I found this in a recent Lama Shenpen email teaching to one of her students.

Many people have this attitude of dismissing their own experience as of no consequence and it’s the biggest obstacle to progress towards Awakening.

You have to have confidence in your own experience and your own judgment and then just use other people’s experience and guidance in order to home in on it and hone it - but it always comes down to what you experience yourself.

I’ve bought quite a few Zen books over the years. And they seemed bright with the hope of insight as I finally decided to purchase them and awaited an opportunity to read them. As I read them, some were more helpful from others, but all of them failed to have the spark that would ignite my own insight. For a long while, I searched for a better book. Surely, that must have been the problem. I’d read again, be inspired temporarily again by the evanescent fantasy of enlightenment, and would meditate extra hard for the next week or so until the enchantment wore off. I could list the books. Many are classics. Many are written by well-known authors. Some almost have a cult-like following.

Until I finally read, studied, and listened to what the Buddha actually taught, though, there was little connection to my own experience. It was in the context of basic Buddhist teaching that I could finally find something I could know by what I experience. As I’ve progressed from that point, this Buddhist teaching of “finding for yourself” has become much more meaningful and relevant. Understanding how your own mind works, how it gets stuck, what its habits are — those are the difficult things — and the things that have been really worth knowing so far.

The quotation struck a resonant chord about my experience with books. Books, particularly Zen books, no matter how wonderful, are someone else’s experience. They can be useful in the way a map is useful, but like maps, they can be completely misleading about the territory. I think the trip each person will experience must be his own. The territory will have a uniqueness about it that can only at a general, abstract level be similar to another’s. There is a courageous loneliness required to stick to one’s experience at times, but the reality is that one’s own mindscape cannot be experienced by another, even with the best communication skills. Part of the journey is to realize this, and to not shy away from the task by distracting oneself — with the noise of the crowd, the experience of others, even the company of friends. Those seeking the comraderie of a throng based religion are probably better off with Christianity. The Buddhist path to realization cannot be someone else’s road.