ut me, about
Siddhartha!"

Having been pondering while slowly walking along, he now stopped as
these thoughts caught hold of him, and right away another thought sprang
forth from these, a new thought, which was: "That I know nothing about
myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems
from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing
from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to
to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of
all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the
ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process."

Siddhartha opened his eyes and looked around, a smile filled his face
and a feeling of awakening from long dreams flowed through him from his
head down to his toes. And it was not long before he walked again,
walked quickly like a man who knows what he has got to do.

"Oh," he thought, taking a deep breath, "now I would not let Siddhartha
escape from me again! No longer, I want to begin my thoughts and my
life with Atman and with the suffering of the world. I do not want to
kill and dissect myself any longer, to find a secret behind the ruins.
Neither Yoga-Veda shall teach me any more, nor Atharva-Veda, nor the
ascetics, nor any kind of teachings. I want to learn from myself, want
to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha."

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time.
Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious
was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky
and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it
was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was
he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this,
all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the
first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no
longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and coincidental
diversity of mere appearances, despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman,
who scorns diversity, who seeks unity. Blue was blue, river was river,
and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and
divine lived hidden, so it was still that very divinity's way and
purpose, to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest, and here
Siddhartha. The purpose and the essential