Zarathustra The Laughing Prophet ~ 05
event type | discourse |
date & time | 10 Apr 1987, 8:00 |
location | Chuang Tzu Auditorium, Pune |
language | English |
audio | Available, duration 2h 5min. Quality: good. Live music after the discourse. |
online audio | |
video | Available, duration 2h 7min. Quality: good, but a slight constant audio-noise. |
online video |
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see also |
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online text | find the PDF of this discourse |
shorttitle | ZARA205 |
- notes
- synopsis
- Reader of the sutra: Ma Prem Maneesha.
- The sutra
- Of redemption
- Truly, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men!
- The terrible thing to my eye is to find men shattered in pieces and scattered as if over a battle-field of slaughter.
- And when my eye flees from the present to the past, it always discovers the same thing: fragments and limbs and dreadful chances -- but no men!
- The present and the past upon the earth -- alas! My friends -- that is my most intolerable burden; and I should not know how to live, if I were not a seer of that which must come.
- A seer, a willer, a creator, a future itself and a bridge to the future -- and alas, also like a cripple upon this bridge: Zarathustra is all this.
- And even you have often asked yourselves: who is Zarathustra to us? What shall we call him? And, like me, you answer your own questions with questions.
- Is he a promiser? Or a fulfiller? A conqueror? Or an inheritor? A harvest? Or a plowshare? A physician? Or a convalescent?
- Is he a poet? Or a genuine man? A liberator? Or a subduer? A good man? Or an evil man?...
- ... It is all my art and aim, to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance....
- Will -- that is what the liberator and bringer of joy is called: thus I have taught you, my friends! But now learn this as well: the will itself is still a prisoner.
- Willing liberates: but what is it that fastens in fetters even the liberator?
- 'It was': that is what the will's teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past.
- The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time's desire -- that is the will's most lonely affliction.
- Willing liberates: what does willing itself devise to free itself from its affliction and to mock at its dungeon?...
- The spirit of revenge: my friends, that, up to now, has been mankind's chief concern; and where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment.
- 'Punishment' is what revenge calls itself: it feigns a good conscience for itself with a lie....
- 'Except the will at last redeem itself and willing become not-willing -- ': but you, my brothers, know this fable-song of madness!
- I led you away from these fable-songs when I taught you: 'The will is a creator....'
- Has the will become its own redeemer and bringer of joy? Has it unlearned the spirit of revenge...?
- ... Thus spake Zarathustra.
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