He looked around as if seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world! There was blue, there was yellow, there was green. Sky flowed and river, forest jutted and mountain: everything beautiful, everything enigmatic and magical. And in the midst of it he, Siddhartha, the awakening man, was on the way to himself. For the first time, all this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, passed into Siddhartha through his eyes, was no longer the magic of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer senseless and random diversity of the world of appearance, despised by the deep thinking Brahmin, who disdains the diversity, who seeks the unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and even though the One and the Divine lived concealed in the blue and the river in Siddhartha, it was the manner and meaning of the Divine to be yellow here, blue here, sky there, forest there, and Siddhartha here. Meaning and reality were not somewhere beyond these things, they were in them, in everything. "How deaf and dense I was!" thought the swift walker. "If someone reads a manuscript, trying to find its meaning, he does not scorn the signs and letters, calling them deception, happenstance, and worthless peels. Instead, he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I, for the sake of a presumed meaning, scorned the signs and the letters, I called the world of appearances deception, called my eyes and my tongue random and worthless. No, that is past, I have awakened, I am truly awake, and today is the day of my birth." -Siddhartha, Herman Hesse