Echo of an Echo of an Echo

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

I HAVE A UNIQUE VOICE! Thus I scream into the void that is the internet. It is vanity and it is illness to think this, yet I do. The problem we face today is that no thought really is uniquely your own and that no thought really is uniquely unique. Even if I claim to be able to write a completely unique sentence, the idea of doing such a thing still is nothing unique. I will therefore not attempt to write such an arbitrary string of words. Doing so would be like an elephant inside of the blue bee bookstore striving to read the fresh farm-worthy e-book on international clay-based anti-elephant beehives, completely nonsensical if not somewhat tangentially related to things I am currently associating in my mind somehow and how do I turn this off I can’t stop this sentence please send help if this doesn’t stop soon my fingers are going to cramp from writing on my 75% mechanical keyboard that I currently have on my desk while writing this convoluted sentence – which I believe has never been written before – to completion.

Ok, enough insecurities and funnyties (is that a word?), I actually want to get into the meditation now. The thing is, I always advocate for writing things in blood, and with your own voice. The voice with which you write should be something natural, something that speaks to and for you. Achieving this, to me, is more of a feeling than it is a science. I don’t truly think there is a measure for how “Paul” a sentence is, and I believe that trying to find patterns inside of the way I write would degrade my overall writing and reduce it to a script that I should follow to write true to myself – exactly what I am trying to avoid! If I can try to make this a science, there would be only two conditions I would impose on writing true to yourself. Firstly, you should write whatever your thoughts are in a way that makes you feel strongly (whatever that may look like, for me, I sometimes start pacing around the house or dancing to music). Secondly, the reader should be able to understand who you are, and recognise your speech in your writing and vice-versa. If you do not dare present yourself the same way you write or to write the same way you present yourself, you are either not truly writing or not truly living.

Thus I come to the conclusion that I am writing true. But wait! There is more! It would seem that this “true” may still not be as true as I expected. For am I not an echo of an echo of an echo? What thoughts truly are my own, and which have been planted into me from outside? Can we truly say I have my own voice when my writing comes of as just an edgy kid trying to mimick Nietzsche and Laozi and other great philosophers? Can I truly think for myself when 9/10 quotes I use as headers for my meditations are from someone else? Can we stop it with the damned questions already?

Here is the thing, Nagarjuna tells us that everything is emptiness and only exists to us through co-dependence. I only exist to you through you, and thus I would cease to exist without you. Likewise, the world around me and all my inspirations only exist through me, I have witnessed them, I have internalised them, and through me, they have come to be for me. Then, thought is original, though I have uttered it a hundred times – no, BECAUSE I have uttered it a hundred times. I cannot separate myself from my inspirations and surroundings and likewise, my surroundings cannot be separated from me. The thoughts and ideas are original, precisely because they are echoing and alive inside of me! Those thoughts that I truly live by, that truly make my heart beat, though they may have appeared in others, never before inside of me! As I am my world, and my world is its first and only, the thoughts that I think are my own thoughts, and the life that I live is my own life. All is empty and co-dependence, and the echo of an echo of an echo lives alive and well in me – the medium is the source.

So let that source vibrate, vibrate with it while you are at it, become true to yourself and let yourself not become – a mere echo.