This is the textbook of textbooks. Do not expect that you can use it to seek wisdom – finding knowledge is a process of seeking, but wisdom comes from within. Remember that words should not merely be read. Learning involves more than that. Words should be experienced, ingested and digested. Experiencing the written word can be like experiencing a bit of life itself. Life gives us no exact answers and therefore life can’t be expressed precisely in words, but merely through a meeting involving a mutual understanding. Think about this next sentence and see if it can be refuted:

”No piece of writing contains the indisputable truth – and these words are no exception.”

Reading should not be an exercise in strengthening your memory, but a process of trying to nourish oneself. In order to convert nourishment into healthy leaves, new shoots, bark and roots, you must expand, shift the earth around your roots and bend with the wind. If you do not stretch your roots and allow yourself to be exposed to the forces of nature, you will grow weak and wither. Some people read a great deal, but without appetite. They let words fill their memory to the bursting point, yet their emotions and their thought process remains in the shade. They don’t find the sun and don’t allow their roots to spread, thus becoming easy prey for the destructive winds of emotional ignorance.

In order to get into good physical shape one must often do things that the body protests against. You can swim, run or do other athletic exercises, and in order to make the body grow, these exercises must frequently be done to the point where you cannot continue. Only at this point will you find the energy to turn the foreign parts of yourself into something familiar. The most important part of learning is learning how to learn. Don’t become too critical or serious, but look at the whole process of growth and expansion as a game. Don’t settle for a single truth about life, but play with your own truths and let the process of playing become the center of your curiosity. Reading without the element of curiosity is like eating without an appetite. For reading to be meaningful, you must always pay attention to your ability to play and to be curious. Agree, or take exception - but take a position and be prepared to change it as you go along. Your mind and thoughts must always be in motion and in touch with both yourself and with the world around you. It’s a strain at first - few people are able to stay in touch with themselves and to form their own point of view as they read. This requires a certain amount of practice: You don’t run a marathon on your first day of jogging, nor do leaves grow before the seed has sprouted.

All too much teaching is about filling student’s head with models, theories and curves, followed by an exam in order to measure how much got stuck in the student’s mind. Maybe there’s a greater wisdom in letting all that you are taught pass through you, and instead use it to loosen and open yourself up in order to discover who you really are. Finding yourself in the words of others takes effort, but it’s a necessary process similar to the process of a musician working towards finding his or her own personal musical expression in music written by others. If you want to grow, reading is simply not enough. Reading is like trawling your mind with a fish net of words. If someone asks about something you’ve read, you peer into the fish net and pull out a passage or two. Your own thoughts can’t be compared with what’s in the net, but rather the water in which the net is submerged. The more fishing nets you have in your mind, the harder it becomes to move around quickly and freely in your own universe of thoughts and feelings. You might loose your ability to differentiate between your own thoughts and someone else’s. A fish net and water will always be two separate things. Going through a long education means learning an enormous amount of techniques and methods. You fill your mind with a system of heavy fishnets. One might call these nets formalized knowledge. There’s no getting around this form of knowledge in modern society. It is the foundation of our entire culture – from computer-programming language, mathematics and architecture to grammar and law, but don’t forget: If you fill your mind with formalized knowledge you might wind up being afraid of the authorities that created this knowledge – you might loose yourself in the process of learning.

In the consumer society we stuffed ourselves with food; in Infotopia we stuff ourselves with knowledge, and both are equally unhealthy.

If you want to understand the true meaning of life, you must maneuver behind, and beyond, information. You may even have to ignore it altogether in order to find out who you really are. The further your own true understanding of life lies from all you have heard and read, the more difficult it will be to find. But if you dare to work in the right direction your inner strength will grow – and the more it grows, the stronger you become …

If you read a book in order to learn, it’s important not to learn it by heart – on the contrary. The only thing you prove by learning something by heart is that you have a good memory.
It’s your responsibility to take a position on what you’ve read and thereafter find your own viewpoint. Do you believe in the lines you are currently reading? If you do, it’s a sign of naïveté; if you don’t, you’re mistrustful. You can only find out who you are by finding a balance between trusting the words of others and trusting yourself. Reading is often a process of searching for trust in others – writing is often a process of searching for yourself, but why do you lack trust in yourself? If you grew up in Infotopia the answer to this question is probably that there are many things inside yourself that you have never had the time to look for. This is the textbook of textbooks and the author is now resigning his status as an authority. This means that from now on you are given the freedom to forget that you read these words and to follow your own mind.