Sublime

Once, he said to her: “You are like me, you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and inside of you, there is a peace and refuge, to which you can go at every hour of the day and be at home at yourself, as I can also do. Few people have this, and yet all could have it.”

One goal loomed before Siddhartha, and only one: to become empty, to be empty of thirst, of wishing, of dreams—empty of all joy and pain. He wanted the self to die, to no longer be an “I”, to find peace with an empty heart. His goal was to stand open to the wonder of thoughts conceived in self-dissolution. When every shred of his self had been conq

But never, he had really found this self, because he had wanted to capture it in the net of thought. With the body definitely not being the self, and not the spectacle of the senses, so it also was not the thought, not the rational mind, not the learned wisdom, not the learned ability to draw conclusions and to develop previous thoughts in to new o

He was a seeker, but retrogressive, he was a romantic. And suddenly I realized that it was just what he had been to me and had given me that he could not be and give to himself. He had guided me to a point on the road beyond which he, the guide, could not go.

He soon saw that Siddhartha knew little about rice and wool, shipping and trade, but that he acted in a fortunate manner, and that Siddhartha surpassed him, the merchant, in calmness and equanimity, in the art of listening and deeply understanding previously unknown people. “This Brahmin,” he said to a friend, “is no proper merchant and will never

Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: World Publishing Co., 1971), Joseph Campbell,

stage

him.