“His eyes are clear, and no disgust lurks in his mouth.”

If you look at people, they are disgusted with the whole of life and you cannot blame them. What have they got? Their whole life is nothing but a long-drawn-out tragedy. It is sickness unto death. They go on breathing, they go on living, they go on hoping. But those hopes always remain hopes. Their dreams are never fulfilled.

As they grow older, they see their hopes shattering, more and more. It is natural that they will be full of disgust with this whole business of life. They had never asked to be born, they have never asked that they should be given a heart which feels, which needs warmth, which needs love.

They have never asked that they should be given a soul that longs for the ultimate heights of joy and ecstasy. They suddenly find themselves, and all that has been given to them by existence remains unfulfilled. They are truly angry.

One of the most significant novelists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his great novel Brothers Karamazov, has one character who says, “I have only one relationship with God, and that is that of disgust. I am angry, and if I can meet Him, the only thing I am going to do is to give Him the ticket back, and ask Him to find the way out of life. It is a cruel joke. He gives us so many desires, so many longings…and there is no opportunity to fulfill them. There is not even any hope in the future.” Everybody is born with great enthusiasm, and everybody dies just frustrated.

The old saint says, “Now I don’t see any disgust, any agony; instead I see ecstasy: he goes along like a dancer…” You had come to the mountains dragging yourself somehow, carrying your own corpse on your shoulders, and now:

“Does he not go along like a dancer?”

The transformation has happened. The man has realized himself. The man has drunk from the sources of the divine.

“How changed Zarathustra is. Zarathustra has become – a child…”

That is the greatest change in life – to be a child again:

“…an awakened-one: what do you want now with the sleepers?”