Imagine a prince who hears about a man who left his palace and his family and went out into the world and found something extraordinary there. The prince is genuinely moved by this account and thinks about it for a long time. So he leaves his own palace, and his own family, and goes out into the world, and does everything the first man did, in the same order, with the same seriousness and the same sincerity.
Will he find what the first man found? Almost certainly not. And the reason is not that his devotion is lesser or that he is doing it badly. It is that the leaving was never the thing. The leaving was what that particular life required of that particular person at that particular moment, and the prince has copied the shape and left behind absolutely everything that made it work.
We do this constantly, in smaller ways, all the time, and it is so ordinary that it does not look like a mistake. Somebody arrives somewhere we would like to be, and we study what they did, and we do it, and it does not work, and we conclude that we did not do it thoroughly enough. So we go back and do it harder.
What we are actually copying
When somebody has found something real, they will usually try to tell us about it, and what they can describe is the outside. What time they woke. What they gave up and when. What practice they kept and for how long. These are the visible parts and they are the only parts that can be transmitted in words at all.
What cannot be transmitted is the inside. The particular question that was burning in them. The specific ache that made all of it necessary rather than optional. The moment when it stopped being a discipline they had chosen and became the only thing they were able to do. None of that fits into a description, and without it the description is a set of instructions for a machine that has no fuel in it.
So the outward form gets performed perfectly and nothing arrives. And usually the person blames themselves, which is the worst possible conclusion, because it sends them straight back to do the same empty thing with more effort and more disappointment waiting at the end of it.
The one thing they all had
Read a great many accounts of people who found something, in every tradition and in no tradition at all, and their methods have almost nothing in common with one another. Some through stillness, some through devotion, some through work, some through suffering they did not choose, some apparently through nothing at all that anybody could identify.
The only thing common to every single one of them is that each followed something inside themselves rather than a description of somebody else. Not one of them got there by imitation. Every one did the thing that was theirs to do, which in most cases nobody had done before and which looked eccentric or wrong to the people standing nearby at the time.
Which means the one instruction that could actually be passed on is the one thing that cannot be copied, because following your own is by definition not the same as following somebody else's. That is not a paradox invented to sound wise. It is simply the shape of the difficulty, and it is why every book on the subject ends in roughly the same unsatisfying place.
Why the copy is preferred
A path somebody else has walked is safe. It is known to lead somewhere, because somebody stood at the far end of it and reported back, and there are witnesses. To follow your own is to go without any confirmation at all, with no idea whether it leads anywhere, and to be unable to explain to anybody why you are doing it or what you expect.
Nobody chooses that when a mapped route is available and everybody around them is recommending it. So the map gets taken, and the map is a description of terrain that no longer exists, made by a person whose questions were not our questions and whose life bore no resemblance to ours.
To experience something is to feel it, and feeling comes from inside, never from outside. Sometimes something outside triggers it, and that is real and worth being grateful for. But the feeling was already in there, waiting underneath everything that had been put on top of it, and no amount of walking carefully in somebody else's footsteps will produce it. What was theirs was theirs, and it was their destiny to find it in the way they found it.
