Death of the Ego JR

In this quote Siddhartha’s ego dies. He thinks it finally died because when he was an ascetic, and a Brahmin, he had too much knowledge which held him back. He was arrogant; he was always the best and had always been a step ahead of the others. The quote I chose would best represent this was “That he had felt that despair, that profoundest revulsion, and had not been broken by it, that the bird, that wellspring, that happy voice, was still alive in him-that is where his joy came from.” Right before this he was going to commit suicide because he thought his inner voice had died; now he realizes that he just had to go through the despair to get to be happy. He now knows that his inner voice is not dead. I think this is a universal think in life, that you have to understand what pain is so you can know how it good it feels when there is no more pain. The fact that’s something that people still sort of say today makes it easier, at least for me, to understand what he was talking about.