Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Search for Enlightenment

I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) when I was in high school. I remember not liking it very much, because it moved so slowly. At the time I was into Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and science fiction – both genres a far cry from the gentle story of a young Indian man trying to find meaning in his life!

Siddhartha is the son of an upper caste Brahmin – bright, eager to learn, and attractive. His best friend is Govinda. He’s on the path to follow his father and be a respected man who discusses weighty philosophical and religious topics with other Brahmins. However, something is bothering Siddhartha, namely, what is the meaning of life? When a band of ascetics called Samanas show up in hi village, he immediately decides to join them. Govinda, the loyal companion, goes with him.

While learning the ways of self-denial from the Samanas, Siddhartha subjects himself to extreme deprivation: fasting, staying outside in the hot and the cold, sleeping in thornbushes, etc.

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heart, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 143-147). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, he realizes asceticism is a dead end. He and Govinda come across some monks who are followers of Gotama, the Buddha, who has allegedly found true enlightenment and broken the cycle of endless death and rebirth. They go to see the Buddha, and Govinda immediately joins his followers. Siddhartha, on the other hand, admires his teachings, but seeks his own enlightening experience. As he explains to Gotama himself:

“The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands.”

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 372-374). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

After the extreme asceticism of the Samanas, Siddhartha embraces hedonism, learning the art of love from the courtesan Kamala and how to be a successful merchant from Kamaswami. He indulges all of his physical desires, but he still is not satisfied. As Kamala says to him one day,

“You’ve learned my art well, Siddhartha. At some time, when I’ll be older, I’d want to bear your child. And yet, my dear, you’ve remained a Samana, and yet you do not love me, you love nobody. Isn’t it so?”

“It might very well be so,” Siddhartha said tiredly. “I am like you. You also do not love—how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps people of our kind can’t love. The childlike people can; that’s their secret.”

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 765-768). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

For a while, Siddhartha is able to keep things in perspective, laughing when he loses at a game or a business deal, and not giving in to greed, but eventually his burning desire to seek the true meaning of life is dulled.

Siddhartha lost his calmness when losses occurred, lost his patience when he was not paid on time, lost his kindness towards beggars, lost his disposition for giving away and loaning money to those who petitioned him.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 823-824). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, he wakes up, and leaves it all behind. He returns to a river where he met a ferryman many years ago, and apprentices himself to him. From the river and the ferryman, Siddhartha finally learns peace. When Kamala shows up with a boy who is the son of Siddhartha, he welcomes them. Kamala, however, is bit by a snake and dies. Siddhartha loves his young son unconditionally, but the boy hates living in a rundown shack with two old men and runs away.

So Siddhartha experiences the joy and pain that comes from loving another person. He eventually achieves enlightenment by listening to the river and learning to be content no matter his circumstances. When his old friend Govinda comes by, Siddhartha explains his hard-won philosophy:

The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Kindle Locations 1502-1504). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Although Siddhartha was published in 1922, it became very popular in the 1960s as the so-called counterculture took hold. It is not a long book, and it is a relatively easy read. However, I had a hard time relating to Siddhartha – for most of the book he is self-centered and unable to give himself to any other person. Even the extreme asceticism he engages in with the Samanas has a selfish goal: to reach an enlightened state and no longer be trapped in his self.

Also, the goal of Buddhism, as far as I can tell from this tale, is annihilation – to get out of the endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. As a western Christian, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I can see how attractive it might be if I were raised in a different culture. By the end of the book, Siddhartha has found that simplicity is the key to a fulfilling life, and that true wisdom doesn’t come from books or teachings, but from being accepting of everything one experiences. I’m glad I gave Siddhartha a second chance, but it still didn’t speak that deeply to me.

Rod Dreher: Living In Wonder

Book number 54 of 2024

I have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s writing since the bygone days of his Crunchy Cons book, published in 2006. He followed that with The Benedict Option – which a lot of people mistook as a call for a complete withdrawal from society to preserve civilization – and then Live Not By Lies, which he wrote after coming into contact with brave resisters of Communist oppression in Hungary. Live Not By Lies is a stirring call to simply tell the truth, even when it can cost one everything.

Dreher has been open about his personal search for meaning. It has entailed countercultural lifestyles and some personal cul de sacs. He has been an Orthodox Christian since 2006, and he lives in Budapest, Hungary. I was sad to learn in the first few pages of Living In Wonder that he has gone through a divorce. It was obviously a traumatic event, and he appears to have come out of it stronger, but still seeking.

The thesis of Living In Wonder can be summed up with its first sentence, “The world is not what we think it is.” In the West, we have become so used to the scientific/materialist way of looking at the universe that we literally cannot see the world around us in the same way other cultures do. For most Westerners (or those of us who are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) if we can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist. Even believing Christians, by and large, look at the practice of their religion as following a moral code exemplified by Jesus, and not as a way to perceive a higher, spiritual reality.

Early on, Dreher explains how we need to use both sides of our brains to fully comprehend the world:

It’s an exaggeration to say that the left brain is analytical and the right brain emotional. Nevertheless, it is true that the most important difference between the sides of the brain is how they attend to the world. The left brain picks things apart to analyze them, and the right brain puts them together again. Both cerebral hemispheres are necessary for the healthy functioning of the brain – but the left must never dominate the right, because the left brain makes a good servant but a poor master. This is in part because the left hemisphere is domineering by nature and doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. The left brain is intelligent, but it is not wise.

In the modern world – that is, during the past five hundred years – we in the West have privileged the left-brain way of knowing. (page 44)

Our desire to control nature has left us unable to resonate with it.

According to Dreher, the problem with a societal loss of enchantment is that people will not become atheist, but rather seek re-enchantment in any way they can. Unfortunately, some choose to do so via spiritually harmful ways. Chapter 5, The Dark Enchantment of the Occult is truly disturbing. In it, Dreher interviews several people who have experienced the demonic, whether through overtly occult practices, use of psychedelic drugs, or a combination of both. Dreher warns that there is a spiritual battle going on, and Western churches are woefully unprepared to fight it. As one priest Dreher spoke with put it,

The devil frightens me. I mean, he’s a fallen angel. I’m not going gung ho and stupid about these things. I know he’s ultimately only allowed to operate within the boundaries the Lord has set, but as a human being, I’m frightened of this supernatural intelligence far beyond our capacities.” (page 106)

In the next chapter, Aliens and the Sacred Machine, Dreher discusses the phenomena of UFOs as a modern manifestation of demonic forces that have been bedeviling humanity for millennia. According to many experts, UFOs are not visitors from another planet, but rather beings who have come from a different dimension.

Dreher also writes about the desires of many tech gurus to achieve “transhumanism” – the merging of humans with machines. AI is a rapidly developing technology that we really don’t know what will do to our spiritual health. There are already signs of people succumbing to the temptation to make an “idol” of AI, preferring virtual relationships to real ones. We are living in an age of “liquid modernity”, as coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which is characterized by a rate of technological change that is so fast we cannot properly evaluate it.

Could technology really hasten the end of orthodox religion?

In the digital era, we face an enormous religious temptation. “Digital technology is spiritual technology,” says philosopher Anton Barba-Kay. Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.” The temptation is to believe that we can extend control over human nature by merging ourselves with our own machines. (page 128-129)

At this point, I have to say that Dreher is making a pretty good case, but then he quotes Martin Heidegger, whom he describes as “arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century”. I know next to nothing about philosophy, but I do know Heidegger was a member of the German Nazi party, and they used his philosophy to justify their policies. Why Dreher thought it was appropriate to quote this man out of so many other tech-sceptic thinkers is inexplicable and undermines his argument.

After spending the first six chapters describing and diagnosing the problem of disenchantment, Dreher offers the cure in the final five. in chapter 7, he explains how important it is to cultivate attention to the ways God is communicating His presence. This is a difficult process of emptying oneself of distractions, being still, and waiting. Dreher recounts how he struggled with this, but through perseverance and practice slowly got better. He suffered from a stress-related chronic illness, and his priest assigned him a rule of prayer that healed him. It took him months, but he managed to successfully “get out of his own head”.

The prayer he prayed is one that Christians have prayed for centuries – the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Chapter 8 is Learning To See. If we can learn to properly perceive and appreciate true beauty, we are drawn closer to God.

How, then, will beauty save the world? By piercing the hard hearts and closed minds of men with the truth that delivers them from despair and calls them out of themselves. (page 168)

Chapter 9, Signs and Wonders, is a recounting of several modern-day miracles. They have happened to people from all walks of life, and were usually completely unexpected. One common thread is that they occurred during a personal struggle or crisis. It’s as if the recipient has to see how far they could fall before he or she could discern that a true miracle is happening.

Chapter 10, Three Prophets of the Real, is just that: portraits of three people who could be considered prophets. All of them are Orthodox Christians, but they did not start out that way. Martin Shaw is an English writer and scholar of myths and the truths they reveal. At a particularly difficult period of his life, he was granted a vision one evening that changed him forever. He now spends his time warning Western Christians that they must brace themselves for a struggle. In his theory of myth, there are three stages: red, black, and white. Red represents youth and passion. Black is failure and suffering, while white is the wisdom gained from the black stage: elderhood. He says Christianity is about to enter a “black” phase.

The second prophet is the English novelist Paul Kingsnorth, who lives in Ireland. His passion is reconnecting Christians with their patristic heritage that celebrated God’s creation.

His writing comes across as apocalyptic, which Kingsnorth readily concedes. But we are living through an apocalypse, from the Greek word meaning “unveiling”. What is being unveiled? that we are using our advanced technology to build new new life-fors to become our gods – and, in so doing, we are destroying our humanity and the good earth. …

Kingsnorth calls the emerging enemy of God and man “the Machine.” It’s a metaphor for the technological society manifesting around us, seizing control of our lives and rendering us all as little more than data. (pages 224 – 225)

The third prophet is Jonathan Pageau, who carves icons out of wood, and hosts a site called The Symbolic World.

“Materialism has played itself out,” Pageau tells me [Dreher]. “After World War II, the philosophical materialists and reductionists claimed they could explain everything in terms of purely material reasons. But you can’t do that with consciousness. People have begun to see that there is a necessary patterning to reality, a patterning that seems to have something to do with our capacity to perceive reality and to participate in it consciously.” (page 232-233)

The concluding chapter is The Urgency of the Mystical, in which Dreher relates several personal experiences that helped him survive some personal crises. He uses them to urge the reader to be open to miracles, and to resist the disenchantment that is accelerating in the West.

Living In Wonder  is a challenging book – not in the way it’s written; Dreher is very readable and engaging, but in his call to the West to wake up and not accept every technological advance as beneficial for the human race. Rather, he urges us to channel the longing for enchantment into healthy and time-honored practices, and avoid the darkness of the occult. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception his book receives.