Reading is the art of making meaning from sentences and their context. How do we make meanings? We can do it in a very egocentric way, or we can do it in a way that always arrives at what the author has meant. The egocentric way, the lazy way, is to decide that any meaning must be familiar. This is "reading by recognition”. For example, you read, "Cherishing other as oneself.”, and this becomes, "Sharing. Don’t Bogart that joint. Don't eat your candy in secret where no one can demand a share.”, whereas the original meaning is, "Self-obliviousness, the metamorphosis from self-awareness (which is awareness limited to what can be controlled by will, splitting conscious from unconscious and subconscious) to self-exclusive other-awareness.”.

When we are no longer self-oblivious this real meaning is not recognizable, and the lazy reading of the words does not admit the challenge of the unfamiliar, the yet-to-come. Is there such a thing as self-oblivious people? If so there is no familiar way to mean them, no way to recognize them. Small children are self-oblivious, but no ordinary adult has ever recognized them as such, so despite the familiarity with small children in the present and the fact that all of us have been small children there is no familiarity with the phenomenon.

Self-oblivion may seem to the recognition like some sort of fetish accomplished through bizarre rituals, but in reality it is only the recovery of the lost mind or perception. This recovery is not chosen, not something on a menu to select or not. The intelligence that remains must demand that the intelligence that is lost be recovered if the chance arrives.

It is hard work to read without recognition as the way to arrive at a meaning, and hence as a way to proceed, to continue, to get to the end. It is hard work to see so many words and to have read so few of them after so much effort. But it is education. You don’t pick up your first serious calculus book and read it in an evening.

It is not an insult to us, after we have established that we can earn a living, to be given something that is difficult to get through. The writer didn’t just out of the blue write these things, but has devoted his life to it, so it should not feel strange to the reader that it requires some mental energy and time to understand it and actually get it done.

Från
    Kom ihåg mig
URL

Säkerhetskod
     

Kommentar

Go to: http://seriouslyfolks.bloggagratis.se/   or http://dhagglund.wordpress.com/    if you want to see my new blogs. I warn you before you click that these are purely holistic psychology blogs, and the reading will require some concentrated effort ...

  The conscious is called that because it is consciously observable, and the subconscious is called that because it is not consciously observable. At one time even our species had a mind that operated without any aspect of the operation becoming obse...

  Gullibility is an opiate. The one who tries to correct it will seem more cruel than kind this side of time's horizon.   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   Some thousands of years ago a nearly four billion year old process of evoluti...

I find that writing Knols ("units of knowledge") more practical at the moment. Blogs are more for people who follow them. New readers are disinclined to go back to the beginning. So you might consider this: http://knol.google.com/k/dennis-hgglund/med...

  How evolved is life on Earth? This is a question regarding the depth of evolution, and it must be fairly obvious to anyone who asks the question earnestly that an evolved awareness is aware of the exact depth of life's evolution. The awareness ...