Siddhartha Once Again…jim nolan 

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Siddhartha in my life, but it’s gotta be at least six. What a journey THAT book has had down the byways of my literary and spiritual psyche!

When I was 17, it may have been the deepest and most influential book of my life to that point. (There was also The Prophet, and Damian, then a little later there was On the Road, the Upanishads, Trout Fishing in America, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, the Beats, Soul on Ice, Paris in the 20’s…But at that existential intersection of 17 years old and Columbus, Ohio, there was that early awakening of Siddhartha.)

Like other books, authors, and protagonists during my 65 years on the planet, in Earth School, Siddhartha’s journey was at times rocky. At points I thought him and Hermann Hesse utter jackasses, sophomoric weenies, sillily arrogant, inauthentic spiritual wannabes and punks. (I remember a wise person telling me that our judgments of others are more often than not about parts of ourselves that we do not like, and do not want to acknowledge, but I am CERTAIN this could not have been the case for me!!! Anyway…..)

I’ve gone south, north, and zigzaggy on Hemingway, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Ginsberg, Didion, Joyce, Taoism, Dada, and countless other writers and lineages. Why should Siddhartha have been any different?

Anyway, I read Siddhartha in India a few years back, and now again in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, sitting around hot springs and fire pits. I am back to a position of awe—not the awe of the 17 year old, but more of an elder’s awe, a more informed awe, I hope. OK, during most of the book, Siddhartha truly is an insufferable, arrogant, self-absorbed weenie, and Hesse let him be (his bad.) Way over the top. (Where was the      editor?)

But the thread I love so much is Siddhartha’s early, early recognition that no teachers, no “teachings”, no words, not even those of Gautama, the Buddha, the Perfect One, who Siddhartha meets along the way, were going to get him anywhere he wanted to go, in the big picture.

That is an experience, or inkling, or knowing I feel I have had since a long time ago. The road to wherever I am going is not going to be (and never has been) one mapped out by “teachers” or therapists—not Tolle, or Chopra, or Oprah, or Adyashanti, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Bible, or Jack Kerouac, or the Catholic Church, or my last shot at “therapy.” “Isms” have never appealed to me. What allowed the Buddha to be the Buddha was not something that he could convey, transfer, teach or gift to others. Upon opening his mouth, the Suchness that he was went downhill, losing ground to language, which is a siren of great beauty, and one of my own personal favorites, but one that will invariably crash on the rocks of its own limitations.

Not many teach that. Especially in Santa Fe, which has more “spiritual teachers” than you can shake a stick at. Seriously.

Gurus keep talking, teachers keep teaching, presenters keep presenting, but hearing Osho, or Ram Das (who I love), or hugging Ammaji is, for me, more like going to a World Series game, or a Pink Floyd concert, which, when finished, fades quickly, leaving me appreciative of the moments they gave me, but nevertheless not really anything more or less than I was before, which is Jimmy Nolan.

Siddhartha got that. That was one of the biggest gets that he got.

I see that, and feel that, and know that now, at 65, and it’s OK that my younger selves did not. They got other things, and so it was.

In a few future posts, I am going to share a few of the jewels that jumped out at me from this reading—just because. Yeah, I know…Words, words, words…

Here’s one. And yes, it sounds foolish, as Siddhartha predicts:

“Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”

“Are you not joking?” asked Govinda.

“I’m not joking. 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, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. This is what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the teachers.”

Until the next time…

Jim

Ojo Caliente

10.22.18

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