The Importance Of Spiritual Journey In Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha

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My whole life up to this date I was told to go to college right after high school, get a good job to support my family and the future. But is that really what I wanted to do? I didn’t want to follow societal expectations put on me, I want to live my own path and not the road already laid out for me. I 'm not the only one that thinks like this. As for Siddhartha, he didn’t want to become a Brahmin like everybody expected him to, but instead to experience the things he was always learning about. He wanted to find the ultimate state of peace within himself and become happy without anyone telling him how to become happy.. After reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha and I both have dreams of our own and want to choose the future for ourselves …show more content…

Siddhartha needed to experience everything in life to find out what truly made him happy. While visiting Kamala, he fell in love with her. He never experienced love before and he wanted to experience it with someone like her in order to help his spiritual journey. The love between them two help impact his journey on a positive way showing him how to love and the feelings behind loving someone. In the book Siddhartha, Siddhartha says to Kamala “And if it does not displease you, Kamala, I would like to ask you to be my friend and teacher, for I do not know anything of the art of which you are mistress.”(53) Siddhartha knew Kamala was very smart in her art of work and knew everything to it so he came to her to help him find love in order to become happy with himself. While he was with her, Kamala became pregnant with his kid which he met years later after him and Kamala stopped talking. I believe meeting his son halted his spiritual journey in different ways. Siddhartha was trying so hard to be there for him and teach him the way he lives but his son never obeyed him or anyone their. He didn 't want to do any work and was very arrogant. Siddhartha soon realizes that we wasn 't happy with his son acting like this. “Siddhartha began to realize that no happiness and peace had come to him with his son, only sorrow and trouble”(118). Siddhartha wasn’t happy with him …show more content…

Siddhartha didn’t want to become what society laid out path for him was. He wouldn’t have been happy with his life if all he did was learn and not experienced everything. He did what made him happy and that was to go out on his own and experience everything in life and to find true happiness within himself. This ties into modern day by society 's expectations on us. Society puts way too many expectations on everyone including me. I felt that I already had my whole life planned out right in front of me without me having any say in it. I was suppose to go to college, get a degree and marry and have kids and provide for them and save for the future and what it holds. I didn’t like how I had my path laid out in front me. I want to be able to follow my own “American Dream” rather than the normal american dream society portrays on us. In the essay The american dream: Dead, Alive, or on hold?, Mr. King said that “The American Dream, however, is based on perception, on the way someone imagines on how to be successful”(613). I will be the only person who determines my own dream and successful is defined in my own actions and

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