How to Consume Contents: the other way

After years of studying in school and achieving good results + reading a lot of magazines and books weekly, I guess I have the accountability (sort of) to express a little of my experience on how to consume contents (or knowledge) smartly (or efficiently) bah.

Consuming contents has been a happening-around-the-corner daily routine, whether you realize it or not. Facebook, online news, blog feeds, wiki, newspaper, television, magazines, tabloids etc. In this era, unless you live in North Korea which there's less than 0.01% chance of you reading my post, every single person on earth deals with content consuming. You might have read a few articles or books or whatsoever on how to select books, magazine for efficient reading but here I am going a tad different. I go into the state of mind during content consuming.

Yes you sort of got it. It can be shrunk into one word: Feelings.

Basically I would differentiate two different feelings during content consuming, just for the purpose of illustration of course. You can explore your own afterward.


1) The feeling of "I want to get something out of this!";
2) The feeling of "Just glancing through...";


As I expect most of you reading this would at least gone through high school education, I bet all of you encountered problems studying subjects, and sometimes even reading novels/magazines. All along I noticed a few problems I encountered:-


a) I couldn't understand a shit, and I decided to understand word by word, and in the end I spent hours on a single page;
b) My feelings do not match that of the content I am consuming, creating frustrations and mixed feelings instead;
c) Almost contradictory views and supporting statistics on all sort of opinions focused on one single issue;
d) By and by I seem to have something locking me (seems like my eyesight could not move freely, and also arms etc) when I am consuming the content, this especially true when I am reading newspaper or magazines;


Well I couldn't list all, but those are what I could think of at the moment. All situations from A to D are encountered in both feelings 1 and 2. I always been wondering what's wrong with me until recent experience (aikido, enlightenment etc) led me to a better understanding and observation of the problem.

I notice there's a third feeling often goes unnoticed underneath our eyes. You have to observe yourself to find that state of mind. In this state of mind, you are not reading to get something out of it, rather you are not just glancing the content. Usually in this state of mind you enjoy the most out of your reading, because it is relaxing and refreshing, and you don't feel stressed doing it. And the knowledge absorbed during this state stays for the longest time in your memory. You wouldn't seem to forget it, somehow.

I call this state of mind: Experiencing the contents.

This is very different from imagining that you are the main character and walks through the story. If you do that, sometimes your current emotions clash with the content and you couldn't continue. You are actually doing Feeling 1, trying to sync yourself with the story. In this sense you bound to fail anyhow.

To experience the content is like listening to the sound of a river, or a waterfall. You won't mind too much on what each word means. Rather, you are going with the content in its flow. You are accepting it and you are following it, continuously. Mind that "continuously" is very, very important.

Also in order to fully experience the content, you have to accept yourself. Yes, accept your own feelings and emotions. And constantly check how stiffened your body is. Is it in a naturally relaxed condition? Naturally relaxed as in your back is straight when you are sitting. Somehow when you check your own body like running it through a program, your body will start to relax itself.

Accepting and constantly checking your own state (body + mind), and at the pretext of accepting the content as what it is and going with its flow, then you are in the third feeling, experiencing.

Usually in this state, you will have judgments on the contents but your judgment won't linger long enough to trouble you, because you are already immediately moving past your judgment before it troubles your mind. But you know you have these judgments.

This is very interesting. You can even come to observe your own thoughts.

But what if the text itself is too hard to comprehend for you? Go with the flow, and then start over again. If you linger over a few of the words too much, you would bound to get stuck and thus miss out a lot of stuff.

In this state, I found that knowledge is absorbed relaxingly, and I don't have overacted judgments and at the same the content sticks on my mind!!

Try it and tell me how you feel!

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