Reading: The Ladder to Heaven – 08.26.10

Student Question: In school today we were learning about how to teach kids to read. And in one particular model, the first phrase that you teach the kids is that reading is thinking. I heard that and, I don’t know why, but it really rubbed me the wrong way. Is that true, that reading is thinking?

“Well, it depends on what thinking is,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Reading is entering into the mind of another being, of another consciousness.” So a better question is not “Do you read?” but “Who do you read?” “Literally, reading is an act of altering your state of consciousness. That’s what it is, it’s a drug. And if you read something very powerful, it can bring you into chakra seven.” However, today, reading has fallen into “this horizontal mastery of some skill sets on the physical plane. That’s not what reading is about at all. It’s the ladder to Heaven.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.