Reading

[SovereignDove]

Pipe breathing and stretching before reading would be a good way to relax for some quality reading time that's good advice! I don't know if you've tried it, but reading out loud helps me concentrate on a book. It's quite enjoyable "listening" to the words out loud and it tends to silence any stray distracting thoughts.

I've noticed that when reading aloud, I do not retain whatever I have read, and then need to reread the material silently to myself to remember it.

I have experienced this problem with remembering my own outloud reading too before and discovered that it is a lot about focus. Once you really want to perceive the content and experience it while reading aloud, you can do it. Practice. I would say ajseph is right when suggesting the breathing before you start reading. It will bring the attention to anything you are about to do.

I agree Anka, I believe this supplements what we already know about doubled attention, self-remembering and non-identification. It helps me to remember "I am not my body". Then I am able to move past doubts and discomfort and see what I can really do with my mind in the moment.

For instance recently I was sitting amidst my family while my mother was washing dishes and constantly complaining. Such a situation is a real test of will and an opportunity to practice self-remembering, doubled attention, non-identification and external considering. I think that if done well this practice should invigorate the brain/mind and in fact help one to integrate what they read.

I will try this approach with the next books I read and see how understanding and retention go from this approach. Thanks.

 

[monotonic]

As I was reading this forum I saw a signature containing an important quote from Strangers. I realized I had read over that sentence and did not realize its profundity. I wondered what it might be that causes or allows a person to read through a book and pick out the profound succinct quotes. What makes a person notice the these sentences as they're read? So I read the beginning of Trapped in the Mirror thinking about the impression each sentence would give if I saw it quoted in someone's signature. Thinking about it this way apparently exposed the text to a way of reading I apply to forum signatures but that I find hard to apply to paragraphs. I have a hard time stringing the meaning of the individual sentences together.

Another exercise I tried was to read while considering who is being written to, what the writer wants them to get from the text, why the reader wants to know what was conveyed, and why the ideas are given in the order that they are. It strikes me that that approach seems to be seeing from the perspective of the writer, and deducing the writer's reasoning seems to help me piece together an understanding of the topic from the writer's perspective. Apart from this process, the text from my point of view as a reader seems pretty unhelpful.

Surprisingly, while doing this I found myself putting together things I had read, and actually thinking about them as concepts I understood. I was even able to apply these concepts freely to my past experience. This must mean I am doing something to really integrate the process of learning.