More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Everything else was searching, was a detour, was getting lost.
‘What is meditation? What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is holding one’s breath? It is fleeing 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.
He had overcome the suffering of the world in himself and had halted the cycle of rebirths.
love can be obtained by begging, buying, receiving it as a gift, finding it in the street, but it cannot be stolen.
His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach one’s goals, if one is able to think, if one is able to wait, if one is able to fast.’
many things he had learned from the Samanas, he had learned from Gotama, he had learned from his father, the Brahman, had remained within him for a long time afterwards: moderate living, joy of thinking, hours of meditation, secret knowledge of the self, of his eternal entity, which is neither body nor consciousness.
But isn’t every life, isn’t every work beautiful?’
Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.
Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.’
‘When someone is searching,’ said Siddhartha, ‘then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means having a goal. But finding means being free, being open, having no goal.
wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.’
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.
love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all.
