Going away from yourself is a sin

My Review of Demian (Hesse novel)

Demian was my introduction to Herman Hesse’s works. In my search to find stories of a man searching for himself, I’ve come across this novel and Siddhartha. It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

Here’s some of the lessons I’ve learned. In order to know yourself, you must:

1. Understand that going away from yourself is a sin.

“We’re talking too much,” he said with unusual seriousness. “There is no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What a person needs to do is crawl entirely into himself, like a turtle.”
p. 51. Demian.

2. Avoid using society, friends, or communities as an escape from yourself.

The communities we have now are just herds. People run as fast as they can to each other because they’re afraid of each other – the rich come together over here, the workers over there, the educated elites somewhere else! And why are they afraid? Fear always comes from a split in yourself. They are afraid because they have never gotten to know who they really are. A whole society of people afraid of the unknown in their own hearts!
p. 110. Demian.

3. Be comfortable with loneliness and solitude.

I had already tasted great loneliness. Now I began to suspect the existence of even deeper solitudes, and that they were inescapable.
p. 104. Sinclair.

If you really and truly want nothing except your fate, there no longer is anyone of your own kind, you’re completely alone with only the cold universe around you. That is Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, you understand. Anyone who wants nothing but fate has no model, no ideal, nothing he cares about, no consolation left! And that is the path we actually should follow. People like us are very lonely …
p. 104-105. Pistorius

4. Figure out what you forbid yourself, and what you do not. Understand why.

And so every one of us has to find out for himself what is allowed and what is forbidden – forbidden to him. It is entirely possible to never do anything forbidden and still be an absolute scoundrel.
p. 50. Demian

5. Treat your drives and temptations with love. Understand where they are coming from within you. When you have a supposed sinful drive, when you hate someone, understand that there is something in you that you see in the other person. Figure out what that is.

It is possible to treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love, even if you don’t act on them. Then they show you what they mean – and they all do mean something. The next time something truly crazy or sinful occurs to you, Sinclair – when you want to kill someone or commit some other enormous horror – stop for a moment and think that this is Abraxas imagining within you! The person you want to kill isn’t Mr. So-and-so: he is surely just a disguise. When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourself. Nothing that isn’t in us ever bothers us.
p. 91. Pistorius

6. Wish for something you truly believe in. When you have a wish, understand within yourself why you have that wish.

You mustn’t have wishes you don’t believe in. I know what you wish for. Either you can give up these wishes or you need to fully and properly wish for them. If you can ever ask in such a way that you are entirely sure your wish will be fulfilled, the fulfillment will come. But now you’re just wishing and then feeling bad about it, scared the whole time. That is what you need to overcome.
p. 120-121. Eve

7. Love others with the mindset of not running away from yourself.

Love cannot ask or plead. Love must have the strength to reach certainty from within. Then one’s love is no longer attracted, it attracts.
p. 121. Eve

He had loved and had found himself in the process. Most people love only in order to lose themselves.
p. 122. Eve

Conclusion

These lessons from Demian gave me insights on the attitudes and common mistakes one can make in the journey to be one’s self – with focus on solitude, honesty, and deep self-examination. Hesse’s novel made me more aware of some of the things I do that are actually an escape from myself. The novel does not provide easy answers, but encourages us to go on a journey of self-understanding.

My Favorite Quotes

Finding yourself

Everyone’s life is a way into himself, or the attempt at a way, the hint of a path. No one is utterly and completely himself; everyone strives to become himself, however he can, this one dully, that one more brightly. We all carry traces of our birth with us to the end – the slim and eggshell of a primeval past. Some of us never become human, but stay a frog, a lizard, an ant. Some are human from the waist up and fish from the waist down. But everyone is a stab at humanity, a roll of Nature’s dice. We all share a common origin, our mothers; we all come out of the same gaping max; but every one of us struggles – an attempt, a throw from the depths – to reach our own individual goal. We can understand each other, but each of us can truly grasp and interpret only himself.
p. 2

Alas, I now know only too well that there is nothing in the world more hateful to a person than walking the path that leads to himself!
p. 36, Sinclair on Demian. Tags: [[Solitude]], [[Self-reliance]], [[M’s of Self Knowledge]], [[Introspection]]

“We’re talking too much,” he said with unusual seriousness. “There is no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What a person needs to do is crawl entirely into himself, like a turtle.”
p. 51. Demian. Tags: [[Solitude]], [[Solitude deprivation]], [[Introspection]], [[capacity to be alone]]

All I wanted to do was try to live the life that was inside me, trying to get out. Why was that so hard?
p. 77. Sinclair

But there is no such thing as chance in such matters. When someone needs something and then finds what he needs, it is not chance that has put it in his hands: rather he himself, his own longing and need, leads him to it.
p. 79. Sinclair

Contemplating such patterns, giving ourselves to the irrational, confused, bizarre natural forms, creates in us a feeling of harmony between our inner selves and the force that willed these patterns into being – before long we even feel tempted to see these patterns as our own moods, our own creations – we see the border between ourselves and nature quiver and melt away and learn what it feels like not to know whether the images on our retina come from external or internal impressions. Nowhere but in these practices can we so quickly and easily discover the extent to which we are creators, how greatly our own soul constantly participates in the continual creation of the world. Or rather it is the same indivisible divinity active in us and in nature, and if the external world were destroyed, any one of us would be able to rebuild it, for mountain and river, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature has its model and prototype within us and arises from the soul whose essence is eternity, whose nature we do not know but which shows itself primarily as the power to love and the power to create.
p. 85. Sinclair finding a new purpose. Tags: [[Contemplation]], [[How do you contemplate?]], [[The Book of Disquiet (book)]], [[Leonardo da Vinci]]

And I’m not saying you should simply do whatever comes into your head. No, but these ideas have their own good sense, and you shouldn’t make them harmful by repressing them and moralizing about them. Instead of nailing yourself or anyone else to the cross, you can drink wine from a chalice, think ceremonial thoughts, and consider the mystery of sacrifice that way. It is possible to treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love, even if you don’t act on them. Then they show you what they mean – and they all do mean something. The next time something truly crazy or sinful occurs to you, Sinclair – when you want to kill someone or commit some other enormous horror – stop for a moment and think that this is Abraxas imagining within you! The person you want to kill isn’t Mr. So-and-so: he is surely just a disguise. When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourself. Nothing that isn’t in us ever bothers us.
p. 91. Pistorius

The things we see, are the same things that are in us. There is no reality other than what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself. You can be happy living like that, but once you know that there is another way, you can no longer choose to follow the path of the many.
p. 91-92. Pistorius

And yet these scholarly matters weren’t what encouraged my soul – rather the opposite. What did me good was my forging ahead of myself, the growing trust I had in my own dreams, thoughts, and intuitions, and my increasing knowledge of the power I carried within me.
p. 98. Sinclair. Tags: [[Self-reliance]]

For awakened human beings, there was no obligation – none, none, none at all – except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led. … Every person’s true calling was only to arrive at himself. … His concern was to find his own fate, not a random one, and to live it out, full and complete. Everything else was a half-measure, escapism, fleeing back into the ideal of the masses – conformity and fear of what was inside of yourself.
p. 103. Sinclair

Everywhere they sought “freedom” and “happiness” somewhere behind them, purely out of fear that they might be reminded of their responsibility for their own lives, might be admonished to follow their own path.
p. 111. Sinclair. Tags: [[Existentialism]], [[Solitude]], [[Introspection]]

Parenting

Like almost all parents, mine did nothing to help the life forces awakening within me, which were never spoken about. They only tried, endlessly and untiringly, to help me in my hopeless efforts to deny reality and stay in a child’s world that grew more and more false and unreal every day.
p. 38. Tags: [[Parenthood]], [[Self-reliance]]

Conscience

For a moment I wasn’t afraid of what would happen tomorrow, but mainly of the terrible certain truth that my path now led farther and farther down into darkness.
p. 11. Tags: [[Fear]], [[Anxiety]], [[Guilt]], [[Vicious Cycle]]

And so every one of us has to find out for himself what is allowed and what is forbidden – forbidden to him. It is entirely possible to never do anything forbidden and still be an absolute scoundrel.
p. 50. Demian

Only a thought we’ve lived has any value. You knew that your ‘permitted world’ was only half the world, but you’ve tried to suppress the other half the way the pastors and teachers do. It won’t work! It never does for anyone who has started to think.
p. 49. Demian to Sinclair. Tags:

And the whole time I was entertaining and often shocking my friends with my monstrous cynicism at the dirty tables of cramped pubs between puddles of beer, in my heart of hearts I still respected what I was mocking.
p. 59. Sinclair

The force that hurls you into flight is the great treasure trove of our humanity, which we all possess. It is the feeling of connection with the roots of all power. But it gets scary in a hurry! It’s damned dangerous! That’s why most people are so happy to renounce flying. They’d rather stay safe on the sidewalk, following the rules. But not you. You keep flying, the way a brave fellow should. And look, then you discover the incredible thing: you can gradually get control of it.
p. 87. Pistorius on Sinclair’s dream. Courage: [[Man’s Search for Himself (book)]]

We cannot fear anything or treat anything our soul desires as forbidden.
p. 91

You mustn’t have wishes you don’t believe in. I know what you wish for. Either you can give up these wishes or you need to fully and properly wish for them. If you can ever ask in such a way that you are entirely sure your wish will be fulfilled, the fulfillment will come.
p. 120. Eve to Sinclair. Tags: [[Law of attraction]], [[James-01#v6]], [[Mark-11#v24]]

Love, Friendship, Community

Love was no longer either the dark, animalistic drive I had fearfully felt it to be at first, or the pious, spiritual worship I had offered up to the image of Beatrice. It was both – both and much more: angelic and Satanic, man and woman in one, human and animal, the highest good and the uttermost evil. To live this love seemed to be my destiny, to taste of it my fate. I longed for it and was terrified of it at the same time, but it was always there, always above me.
p. 77. Sinclair. Tags: [[Ethics of Ambiguity (book)]]

Community is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere around us is no such thing. True community will rise again when actual individuals come to know each other; then will come a time when it reshapes the world.

The communities we have now are just herds. People run as fast as they can to each other because they’re afraid of each other – the rich come together over here, the workers over there, the educated elites somewhere else! And why are they afraid? Fear always comes from a split in yourself. They are afraid because they have never gotten to know who they really are. A whole society of people afraid of the unknown in their own hearts! They all can feel that the principles they live by are not valid anymore, that they’re following the old laws; none of it, neither their religion nor their morality, is right for us today. For a hundred years and more, Europe has done nothing but go to school and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill someone, but don’t know how to pray to God. They don’t even know how to be happy for an hour at a time. Just look at these student bars! Or anywhere rich people go to to amuse themselves! It’s hopeless!
p. 110. Demian. Tags: [[Community feeling]], [[The Brothers Karamazov (book)]], [[doom scrolling]]

“No one can ever go home,” came her friendly reply. “But when friends’ path meet, the whole world can look like home for a time.”
p. 114. Eve. Tags: [[Friendship]]

“Love cannot ask,” she said. “or plead. Love must have the strength to reach certainty from within. Then one’s love is no longer attracted, it attracts.”
p. 121. Eve to Sinclair

He had loved and had found himself in the process. Most people love only in order to lose themselves.
p. 122. Eve

Death

Nothing new comes without death.
p. 126. Demian

Earlier I had given much thought to why people were so rarely capable of living for an ideal; not I saw that many, indeed all people were capable of dying for one.
p. 132. Sinclair

Others

There’s no reason to be afraid of anyone. If someone is afraid of another person, it’s because he has given this person some kind of power over him.
p. 30. Tags: [[Oppression]], [[Fear]]

Also – I read somewhere – the life of a sensualist is one of the best preparations there is for mystics. It’s always people like St. Augustine who turn into visionaries. He was a rake and a sensualist beforehand too.
p. 69. Demian to Sinclair. Tags: Narcissus and Goldmund (novel)

There is a big difference between having the world inside you and knowing it! An insane man can utter thoughts that recall Plato, a devout little Pietist schoolboy in Herrnhut institute can reconstruct deep mythological connections found in Zoroaster or the Gnostics from his own creative spirit. But he doesn’t know it! He is a tree, or a rock, or at most an animal, until he becomes conscious of it.
p. 86. Pistorius

Everyone who has changed the course of human history, every last one was able to do so only because he was ready for his destiny.
p. 119 Sinclair

For example, when I want to fall asleep, or concentrate on something, I do one of these exercises. I think of something, a word or a name, a geometrical shape. Then I think it into myself as hard as I can. I try to see it inside my head, until I can feel it there, then I think it down into my neck, and so on, until it entirely fills me up. Then I am firmly grounded, and nothing can shake me.
p. 93. Knauer on white magic, self-mastery. Tags: [[How do you contemplate?]], [[Introverted Intuition]]