Siddhartha By Hermann Hesse

Passage:

"This it is," said Siddhartha. "And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha's previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present."

Siddhartha spoke with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted him. 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? In ecstatic delight, he had spoken, but Vasudeva smiled at him brightly and nodded in confirmation; silently he nodded, brushed his hand over Siddhartha's shoulder, turned back to his work.

My Understanding of the passage and why it is important for me:

Siddhartha was searching for truth everywhere and was never satisfied as he felt there was always something missing. Perhaps, he had reached a level of consciousness too great to be fulfilled and withheld in any religion or practice. He explored different dimensions of faith and beliefs but none really satisfied his desires. He seeks contentment but only finds it when he’s not searching. This passage is important to me for that reason. I've learned to appreciate and live in the present moment through meditation, however I also believe that grasping the wholeness of this experience called life is felt and not learned. I also believe that in order to be open to a greater understanding you can’t force anything. This space and time that we live in should be effortless as it is fanciful and imaginary. Just as Siddhartha is sitting by the river, listening to the calming sounds of the water streaming past effortlessly and undisturbed, he gets it for the first time. He notices that the sweet river water flows into the ocean only to be evaporated leaving the dissolved salts behind before dripping back into the rivers again and again in a continuous cycle. Upon this observation he realizes that we’re all interconnected and that life and nature is a cycle in which we all participate without attempt, without disunity and that as we’re all interconnected so is every emotion we feel. We can’t isolate happiness from sorrow or failure from success. Finally Siddhartha reaches the level of enlightenment he’d always hoped for. But you can’t limit your understanding of the universe through boundaries created by religion and then hope to indulge fully in the greatness of this universe.