Shawn and I discuss Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and its relation to his recovery. Hesse has served as an introduction of Eastern thought to Westerners for over a century now. Hesse has been criticized by some of getting Buddhism wrong, or of "cultural appropriation" in general, or of being too individualistic and naive in his depiction of the spiritual journey as a solipsistic retreat into the balance and harmony of nature from the fallen, hectic world of family and work. While all those accusations may be valid to some degree or another, there is still much that recommends Hesse's version of authenticity or of Jungian "Individuation." Shawn recounts how the text helped him to come to certain essential realizations as he walked the paths of both decadence and recovery. It may be that JD Salinger and other Western authenticity hounds misused Hesse's thought to separate the world into the real ones and the phonies, but Hesse himself doesn't make any such facile categorizations. Shawn demonstrates how Hesse's thought can be understood as a sort of unification of opposites that neither resolves one into the the other nor becomes the sort of whole that Hesse and the great thinker of wholeness Karl Jung were both accused of. Hesse's whole is the wholeness that includes what can't be whole, something like Jung's individuation through the integration of the shadow, and it is this creative contradiction at the center of Hesse's work that still makes reading him worthwhile.

Intention without intention