Orientalism (?)

Reading about self-actualization concepts, I remembered a book I read when I was in high school and picked it up again from my bookshelf and start reading it. Hermann Hesse is one of my favorite writers, for many reasons. Most importantly because he focuses and explores the concepts of an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality, but also because apart from a poet and a novelist he was a painter and a lover of orientalism. Looking at this picture where Hesse is painting on the countryside, I am almost jealous, of his tranquility…painting like that, and writing beautiful stories about the search for truth and identity…

Siddhartha is one of my all time favorite books, I guess it is one of these books that offers different meanings, every time you read it.

It is a story of a brahmin boy (Siddhartha) who follows his heart and goes through various lives to finally understand what it means to be enlightened. Along the way, he is separated from his family, but also from his best friend, carrying his journey on his own…with no fear, but with warmth in his heart...

Last night the following lines made sense to me…..

When Siddhartha left the grove, where the Buddha, the perfected one, stayed behind, where Govinda stayed behind, then he felt that in this grove his past life also stayed behind and parted from him. He pondered about this sensation, which filled him completely, as he was slowly walking along. He pondered deeply, like diving into a deep water he let himself sink down to the ground of the sensation, down to the place where the causes lie, because to identify the causes, so it seemed to him, is the very essence of thinking, and by this alone sensations turn into realizations and are not lost, but become entities and start to emit like rays of light what is inside of them. Slowly walking along, Siddhartha pondered. He realized that he was no youth any more, but had turned into a man. He realized that one thing had left him, as a snake is left by its old skin, that one thing no longer existed in him, which had accompanied him throughout his youth and used to be a part of him: the wish to have teachers and to listen to teachings. He had also left the last teacher who had appeared on his path, even him, the highest and wisest teacher, the most holy one, Buddha, he had left him, had to part with him, was not able to accept his teachings.

Slower, he walked along in his thoughts and asked himself: "But what is this, what you have sought to learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?" And he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!"