Hermann Hesse is my favorite author. I have read Narcissus and Goldmund 3 or 4 times starting in high school. No one talks about that book, which dismays me. He wrote it when he was happy and it is a beautiful story of friendship.

Demian and Siddhartha have each played huge roles in my spiritual journey. These two tanka stem from Siddhartha, which is the most spiritual book I have ever read. https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/your-soul-is-the-whole-world-7a149c7602ad

This is my favorite quote from Demian: “We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature’s determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind — which they loved as much as we did — was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren’t written down anywhere.”

I love that quote the most because I identify with it, not only as a nonconformist spiritualist, but because I actually have the mark of Cain he describes. https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/my-mark-of-cain-de5db04c5249

This is my favorite passage from Steppenwolf: "The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, … ever deeper into human life. … Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are to ever find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All."

In a nut shell, that quote comports with the concept that we are souls that incarnate to learn from being human and to try to be as spiritual as possible and not act like animals.

I'll close with a link to this poem that I wrote for Hermann:

Cleanse oneself of stains of conformity

Follow the born-into-Brahmin path

I speak not of “the” Buddha, but of the Laureate Hermann Hesse

Demian taught Sinclair the true meaning and power of the mark of Cain

Weighted down by his father’s expectations, Siddhartha Ganges dove to drown

But he could not cheat death

He rose and he found his dharma

Ferry others from riverbank to riverbank

Travel east my friends, while west looks like you will arrive, Columbus’ cartesian presents an illusion

The decoder ring is here: https://medium.com/literary-impulse/descortly-poetic-ode-to-the-spiritual-genius-of-hermann-hesse-11799d5833de