Quotation reference:
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Books were ca. 90% of what brought me to dan. Without books, I would not have become a dan.

From books without explanations, I learn by creating missing explanations by myself. This process is extremely slower than learning from books having all the relevant explanations. The books without explanations (other than game collections) together contain only a small fraction of the knowledge I need now, even if I provide all explanation hidden in them. Several years ago, I was not prepared to read pro games and extract all knowledge from them I need because I was lacking some relevant meta-knowledge of what kind of knowledge I would need to extract. Now, I know. Books that would have taught me which kind of knowledge to look for would have saved me decades of delay of understanding. Now, looking at all those thousands of books without explanation in restrospect, they still do not offer the hidden hints about what kind of knowledge I need. I had to find out more than 99% of that by myself. I see most stronger players (incl. inseis that are stronger players) applying that kind of knowledge but essentially none of them could express to me what kind of knowledge I need. I always have to find out by myself. This would not be so if there were books by other authors stating such knowledge explicitly.

It is not just experience - it is development of a higher level of understanding of go theory that has enabled me to access that kind of knowledge at all. And no, beauty of shapes does not belong to it. Beauty of shapes and flowing naturally like water are just some of those excuses of intuition-like words for not being able to explain understanding explicitly why some shapes (and their inherent dynamics) or timings are better than others.

While I don't agree with you, what you say all makes sense. It's basically not the way I'd say to someone trying to learn go. Well, it's not a fun way to me at least; I enjoy thinking myself rather than trying to figure out someone else's thought (reading that person's book or paper).

You explained very well what was the most suitable way to learn your go. You seem to be 5d strength already, so you proved yourself that your method does work.

I'd like to say a bit of your thought about intuition or subconscious thinking in go, after reading some of your recent posts. It's just my broad idea, but if you think your ideas of go can be applied without any magical 'intuition', it should be directly programmable in a programming language. See how Mathematica is done; such software can exist because the 'stable' mathematical ideas are pure piece of logic without ambiguity. Do you believe your go theory can be formalized to that extent so that the Mathematica equivalent of go can be written? I feel that the sample pages of your books are still too human-friendly.

Given enough time for programming (several man-years), I could work out the details, remove the ambiguity and fake contradictions, supplement and translate all my human-readable theory for unequivocal algorithms and implementation. A few more details on that recently I have mentioned on the computer go mailing list.