Cave at Tham Wua Forest Monastery (2011)
"Siddhartha reflected deeply as he went on his way. Something was no
longer in him, something that had accompanied him right through his youth
and was part of him: this was the desire to have teachers and to listen to
their teachings.
Slowly the thinker went on his way and asked himself: 'What is it that you
wanted to learn from teachings and teachers, and although they taught you
much, what was it they could not teach you?' And he thought:
It was the
Self - the character and nature of which I wished to learn. I wanted to
rid myself of the Self, to conquer it, but I could not conquer it; I could
only deceive it, could only fly from it, could only hide from it. Truly,
nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this
riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from
everybody else, that I am Siddhartha; and about nothing in the world do I
know less about than myself, about Siddhartha.
The thinker, slowly going on his way, suddenly stood still, gripped by
this thought, and another thought immediately rose from this one. It was:
'The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why
Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing,
to one single thing - I was afraid of myself; I was fleeing from myself.
I was seeking Brahman, Atman. I wished to destroy myself, to get away
from myself, in order to find in the unknown innermost, the nucleus of all
things - Atman, Life, the Divine, the Absolute. But by doing so, I lost
myself on the way.'
Siddhartha looked up and around him. A smile crept over his face, and a
strong feeling of awakening from a long dream spread right through his
being. Immediately he walked on again, quickly, like a man who knows what
he has to do. Yes, he thought breathing deeply, I will no longer try to
escape from Siddhartha. I will learn from myself, be my own pupil; I will
learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha.
He looked around him as if seeing the world for the very first time.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things;
they were in
them... in all of them."
Excerpt from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
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