The Way It Is … a truly educational book
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The Way It Is … a truly educational book
I just came across an advertisement about the newest invention from LuaBooks where paper books can be animated with the mobile phone and therefore offer the child a more interactive and technological way of reading.
Reading books and generally accumulating knowledge – possibly even wisdom – from books has always been a sign of culture, of being educated, finding your way through life and being an active contributor to the different thinking ways of life. I myself grew up with an enormous pressure to read, as reading was related to ‘making’ you a valid member of society. Without reading I was condemned to be an ignorant member of a society that defined itself by an all-knowing mind through accumulating information.
Today most people, and specifically young people, don’t read, or hardly at all, as the fast changing technology and visual animation has brought us a pace of life that cannot attune to the physical requirement of sitting still and staying with the unfolding of the content, instead getting it presented in a fast changing and therefore entertaining way.
But what are books actually offering and what are we losing with these technological changes?
My book experience has been that I either had to apply an enormous discipline to follow what was written, or I was reading a book that was capturing me in a story of excitement, tension and mystery so I was intrigued to know what was going on and kept on reading, often for hours, not even noticing my body or anything around me, similarly distracted as watching TV, a movie, or being caught up in daydreaming.
From my experience books only offered me short-term entertainment or they were hard work to extract the information and then even more hard work to memorise this information, trying to recall when needed. During my studies and working life I had to read a lot, and I still do, and what I realised from the beginning was that the only things I could memorise from books were those aspects I could relate to from my lived experience. I needed a lived record in my body and then the knowledge was there.
Working on women’s rights and gender equality I was always looking for answers to the truth behind the gender struggle, but although many were praised for good solutions, no one ever seemed to have any true answers.
Generally, reading one book would lead me to read another in the endless pursuit of finding the answer.
And so it remained… until I got from my dad a book called The Way It Is by Serge Benhayon – which I started to read, but couldn’t get past the first page as I didn’t know half the words used! I browsed through it and saw that it had a chapter on ‘Femaleness’. I became interested and started reading and there it was – the first time in my life I was getting answers to all my questions. But the answers were not in the book, the answers started coming from me.
I began to read the book then, from this chapter onwards and backwards, just however I felt to read, and it was amazing that it always made sense. I could start at any page and then at another and it was always joining the dots. This was a spherical way of writing I had never come across. I was so used to the lineal way of reading books, often having difficulty concentrating or even following the established line of thinking in my ‘until then’ book experience, which was a tiring process that brought me to mental exhaustion and left me with more questions than when I started.
This book on the other hand was refreshing and uplifting. I never fell asleep and I never closed it with the feeling of not having got an answer. This book was ‘adjusting’ to me and my way of reading and understanding; it offered me what I needed to read and hear and I always had the feeling of unfolding my own knowledge and wisdom and never that I was accumulating, remembering or trying to recall someone else’s knowledge. This book spoke to me and asked me to unfold what was already inside me.
I was inspired to start joining the dots myself and today I have read the book at least three times and multiple times I read specific chapters in it and specifically the one on femaleness, and for the last seven years, with just one book, I have consistently been deepening my understanding of this topic. This book is an endless source of wisdom as it is not a wisdom that is limited to what is written, but a wisdom that we all hold in our bodies and that unfolds in the way we are unfolding.
I still read other books, specifically books related to gender equality and women’s empowerment, as part of my job is to bring the truth of what is really going on with the gender divide to the world. However those books offer me mere lineal information about historical or social aspects and what has been the interpretation of certain patterns and behaviours. But with what I learned from Serge Benhayon’s books I have developed the capacity to read beyond this lineal presentation of facts, and when reading the dots are joined and it becomes another dimension, where the bigger picture is being presented.
What I learned from Serge Benhayon’s books is that it is not so much about the content of a book, as there are books with very important content, but it is about the quality and energy those books are written in that supports people to evolve or just learn how to reproduce, memorise or recall what has been written.
True reading and true learning is to provide material (books and more) that activates the volume in people to connect to the universal wisdom and start expressing from there.
We praise books as being the advancers for humanity – the importance of reading and writing skills gives people access to the world today and this is absolutely true – but we have to stop and look at the quality of our books and if they truly evolve us.
The fast growing technology and the development of visually animated books is a clear sign that the quality of our books today has not evolved us. Humanity is moving away from books and replacing them with an even stronger distracting force because books have been a medium of distraction too, just in a different form, and we have outgrown this form now as the content, the quality and what was and is delivered in them has not addressed what was truly needed.
The growing technological distractions are all great inventions to entertain the mind, a mind we have trained to run the show. Books have been written for the mind and not for the body and what we are craving today is to be more and more entertained in the mind, but the mind will never be satisfied as it always needs a source to exist.
Humanity is longing for more, with an unsatisfied mind that has been educated into lineal thinking and gets so bored by it that even the fast pace of today’s technological inventions is not keeping up.
If we want to step out of this self-made feedback loop that today leaves us with an education system that is producing fewer and fewer functioning human resources instead of empowered human beings, we cannot go on with the lineal thinking and teaching and we have to re-connect back to what the Alexandrian Library was offering in its time: we have to start attending to the body and stop pandering to the mind.
Looking at the state of the world through stats and data we are being told clearly that the body is resurrecting from its age old oppression and becoming a true rebel – a rebel in a world that has lived by the 'loveless mind' at the cost of the body… a body that in truth cannot be oppressed but forever shows us the truth of our choices.
Filed under
Education, Wisdom, Technology, Gender equality, Exhaustion
