You can never be original while your hands are still on someone else’s thoughts. Makes no difference if you are caressing them or strangling them, you are doing nothing but playing in the wind; frolicking around outside Plagiarism Central. The total lack of the atmosphere of originality will eventually suffocate you so slyly that you will not even notice it. There are no originals in the cemetery – only copy cats and critics.
With your own original thoughts you are invincible. Original thoughts cannot be attacked, people can try, even tell themselves they succeeded, but they do not. Original thinking is immune to all attack, for there is nothing there which the unoriginal can perceive. They are blind to originality, and can but only pretend that they know what they are attacking. In its highest form, originality does not exist. Just as in its grandest manifestation, freedom is an illusion. Only the unoriginal believe in originality, and are thus imprisoned by their own misjudgment.
Who Is Not Original:
those who whine;
those who complain;
those who criticize;
those who think the world is going to hell;
those who think they know what is going on;
those who think that other people do not, and
those who say they fit none of these categories.
Only a man who is original knows that he is but it would be unoriginal to think so, and he knows that being unoriginal is self-imprisonment. To make ordinary dozing and uncertain life tolerable, do not mess around with the idea of originality. Leave things in your mind just the way they are. If you feel like you just simply have to get involved – get new shoes or a tattoo. And as should be obvious, if you do not wish to merely make your routine state of mind bearable, then go for it. Be original, but only you can find how YOU can be original in your thinking, and only you will know when you do it. If one day you suddenly get to a place of REALLY doing it – you’ll double damn well know you’ve done it, ‘cause your eyes/I’s will jump completely out of their old sockets, you will discover a pot of rewards at the end of a rainbow in a place where the rest of the unoriginal world doesn’t even know that a rainbow exists.
(From the above, it should be obvious that you have two choices: either be a copycat, or a critic …or don’t.)
Happy hunting!
J/