Staring Into the Abyss

I’ve always had a propensity to look too deeply into the darkness of the world. It draws me in, and in a sense I love it. Most of us do.

I recall when I was young seeing a bootleg VHS of Faces of Death with my middle school friends. Back then we didn’t have the internet where you can now click a few buttons and see the most disturbing images possible. Simpler times.

Someone recently sent me an email that I can only describe as a proper psychic attack. When I opened it up there was a large image looking right at me. Definitely the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen, and to be honest it fucked me up for a few days.

It wasn’t until I had a conversation about it with a friend that the psychic energy of it began to dissipate, but the experience reminded me of my own lust for darkness, which I believe many of us have. It’s really the only thing that can explain to me why people can be so demented and cruel.

I never thought that taking in images of death and destruction were anything to worry about until in 2013 during one of my first journeys with the shamanic plant medicine Iboga.

Iboga is a fascinating experience, and I’ve described it as a lifting of the veil between the conscious and subconscious mind. You get a chance to see into the abyss within your heart and soul and ferret out the crud swimming around in there. And there is a LOT of crud in there.

During that journey I learned that every image, every negative thought, and every psychic impression you’ve ever consumed sits deep within the soul rotting and festering, coloring you darkly in subtle and not so subtle ways.

So many talk about trauma and the need to resolve the traumatic experiences of your past, but I’ve heard few discuss the traumatic effects of consuming decades worth of violence and death, both the theatrical crap we call entertainment and raw footage of real human brutality.

I’m thinking about this today because I received an email this morning from someone who recently took a job at Google reviewing disturbing content to determine what needs to be censored from the search engine. Her work has her routinely looking at the most disturbing stuff imaginable, and she’s having what I see as a spiritual crisis, and is stuck between the need to have a job and income and knowing that the work is disruptive to her well-being.

Jung talked about the shadow side of man, and how important it is to integrate this part of you in a healthy way in order to live a mentally healthy and stable life. We are shadow beings. We are drawn to darkness, because we are in part darkness. When you’ve learned how to appropriately integrate this energy in a healthy way, the deeper into the abyss you are willing to look proportionately expands your ability to see into the light. It’s a double-edged sword that requires intention and discernment to handle.

In other words, shadow exploration can be a path to personal growth and expansion, but when there is no consciousness to how one approaches the darkness in our world and in their life, it pushes the psyche out of balance, and, as I believe, creates conditions ripe for mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and other neuroticisms.

As a self-sabotage coach, I speak in depth about how the contents and programs in the subconscious mind are the source of your self-sabotaging behavior. The subconscious does not know the difference between reality, what’s on the TV screen, or even what you visualize within your own mind. When you’re consuming darkness intentionally or inadvertently, the subconscious sees it all as real, and you’re adding crud to your programs that will effect the way you feel, think and behave.

Nietzsche figured this out a long time ago…

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” –Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Protect your subconscious minds, people. It’s far important to your health, wealth and happiness than you may realize.

About the Author

Dylan Charles is a self-mastery and self-sabotage coach, the editor of Waking Times, and host of the Battered Souls podcast. His personal journey is deeply inspired by shamanic plant medicines and the arts of Kung Fu, Qi Gong and Yoga. After seven years of living in Costa Rica, he now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he enjoys serving, training, and spending time with family. He has written hundreds of articles, reaching and inspiring millions of people around the world. Follow Dylan on telegram here, and sign up for his weekly newsletter here. On Facebook.

Dylan is available for interviews and podcasts. Contact him at WakingTimes@gmail.com. 

This article (Staring Into the Abyss) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

How To Self-Overcome Like Friedrich Nietzsche

“Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then search.” ~Nietzsche

In German Überwindung means self-mastery, or self-overcoming. Überwinden means to overcome. Mensch means man, or human. So ‘Self-overcoming Human’ seems to be the most accurate translation of Übermensch.

Nietzsche used the Overman as a personification of potential genius, demonstrating that Truth moves, and moving, demolishes thrones and altars. If it’s not moving, then it becomes stale. Thrones become entrenched. Alters become golden idols. Truth that doesn’t move, and keep moving, soon becomes fallacy. It dissolves into delusion. It grows uncouth.

Thus, self-overcoming is the life-task of man. If we never discover this life-task, we limit ourselves to merely existing. We become stuck. We comfortably and contentedly believe rather than adaptively and proactively seek. We would rather comfortably bow to thrones and revere altars than uncomfortably discover new ways of being human in the world. We would rather have faith than have fortitude, and often we confuse the two.

The most powerful way to prevent this merely existing—this stuck-ness, this comfortable annihilation, this confusion of faith and fortitude—is to practice the art of self-overcoming. When we self-overcome, we are forcing Truth to move. We don’t allow it to grind to a halt and become a millstone. We don’t allow it to rule over us. Instead, we use it as merely a steppingstone into higher and higher truth. We transform it into a Philosopher’s Stone.

As Nietzsche said, “And Life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself.”

And so, foremost, the art of self-overcoming is the ability to continue the search despite the urge to give it up to a particular belief. It’s the ability to cease merely arriving and to focus instead on courageously thriving. It’s the ability to overcome. Let’s break it down…

‘Belief’ is an existential hang-up:

“Faith: not wanting to know what is true.” ~Nietzsche

Belief in any ideology is a spiritual camouflage pattern based upon fear. Belief is almost always fear conditioning. The statist ‘believes’ in nationalism out of fear of being ostracized. The religious zealot ‘believes’ in their particular religion out of fear of the afterlife. As Krishnamurti said, “Any activity or education that conditions the mind through nationalism, through identification with a group, an ideology, a dogma, is an impediment to truth.”

The same applies to almost every level of belief, and the more blind the belief the more fear tends to be the driving force. But fear-based reasoning can be extremely unhealthy, and even dangerous. As Nietzsche said, “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”

When it comes to self-development, belief tends to be the fear of growth, the fear of being wrong, the fear of stretching one’s comfort zone, the fear of the unknown. The list goes on. Perhaps the greatest fear is the fear that one’s worldview could be wrong. This fear is so powerful that it creates a kind of blind spot in our reasoning. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it.

When it comes to navigating through cultural, political, and spiritual change—and all change, really—there is a level of cognitive dissonance that comes into play that amps the difficulty to near impossible proportions. The cart of cultural pressure is set so firmly in front of the horse of our reasoning powers that it seems unpassable. Our ability to progressively evolve becomes blocked by the comfort and security infrastructures we have erected. So what can we do?

We can choose self-interrogation over belief. We can choose discomfort despite security. We can choose the question mark over the period. We can choose having a flexible notion rather than a rigid opinion. We can choose to be adaptive and transformative rather than stuck in our ways. We can become gamechangers. We change the way the game is played by taking responsibility for change itself, by getting comfortable with the uncomfortable truth, by moderating our comfort and security with courage and flexibility. Most of all, we become gamechangers by admitting that we could be wrong.

If it’s true that, as Daniel Dennett said, “There’s no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly,” then it stands to reason that we simply get out of our own way in the first place so that we are not so devastated when we discover our folly.

If we rigidly and dogmatically cling to a particular “basket,” (rigid belief) then we would probably be crushed under the heavy blow that our worldview has suddenly become invalid (or maybe our cognitive dissonance will have been so strong that it keeps us mired in ignorance).

But if we cultivate an open-minded, flexible, and humorous disposition regarding our “answers” then there would never have been any basket worthy enough to hold all our “eggs” in the first place, and so we would not be so devastated. We would be more likely to simply shrug our shoulders, have a good laugh at ourselves (self-deprecating humor is a staple for self-overcoming), and then move on with our new knowledge in tow. Indeed. We would be more likely to embrace the wise words of Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

‘The search’ is an existential jumpstart:

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. What can be loved in man is that he is an overture.” ~Nietzsche

The key to keeping the search alive, then, is to keep belief at bay. All belief. Whether it’s the abstract belief in God or the concrete belief that we exist. All belief must be taken into consideration rather than believed so as to prevent falling victim to the blind spot and tripping into dogmatic thinking, which is the opposite of thinking clearly.

So, the secret to keeping the search alive is discovering the joy and transcendence of uncertainty. Where certainty bottles us up, constricts our perception, and puts up walls around our comfort zone; uncertainty shatters the bottle, unknots our thoughts, and demolishes all the walls preventing us from further expansion into Truth. Indeed. There is a virtue in uncertainty that the certain will never know.

It’s a matter of attitude. A bad attitude falls into the trap of right and wrong, of good and evil, whereas a good attitude goes beyond. It transcends. A bad attitude plays the victim; a good attitude plays with victimhood. A good attitude transforms tragedy into teacher, pain into professor, labor into laboratory.

This, the self-overcoming philosopher knows: The lodestone must become a whetstone before it can become a Philosopher’s Stone.

Transforming life into a whetstone gives us something to sharpen the sword of our self. This is the essence of self-overcoming. Where yesterday our sword was dull, having not experienced honing, today, after the honing, it is sharper. Self-overcoming is allowing the possibility of our own personal sharpening. Without honing there can be no sharpness. Self-overcoming is taking the sword of our self and honing it against the whetstone of hardship. It’s the ability to use the hardships of life, the setbacks, the slings and arrows, the ups and downs, to make ourselves stronger, resilient, more robust, and even antifragile despite the fragile culture.

Self-overcoming is honoring the grit, the coal, and the dullness within us, and, through such honoring, recognizing the vital importance that polishing, pressure, and honing have in transforming us into pearls, diamonds, and sharpness. It’s the deep understanding that in order to experience growth there must be a rub, a friction, a testing. There must be a crucible. Self-overcoming is allowing life to be a crucible for transformation, rather than a comfort zone of stagnation.

When we are in the throes of self-overcoming, the search is always on. We are continuously searching for truth. We may discover “answers” here and there—ideas, knowledge, wisdom, love—but these “answers” do not hinder our overall truth quest, they only strengthen it, they only compel it, propel it, launch it above and beyond the need for an answer. For we understand that the truth quest—allowing the journey to be the thing, forever questioning, never settling on a belief—is the answer.

Nietzsche was able to tap the depths of the human condition like no other philosopher before or after. He was able to do this because he practiced self-overcoming. His philosophy was a hammer that shattered the very concept of belief itself. It crashed through all values. It even launched us into a revaluation of all values. It taught us how it is possible to recondition our cultural conditioning. It taught us how the self can also be a hammer, and how, through the hammer of the self, new, healthier values can be created despite the rigid, inflexible, and entrenched dogmas that trip us up as a species and prevent us from evolving in a healthier way.

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

What did Nietzsche mean when he said "if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you"?

By
Mike Leary, Psychotherapist

http://www.quora.com/What-did-Nietzsche-mean-when-he-said-if-you-stare-into-the-abyss-the-abyss-stares-back-at-you

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
 
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."
 

The tormentor becomes the tormented.
 

People become what they love and hate, because their mind focuses on it.
 

The hall of mirrors folding in on itself.
 

Madness

Br'er rabbit and the tar baby

 

Neo and the Mirror

With him finally surrendering to the matrix to destroy it.
 

Star Wars: Luke and the dark side

Yoda: Remember, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

The Emperor: [to Luke] The alliance... will die. As will your friends. Good, I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
 

The Emperor: Come, boy, see for yourself. From here, you will witness the final destruction of the Alliance and the end of your insignificant rebellion.
 

[Luke's eyes go to his lightsabre]
 

The Emperor: You want this, don't you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.

John Stuart mill and the question he asked himself, imploded.

It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear."
 

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out

And what is inside us, we cultivated.
 

Michael Crichton Addressed that in the Sphere. Minds so undisciplined it created whatever they feared. They finally choose to forget. Forbidden planet had this theme. So does The Abyss by Orson Scott Card where the Aliens find some decency in humans and therefore spare us.

Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar but one dissatisfied with his life who therefore makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.
 

A newer version was "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by wikipedia.orgStephen Vincent Benét.

Many people get co-opted into evil Such as Eve and the temptation. We are seeing that in many facets of society today but the political and religious ones are still the favorites for people losing their souls. Sex and Money are the draw. Emptiness the motivator. The hole of the abyss is filled with them, not what they were after. Addicts always start out with a view they can tempt the abyss and not be caught. Every addict ends up saying: "Oops!"

And I'll leave this with one of my favorite songs By David Bromberg:

The Divine Songs of Zarathushtra

Forward To The Gathas - The Divine Songs of Zarathushtra 

by Rabindranath Tagore 

The most important of all outstanding facts of Iranian history is the religious reform brought about by Zarathushtra. He was the first man we know who gave a definitely moral character and direction to religion, and at the same time preached the doctrine of monotheism, which offered an eternal foundation of reality to goodness as an ideal of perfection. All religions of the primitive type try to keep men bound with regulations of external observances. These, no doubt, have the hypnotic effect of vaguely suggesting a realm of right and wrong; but the dimness of their light produces phantasms leaving men to aberrations. Zarathushtra was the greatest of all the pioneer prophets who showed the path of freedom to men, the freedom of moral choice, the freedom from blind obedience to unmeaning injunctions, freedom from the multiplicity of shrines which draw our worship away from the single-minded chastity of devotion. To most of us it sounds like a truism to-day when we are told that the moral goodness of a deed comes from the goodness of intention. But it is a truth which once came to a man like a revelation of light in the darkness and has not yet reached all the obscure corners of humanity. There are men we still see around us who fearfully follow, hoping thereby to gain merit, the path of blind formalisms, which have no living moral source in the mind. This will make us understand the greatness of Zarathushtra. Though surrounded by believers in magical rites, he proclaimed in those dark days of unreason, that religion has its truth in its moral significance, not in external practices of imaginary value; that it is to uphold man in his life of good thoughts, good words and good deeds.

The outer expression of truth reaches its white light of simplicity through its inner realization. True simplicity is the physiognomy of perfection. In the primitive stage of spiritual growth, when man is dimly aware of the mystery of the infinite in his life and the world, when he does not fully know the inward character of his relationship with this truth, his first feeling is either that of dread or of a greed of gain. This drives him into wild exaggeration in worship, into frenzied convulsion of ceremonialism. But in Zarathushtra's teachings, which are best reflected in his Gathas, we have hardly any mention of the ritualism of worship. Conduct and its moral motives, such as Vohumano. Asha and Aramaiti, have received almost the sole attention in them.

The orthodox Persian form of worship in ancient Iran included animal sacrifices and offering of haoma to the daevas. That all this should be discountenanced by Zarathushtra not only shows his courage, but the strength of his realization of the Supreme Being as Spirit. We are told that it has been mentioned by Plutarch: "Zarathushtra taught the Persians to sacrifice to Ahura Mazda 'vows and thanksgivings.'" The distance between faith in the efficacy of bloodstained magical rites and cultivation of moral and spiritual ideals as the true form of worship is immense. It is amazing to see how Zarathushtra was the first among men who crossed this distance with a certainty of realization which imparted such a fervour of faith in his life and his words. The truth which tilled his mind was not a thing borrowed from books or received from teachers. He did not come to it by following a prescribed path of tradition. It flashed upon him as an illumination of his entire life, almost like a communication to his personal self, and he proclaimed the utmost immediacy of his knowledge in these words:

"When I conceived of Thee, O Mazda, as the very First and the Last, as the most Adorable One. as the Father of Good Thought, as the Creator of Truth and Right, as the Lord Judge of our actions in life, then I made a place for Thee in my very eyes"-Yasna, 31-4. (Translation by D. J. Irani.)

It was the direct stirring of his soul which made him say:-

"Thus do I announce the Greatest of all. I weave my songs of praise for Him through Truth, helpful and beneficent to all that live. Let Ahura Mazda listen to them with His Holy Spirit, for the Good Mind instructed me to adore Him; by His Wisdom let Him teach me about what is best."- Yasna, 45-6.

The truth which is not reached through the analytical process of reasoning, and does not depend for proof on some corroboration of outward facts, or the prevalent faith and practice of the people--the truth, which comes like an inspiration out of context with its surroundings, brings with it an assurance that it has been sent from a divine source of wisdom; that the individual who has received it is specially chosen and therefore has his responsibility as the messenger of God. Zarathushtra felt this sacredness of his mission and believed himself to be the direct medium of communication of Divine Truth.

So long as man deals with his God as the dispenser of benefits to the worshipper, who knows the secret of propitiating him, he tries to keep him for his own self or for the tribe to which he belongs. But directly the moral or spiritual nature of God is apprehended, this knowledge is thrown open to all humanity; and then the idea of God, which once gave unity only to a special people, transcends limitations of race and gathers together all human beings within one spiritual circle of union.

Zarathushtra was the first prophet who emancipated religion from the exclusive narrowness of the tribal God, the God of a chosen people, and offered it to the universal man. This is a great fact in the history of religion. The Master said, when the enlightenment came to him:

"Verily I believe Thee, O Ahura Mazda, to be the Supreme Benevolent Providence, when Sraosha came to me with the Good Mind, when first I received and became wise with Thy words! And though the task be difficult, though woe may come to me, I shall proclaim to all mankind Thy message, which Thou declarest to be the best."-Yasna, 43-11.

He prays to Mazda:

"This I ask Thee, tell me truly, O Ahura, the religion that is best for all mankind--the religion, based on truth, which should prosper all that is mine, the religion which establishes our actions in order and justice by the Divine Songs of Perfect Piety,which has, for its intelligent desire of desires, the desire for Thee, O Mazda!"-Yasna, 44-10.

With the undoubted assurance and hope of one who has got a direct vision of Truth he speaks to the world:

"Hearken unto me, Ye, who come from far and near! Listen, for I shall speak forth now; ponder well over all things, weigh my words with care and clear thought. Never shall the false teacher destroy this world for a second time; for his tongue stands mute, his creed exposed."-Yasna, 45-1.

I think it can be said without doubt that such a high conception of religion, uttered in such a clear note of affirmation, with a sure conviction that it is a truth of the ultimate ideal of perfection which must be revealed to all humanity, even at the cost of martyrdom, is unique in the history of religion belonging to such a remote dawn of civilisation.

There was a time when along with other Aryan peoples the Persians also worshipped the elemental gods of nature, on whose favour they depended for the good things of life. But such favour was not to be won by any moral duty performed or by any service of love. In fact, it was the crude beginning of the scientific spirit trying to unlock the hidden sources of power in nature. But through it all there must have been some current of deeper desire which constantly contradicted the cult of power and indicated a world of inner good infinitely more precious than material gain. Its voice was not strong at first, nor was it heeded by the majority of the people; but its influence, like the life within the seed, was silently working. Then comes the great teacher; and in his life and mind the hidden fire of truth suddenly bursts out in a flame. The best in the people works for long obscure ages in hints and whispers till it finds its voice, which can never again be silenced. For that voice becomes the voice of mankind, no longer confined to a particular time or people. It works across intervals of silence and oblivion, depression and defeat, and comes out again and again with its conquering call. It is a call to the fighter--the fighter against untruth--against all that lures away man's spirit from its high mission of freedom into the meshes of materialism. And Zarathushtra's voice is still a living voice, not a mere matter of academic interest for historical scholars who deal with the dead facts of the past. It is not a voice which is only to guide a small community of men in the daily details of their life. For have we not seen that Zarathushtra was the first of all teachers who, in his religious teachings, sent his words to all human races across the distance of space and time? He was not like a man who by some chance of friction had lighted a lamp, and knowing that it could not be shared by all, secured it with a miser's care for his own domestic use. But he was the watcher in the night, who stood on the lonely peak facing the East and broke out singing the poems of light to the sleeping world when the sun came out on the brim of the horizon. He declared that the sun of truth is for all, that its light is to unite the far and the near. Such a message always arouses the antagonism of those whose habits have become nocturnal, whose vested interest is in the darkness. And there was a bitter fight in the lifetime of the prophet between his followers and others who were addicted to the ceremonies that had tradition on their side and not truth.

We are told that "Zarathushtra was descended from a kingly family," and also that the first converts to his doctrines were of the ruling caste. But the priesthood, "the Kavis and the Karapans, often succeeded in bringing the rulers over to their side." So we find that, in this fight, the princes of the land divided themselves into two opposite parties, as we find in India in the Kurukshetra war. "With the princes have the Kavis and the Karapans united, in order to corrupt man by their evil deeds." Among the princes that stood against Zarathushtra, as his enemies, the mighty Bendva might be included, who is mentioned in Yasna, 49, 1-2. From the context we may surmise that he stood on the side of the infidels. A family or a race of princely blood were probably the Grehma (Yasna, 32, 12-14). Regarding them it is said that they "having allied with the Kavis and the Karapans, have established their power in order to overpower the prophet and his partisans. In fact, the opposition between the pious and the impious, the believers and the unbelievers, seem very often to have led to open combat. The prophet prays to Ahura that he may grant victory to his own, when both the armies rush together in combat, whereby they can cause defeat among the wicked, and procure for them strife and trouble."

There is evidence in our Indian legends that in ancient India also there have been fights between the representatives of the orthodox faith and the Kshatriyas, who, owing to their own special vocation, had a comparative freedom of mind about the religion of external observances. The proofs are strong enough to lead us to believe that the monotheistic religious movement had its origin and principal support in the kingly caste of those days, though a great number of them fought to oppose it.

I have discussed in another place the growth in ancient India of the moral and spiritual element in her religion which had accompanied the Indian Aryan people from the time of the Indo-Iranian age, showing how the struggle with its antagonistic force has continued all through the history of India. I have shown how the revolution which accompanied the teachings of Zarathushtra, breaking out into severe fights, had its close analogy in the religious revolution in India whose ideals are still preserved in the Bhagavadgita.

It is interesting to note that the growth of the same ideal in the same race in different geographical situations has produced results that, in spite of their unity, have some aspect of difference. The Iranian monotheism is more ethical, while the Indian is more metaphysical in its character. Such a difference in their respective spiritual developments was owing, no doubt, to the more active vigour of life in the old Persians and the contemplative quietude of mind in the Indians. This distinction in the latter arises in a great measure out of the climatic conditions of the country, the easy fertility of the soil and the great stretch of plains in Northern India affording no constant obstacles in physical nature to be daily overcome by man, while the climate of Persia is more bracing and the surface of the soil more rugged. The Zoroastrian ideal has accepted the challenge of the principle of evil and has enlisted itself in the fight on the side of Ahura Mazda, the great, the good, the wise. In India, although the ethical side is not absent, the emphasis has been more strongly laid on subjective realisation through a stoical suppression of desire, and the attainment of a perfect equanimity of mind by cultivating indifference to all causes of joy and sorrow. Here the idea, over which the minds of men brooded for ages, in an introspective intensity of silence, was that man as a spiritual being had to realise the truth by breaking through his sheath of self. All the desires and feelings that limit his being are keeping him shut in from the region of spiritual freedom.

In man the spirit of creation is waiting to find its ultimate release in an ineffable illumination of Truth. The aspiration of India is for attaining the infinite in the spirit of man. On the other hand, as I have said before, the ideal of Zoroastrian Persia is distinctly ethical. It sends its call to men to work together with the Eternal Spirit of Good in spreading and maintaining Kshatra, the Kingdom of Righteousness, against all attacks of evil. This ideal gives us our place as collaborators with God in distributing His blessings over the world.

"Clear is this all to the man of wisdom as to the man who carefully thinks; he who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, he who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed, he, indeed, is thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!-Yasna, 31-22.

It is, in fact, of supreme moment to us that the human world is in an incessant state of war between that which will save us and that which will drag us into the abyss of disaster. Our one hope lies in the fact that Ahura Mazda is on our side if we choose the right course. The law of warfare is severe in its character; it allows no compromise. " None of you:" says Zarathushtra, "shall find the doctrine and precepts of the wicked; because thereby he will bring grief and death in his house and village, in his land and people! No, grip your sword and cut them down!"-Yasna, 31, 18.

 
Such a relentless attitude of fight reminds us of the Old Testament spirit. The active heroic aspect of this religion reflects the character of the people themselves, who later on spread their conquests far and wide and built up great empires by the might of their sword. They accepted this world in all seriousness. They had zest in life and confidence in their own strength. They belonged to the western half of Asia, and their great influence travelled through the neighbouring civilisation of India and towards the Western Continent. Their ideal was the ideal of the fighter. By the force of their will and deed of sacrifice they were to conquer haurvatat, welfare in this world, and ameratat, immortality in the other. This is the best ideal of the West, the great truth of fight. For Paradise has to be gained through conquest. That sacred task is for the heroes, who are to take the right side in the battle and the right weapons.

 http://www.zarathushtra.com/z/gatha/dji/The%20Gathas%20-%20DJI.pdf

6 Signs you May be an Übermensch

January 7, 2015
Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff
Waking Times

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge –a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.” –Nietzsche

The Übermensch, or Overman, is the primordial prodigy, the interdependent-self, the chameleon of the human condition, the epistemological elite longing to emerge. The Overman is the “genius” that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.” In a world where the majority of people have not brought forth the genius within themselves, it is no wonder things are being destroyed. It is therefore the duty, indeed the quest, of overmen the world over to bring forth the genius within themselves, to stand as beacons of hope, to go forth as walking examples of genius incarnate, so that others may learn how to do the same. Here are six signs you may be on the sacred path of the Ubermensch.

1.) You Have Perfected the Art of Self-Overcoming:

“The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learned, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.” –Jose Ortega y Gasset

You have freed yourself from the smoke and mirrors of “security” and the illusion of “comfort.” Indeed, you have freed yourself to create new freedom. You have once again transformed yourself into a self-propelled beast, a sacred cycle, the walking personification of the life-death-rebirth process of the human condition. Self-overcoming (self-interrogation) is a tool of conviviality that you use to dig up the courage within the primordial self so that it may defend itself, and life itself, against the degradation of the inert self. The inert self is the part of us that wishes everything would stay the same. You understand that it is precisely this part of us which must be overcome, because permanence is the ultimate illusion. Fixed conviction is a grave error that leaves us petrified and stuck. Like Daniel Kolak wrote in Experience of Philosophy, “There is a frozen sea within us. Philosophy is an axe.” You have learned how to use this axe with self-actualized precision, and you have therefore become quite adept at bringing meaning to the meaninglessness.

2.) You Have the Ability to Transform Suffering Into Strength:
“To live is to suffer and to survive is to find meaning in this suffering.” –Nietzsche

You are willing to suffer in order to discover your greatness, knowing that pain is the ultimate teacher next to nature herself. You are purposefully vulnerable, realizing that it’s the only way to learn about the weakness within invulnerability. You recycle your vulnerability by propelling yourself and others to create waves of change in a world starving for change. You direct your passion and your compassion by spreading your art and your heart only across what matters most. Like Simone De Beauvoir, your “contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.” You seek tasks that would cause others to curl up into a ball of fear, because you have learned how to transform fear into courage. You realize that the secret to transforming suffering into strength is to embrace, and thereby subsume, the vicissitudes of change. You do not fear change because you’ve learned how to change fear into a courage of the most high.

3.) You Accept Your Own Dionysian Nature and Use it Appropriately:

“The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.” –Nietzsche

As a liberated artist you represent the Dionysian endeavor toward wild, carefree creativity. You have chosen to embody a wide spectrum of the human experience, lusting for the gruesome ecstasy of the sensual world yet capturing and expressing it all through your art. The Dionysian innovator is a perfect example of divergent thinking, which you embrace with all your heart. The Apollonian artist, on the other hand, relies on convergent thinking; which is fine, as balance is necessary. But since we live in a rigid, stuck-in-the-muck, overly convergent thinking society, you see how important Dionysian energy really is. You are not a collection of mirrors reflecting what everyone else expects of you. You are self-shattered, Chaos theory in motion, laughing mightily with God’s tongue in your cheek. You declare to the lopsided Apollonian culture, “You can have your Apollonian rigidness; I’ll take Dionysian courage and astonish you all.”

4.) You Are Neither Restricted by Tradition Nor Bounded by Convention:
 
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

You shirk tradition and convention in order to remain open to what the vicissitudes of change have to teach you. You refuse to live out a harried life of nine-to-five slavery, wasting your days on heartless corporations that don’t give a damn about anything except making money. Instead, you wish to live a life of adventure full of doing what you love to do, despite the powers that be and in spite of the tyranny that wishes to contain you? You use rebellion and the art of Social Gadflying as a tool for obliterating unsustainable hierarchies, and as a leveler of close-minded elitist pretension. You’re not driven by petty revenge or egoistic one-upmanship. You emphasize and actualize what you disrupt, seeking not to discredit and embarrass the status quo of your mischief, but to shock it into becoming more self-authentic. Yours is a celebration of the soul instead of the conditioned reflex and self-aggrandizement of the ego. You love what you profane, weaving your knowledge and experience together with the status quo, you honor your engagement with it even as you tweak it out of its extremism. You show them the door to their freedom and declare: “enter if you dare!”

5.) You Are Willing to Risk All For the Enhancement of Humanity:

“You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.” –Nietzsche

“He who flies is hated most of all”? You fly anyway, soaring over the culturally constructed illusion of it all. You are willing to be “the odd man out,” refusing to give into the unconscious peer-pressure of the herd-instinct. Your conscious awareness propels you past the unconscious comfort zone, which is infective and causes others to want to do the same. You are wholly natural and holistically ascetic. The unconscious of anyone living in an artificial manner senses you as doubly dangerous. Everything about you irritates them, your way of writing, your sense of humor. They sense nature in you, and they are afraid. They are afraid that you will call them out; that you will break their soft illusory shell of “security” and “safety,” and reveal the pulsing blister of the vulnerable Self suffering underneath. You are an icon of iconoclasm, a force of nature that leads by example whether or not anybody else decides to “follow.” You are willing to die bringing water to the wasteland.

6.) You Seek Power Over Power:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” –Abraham Lincoln

You have learned how to break the chain of obedience that plagues mankind. You have cut the strings dangling down from the highest echelons of power. You are capable of clipping yokes and cutting away the straps that bind the heavy burden of parochial values. You have turned the tables on the “powers that be” by getting power over power. You realize that those at “the top” deserve neither your pity nor your rancor. They deserve nothing more than your unadulterated laughter and high humor: a thumbing of your nose that all at once keeps them in check and prevents their “absolute power” from corrupting absolutely. But you have also learned, as Naseem Nicholas Taleb suggested, that “you don’t become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.” And so you have learned to recycle your own mastery. You have dared to rejoin your rationality with your primordial unconscious. You live multi-dimensionally, refusing to live the one-dimensional life of the typical man. Indeed, you stand in defense against the typical man, the “last man,” the “despicable man,” the “man who would destroy everything despite himself.” You stand in defense of those who would horde power by empowering the powerless and teaching them how to expiate that power. You disclose the world with the purpose of freedom and further disclosure, and by the same action try to free others from enclosure into disclosure. Deep within you find the exigency which is common to all men and women: the will to freedom, the will to power, and the will to conquer both so as to make compassionate action manifest. Like David DeGraw said, “The more you empower people, the more empowered you become. It creates a positive feedback loop, an evolutionary feedback loop that cannot be stopped.”

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

©2015 Waking Times, all rights reserved. For permission to re-print this article contact wakingtimes@gmail.com, or the respective author.

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The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you

"No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too "traveled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics:—to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds? must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states? ... We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense." We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor!— good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit: as such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it, and precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright; for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by— a faith! ..."

Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche 1st ed. edited, with a preface, by Oscar Levy ; authorized translation by Anthony M. Ludovici Published 1921 by Doubleday, Page & Co

Scholars

For this is the truth: I have moved from the house of the scholars and I even banged the door behind me. My soul sat hungry at their table too long; I am not, like them, trained to pursue knowledge as if it were nutcracking. I love freedom and the air over the fresh earth; rather would I sleep on ox hides than on their decorums and respectabilities.

I am too hot and burned by my own thoughts; often it nearly takes my breath away. Then I must go out into the open and away from all dusty rooms. But they sit cool in the cool shade: in everything they want to be mere spectators, and they beware of sitting where the sun burns on the steps. Like those who stand in the street and gape at the people who pass by, they too wait and gape at thoughts that others have thought.

When they pose as wise, their little epigrams and truths chill me: their wisdom often has an odor as if it came from the swamps; and verily, I have also heard frogs croak out of it. They are skillful and have clever fingers: why would my simplicity want to be near their multiplicity? All threading and knotting and weaving their fingers understand: thus they knit the socks of the spirit.

They are good clockworks; but take care to wind them correctly! Then they indicate the hour without fail and make a modest noise. They work like mills and like stamps: throw down your seed-corn to them and they will know how to grind it small and reduce it to white dust.

They watch each other closely and mistrustfully. Inventive in petty cleverness, they wait for those whose knowledge walks on lame feet: like spiders they wait. I have always seen them carefully preparing poison; and they always put on gloves of glass to do it. They also know how to play with loaded dice; and I have seen them play so eagerly that they sweated.

We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more distasteful to me than their falseness and their loaded dice. And when I lived with them, I lived above them. That is why they developed a grudge against me. They did not want to hear how someone was living over their heads; and so they put wood and earth and filth between me and their heads. Thus they muffled the sound of my steps: and so far I have been heard least well by the most scholarly. Between themselves and me they laid all human faults and weaknesses: “false ceilings” they call them in their houses. And yet I live over their heads with my thoughts; and even if I wanted to walk upon my own mistakes, I would still be over their heads.

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice. And what I want, they would have no right to want!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Four Ways Nietzsche Made God His Bitch

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer 
March 30, 2014
Waking Times

“We stumble on; the Übermensch plants a foot where there is no certain hold; and in the struggle that follows, the whole of us get dragged up.” –William James

Friedrich Nietzsche is a fascinating philosopher that must be taken with a grain of salt, and possibly the entire salt shaker. But he is an absolute joy to read, for his audacity alone. And his ruthlessness was no joke. Knocking gods off pedestals was second nature to him. With merciless glee, he stormed in where other philosophers feared to tread. Through poetic prose, brutal honesty, and venomous wit, he brought us a way of thinking that still has people’s brains doing backflips in their heads and their hearts doing somersaults in their chest. A God-fearing man probably couldn’t get through a single paragraph of Nietzsche without collapsing into a fit of: “Blasphemy!” this and “Satan incarnate!” that. Not realizing that there is gold gleaming in the darkness of his words and unaware that his surfaced soul is a brilliant diamond shining in the rough texture of his prose. So in honor of that God-fearing man pitifully writhing on the floor, and with a healthy dose of mockery, here are four fascinating ways that Master Nietzsche made God his bitch.

1.) Anti-Christ Superstar

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was the original Antichrist. He wrote the book on it, literally. The Anti-Christ was a smash-mouth, no-holds-barred grudge match between Nietzsche and Christianity. And Nietzsche came out of it with nary a scratch, while all of Christianity lay bleeding and bruised at his blasphemous feet. For decades fundamentalist Christians reeled from the merciless body-blows dealt by the tiny book that made the bible look like the Goliath to its David. Of course the Christians were eventually able to incorporate it all into their religion while conveniently ignoring this and expediently hiding that, and so the blind-faith machine rolled on, but they inadvertently spread Nietzsche’s gospel rather than squashed it, and so it is still very much alive today.

Some of the more delicious morsels in Nietzsche discourse were as follows: he spoke of the Christian God as a “… declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live.” Proclaiming that the Christian God was “… the sanctification of the will to nothingness!” and “…this entire fictional world has its roots in the hatred of the natural (—actuality!—).” Nietzsche opposed the Christian concept of God because it “…degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being life’s transfiguration and eternal ‘Yes’!” He declared that the Christian God was “… the sanctification of the will to nothingness!” Wow! Put that in your invisible pipe and smoke it, God.

2.) God is dead!

“Whither is God? … I will tell you. We killed him –you and I. All of us are his murderers… What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festival of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us – for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.” –Nietzsche, Parable of the Madman

With this bold declaration Nietzsche reached skyward, pulled God from his celestial throne, and in one fell swoop declared the now earth-laden body a corpse, bringing down with it the entire apparatus of institutional Christianity. Talk about audacious. It’s especially daring when you consider the religious atmosphere during the time when he lived. The man’s insouciance knew no bounds. He called it like he saw it, peer pressure be damned.

Later in the text of the Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche’s protagonist visits various churches saying nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

3.) The Übermensch

“Behold, I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?.. What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…” –Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Übermensch, or overman, is Nietzsche’s cosmopolitan vision of human excellence, his epistemological elite. In many ways he is the replacement for God, the courageously moral substitute for the pitiful decadence of the Christian deity. A self-actualized, fully individuated, enlightened master prepared to take on all comers.

More importantly, the overman has the power to pull the head of man out of the clouds and bring it down to earth. Nietzsche goes on to say, “The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth… I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes,” and, “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing…”

It’s almost as if Nietzsche foresaw the environmental calamity of our time, heralding the call of the overman for a future time when he would be needed to get us back in touch with Mother Nature, and to reconnect the severed umbilicus before it’s too late.

4.) Perspectivism

“In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—Perspectivism.” –Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Perspectivism implies that no way of seeing the world can be taken as absolutely true. But it does NOT necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid (and so should not be confused with relativism). With this idea Nietzsche didn’t necessarily make God his bitch, but he did create a good tripwire to trip him up with. For if everybody has a different perception of the concept of God, however minute that difference, then God can never just be one almighty being we can all agree on, it can only ever be a smeared-out energy, at best; an idea or a conceptualization, never a definitive truth.

Nietzsche wants us to be honest with ourselves, and then with each other, about the fact that we are all interconnected, while at the same time we all have our own personal experiences. There are over 7 billion people on this planet, and every single one of us has a different psycho-physiological reaction to any given stimuli. Our “reactions” to things are as unique as our own fingerprints. If I say the word “fork” it creates a different psycho-physiological reaction (however minute) in you than it does in me, than it does in her, than it does in him. We all have different experiences, different memories, different ideas, regarding the concept of “fork,” even though we can all agree that we’re looking at a fork. The same thing applies to everything: a spoon, a tree, the concept of love, even the concept of God. In the end, we just need to be brutally honest with each other: we’re our own gods. But, as Nietzsche warned, “Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.”

About the Author
Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

The Four Great Errors of Humankind

Friedrich Nietzsche
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1

The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more insidious error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error is one of the most unchanging habits of mankind: we even worship it under the name of "religion" or "morality." Every single principle from religion or morality contains it; priests and moral legislators are the originators of this corruption of reason. Here is an example. Everybody knows Cornaro's famous book in which he recommends a meager diet for a long and happy life — a virtuous life, too. Few books have been read so widely; even now thousands of copies are sold in England every year. I do not doubt that scarcely any book (except the Bible) has done as much harm, has shortened as many lives, as this well intentioned oddity. Why? Because Cornaro mistakes the effect for the cause. The worthy Italian thought his diet was the cause of his long life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the extraordinary slowness of his metabolism, was the cause of his slender diet. He was not free to eat little or much; his frugality was not a matter of "free will" — he made himself sick when he ate more. But whoever has a rapid metabolism not only does well to eat properly, but needs to. A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would simply destroy himself on Cornaro's diet. Crede experto — believe me, I've tried.

2

The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don't. ." Every morality, every religion, is based on this imperative; I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite — the first example of my "revaluation of all values." An admirable human being, a "happy one," instinctively must perform certain actions and avoid other actions; he carries these impulses in his body, and they determine his relations with the world and other human beings. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A long life, many descendants — these are not the rewards of virtue: instead, virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other things, to a long life, many descendants — in short, to Cornaro's virtue. Religion and morality say: "A people or a society are destroyed by license and luxury." My revalued reason says: when a people degenerates physiologically, when it approaches destruction, then the result is license and luxury (that is, the craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation necessary to arouse an exhausted nature). This young man easily turns pale and faints; his friends say: that is because of this or that disease. I say: he became diseased, he could not resist the disease, because of his pre-existing impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party destroys itself by making such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party that makes such a mistake has already reached its end; it has lost its sureness of instinct. Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically different from the hero. (In my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity.)

3

The error of a false causality. Humans have always believed that they knew what a cause was; but how did we get this knowledge — or more precisely, our faith that we had this knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far turned out to be true. We believe that we are the cause of our own will: we think that here at least we can see a cause at work. Nor did we doubt that all the antecedents of our will, its causes, were to be found in our own consciousness or in our personal "motives." Otherwise, we would not be responsible for what we choose to do. Who would deny that his thoughts have a cause, and that his own mind caused the thoughts? Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be completely absent. The so-called motives: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them. And as for the ego . that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will! What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for mental causes has gone out the window. That is what follows! And what a nice delusion we had perpetrated with this "empirical evidence;" we interpreted the real world as a world of causes, a world of wills, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here: it simply interpreted everything that happened in the world as an act, as the effect of a will; the world was inhabited with a multiplicity of wills; an agent (a "subject") was slipped under the surface of events. It was out of himself that man projected his three most unquestioned "inner facts" — the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he interpreted "things" as "being" in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things what he had already put into them. The thing itself, the concept of thing is a mere extension of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear materialists and physicists — how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still resides in your atom! Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians! The "spirit as cause" mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!

4

The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: a cause is slipped after the fact under a particular sensation (for example, the sensation following a far-off cannon shot) — often a whole little novel is fabricated in which the dreamer appears as the protagonist who experiences the stimulus. The sensation endures meanwhile as a kind of resonance: it waits, so to speak, until the causal interpretation permits it to step into the foreground — not as a random occurrence but as a "meaningful event." The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later (the causal interpretation) is experienced first — often with a hundred details that pass like lightning before the shot is heard. What has happened? The representations which were produced in reaction to certain stimulus have been misinterpreted as its causes. In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings — every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and impulsion in the ebb and flow of our physiology, and particularly in the state of the nervous system — excites our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that — for feeling bad or good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only — become conscious of it only — when we have fabricated some kind of explanation for it. Memory, which swings into action in such cases without our awareness, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them — not their actual causes. Of course, the faith that such representations or accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause — it even excludes it.

5

The psychological explanation: to extract something familiar from something unknown relieves, comforts, and satisfies us, besides giving us a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states.

First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is fundamentally just our desire to be rid of an unpleasant uncertainty, we are not very particular about how we get rid of it: the first interpretation that explains the unknown in familiar terms feels so good that one "accepts it as true." We use the feeling of pleasure ("of strength") as our criterion for truth. A causal explanation is thus contingent on (and aroused by) a feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, result not in identifying the cause for its own sake, but in identifying a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving. A second consequence of this need is that we identify as a cause something already familiar or experienced, something already inscribed in memory. Whatever is novel or strange or never before experienced is excluded. Thus one searches not just for any explanation to serve as a cause, but for a specific and preferred type of explanation: that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced in the past — our most habitual explanations. Result: one type of causal explanation predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant — that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations. The banker immediately thinks of "business," the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love.

6

The whole realm of morality and religion belongs in this category of imaginary causes or "explanations" for disagreeable feelings. These feelings are produced by beings that are hostile to us (evil spirits: the most famous being the labeling of hysterical women as witches). They are aroused by unacceptable acts (the feeling of "sin" or "sinfulness" is slipped under a physiological discomfort; one always finds reasons for feeling dissatisfied with oneself). They are produced as punishments, as payment for something we should not have done, for something we should not have desired (impudently generalized by Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it really is — as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: "Every great pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it." World as Will and Representation II, 666). They are the effects of ill-considered actions that turn out badly.

(Here the affects, the senses, are posited as causes, as "guilty"; and physiological calamities are interpreted with the help of other calamities as "deserved.") We explain agreeable general feelings as produced by our trust in God, and by our consciousness of good deeds (the so-called "good conscience" — a physiological state which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell them apart). They are produced by the successful termination of some enterprise (a naive fallacy: the successful termination of some enterprise does not by any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal agreeable general feelings). They are produced by faith, charity, and hope — the Christian virtues. In fact, all these supposed causes are actually effects, and as it were, translate pleasant or unpleasant feelings into a misleading terminology. One is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins.

7

The error of free will. Today we no longer have any tolerance for the idea of "free will": we see it only too clearly for what it really is — the foulest of all theological fictions, intended to make mankind "responsible" in a religious sense — that is, dependent upon priests. Here I simply analyze the psychological assumptions behind any attempt at "making responsible." Whenever responsibility is assigned, it is usually so that judgment and punishment may follow. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any acting-the-way-you-did is traced back to will, to motives, to responsible choices: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially to justify punishment through the pretext of assigning guilt. All primitive psychology, the psychology of will, arises from the fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish — or wanted to create this right for their God. Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty — could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself). Today, we immoralists have embarked on a counter movement and are trying with all our strength to take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world — to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of these ideas. And there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming by means of the concepts of a "moral world-order," "guilt," and "punishment." Christianity is religion for the executioner.

8

What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities — neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant — and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society can realize an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end. 

A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.