best to teach me the rudiments of idealism.
PHOTO HAIKU: Sea of Paper and Ink
Paper and ink sea,
countless heart-mind fish abound-
get wet, change your world.
Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week:
• Try reading for ten minutes per day at least. Let the external world fall away, fall into someone else's mind for a while. Sit outside of time and space in the new world both reader and writer are creating.
• Slow down when you read, be aware of the superpower you're exercising by automatically translating black marks on paper into words, sentences, ideas, feelings.
• Try writing down some stories or ideas with the thought of transmitting benefit to the world. Even a scrap of paper blown in the wind can save the kingdom if it contains the words of the Tao.
Peace Now,
Morgan ,
20th July, 2024
