Reading books can help fulfill a need for increased spiritual awareness.

What I do know, or think I know, is that children, like adults, read to fill psychic needs. Perhaps they get comfort and reassurance from reading about happy families; perhaps they want to read what’s scary in order to realize the safety of their own situation; perhaps they yearn for vicarious adventure. Long after the time when they insist that caregivers reread their favorite books and then reread them some more, many children reread for themselves the works that offer them security.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. On Rereading (pp. 52-53). Harvard. Kindle Edition. 

I have long intuited that I read to fulfill my psychic needs. The psychic needs I read to fulfill are curiosity and concern. Fiction describes a moral universe that sets up certain rules, norms, attitudes, motivations and decision making. These components of a moral universe have consequences that can benefit or harm.

I have always been interested in what makes people tick and why they do the things that they do starting with myself, my family, my friends, my neighbors, my country and society, and then cultures and people totally different from myself and my world.

This reading fiction to better understand myself and others serves me very well in developing my skills in empathy and compassion in my personal and professional life. If I read about moral universes I am unfamiliar with and didn’t understand as well as I would like during the first read, this lack of understanding would be a good motivation for me to reread.

Two of the twenty one skills in Cindy Wigglesworth's model of spiritual intelligence are #6 Awareness of Interconnectedness Of Life and #7 Awareness Of The World Views Of Others. Reading books, both fiction and nonfiction, is a way of increasing one's spiritual awareness of self and others and the universe we are living in.

I will be posting some book reviews here of books, both fiction and nonfiction, that highlight spiritual themes.