Why reading books is so important for your child?
There are a lot of people who are making an effort to rise in spirituality. They follow the advice of their guru and do regular meditation. As time went on a lot of people found out that if you do meditation regularly and follow your Guru’s words there is no need to read any books or literature. God will gradually reveal to you.
However, for beginners in spirituality, reading books can be highly useful. Reading holy books or commentaries on Bhagwad Gita or Bible or Koran can be very very beneficial. The sages in India took great care of preserving their teachings and lessons in the form of books because they realized that the coming generations will require these precious gems.
As the beginners in spirituality initially pray to God in the form of idols and as they do more progress gradually they don’t require the image at all. They can visualize God just be imagining him in their thoughts. The same thing applies in the case for read books. For the beginners, it is not possible to directly jump into long hours in meditation and other religious practices. So the guru’s or masters suggest all their disciples or students develop habits of reading good books. Reading holy books of their religion and cultures will only be helpful to them.
Reading books will give the students a two-way benefit. If they here some good advise from their master and come across something similar in some book which they read, they will be able to associate more with those ideas. On the other hand, if they read some good books they may not be able to understand it completely but when the guru comes across the same topics, they can understand the literature in a better manner. Reading books is also a habit that is at least harmless. It will detract us from other bad habits like watching TV, indulging in useless gossip, etc.
The habit of reading books is gradually ingrained in the disciples. But the masters say that gradually also try to express your ideas and write them in the form of articles and good literature. Writing good thoughts may not be very helpful to many people but at least it will make the students think more deeply and understand the things in a better manner. And it is quite possible that there might be some gifted writer hidden in some disciple.
However, care should be taken while selecting the books which we need to read and also write. We should stay away from fiction books with imaginary stories. Guidance should be taken from the master when selecting material for reading.
