Enlightened

I recently read a book called Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I fell in love with Buddhism and the power of thought (especially free thinking). If I wasn't convinced that the LDS church was true, I think I would move to Southeast Asia and become Buddhist.

Siddhartha follows a boy (named Siddhartha. Imagine that.) who is seeking for enlightenment during the time of Gotama Buddha. He ultimately finds what he's looking for, not through scholarly or academic cognition, but through experience and figuring it out for himself.

Read the book. It is short (so don't use the excuse that you don't have time to read). It will change your life. My description of how amazing the book is doesn't do it justice. In the words of Siddhartha, "Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish." Somehow Hesse was able to find the words to express an incredible message about the importance of free thinking and enlightenment. I am in love with it.

I like the idea that enlightenment is accomplished through free thinking. It's sad to me that our culture puts so much emphasis on conforming to traditional schools of thought and putting everything into nice, neat categories. We give leaders and authority figures permission to tell us what to think, never bothering to determine for ourselves if we agree with what they're telling us. We think of things in terms of black/white, big/small, here/there, and so forth. Creativity is lacking. Abstraction is lacking. Enlightenment is lacking.

A few more quotes from the book (just to whet your appetite and get you to read the whole thing):

"Like a player who plays with his ball, he played with his business, with the people around him, watched them, derived amusement from them; but with his heart, with his real nature, he was not there. His real self wandered elsewhere, far away, wandered on and on invisibly and had nothing to do with his life."

"'When someone is seeking,' said Siddhartha, 'it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.'"


"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tired to communicate always sounds foolish."