On Consciousness.

Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing; there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put above them except for one little thing, a tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life.

And Siddhartha even doubted in many an hour, whether this knowledge, this thought was to be valued thus highly, whether it might not also perhaps be a childish idea of the thinking people, of the thinking and childlike people. In all other respects, the worldly people were of equal rank to the writer men, were often far superior to them; just as animals too can, after all, in some moments, seem to be superior to humans in their tough, unrelenting performance of what is necessary.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.

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