In the study of any subject, you have both mass and significance.

Mass means the actual physical objects that you are learning about, rather than their meanings or ideas about them. These include things such as computers, a car, a rock, the wind, light, heat, birds, trees, animals, etc.

Significance of a subject refers to the meaning or ideas or rules about something, rather than its existence as an actual physical object.

For example, if you were learning how to swim, the mass would include the water, the pool, the kickboard, the flotation vest to hold you up, etc. The significance would include how you hold the board, how you kick your legs, how you breathe, etc.

If you were studying how to play a guitar, the instrument would be the mass. The significance would include instructions on how to hold the guitar, how to make various notes, how to strum the guitar, etc.

A person needs mass as well as significance to help him understand something. Without any mass, he only has thoughts and significances.

So, the first barrier to study is this: education in the absence of the mass in which the technology will be involved is very hard on a student.

Education in the absence of mass makes you feel:

Squashed (feeling as if one had been pressed or flattened with force)

Bent (feeling as if you were not standing up straight, but with the top part of your body leaning forward and down)

Sort of spinny (feeling as if your mind was spinning, turning rapidly in circles)

Sort of dead (a feeling lacking liveliness, enthusiasm or interest)

Bored (feeling tired and impatient because of having lost interest in something)

Exasperated (feeling very irritated and upset because things are not the way you want them)

If you are studying something in which the mass is absent, the above reactions and manifestations will be the result.

To help handle the absence of mass, photographs help and motion pictures would do pretty good, as they are like a promise or hope of the mass. But the printed page and the spoken word are not a substitute for a tractor if you are studying about tractors.

You have to understand this important fact: being educated about something where you don’t have the mass makes you feel physically uncomfortable in the ways listed above.

It’s just a fact. Let’s say you are studying all about tractors and you don’t have any tractors to give you a balance of the mass. You are going to wind up with:

A face that feels squashed

Headaches

A dizzy feeling from time to time

Your stomach feeling funny

Very often your eyes are going to hurt.

For example, if you were reading about tractors, the best thing to have so you get a balance of the mass and significance is an actual tractor that you can see, touch and feel.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you had a child who was having difficulty learning arithmetic at school. All he had was the significance of the figures he was being asked to add up in his head or write down and add up on a blackboard or on a piece of paper. The absence of mass could be the barrier that was giving him trouble.

The remedy would be to give the child the mass to balance out the significance of what he was studying. For example, get him some apples and give each one of them a number. Now he has a number of apples in front of him and there is no longer just the significance. By doing this, you would remedy his absence of mass and undo the difficulty he was having.

This barrier of studying something without its mass ever being around produces the most clearly recognizable physical reactions.