Another Lateral Move for Experiential Alchemy

My latest book conquered, "Consider Phlebas"

Break Apart, Clarify, Understand

In a previous post, I used the term "lateral move" in the context of parkour training. I'm developing the idea that reading is a lateral move for the mind. Making a lateral move, in the context of one's experiences, involves expanding what we know outward. So instead of accumulating knowledge through our senses from the outside world, we move inwards drawing on our experiences to bring life to the words we read. The words we read break apart and reorder our existing experiences to give us a new take. If we don't allow for experiential alchemy, our experiences lie dormant as mere knowledge. 

This effect can work in reverse as well. Words have a way of clarifying our experiences. There is a base level crudeness to any given experience that is wasted on the conscious mind.  A detailed description about the setting of a room or about, say,  the complex emotions of a character in the grip of indecision, gives us new tools with which to articulate our own experiences. Understanding comes from clarity. It's like the myriad number of  Eskimo names for snow. We know that there are all types of different snow but we can have a fairly flat understanding of it if we do not make finer distinctions. That flat understanding can feed back into our experiences, dulling our ability to perceive the world in a more complex way.

Take back your exploratory nature

In terms of exploration and discovery we often talk about the world of the big and the small. The frontiers of our scientific understanding go as far as they possibly can in those directions. Scientists invent new ways of measuring to understand the world of the small. Scientists invent new spacecraft so we can get closer to the really big things. There is usually a natural limit to how much we can discover and when you ask any given scientist about the stuff on the frontier, you get the kind of response you would from a mechanic working on your car: "workin' on it". The "you'll know when we know" approach works better for humanity as a whole since we're not all qualified to jump in a space shuttle and sample asteroids or whatever. That said, discovery and exploration can still be about the individual. It's about learning something you didn't know before, even if other people know these things. That's why people still travel. No-one's reason for not visiting Japan is "well there are already people living there, so what's the point?" Even with travel there is a natural limit and unless you're living somewhere new for a while until it becomes old to you, chances are you don't sink your roots far enough in to understand what you've experienced like the natives do. Fiction promises no limits in time, geography, or even universe for that matter.

When we read, we call upon our inherent ability to model reality, to make predictions about the future. So in some sense, every experience or situation described in fiction calls upon our ability to anticipate succeeding events within that story. When we consider what might happen next in real life, we create stories and models. Sometimes these can be so vivid, they cause us to flinch away from an imagined pain or twist our faces in disgust over a sight we're not even seeing. Our powerful imagination affects even our physiology. Maxing out our modelling abilities may serve us in other practices such as creating positive associations in meditation. For that matter, any quality we develop in our meditation gets practice when we encounter scenarios in fiction where it might be possible to never come up against any major challenges in real life which test our ability to keep calm and present. Just kidding! There are tons of those but perhaps the more extreme examples don't come up in modern life so often that we can adequately prepare for them.

The moral piece:

Reading is like the movie Groundhog's Day. You go over similar types of stories again and again and you learn something beautiful/helpful from it. You go through the next day again without the deficiency you had before, with new insight, you can move further than you did, you've improved your perspective. You fill out your mind map, uncovering corners of your mental world you may never have experienced. How many lives have you lived? When you read a story, you are born into a new world for a little while. You have a chance to take on the perspectives of characters who experience things you may never encounter. The clarity with which I feel these things depends on my understanding of the words presented and the richness of my own experience. Knowledge, on some definitions in epistemology, is about interacting with the truth of the world in a very particular kind of way. Perhaps we are not gaining new knowledge when we read fiction, but we do work with what we know, bending it, twisting it, reordering it. Though we usually work with the field of our senses, that information combined with the ability to read multiplies the experiences we have. This experience explosion puts us through a gauntlet of moral fortitude which can shape and sharpen our moral sensibilities to a fine point.

Anyways, I found that I was missing some good reasons for why I enjoy reading fiction beyond fun and stimulation. Elucidating the benefits pushes me to feel like it is not just an indulgence, but an active practice which makes me a better person.