Learning something and changing your actions are two aspects of the same process.
For example we may lose our temper and make excuses for it, but if we have information about the force anger is, then it’s much harder to make excuse. If we make excuse, is hard to be less angry, but if we make no excuse it is hard to keep getting angry.
Actually, I think that once a certain level of no-excuse is reached, there are severe consequences for actions. The karma seems to become more obvious and intense. Which makes sense. The less aware you are, the less you can see causes and effects.
Then the other aspect seems to be the excuse for excuse. Sometimes we may get angry and make excuse, so now we just make sure that we don’t make excuse for excuse. We know when to stop, because there is the awareness. Whenever we don’t know when to stop, there is the time when we know again. However hard I want to justify my anger, I no longer can do it.
The Chinese say “it takes a long journey to find the horse’s strength and many years to know the man’s heart”. I think that’s quite applicable to this particular topic. It often takes many years from first coming across a certain piece of information (anger is destructive) to changing your action (not getting angry anymore).
It’s all too easy to start to see yourself in negative light when you have the awareness but your actions are not yet corresponding. Maybe the intention is already better, but there are slips here and there. Those slips end up causing havoc. I think sense of humour is very important aspect of moving from awareness to action.
It’s also important to make a difference between reading and learning. I spent many years of my life without reading anything at all, and learn tremendously. Equally I spent a period of time reading a book per week or faster, and probably ended up learning less and less moving towards the end of that period. More than anything, it just became another link in the golden chain of spiritualism. The way to grasp at spiritualism as if to make it my own, to make it material so to speak.
In regards to balance between reading, contemplation and meditation, it’s obviously easiest to read a lot, so there is probably a bias towards that. So maybe something to be aware of. I think that it’s quite natural to sway somewhere between extremes and slowly those extremes start to even out closer towards the center and a natural equilibrium emerges. It’s not so much that it’s something we can grasp on to or can create, but rather what is left when the extremes are gone.
The golden middle way remains.