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Siddhartha Enlightenment Essay

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Enlightenment is defined as the understanding and knowledge with the lack of hope and pain. The idea of enlightenment can be found I different situations that can be connected through the spiritual awakening of one’s self. Siddhartha and the little boy from The Ocean at the End of the Lane are worlds apart in age, creed, culture and historical era, they are similar in that they are both on a journey of spiritual awakening.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, is a novel about a young boy who is trying to find his spiritual enlightenment in life. The novel begins with a young naïve boy who is living with his father following the family’s traditions of the Brahmin. To reach spiritual enlightenment Siddhartha and his friend Govinda leave the town to seek …show more content…

The two boys leave the town to join the Samanas, a group of people who believe that spiritual enlightenment comes with the rejection of body and all other needs. The boys quickly realize that their ideas of the group are very different, Govinda loves the way that improvements that he has gained spiritually and morally. While Siddhartha has yet to reach the spiritual enlightenment that he wishes to achieve. “Siddhartha learned a great deal from the Samanas; he learned many ways of losing the Self. He traveled along the path of self-denial through pain, through voluntary suffering and conquering of pain, through hunger, thirst and fatigue. He traveled the way of self-denial through meditation, through the emptying of the mind through all images. Along these and other paths did he learn to travel. He lost his Self a thousand …show more content…

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good” (Gailman, 5). The young boy in the story returns to his childhood home as an adult and recalls his memories. As he walks down his lane, the novels protagonist goes from a young man to himself as a young boy. The young boy shows how a child sees the world around them, while the parents show how adults see the world. The child’s creativity, imaginative, and innocent mind is let loose through the same situation as the adults from a different perspective. The memories from the neighbor’s farm begin to come back to him and when he sees the pond the smallest memories begin to return. He recalls that the pond used to be call the ocean by the young girl Lettie. The magic as he recalls began with his family car and continues to an unknown world in which he brings back an unknowing monster. The young boys spiritial enlightenment begins as the two children travel through this unknown world. The enlightenment continues as the different experiences occur throughout the time that the monster is present. This monster, Ursula, turns into his nanny quickly convinces his family of her well-being on the farm. Ursula begins to create problems for the young boy, by not allowing him to leave the farm,

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