Awakening

"Siddhartha looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. It was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha’s eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya… Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them."
-- Siddhartha [Hesse]

He was no longer confined to the unified structure of the world that had been presented to him through his religion. The meaning of a thing wasn’t hidden or derived from his interaction or exploitation of it. The meaning of a thing was now in the thing itself. The human construction that he had laid on top of the world prevented him from experiencing life for what it really was—beautiful.

When someone is seeking “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking… Thus seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal."