Use Your Own Words

As someone who posts a great number of quotes, here is another which hit home. Will I stop? Probably not. If and when I have an awakening, who knows if there will be anything to say...

"In spiritual circles, it is incredibly popular to use direct quotes from spiritual people, continually. In fact, there are some people that that’s all they do – especially in online settings – is quote. From other teachers. From other spiritual sources. Probably the all-time person who has been offended against in this nature is Rumi. I dare you to look on any sort of spiritual forum of a new age nature and make it through a page without finding half-a-dozen Rumi quotes. Or even more pertinent to this subject – people who will start out speaking about a topic or reacting to a topic, either in their own books, or writings on forums or whatnot. And they are just one sentence or so into making their point, when instead of making that point by trying to relay an experience of their own – or trying to just digest and try to put into words their understanding of a topic – they’ll just fall right back on a quote from someone else. From a teacher, from Nisargadatta, from Ramana Maharshi, or from who knows who.

There’s a reason for that. If you don’t necessarily know something as directly as you could – or you think that someday you might, or that you are eventually hoping to achieve through your own understanding – then it does help to find references from other people. That’s really what a lot of research papers are all about. Finding other references and utilizing them. But when you utilize them, you try to put them into your own words. And you try to put it into the context of your own experiences. You can always tell when somebody is referencing something, and they just barely put a little skim of their own words over it. It’s almost somewhere between borderline to flat-out plagiarism (I’m talking in papers, now). They found a source, and they’ve maybe changed one or two words. But if you were to put it into any sort of quote generator – something that looks up papers or references online to double-check for plagiarism, you would find almost the exact same quote.

The point of all of this is: If you know something, convey it in your own words. If you don’t know something, convey what you don’t know, or how you don’t know it – or even your understanding of it to this point – in your own words, to the best of your ability. I’m not saying don’t ever quote anyone. It just seems sort of counter-productive to rely so heavily upon the works and the teachings of someone else exclusively in your own communication of what your understanding of spirituality – or really of any source – to be. It stops your own intuitive processes, it stops your own questioning, it stops your own attempts at dissecting. Especially when all you ever have to do is, “Well, my master, or this writer has covered it. Let me just look it up and memorize their own encyclopedic knowledge of it.” That’s not learning in a sense that’s going to give you growth. It’s learning in a sense that’s going to increase the number of words in your brain and allow you to quote things. Your ability to assimilate quotes is by no means directly proportional to the amount of spiritual growth that you’re going to encounter. The amount of insight – direct insight – that you’re going to encounter. And I think certain people really do believe that the more that they learn in this way, and the more that they memorize, the more their chances are of seeing something directly.

It doesn’t work that way – it really doesn’t. We’re not studying for standardized tests here. Knowledge doesn’t come about in that way, necessarily. You don’t want to do yourself the disservice of relying so much on any source – to the point of constant memorization and then the spitting back out of those memorized chunks. You don’t want to do yourself the disservice of having that be your sole means of trying to directly engage material. Of trying to directly learn material. And especially of trying to then go out into the world, and through your own means trying to directly communicate what you think you’ve learned to others. Use your own words at all times." ~ JP