Siddhartha passage

Siddhartha answered: "How old, would you think, is our oldest Samana, our venerable teacher?"

Quoth Govinda: "Our oldest one might be about sixty years of age."

And Siddhartha: "He has lived for sixty years and has not reached the nirvana. He'll turn seventy and eighty, and you and me, we will grow just as old and will do our exercises, and will fast, and will meditate. But we will not reach the nirvana, he won't and we won't. Oh Govinda, I believe out of all the Samanas out there, perhaps not a single one, not a single one, will reach the nirvana. We find comfort, we find numbness, we learn feats, to deceive others. But the most important thing, the path of paths, we will not find."

     In this passage Siddhartha is showing Govinda that there is no end result to his religion.  If at age sixty the master, the person who is supposed to be the greatest in living the religion can't achieve nirvana how can a regular person do so.  Siddhartha says that the master will grow as old as eighty and he still won't reach nirvana.  Siddhartha at the end of the passage says that we as a people find comfort thinking that there is meaning to life and we will accomplish something at the end.  But, in reality we can not achieve nirvana.  Religion deceives people in this belief, making them hold on to something that is not real.  The most important thing Siddhartha says is that we will never find the proper way to live life because if we follow our religion we can't achieve the end so we must have taken the wrong path.

     The reason I picked this passage is because I think many people who follow any religion let it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other one have thought about this once in their lives.  We think that our leaders of our religion is not perfect so how can I as a regular person who lives in the "real" world (not the Vatican where the pope is surrounded by Christianity) live up to the expectations of my own beliefs.  I think the way people get by with this problem is that they believe in god being a logical thing (either a human, a spirit, or whatever their specific religion believes god is).  They believe that god understands that we are only humans and we are going to make mistakes and that religion is more of a way of life a path in life that we choose as a person.  Siddhartha would disagree with this because he doesn't have a belief in god and because of that he can't understand people living a religious life.