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Is the Spiritual Journey a Never-Ending Circle or a Spiral (or perhaps both)?

June 26, 2007 at 11:19 pm by mahud

…Siddhartha began to speak and said: “Well, Govinda, are we on the right road? Are we gaining knowledge? Are we approaching salvation? Or are we perhaps going in circles—we who thought to escape from the cycle?”
Govinda said: “We have learned much, Siddhartha. There still remains much to learn. We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
Hesse, Hermann, 1951, ‘Siddhartha’, p.14 (New Directions)

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3 Comments (Have your say)

  1. Laura

    Comment on June 28, 2007 at 4:37 am

    Siddhartha is one of my all-time favorite books. I’ve read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books and somewhere he explains why Herman Hesse didn’t get it right, but I have been unable to find it. (Very frustrating - I’ll probably find it when I’m ready to fully understand what he means.)

    I like the idea of a spiral path. It meshes with the Catholic Calendar. You move in and out of periods of darkness and lightness that become increasingly shorter as you ascend the spiral. The shorter the periods of darkness, the more you begin to realize light is around the corner until finally you reach the point where light and dark merge into one and are indistinguishable.

  2. mahud

    Comment on June 28, 2007 at 7:59 am

    Siddhartha’s quest reminded me of the Buddha-to-be’s own quest for enlightenment, just in reverse, between the two extremes of asceticism and pleasure. I can’t imagine the Buddha jumping headlong into a worldly life, like Siddhartha.

    It seemed to me that that Gotoma represented Theravada Buddhism (which makes sense historically), while Siddhartha’s enlightenment experience was closer to the Mahayana version of Buddhism. Enlightenment is not something reserved for monks, but for the laity as well, and not attained as such, just realized in the here and now.

    I didn’t know that about the Catholic calendar. It sounds really lunar and mystical, and Buddhist :D

  3. Danielle

    Comment on July 2, 2007 at 8:46 pm

    I say an infinite spiral indeed. You can even see a similarity between the words themselves…
    spiral
    spiritual

    The only difference is I and U. Very interesting.

    Thanks for the inspiration.

    Be well and enjoy the day.

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