Seeing the world through new eyes

“Siddhartha opened his eyes and looked around him, a smile filled his face, and a deep sensation of awakening from long dreams streamed through him, even to his toes. And instantly his pace quickened, he walked briskly, like a man who knows what he has to do.

‘Oh,’ he thought breathing freely, taking a deep breath, ‘I will not let Siddhartha slip away from me now! No longer do I want my thinking and my life to begin with Atman and the suffering of the world. No longer do I want to slay and dismember myself, to find a secret behind the remains. Neither Yoga Veda nor Atharva Veda shall instruct me, neither the ascetics nor any other teachers. In the school of myself I want to learn, that is where I want to be a pupil, I want to get to know myself, the secret that is Siddhartha.’

He looked around, as if he were seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, the world was particolored, strange and quizzical. Here was blue, here was yellow, here green, the sky flowed and the river, the forest froze with the mountains, everything was beautiful, everything full of mystery and magic, and in its midst he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the way to himself.”

 

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha