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 properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.

“How deaf and stupid have I been!” he thought, walking swiftly along.  “When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter.  But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance.  No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day.”