Of the way of the creator.
My brother, do you want to go apart and be alone? Do you want to seek the way to yourself? Pause just a moment and listen to me.
“He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone” – thus speaks the herd.
The voice of the herd will still ring within you. And when you say: “We have no longer the same conscience, you and I,” it will be a lament and a grief.
For see, it is still this same conscience that causes your grief: and the last glimmer of this conscience still glows in your affliction.
But you want to go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? If so, show me your strength for it and your right to it!
Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-propelling wheel? Can you also compel stars to revolve about you?
Alas, there is so much lusting for eminence! There is so much convulsion of the ambitious!…
Alas, there are so many great ideas that do no more than a bellows: they inflate and make emptier.
Do you call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling idea, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.
Are you such a man as ought to escape a yoke? There are many who threw off their final worth when they threw off their bondage.
Free from what? Zarathustra does not care about that! But your eye should clearly tell me: free for what?
Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law? Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?
It is terrible to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. It is to be like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude.
Today you still suffer from the many, O man set apart: today you still have your courage whole and your hopes.
But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will bend and your courage break. One day you will cry: “I am alone!”
One day you will no longer see what is exalted in you; and what is base in you, you will see all too closely; your sublimity itself will make you afraid, as if it were a phantom. One day you will cry: “Everything is false!”
There are emotions that seek to kill the solitary; if they do not succeed, well, they must die themselves! But are you capable of being a murderer?…
You compel many to change their opinion about you; they hold that very much against you. You approached them and yet went on past them: that they will never forgive you.
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….
And be on your guard against the good and just! They would like to crucify those who devise their own virtue – they hate the solitary.
Be on your guard, too, against holy simplicity! Everything which is not simple is unholy to it: and it, too, likes to play with fire – in this case, the fire of the stake.
And be on your guard, too, against the assaults your love makes upon you! The solitary extends his hand too quickly to anyone he meets.
To many men, you ought not to give your hand, but only your paw: and I should like it if your paw had claws, too….
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?…
Go apart and be alone with my tears, my brother. I love him who wants to create beyond himself, and thus perishes.
…Thus spake Zarathustra.
Creativity is perhaps the only existential religion. The moments of creativity are the moments when you are one with the universe. In a way you are lost, you are no more your old ego; in another way you have found yourself for the first time.
Only the creator knows the depths of life and the heights of love. Those who do not know the dimension of creativity remain unaware of what true religion is. True religion is not worship. True religion is not contained in the scriptures. True religion consists only of one thing: when you participate with the creator, howsoever small your participation may be. It has a significance, because only you can do it, and nobody else can do it.
God is not a person somewhere – God is only a collective name of the whole creative energy of the universe. The moment you are creative you are part of it, and the people who are not creative remain separate from the flow of existence. And the people who are destructive are not only separate, but they are against existence. They are the real sinners.
The only virtue worth calling virtue is creativity. What you create does not matter, but it should enhance life, beautify existence, make living more joyous, the song a little more juicy, the love a little more glorious – and the life of a creator starts becoming part of eternity and immortality.
Zarathustra is talking about the way of the creator. Millions of people live, but they don’t create anything. And it is one of the fundamentals of life that unless you create – it may be a painting, a song, a dance – you cannot be blissful, you will remain in misery. Only creativity brings to you your dignity. It helps you to blossom in your fullness.
My brother, do you want to go apart and be alone?
The creator cannot be part of the crowd. The creator has to learn to be alone, to go apart, to learn the beauty of solitude, because only in that space your potential starts changing into actuality.
Do you want to seek the way to yourself?
The way of the creator ultimately leads you to yourself, because you are going away from the crowd, away from the mass – you are going into aloneness.
A painter is absolutely alone in his vision.
A dancer is absolutely alone in his dance.