reframe

Return to Waldzell

// August 28th, 2008 // Leadership Development

After a year, I’ve returned to reading Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I’d put it down half-way through when I realised my mind was not focused enough on digesting and applying the deep lessons being so carefully laid out in his last and consummate work. On reflection, perhaps it was even more important that I continue. Nonetheless, it is a joy to return to it in these clearer and more fertile moments. A small extract that struck me last night;

“”Awakening,” it seemed was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality. That, too was why the experience of awakening was so difficult to convey, so curiously hard to formulate, so remote from statement. Language did not seem designed to make communications from this realm of life. If once in a great while, someone were able to understand, that person was in a similar position, was a fellow sufferer or undergoing a similar awakening.”

Last October I wrote of another favourite extract from the masterwork.