Siddartha Passage - The Self

Whenever I feel a little lost, I read this short novel to get me back on track. The last time this passage stood out:

It is good to experience everthing oneself, he thought. As a child I learned that pleasures of the world and richers were not good. I have known it for a long time, but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. It is a good thing that I know this.

He thought long of the change in him, listened to the bird singing happily. If this bird within him had died, would he have perished? No, something else in him had died, something he had long desired should perish. Was it not what he had once wished to destroy during his ardent years of asceticism (rigorous self-denial; extreme abstinence)? Was it not his Self, his small, fearfull and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear? Was it no this which had finally died today in the woods by this delightful river? Was it not because of its death that he was like a child, so full of trust and happiness, without fear?

Siddartha now also realized why he had struggled in vain with his Self when he was a Brahmin (a member of the highest, or priestly, class among the Hindus) and ascetic. Too much knowledge had hindered him; too many holly verses, too many sacrificial rites, too much mortification of the flesh, too much doing and striving. He had been full of arrogance; he had always been the cleverest, the most eager-always a step ahead of the others, always the learned and intellectual one, always the priest or the sage. His self had climbed into his priesthood, into his arrogance, into his intellectuality. It sat there tightly and grew, while he thought he was destroying it by fasting and pentinence. Now he understood it and realized that the inward voice had been right, that no teacher could have brought him salvation. That was why he had to go into the world...