"But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking"
About this Quote
Hesse points to a deeper issue: some questions cannot be answered because they are built on faulty premises. When the frame of thought is wrong, every query it generates leads into a maze. Instead of advancing understanding, the mind keeps reinforcing its initial mistake.
Across Hesse’s work, especially Siddhartha, the mistake is dualistic thinking. It splits the world into opposites: salvation versus sin, self versus world, goal versus path. From that split spring the urgent questions seekers ask: How do I reach enlightenment? What doctrine is true? What is the right way to live? Each presupposes a gap to be bridged, a final state to be seized, a truth to be possessed. But nondual insight, the kind Hesse’s characters grope toward by rivers and in silence, undoes those premises. If the separations are illusions, then questions framed by them cannot possibly be answered; they dissolve when the illusion lifts.
Hesse also critiques the modern appetite for conceptual mastery. The educated, anxious mind treats existence like a problem set. It wants definitions, guarantees, steps. Yet lived reality, in Hesse’s view, resists this approach. Words fracture what is whole. Time, cut into before and after, obscures the unity of moments. The wiser stance is receptive rather than grasping, listening rather than demanding, learning to inhabit experience without carving it up.
The line is not anti-intellectual; it is anti-reification. It challenges the habit of smuggling hidden assumptions into our questions and then mistaking the resulting impasse for mystery. To ask better, one must first think differently: loosen binaries, notice the ego’s need for control, and allow understanding to arise from attentive presence. Often, when the premise shifts, the question changes or falls away, and what seemed unanswerable reveals itself not as a riddle to solve but as a reality to live.
Across Hesse’s work, especially Siddhartha, the mistake is dualistic thinking. It splits the world into opposites: salvation versus sin, self versus world, goal versus path. From that split spring the urgent questions seekers ask: How do I reach enlightenment? What doctrine is true? What is the right way to live? Each presupposes a gap to be bridged, a final state to be seized, a truth to be possessed. But nondual insight, the kind Hesse’s characters grope toward by rivers and in silence, undoes those premises. If the separations are illusions, then questions framed by them cannot possibly be answered; they dissolve when the illusion lifts.
Hesse also critiques the modern appetite for conceptual mastery. The educated, anxious mind treats existence like a problem set. It wants definitions, guarantees, steps. Yet lived reality, in Hesse’s view, resists this approach. Words fracture what is whole. Time, cut into before and after, obscures the unity of moments. The wiser stance is receptive rather than grasping, listening rather than demanding, learning to inhabit experience without carving it up.
The line is not anti-intellectual; it is anti-reification. It challenges the habit of smuggling hidden assumptions into our questions and then mistaking the resulting impasse for mystery. To ask better, one must first think differently: loosen binaries, notice the ego’s need for control, and allow understanding to arise from attentive presence. Often, when the premise shifts, the question changes or falls away, and what seemed unanswerable reveals itself not as a riddle to solve but as a reality to live.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Herman
Add to List
