Herman Hesse was a Tantrika

Tantra, the ancient art of Conscious Sexuality which I am calling Totality Therapy here, requires
a movement through dualities. Dualities are the throught constructs that keep our partialities in place. A primary duality is our beliefs around good and evil.

These beliefs come from earliest childhood experiences. The great 19th century mystic and writer Herman Hesse depicts the formation of this duality masterfully in his novel Demian. The novel starts where the main character, Sinclair, starts to become aware of the two worlds that he inhabits. There is the world of goodness, light and righteousness created by his parents, and there was the unpredictable world of chaos and darkness that the servants lived in. "It was wonderful to be living in a house in a reign of peace, order and tranquility, duty and good conscience, forgiveness and love, but it was no less wonderful that there was the other, the loud and shrill, sullen and violent world from which you could dart back to your mother in one leap."

But as Sinclair grows up, he falls into bad company and finds himself hopelessly embroyled in a cycle of lies. Sinclair believes that "..now the Devil has me in his clutches" and experiences himself as forever lost to the world of light.

His savior from this torment is the strange, dignified character of Demian, an older boy in his school. Over the course of years, Demian initiates Sinclair into another, much more dangerous understanding: the knowledge that all ideas of "right" and "wrong" are our constructs. And that ultimately it is our own responsiblity to choose the rules we live by.

The essential truth that Demian teaches Sinclair is that a life of totality, of stopping at nothing but the truth, will require of you to stand on your own in stead of following the herd. Hesse describes those who have this attitude to life as those who bear the 'sign'.

Towards the end of the novel, where Sinclair finds this truth in himself, he says:

"We who bore the 'sign' might rightly be considered odd by the world, even mad and dangerous. We were 'awake' or 'awakening' and our striving was directed at an ever-increasing wakefulness, weheras the striving and quest for happiness of the rest was aimed at identifying their thoughts, ideals, duties, their lives and fortunes more and more closely with that of the herd. That too was striving, that too was power and greatness. But whereas we, in our conception, represented the will of nature to renew itself, to individualize and march forward, the others lived in the desire of the perpetuation of things as they are. For them humanity- which they loved as we did - was something complete that must be maintained and protected. For us humanity was a distant goal towards which we were marching, whose image no one yet knew, whose laws were nowhere written down." - p136

As people on a path of totality, we learn to recognise others who bear the 'sign' and find special delight in their company. This is one of the reason why in our school we create many structured and informal group events. That we may enjoy the eccentric company of all those who refuse to live by laws that are already written down, because we follow another, deeper, much more potent knowing that has no words.