It took me several flights to finish this book, but when I finally did, the last chapter really left impression on me. I was walking the streets of San Francisco yesterday in the early morning to meet a friend at the park. I got to the park in Pacific Heights and had 15 minutes alone to ponder deeply the words playing in my AirPods on Audible. I then went online to find a transcription of this chapter and I want to share my favorite paragraph here. This isn’t a spoiler for the book, in fact, I hope it encourages you to read it from the beginning.
This excerpt really stood out and I had to listen twice and read:
“I'm telling you what I've found. Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it
cannot be expressed in words and taught. This was what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the
teachers. I have found a thought, Govinda, which you'll again regard as a joke or foolishness, but which is my best thought. It says: The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided.
Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness,
roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception."
Thanks uncle Randy for recommending this book an earlier this year. I wish to enter the stage of life where I am a ferryman helping strangers across the river.
Scott X - 420 News, Live from Los Angeles
May it be so.
By the way, Siddhartha was also a film, I think it was made back in the 70s. Worth a watch if you can find it.
A top 10 favorite of mine for many years. Quick read but ponderous due to the Hindu meanings stuffed within. I love Govinda; because he’s just a man- and yet Govinda means Supreme being of Senses&sacred shepherd of the most spiritual(cow). So it’s pretty deep. Concepts like; To be or not to be & time does not exist are on the surface-with life’s big personal questions exposed in the pondering. I’m thankful for short books like this to compliment the super long ones that may tell you the same thing in 10,000 pages(Gilgamesh, or King James Bible) they’ll say the veil is thin and other dimensions are real too.