Some people cannot dance because they cannot get get over their appearance as a dancer and be inside the dancing. We call this “self-consciousness” but in a certain respect it is the opposite of consciousness. We are “self-as-object” conscious — we are hyper-aware of our being experienced, at the total expense of experiencing. We reduce ourselves to a body everybody sees, and this body stands in the way of ourselves and eclipses our essential being. Much later, once the essential self is recovered, one has better access to the objective self who is watched. One can link up inside with outside. The dancer can become a performer.

Being inside does not mean abandonment of discipline, though. We don’t just start flailing our limbs. We also don’t start with a different dance we already know and make modifications to it until it resembles the dance we are learning. We study the steps, memorize the steps, count the steps and practice them. Then at some point we just inhabit the dance. Then we can study ourselves in a mirror and listen to others and make modifications to our dancing to make the dance better to watch, and perhaps somehow deepens the experience of dancing?

Reading is exactly the same. Too often we stand outside our reading selves as believers of particular facts and theories. What is read and grasped is one thing, we the critical believers are another. We can’t think out the thoughts of the author because we are so self-conscious as a cognitive self and too self-forgetful as one who comes to understanding.

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The best practical advice on deep reading I’ve ever read:

Love as artifice. — Whoever wants really to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, or a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to avert his eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that he finds inimical, objectionable, or false. So, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start, and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new thing, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Once we have got that far, reason then sets its limits; that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, was just a device to entice the soul of a matter out into the open.