Recommends Siddhartha. Recommends The Glass Bead Game.

Transcript context

…comfort to search for meaning. You can feel his personal struggle in every page. Siddhartha’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom, his need to find truth, the direct experience. Again, the book wasn’t simply a philosophical exploration for Hesse, it was psychological survival. He was writing his way out of suffering and towards his own enlightenment. I won’t go into a deep analysis of the book here, but I will mention two key lessons I took away and carry with me to this day. First lesson comes from the scene in the book that to me is one of the great scenes in all of literature. Siddhartha is sitting by a river just listening, and in that river he hears all of life. All sounds, all voices, all of time, past, present, future, flowing together as one. That scene gave me the experience and the notion that while in some grounded human sense, the linear arrow of time does exist. In another sense, time is a kind of illusion that, in fact, everything exists simultaneously. That our lives are both momentary and eternal. It is hard to describe these ideas with words. I think they must be experienced as personal revelations. I’m reminded of the fish story that David Foster Wallace, another one of my favorite writers, described in a commencement speech 20 years ago. The story goes, “Two young fish are swimming along when they encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. The older fish nods and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The young fish swim on, and eventually one turns to the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?'” The illusion of the forward progress of time is water in this metaphor. As humans, we’re fully immersed in it, but enlightenment, in part, involves being able to step back and get a glimpse at another deeper perspective on reality where all things are inextricably interconnected across both time and space. Another key lesson from the novel that was especially formative to me as a young man was that one should not blindly follow others or learn about the world exclusively through books. But rather forge your own path and thrust yourself into the world where the lessons of life can only be learned by experiencing them directly. And every experience, both positive and negative, mistakes, suffering and even seemingly wasted time is all an essential part of growth. To this point, Hesse draws a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge can be taught by others. Wisdom can only be gathered through experiencing the full mess of life yourself. In other words, the path to understanding isn’t through rejection of the world, but through complete immersion in it. Those are my early steps in seeing the world through the lens of Eastern philosophy. But many of Hesse’s books had an impact on me. I would recommend to read Demian, when you are younger, Steppenwolf, when you are older, Siddhartha throughout your life, especially in moments of crisis, and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning. and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning. But Siddhartha is the only one I’ve returned to more than twice. In my own life, when faced with a difficult situation, I often return to the moment in the book when Siddhartha is asked what skills he possesses, and his answer is simply, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” Let me elaborate. Indeed, for the first part, “I can think.” As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.” For the second part, “I can wait.” Patience and waiting often is indeed the optimal decision when facing a problem. Time does bring clarity and depth of understanding. For the third part, “I can fast.” When needed, being able to live and flourish with less is a prerequisite of being free when the mind, the body, and society all are trying to put you in cages. All right, friends, now sadly, our time together in this episode has come to a close. As always, thank you for being here and thank you for your support through the years. Let me leave you with a few words from the Bhagavad Gita. “He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own self in all beings and all beings in his own self and looks unto everything with an impartial eye.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.