Finding the Path

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Greetings, my fellow literature-lovers!

Today, I’m very excited to bring you an absolute corker of a post from the one and only,

Russell Nohelty

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Russell is a USA Today bestselling author (with over 40 novels published 🤯) and the creator of the brilliant The Author Stack Substack, where his mission is to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them. I can’t recommend Russell’s work enough, his ideas and feedback have helped me hugely with my own newsletters, and his recent 15,000 post on how to create a world class Substack publication is worth the subscription fee alone!

In this deeply personal piece, Russell explores a book that set him on the path to a new kind of spirituality. Enjoy!

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I have a complicated relationship with religion. I was raised Catholic. My father graduated from Catholic University and went to minor seminary for a spell, thinking he would be a priest. My mother has gone to church every week for 70+ years. While they didn’t force me to attend church past my confirmation – the final rite of passage Catholics go through at 13 to become full-fledged members of the church that confers the gifts of the Holy Spirit to you – going to church and Sunday school was the way of things for most of my childhood. 

That said, my problems with religion started just as young as my indoctrination into the faith. One of the priests at my parish experienced stigmata – a deeply religious experience where his hands and feet bled like Jesus – and instead of being praised or even studied, he was instead exiled and vilified. Meanwhile, another priest was found with child pornography and instead of being vilified he was “sent away” and his horrible actions were swept under the rug.

Those events put me on shaky ground with the church from a young age. Then, my grandmother died, and at her funeral my uncle told me that she was going to Hell because she didn’t get last rites – the final confession of your sins before you die – and thus couldn’t go to Heaven. I don’t say this lightly, but my grandmother was a literal saint. I know we often think our elders are saintly, but this woman never said a bad word about anyone, and was kind to everyone despite leading a very hard life. If she wasn’t going to Heaven, then it wasn’t a place I wanted to go.

On top of that, the uncle who told me that my grandmother was going to Hell was a complete degenerate scumbag who was convinced he was going to Heaven because he went to confession every day. The toughest pill to swallow in my religious reckoning was that according to Catholic dogma at the time, he was right. My awful uncle would go to Heaven because he confessed his sins and my grandmother would be sent to Hell because she didn’t. That was the last straw for me.

Something broke in me at that moment, and I couldn’t keep going to any church with such an awful reward system, so I left. My parents were understanding when I decided to stop going to church after all that, but they were disappointed in my choice. They both found ways to keep their faith even during the myriad of scandals that have rocked the church in the past thirty years. They thought I would do the same, but I simply couldn’t do it.

This kind of grand proclamation feels humorous to me now. As a child, it’s easy to make these big, all-encompassing statements and draw hard lines between right and wrong. Today, I know the world is so chaotic and nonsensical that if you find anything that helps you keep a bit of hope in your heart, then you latch onto it tightly, but back then I held a lot of bitterness that my parents could support something so clearly morally wrong in my eyes. Oh, you sweet summer child.

Still, even after I abandoned my faith, my upbringing was very much tied to having at least a spiritual practice. I didn’t know how else to exist in the world. Without Catholicism, I was a bit aimless and directless with how I interacted with the world. I felt…hollow, as if a big piece of my life had just vanished into oblivion. I lived with that silence for a long while, but over time it ate at me until I grew despondent.

So, I started reading, trying to find a way back to any type of faith. I read a lot of books that didn’t resonate before I came across a book that would change my whole life.

I had not heard much about eastern religions before I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. My life had been filled to the brim with a ton of Christianity and a heaping helping of Judaism, with a small serving of Islam on the side. Three different religious practices to be sure, but the whole of my life revolved around religions that sprung from the Old Testament. When the whole of your religious knowledge sprouted from one tradition, it colors the way you interact with the world and makes you think there is only one correct path to walk.

Siddhartha turned all that on its head for me. While it’s not a book about the Buddha specifically, it does mimic a lot of his journey to find spirituality. Most importantly, it talked about Buddhism in a way that I could wrap my brain around, since it was written by a philosopher who grew up in the tradition of Western religions. It was the first thing I ever read that united those two traditions in a way that clicked in my adolescent brain.

The book follows a wealthy Brahmin who leaves everything behind on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. He believes very deeply in the purity of a spiritual practice, and searches out the Buddha to learn how to achieve perfection. However, along the way he’s confronted with temptation and beset by issues that prevent him from finding the perfect spiritual practice he craves. Eventually, at the end of the book, he comes to realize those tests and trials were his spiritual practice, and that true perfection lies in the imperfect experiences that tested him.

As a Catholic, I had been told my whole life that the only way to practice my faith was to sit in church, say the right words at the same time, and confess your sins so you can be worth to receive god’s body and blood at church each week. The church told me that was the only way to practice Catholicism, and I believed the only way to practice any faith until I read Siddhartha. Over the years the way the Church has taught how to live a religious life has evolved a bit, but back in the 90s this was a revolutionary concept for me.

Immediately after reading the book, my eyes went wide and I started reading books like Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh, The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, and the Tao de Ching by Lao Tzu. Anything to connect the faith I knew with other religions. I became obsessed with Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Shintoism, and any other religions I could find dating all the way back to the beginning of religious practice. Every book I read led to ten more books that taught me a hundred ways to practice my faith.

I became an atheist for a while, and landed on being agnostic most days, but the simple ability to build a new practice from the ground up changed everything for me. Siddhartha taught me to question everything and build a spiritual practice that worked for me.

That same practice is on full display in my writing work. I’ve written over 40 novels, and most of them deal with the intersection of mythology and religion. At their core they are about a human trying to make sense of their own religious practice and build a universe that makes sense for them. I’m doing it in a very public way, but you can track my growth by reading my books in chronological order. What I have learned about faith is that it means very little unless you question it. The best fans of my work both understand and appreciate that the books are deeply spiritual even if they are not religious.

That practice started with Siddhartha and continues to this day. It started me on the path I’ve walked for my whole life, and I have no idea where I would be without it. Odds are that I would find a different book at a different time, but I didn’t. I found that book at that time, and it changed everything.

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Russell Nohelty is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs. If any of this resonated with you, then you can read over a dozen of his novels by signing up for a trial membership of his Substack at authorstack.substack.com.

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