Self-Knowledge: Is it everything?

Siddhartha is obviously a unique individual. Although he was born into a priestly class, he leaves to pursue the wandering life of an ascetic. Then, he leaves to see the Buddha, rejects his teachings, and moves on to find the town where he meets Kamala and learns about business and suffering. He’s always seeking his Self, capitalized because it’s associated with Atman – the unified, collective soul of the universe in Hinduism.

Still, it’s interesting to see how Siddhartha’s views on the Self evolve during his journey. Early in his asceticism, he “had known for a long time that his Self was Atman, of the same eternal nature as Brahman, but he had never really found his Self, because he had wanted to trap it in the net of thoughts” (47). Here, he has already realized his discontent with erudition, but he clearly still hangs on to the Brahmin studies of his youth. He views the journey to self-realization through the lens of the Hindu scripture. After his revelation he realizes he sought “Brahman and revered the eternal in Atman” (96). I think Siddhartha means that his singular goal of Atman knowledge hindered him because it didn’t let him learn from what was going on around him. He was so focused on reaching his goal that he forgot to pay attention to the vileness of his actions and the arrogance of his thoughts. And yet, perhaps Siddhartha also teaches us that this foolish suffering is necessary to find peace – but that’s a topic for another post!

To me, it seems Siddhartha actually destroys his Self to finally feel at one with the world. A part of him that is arrogant, selfish and acquisitive perished after his years of suffering and epiphany by the river.

He asks, “Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?” (99).

This is reminiscent of the concept of ego death, which has been variously attributed to psychedelic and emotional experiences throughout the years. It’s pretty likely that Siddhartha experiences something like this. He goes through so many attachments, so much suffering, and finally loses it all, but somehow finds himself. To go back to the original question of this post, it seems that knowing the self is all that is necessary to lead a meaningful life. Through the river, Siddhartha learns about himself and the universe simultaneously. Here’s a fascinating video narrated by Jeff Foster on ego death. It also touches on the nature of seeking and the nature of children – it’s hard to keep each post about one theme when they’re all so interrelated! 

While learning about himself, Siddhartha seems to lose his identity. Every form of him is “transitory” and all previous forms have died (100). So what is Siddhartha’s identity, anyway? By the end of his journey, he seems to exist only in his name and in his thoughts. His epistemology has totally changed through the transition from knowing only about himself as a separate person to knowing about the whole of which he is part. He listens to the river only and finds himself among the infinitude of voices in the universe. In a sense, he has learned his place, and in doing so, realized that he doesn’t have an independent identity.