Page: 3 but was it valuable to know all of this, not knowing that one and only thing, the most important thing, the solely important thing?
Page: 3 “Your soul is the whole world”,
Page: 6 Once all of myself was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer myself, the great secret.
Page: 7 and Siddhartha accepted the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of a heron’s hunger, spoke the heron’s croak, died a heron’s death.
Page: 7 through imagining the mind to be void of all conceptions.
Page: 8 “What is meditation? What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is holding one’s breath? It is fleeing
Page: 8 from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life.
Page: 9 And so I’m starting to believe that this knowledge has no worser enemy than the desire to know it, than learning.”
Page: 9 He who ponderingly, of a purified spirit, loses himself in the meditation of Atman, unexpressable by words is his blissfulness of his heart.
Page: 13 With a hidden smile, quiet, calm, somewhat resembling a healthy child,
Page: 13 expressed peace, expressed perfection, did not search, did not imitate,
Page: 13 by the perfection of his calm, by the quietness of his appearance, in which there was no searching, no desire, no imitation, no effort to be seen, only light and peace.
Page: 17 but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die.
Page: 17 Be aware of too much wisdom!”
Page: 18 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,
Page: 18 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.
Page: 18 “It was the self, the purpose and essence of which
Page: 18 I sought to learn.
Page: 18 “That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself!
Page: 19 I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.”
Page: 19 Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself.
Page: 19 The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.
Page: 21 home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond.
Page: 21 Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust.
Page: 22 Both, the thoughts as well as the senses, were pretty things,
Page: 22 both had to be listened to, both had to be played with, both neither had to be scorned nor overestimated, from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived.
Page: 22 To obey like this, not to an external command, only to the voice, to be ready like this, this was good, this was necessary, nothing else was necessary.
Page: 23 It tasted of woman and man, of sun and forest, of animal and flower, of every fruit, of every joyful desire.
Page: 29 This is how it is when Siddhartha
Page: 29 has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal.
Page: 29 Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.”
Page: 30 Everyone takes, everyone gives, such is life.”
Page: 30 “Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good, being patient is better.”
Page: 31 Siddhartha looked upon all of this as if it was a game, the rules of which he tried hard to learn precisely, but the contents of which did not touch his heart.
Page: 31 Siddhartha surpassed him, the merchant, in calmness and equanimity, and in the art of listening and deeply understanding previously unknown people.
Page: 31 He always seems to be merely playing without business-affairs, they never fully become a part of him, they never rule over him, he is never afraid of failure, he is never upset by a loss.”
Page: 32 I’ve neither harmed myself nor others by annoyance and hastiness.
Page: 33 He saw mankind going through life in a childlike or animallike manner, which he loved and also despised at the same time.
Page: 33 He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured, he saw them scolding and insulting each other, he saw them complaining about pain at which a Samana would only smile, and suffering because of deprivations which a Samana would not feel.
Page: 34 Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.
Page: 35 and to drink wine, which causes sloth and forgetfulness.
Page: 36 Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him.
Page: 36 He had been captured by the world, by lust, covetousness, sloth, and finally also by that vice which he had used to despise and mock the most as the most foolish one of all vices: greed.
Page: 37 something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life.
Page: 37 he continued fleeing,
Page: 37 fleeing into a numbing of his mind brought on by sex, by wine, and from there he fled back into the urge to pile up and obtain possessions.
Page: 40 not a Samana, a man who was at home nowhere,
Page: 40 she went to the window, where she held a rare singing bird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took the bird out and let it fly.
Page: 44 Non-eternal things change quickly,
Page: 44 joyful love for everything he saw.
Page: 44 And now, they had abandoned him, none of them was his anymore, neither fasting, nor waiting, nor thinking. For the most wretched things, he had given them up, for what fades most quickly, for sensual lust, for the good life, for riches!
Page: 46 his self, his small, frightened, and proud self, he had wrestled with for so many years, which had defeated him again and again, which was back again after every killing, prohibited joy, felt fear?
Page: 47 always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!
Page: 50 Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.
Page: 50 “did you too learn that secret from the river: that there is no time?”
Page: 50 everywhere at once,
Page: 50 Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one’s thoughts?
Page: 56 Don’t you shackle him with your love?
Page: 56 Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too?
Page: 56 from finding his path for himself?
Page: 57 his fear to lose him.
Page: 61 the conscious thought of the oneness of all life.
Page: 61 to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.
Page: 63 full of unsatisfiable desire.
Page: 64 In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.
Page: 64 the restlessness and the searching still had not perished from his heart.
Page: 65 Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.
Page: 66 wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”
Page: 66 Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.
Page: 66 A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.
Page: 67 you have to worship in him, in you, in everyone the Buddha which is coming into being, the possible, the hidden Buddha.
Page: 67 I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it.—
Page: 67 but rather because it is already and always everything—
Page: 67 The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly—
Page: 68 he knew everything, knew more than you and me, without teachers, without books, only because he had believed in the river.”
Page: 68 love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all.