Where the distraction comes from?
Especially when we read books, we easily notice that the speed of turning the pages is getting slower by our falling into the thoughts digressed from the book’s contents. For me, I found myself easily distracted out of the book’s main contents into my own imagination when my personal experience was projected by specific words from the book’s sentence. When it comes to stronger emotional experience, it tends to go deeper into re-generating the situtation and try to simulate it in a better way or more rewarding way.
Mixing things… is dangerous. Reading is one thing and projecting my personal experience which apparently doesn’t have anything to do with the actual keypoints of the book’s paragraphs is another. Also, there should be full of ‘purposeful’ tension when we read books, especially if it’s a technical book. Without that, we’re just lazy readers seeking certain entertainment out of a wrong book.
Detaching myself from me… is also trying not to mix the fact and the interpretation of it. I’ve been considering myself as an imaginative person but I realized that truth is I was having trouble in being fully lost in the imagination process because of self-recognition in the middle of it. Constantly having this self-awareness doesn’t really help to accept something as it is. Myself should be thrown away to fully appreciate the moment of learning and enjoy it. It’s joyful not because it’s related to myself but because it is truely free from myself.
Reading books or learning something is in the same line of this mechanism. While you’re inputting something in yourself, you should not be interrupted by your egotistical instinct to translate whatever you’re learning into something actually related to the result of it or application of it. It should be a pure process not blocked by any contaminated thoughts which is usually driven by self-awareness.