The Glass Bead Game by Hermann HesseThoughts or reveries of this sort reverberated in him after his meditation. "Awakening," it seemed, was not much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way in to the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality. That, too, was why the experience of the awakening was so difficult to convey, so curiously hard to formulate, so remote from statement. Language did not seem designed to make communications from this realm of life. If once in a great while, someone were able to understand, that person was in a similar position, was fellow sufferer or undergoing a similar awakening.
Yep, I've read both of those; Hesse is one of my favourite authors. The Glass Bead Game is a stunning bit of work. It's much longer than anything else he wrote though. For comparison, Steppenwolf and Siddartha are about 260 and 150 pages respectively. The Glass Bead Game is 600.