Have you ever stopped yourself on track at the bookstore when you suddenly realise you shouldn’t purchase any new books because you have unread ones at home? But you strangle your inner preacher and walk to the cashier anyway? And now you tell yourself you are a hundred times richer than you were, just knowing you had invested in yourself.

And then you reach home and saw a book that had been in the same place for one month!

I’m here to tell you not to beat yourself up with guilt, because the book had been contributing positively to enrich your life for the one month it lay there. Just hear me out.

Although invisible to the eye, each and every book exudes energy that is picked up by our subconscious mind. In this blog post you will discover:

1. How the presence of books impact your behaviour and also the behaviour of others.
2. How the presence of books influence perception.
3. How the presence of books can cause a shift between potentiality and actuality.

Science has proven that all beings and things around us is made of energy in its smallest form. Whether it is the fibres of your sofa, the electricity running through your heater or the ink used to print a book. Some go further by saying that even thoughts and ideas are made of energy. So you can imagine how much energy a book carries!

Although I would not buy into the idea that having books lying around the house would make people smarter, having ONE person reading the books is enough to elevate the kind of energy that vibrates around the house. Just as the brain is likened to an antenna – it broadcasts and receives signals around it and picks up the positive energy broadcasted by the person who is reading nearby. The sight of a person reading a book becomes an image in the person’s brain and is stored away, along with other positive memories.

Let’s not simply assume that the sight of a person reading makes another person immediately want to read a book, but what it does is that the image and the feelings associated to the sight of a person reading registers in the person’s mind – and that is the most crucial part the equation. The feelings associated with the sight of a person reading a book. When a person repeatedly sees the same image and registers the same feelings to his/her brain, after awhile he/she will want to experience a book first hand too. Ladies and gentlemen, that is just the first way of how books subconsciously impact those around them. It impacts our behaviour unbeknownst to us.

Secondly, the presence of books in a setting of an office exudes the quality of the person you are dealing with. Imagine special editions bounded and perfectly lined in sequence along the person’s shelf. It shows the person values truth and puts a high price on integrity. Whereas a person whose office is strewn with dog-eared paperbacks that looked forgotten under a stack of piled papers shows the room belongs to a disorganised person with an even more disorganised mind. Who would you choose to work with?

More importantly, did you realise how the books impacted those in its presence?

For all you know, the dog-eared book was read three times over the previous year and had not been put away to a proper shelf. But didn’t you already have a negative feeling about the person for treating books that way? Didn’t you have a better feeling about the person whose books are placed nicely on a proper shelf, although it may be a fact that those books were never read? Do you see how the presence of books influence perception?

Thirdly, each title on a book carries a lot of weight with it. Have you ever tried reading a controversial book in a train and have people side-eye you for the book you are reading? Have you ever seen a person reading Crazy Rich Asians on a train and you feel the urge of laughing together with the person or gush about its movie? Imagine feeling intimidated when your intern reads The 48 Laws of Power during lunch break when you had used the entire hour just bitching about another co-worker?

A book held, read, carried by a person creates a gap of potential between that person and others around him/her sans any book held, read, carried. This gap between potentiality and actuality can only be narrowed if the reader implements his/her knowledge. Knowledge is only potential power they say.

Books, whether its title or ideas or just its presence, impact people more than just an inanimate object. The books enter our subconscious with its energy, good or bad – whether you have read it or not.

So do you have any books on your shelf that you feel is begging to be read?

Now I would like to hear from you. Do you punish yourself for purchasing more books than you could read? What are the titles of these books? Let me know by commenting below this blog post, or you may reply to my email if you subscribe to The Baini Mustafa Newsletter.

If you would like to be in-the-know about books and such, subscribe to The Baini Mustafa Newsletter here for free.

Until then, stay safe and see you next week!