First post of 2026.

For a long time, I avoided books. Not because I disliked learning itself but because books once felt like pressure, and authority to me. What I resisted was not reading but the condition under which it was imposed (and at the time, the material itself).

That shift happened when reading was no longer imposed.

Non-fiction, in particular altered the way I see both the inner and outer world. Not by adding more information but by challenging the lens through which I perceive life. Slowly, it became clear that what we often call “understanding” is nothing more than conditioned thought repeating itself in familiar patterns. And familiarity feels safe to the mind.

We like to believe that we see the world as it is. In reality, we see it through layers of memory, prejudice, trauma, belief, and habit. Our thought becomes a cage and over time we grow comfortable inside it, so comfortable that we begin to mistake the cage itself for freedom.

The difficulty is that we are both the creator of the cage and the one trapped inside it. Observing ourselves objectively with a fresh perspective is extremely hard when the observer itself is conditioned.

This is where a true external mirror becomes necessary.

Certain books and sometimes if you are fortunate, certain people in our lives act as that mirror. But a mirror only works when there is attention. Without observation, even these encounters remain ordinary to you. They do not comfort, they disturb. They question what we take for granted. They expose how limited personal experience really is. In doing so, they quietly and unconsciously introduce us to our conditioned mind.

Good reading does not inflate the self. It humbles it. It reveals how much of “who we are” has never been examined.

Personally, at this stage, reading has been less about acquiring information and more about undoing preconceived notions, borrowed ideas and the subtle conditioning we carry every moment without realizing it.

Perhaps that is the real value of reading.
Reading is not what it gives but what it slowly takes away.