Time And Enlightenment: According to Siddhartha

This is a pic I took on my cell phone at the end of the summer on a beach on the Mississippi. It's one of my favorites, I just needed an excuse to post it.

I read a book in my religion class a couple of years ago called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which is loosely based on the life of Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism. I thought this quote went good with the picture (read it two or three times for good measure):

"The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth...in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future...Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man [are] only separated by shadows, not through reality...Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence."
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Here's another similar quote from a more modern Buddhist for clarity (because I won't pretend to know exactly what that^ means) :

"Time is not a line, but a series of now points."- Taisen Deshimaru

Don't think about that one for too long. Interesting idea, but it'll give you a headache.

The condensed summary of Siddhartha is that of a regular guy who decides to spend his life trying to reach "enlightenment" on earth. He spends half his life sampling method after method of spiritual enlightenment and finally gives up because none of the methods satisfy his thirst for salvation. Finally, he gives up and decides to work as a ferryman on a river, escorting travelers from one end to the other. He ends up doing this for more than 20 years, and suddenely realizes one day that the very act of giving up his spiritual quest and choosing his humble lifestyle observing the movement and essence of the river for so long, has caused him to ultimately teach himself more about life and reality than any religion or spiritual teaching ever could.

Wikipedia: The novel shows how the path to enlightenment cannot be conferred to another person because it is different for everyone and will likely never be achieved simply by listening to an enlightened one. This is because words and teachings may talk about the truth but are not the Truth itself; being concepts, they trap you, since enlightenment means release from concepts.