Copying and authenticity redux
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I’d like to come back to one of my favorite themes because I have made a small step further. It is in the line of thought of copying others versus authenticity, and touches on how we learn. Where I had arrived at before is that it is impossible to be a copy of someone else, that by being like a teacher you just become an inferior knock-off, and that one should commit to being authentic.
Which is all very well, but nearly all learning happens by copying, it is a strategy used by children to great effect. So yesterday it struck me, there is nothing wrong with copying, so long as you let go of the copying behaviour at some point. Only then can you see what you have made authentically your own, what you have learned. Copying happens in great and small things, it only becomes a problem when you carry it to excess and attempt to become someone else. When you refuse to let go.
Comments
Lay down the raft when it's served its purpose, don't carry it on your back?
I think that through admiring another persons qualities we can develop our own. Not instantly but as a process moving us.
I think that the degree to which I can be free of my habituated responses to phenomena is the degree to which originality manifests.
The degree to which I am unable to be free of my habituated responses to
phenomena is the degree to which originality doesn't manifest.
In one sense we have to break the mould.
However we are all molded by the escapable and the inescapable.
Freedom is limitless but constrained by form.
The limiting self which includes karma, dukkha and ignorance is [insert description of self] not real. Fortunately by resonating with the heroic:
... We begin to separate the preferences from the essential
So we might find our emptying forms a form of nothing.
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