Zarathustra The Laughing Prophet ~ 17

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event type discourse
date & time 16 Apr 1987 am
location Chuang Tzu Auditorium, Pune
language English
audio Available, duration 1h 49min. Quality: good.
Live music after the discourse.
online audio
video Available, duration 1h 57min. Quality: good.
online video
see also
online text find the PDF of this discourse
shorttitle ZARA217
notes
synopsis
Reader of the sutra: Ma Prem Maneesha.
The sutra
Of old and new law-tables part 1
Here I sit and wait, old shattered law-tables around me and also new, half-written law-tables. When will my hour come? -- the hour of my down-going, my descent: for I want to go to men once more.
For that I now wait: for first the sign that it is my hour must come to me -- namely, the laughing lion with the flock of doves.
Meanwhile I talk to myself, as one who has plenty of time. No one tells me anything new; so I tell myself to myself.
When I visited men, I found them sitting upon an old self-conceit. Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for man.
All talk of virtue seemed to them an ancient wearied affair; and he who wished to sleep well spoke of 'good' and 'evil' before retiring.
I disturbed this somnolence when I taught that nobody yet knows what is good and evil -- unless it be the creator!
But he it is who creates a goal for mankind and gives the earth its meaning and its future: he it is who creates the quality of good and evil in things.
And I bade them overturn their old professorial chairs, and wherever that old self-conceit had sat. I bade them laugh at their great masters of virtue and saints and poets and world-redeemers.
I bade them laugh at their gloomy sages, and whoever had sat as a black scarecrow, cautioning, on the tree of life....
... And I laughed over all their 'past' and its decayed expiring glory.
Truly, like lenten preachers and fools did I cry anger and shame over all their great and small things -- their best is so very small! Their worst is so very small! -- thus Ii laughed.
Thus from out of me cried and laughed my wise desire, which was born on the mountains, a wild wisdom, in truth! -- my great desire with rushing wings.
And often it tore me forth and up and away and in the midst of laughter: and then indeed I flew, an arrow, quivering with sun-intoxicated rapture:
Out into the distant future, which no dream has yet seen, into warmer souths than artists have ever dreamed of, there where gods, dancing, are ashamed of all clothes -- so that I might speak in parables, and hobble and stutter like poets: and truly, I am ashamed that I still have to be a poet!
Where all becoming seemed to me the dancing of gods and the wantonness of gods, and the world unrestrained and abandoned and fleeing back to itself....
Where all time seemed to me a blissful mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which blissfully played with the goad of freedom --
Where I found again my old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that he created: compulsion, dogma, need and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil....
I want to go to man once more: I want to go under among them, I want to give them, dying, my richest gift!...
... Thus spake Zarathustra.


(source:CD-ROM)


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