This marks the point of separation between the two friends, for Siddhartha would rather tread his own path than follow another's. Before he leaves, Siddhartha has a conversation with Gotama in which the smiling older man warns him to be wary of his own cleverness. Leaving the grove, Siddhartha experiences an awakening. The colors and splendors of the natural world, which have always been present but without attracting Siddhartha's notice, suddenly leap out to his newly appreciative senses. Even though he is alone in the world, tied to no group, he feels more encouraged than ever, for he is more indisputably himself than at any previous moment, and he surges boldly toward his future.
Commentary .
This first part of the novel is about the realm of the mind; during this period, Siddhartha actively sets about letting the Self die, escaping his Self. This attempt reaches its most concentrated form during his stay with the ascetic Samanas, during which he discards all material possessions and tries further to flee his own body and control his biological needs: we are told, "He killed his senses, he killed his memory, he slipped out of his Self in a thousand different forms." Thus Siddhartha begins his quest with an extreme behavior, first signaled by an unsettling break from his family. However, considering that Siddhartha is a novel about synthesis and unity, such an extreme, with its emphasis solely on the cerebral and its negation of the physical, cannot be sustained. In a three-beat pattern, which sets the rhythm for the novel as a whole (and which echoes the three-phase structure of Siddhartha's life, from mind to body to unity), Siddhartha leaves the learned men of his town, then the Samanas, and then even Gotama Buddha. After leaving both Govinda, and Gotama, the one man for whom he has absolute admiration, Siddhartha wanders lost in thought. He realizes that he does not know himself because he has spent all his life escaping himself in his attempt to find Atman, Life, and the Divine.