How to transform your mind by reading old books

The act of reading is quite unusual, if you really think about it.

For it’s the only time in our daily chaotic existence where we can sit by ourselves, alone, with our own thoughts, yet, at the same time, we also contain the thoughts of another human being—the writer.

During this process, we remain ourselves, but not entirely.

Depending on how immersed we are on the text, we become a hybrid, balancing the thoughts of two individuals inside it.

This hybrid that we become presents a paradox, for reading contaminates the reader with the thoughts of another human being, yet it also represents a fertile path for the reader, as this is how nature procreates, by mixing different genetic material, or information, to create a new unitary and unique organism, ensuring its evolution.

In the case of the reader, the mind is what evolves.

Contamination is a strong word yet it potently conveys the idea that the reader, through reading, gains something that cannot easily be forgotten, good or bad, carrying it with him or her such that the process of thinking is permanently influenced or altered by it.

The more we read, the more we embrace the idea of hybridity, which like it or not, forms our filters for how we perceive the world, and, therefore, reality, around us.

It is this idea, presented to me by my literary mentor, Mohsin Hamid, that sparked a quest for reforming my understanding of the world through reading novels.

Yes, that’s right. It is entirely feasible to change your internal and external realities by immersing yourself, deeply and purposefully, in great fiction.

Although fiction does not factually represent the world, it contains innate truths that resonate across time and contexts, representing a distillation of compelling experiences into a narrowed down form timeline that enables readers to exit their rigid mastered domains, their explored territories of social hierarchy, and step into controlled experiences that are only graspable and understood with creative imagination.

These experiences confront the unknowns with the shield of the archetypal mythological hero at no expense of disrupting the reader’s terrain of emotional stability.

This is part of the reason why drama in books and movies is so appealing to humans: its manifestations are endless but its core structure is universally understood.

We can use this understanding to transport ourselves to new unfamiliar domains of roles and expectations, understanding that it is these places— simultaneously beaming with potential and destruction—that allow us to safely tinker with chaos, the source of all things and our ultimate predator—and come back a changed person.

The more potent the themes of the story are (which is a subjective interpretation) the greater the chances that we can re-calibrate our moral compass.

This is because great stories, in movies and in literature, reset our perspectives and provide us with a renewed sense of what is right and wrong, inspiring us to pursue our lives with a peculiar sense of urgency and clarity. At the fundamental level, all stories share the same structure with life. They portray a distilled human experience that predates our ability to write and which taps into our evolutionary capacity for language and shared collective beliefs. The elements that make a story meaningful are the same that make a life meaningful, and at the unconscious level, we do not differentiate between fiction and reality, so we respond strongly when we experience the pulling forces of a character arc.

In other words, the self is the accumulated fictions, through shared stories, it collects and tells itself.

Without shared stories, we are everything and nothing at the same time.

The self, therefore, needs a canvas, a set of parameters on which it can construct its protagonist, a purely fictional character and a product of roles and expectations in our social hierarchy.

The self often realizes that it’s a fictional construct—a destructive realization but one filled with potential—and occasionally dares to explore its nature, to find out what it is capable of, to discover new worlds, perspectives, and roles.

However, it understands the risks of venturing into unexplored territories, and thus often opts to embark on that exploration indirectly, fiction being a feasible and promising path where the self sheds the weight and responsibilities of its routine reality in search of new perspectives, hierarchies, settings, and cultures.

And when the exploration ends, albeit temporarily, and the self returns back to its temporal world, it does so by acknowledging that it has irrevocably changed, even minimally, its task now becoming that of reconciling the new information in its own story.

And, one of the best way to achieve this, is by reading old books.

Why old books, you ask?

One can think of various reasons, but one of the most important ones, to me at least, is that they have stood the test of time, conveying qualities that are universal, enduring, and worthy of examination.

There is something comforting about picking up the same piece of writing as thousands or millions of other people, presently and throughout history, trying to come in terms with the material, understand it, engage with it, and re-interpret it, each one walking away with their own conclusions.

Doing so indulges readers and writers alike in a great conversation, an intellectual community where the voices of the predecessors are discussed, scrutinized, and serve as guides for advancing and re-inventing our literary canons and our perspectives.

So, in a world of distractions, dominated by hegemonic narratives and shallow lenses of making sense of the world, I challenge you to take the reigns of your own existence, immerse yourself in fictions of your own choosing, and come back a changed person, yielding the knowledge of the past to make sense of your present and carve your future.

Sincerely,
Nikos

If you want to dive into this process with a blueprint already at hand, I recommend the following book from fellow writer, Mell Jeffcoat:

Turn the Page:
How to Transform Your Mind by Reading Old Books

I have nothing to gain from recommending this book. I simply had the opportunity to read it, and I believe that it provides great practical tools and insights on how to begin the process of transformation by reading books. You can read my review of the book below (the book is available at cost, only $9.97, for a limited time):

Mel’s book,Turn the Page, is a short yet impressively practical guide on how to achieve transformation by reading old books. Mel shows you how to create something extraordinary, in the eye of the beholder, out of the mundane and ordinary. It’s about juxtaposing old and new assumptions, novel insights and enduring ideas and coupling them together with the three practices described therein, to create a life worth living. A life of transformation. Through freewriting, discursive meditation, and the Zettelkasten method, I was able, perhaps for the first time, to slow down and question the dominant narratives and mental models that I use to operate in the world. What I learned was that many of my so-called ideas were not in fact mine but products of hegemonic influence. So, I took Mel’s advice and ventured in the past to shape my present.

P.S. I am giving away a free copy of the book to a randomly selected person that replies to this email. I don’t have that many subscribers, so your chances are high.

P.P.S. Since I spoke about the intimate nature of fiction and reading, let me take it one step further, again echoing the ideas of Mohsin Hamid, by claiming that reading fiction is second only to sex. Yes, that’s right. Even today, in the golden age of film production and TV shows, Mohsin Hamid maintains that the novel remains the chief act of “pleasure-based data transfer” between two individuals, second only to sex, for the novel merges two minds with distinct experiences to create something utterly unique and intimate: a distinct reality, a hybrid, between the reader and author’s minds; insights unheard of; experiences that are novel; and perspectives that re-calibrate one’s moral compass. In television the viewer almost never gets to be a participant in the world of the film, an author alongside the author. Only in novels one can take the words from the page and give them life that doesn’t exist anywhere but where two minds converge. That is not to say that films cannot be intimate; of course they can, but in video a world manifests itself upon the viewer, constructed and finalized; great novels require participation to unravel their worlds.