In the "Awakening," Siddhartha takes personal inventory of the events in his life. What realizations has Siddhartha come to that will best benefit him on his quest to find the Self?

As Siddhartha leaves the Buddha, he realizes that a change has overcome him: he has outgrown the desire for teachers. From teachers he had sought to discover the mystery of his Self. As Siddhartha says, "Truly, nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everybody else, that I am Siddhartha" (38). But in seeking this Self, Siddhartha has only succeeded in fleeing from it. He was so consumed in annihilating this Self that he had lost sight of it completely. The path to self-knowledge, and with it a knowledge of everything: Atman and Brahman are one‹cannot proceed by listening to the voice of others. Instead, as Siddhartha puts it, "I will learn from myself, be my own pupil; I will learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha" (39).

This awakening leads to a change in Siddhartha's perception of the world. Whereas he formerly reviled the world as a painful illusion, a distraction from a submerged, unitary reality, he now sees that the value in the world of the senses. Unlike the Brahmins and Samanas who ignored the wondrous diversity of shapes and colors around them, seeking to reduce everything to the common denominator of Braham, Siddhartha became convinced that truth was in the plurality rather than the commonality of nature. As he says, "meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them" (40).