Journey to Find Om

            Siddhartha from the earlier chapters has gone from being a student and a Brahmin, to becoming a Samana. Already as a reader, I saw a new side of Siddhartha, a rebirth of his eternal life. Being a Samana completely altered his life physically and mentally, but he realized he only found a part of what he's looking for, which to him was still an unknown waiting to be revealed to him. Then, after he meets and speaks with the Sublime One, he goes out on his own once again reborn, to find more the world and life has to offer, but in a different realm. Then he meets Kamala, in which she and her boss Kamaswami, take him in to become one of the child people like them. From this he becomes a part of a rich society, and he himself becomes excessively rich with luxury, money, and clothing, and becomes a businessman as well. He then becomes sick of his life, and knows he's wasting it away with how he's living, so he again is reborn and goes off to search for something more to experience. After years of living the life of wealth and excess, he gets to a point where he is slowly dying in every way. "This game was called Sansara, a game for children, a game to be played sweetly perhaps, once, twice, ten times−but again and again?" (Hesse 71). He has found Sansara, and has been living it for too long. I think it was good for Siddhartha to experience a completely different kind of life, and experience the things most people experience in ordinary lives such as pleasure, love, a job, and the things of the selfish such as excess money, indulgence, and everything he misused during this time. He was selfish, and let his ego eat away his soul and mind, but sometimes you have to learn for yourself the hard way because of mistakes, such as his over indulgence. At the beginning when he meets Kamala and Kamaswami, he is also selfish, but this allows him to experience the whole other side of life that was foreign to him as a Samana, and the simple pleasures of life. He learns his lesson, and also makes the right decision to leave and go back to a life he's used to, but still to find the rest of what he's trying to find in life.

            When Siddhartha is reborn once again, leaving the sickening excess he once pursued, he is taken across the river from the ferryman he once met when he was going to the city. The ferryman and him live with each other for a long time, as Siddhartha needed a place to stay and search for the thing he needs to experience. Vasudeva, the ferryman, is full of knowledge, and tells Siddhartha of many insights and things Siddhartha already knew but had not revealed to himself. Siddhartha becomes one of listening, and the thing Vasudeva tells him to do to find what he's looking for is to listen to the river. The river, the symbol of flowing life, multiple lives, and every part of the life of every being, is in a way "all-knowing". Siddhartha listens to the river, and does learn from it, but realizes that 'learning' from the river if really just realization of Self and Oneness with the world in its entirety. This takes many years of listening and experiences of being a ferryman to reach this state of knowing and being. Also, when Kamala comes with a boy through the masses to see the Sublime One die and reach enlightenment, she crosses the river, but is bitten by a poisonous snake beforehand, in which she dies. Before passing, she tells Siddhartha of their son, and the son stays with him, now without a mother. Siddhartha wasn't there for him when he was young, and so he doesn't trust Siddhartha, and eventually can't bear living with him, and runs off to the city, where he grew up; the life he knows and loves. Siddhartha is heart-broken by his son not loving him back, but he realizes that this is what he did to his father, and has to let his son live his own life and experience life himself. Finally, through his whole life of being a Brahmin, a Samana, a rich businessman and lover, to a ferryman who listens to the river, who finally reaches enlightenment. This is so, because from being reborn into these different lives within his eternal life as Siddhartha, he experiences, learns, reaches, and realizes everything he needs to, in which he finds enlightenment and Oneness, and finds out this is what he's been looking for all along. "...when he did not attach his soul to any one voice and enter into it with his ego but rather heard all of them, heard the whole, the oneness−then the great song of the thousand voices consisted only of a single word: Om, perfection" (Hesse 114). Siddhartha finds the meaning of his life and life itself, finding the perfection of the world. Connecting with the world, the Oneness, is his enlightenment, and I think it quite beautiful. The idea of Oneness is something to understand and feel with the world, and I think Siddhartha finds this out from the perfect source; the river. The river is like the bloodstream of the world, keeping water moving, and reflecting life before it. I believe Vasudeva was the most important figure to Siddhartha to put everything all together from his experiences and help Siddhartha find his enlightenment. Buddha was Siddhartha's role model, Govinda his soul mate friend, Kamala his lover, but Vasudeva was his mentor, and in the end finding what you're looking for, the mentor is the most helpful person looking back. Not only that, Vasudeva was much like Siddhartha and a genuine person to stick by Siddhartha's side and not teach, but help Siddhartha through his process and let him experience what he needs to. It's sad in the end how Siddhartha dies in front of Govinda, but it's more so a happy ending, because he reaches full enlightenment during his life and presumably will after death, while Govinda reaches a certain enlightenment from the event as well. Siddhartha is a story of morals and lessons, and I thought was a fantastic portraying of Siddhartha's story, and the meaning of life and the world.