Nick Hutchison recommends Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, a novel about a young man who abandons his family, gets lost in worldly desires, and finds peace by a river. Siddhartha tells a woman that everyone has an inner sanctuary of stillness they can access anytime, though few realize it. Hutchison, a meditator since 2017, urges readers to start meditating.
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Hello, Book Thinkers family! Today's book tip is going to come from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I want to start off this video by letting everybody know that I started to meditate regularly back in 2017, and once I started to meditate, I started to understand a little bit more about what was happening inside of my body. After that, I wanted to double down on that experience, so I started to read a lot of literature about meditation and also about Eastern philosophy. Siddhartha was a book that came highly recommended by a lot of very well-known people in the space, so I decided to give it a shot back in early 2018. I also listened to the book again just a couple months ago, and I love this book and everything that it stands for. Siddhartha is the story of a young man who leaves his family behind for a more contemplative life, but then quickly discards that and lives for the flesh. He lives for the temptations that we all have and that we all feel on a daily basis. After that, he wanders back kind of in disarray and finds a river and hears a sound for the first time and ends up spending a lot of time by the river. And then in his time at the river, he starts to learn more about life. And I think that this very short, simple story— it's a very short book— has given me the opportunity to think a lot more about what's happening inside of myself. And I would highly recommend it for those reasons. What I'd like to do is read a quick quote. And I think that it's very special. It's very special to me for sure. So Siddhartha says to a female character in the book named Kamala, he says, you are like me. You are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else. And within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity, and yet everyone could have it. My action item for everybody today is to meditate, to start meditating, to sit in quiet, uh, kind of solitude and understand what's happening within your body. And I would highly recommend using the app Headspace to do it. But listen to that last quote: few people have the capacity, yet everyone could have it. There's a space that I can go inside of myself where I'm more emotionally intelligent, I'm calmer, I'm quieter, and I can think with more stillness. And not everybody has that, yet they all could have it. So anyway, I would highly recommend meditation. I would highly recommend once you start meditating to learn more about Eastern philosophy and the way that books like this approach the subject of meditation and stillness and solitude. I think there's so much to learn, and I think that it's a skill that can definitely improve everybody's lives. And with that, go out there, read something, and meditate. Have a great day. Bye.
