Every man is in a strange tension. Nature wants to go in one direction and your religions want to take you in the exact opposite direction. Your whole life becomes a fight with yourself. You become your own enemy. And unless you know life in its heights – pleasures transforming into blissfulness, enjoyment turning into ecstasies – you are committing an original sin against life itself.
And if we learn better to enjoy ourselves, we best unlearn how to do harm to others and to contrive harm.
Zarathustra comes to strange conclusions, from very novel directions. Gautam Buddha says, “Do not harm anybody. Do not hurt anybody, because that is a sin.” Mahavira says, “Violence of any kind is a sin.” Zarathustra comes to the same conclusion, but his whole argument is more profound than Gautam Buddha and Mahavira.
And if we learn better to enjoy ourselves, we best unlearn how to do harm to others and to contrive harm.
I can say with absolute authority that once you are blissful, you cannot harm anybody. Once you have known the eternity of life, and the joyous dance of life, it is impossible for you to harm anyone – because there is no one other than you. We are not separate islands; we are one continent, one single whole.
He is not making it a sin, he is not prohibiting you from harming others. He is simply saying, enjoy yourself to the fullest and you will not harm others, because in your very enjoyment the idea of I and thou disappears. There are no longer others; it is one life in millions of manifestations. In the trees, in the animals, in human beings, in the stars – these are all manifestations of one life, one single life.
If we are harming anybody, we are harming ourselves. But this insight arises in you when you reach to the highest peak of bliss. That’s why he says man’s original sin is: he has enjoyed himself too little; and a man who has not enjoyed himself will not tolerate anybody else enjoying himself.
These are simple psychological facts. The man who is in pain, in anguish, in anxiety, in misery cannot tolerate anybody else being blissful. It hurts. Why am I miserable and why are others not? And if the whole of humanity is suffering, then to be blissful in this suffering humanity is to be constantly in danger.
People would like to destroy you. You don’t belong to them, you are not miserable enough. You are a stranger. Perhaps you are mad, because when the whole world is so miserable how can you manage to laugh? How can you manage to dance and sing?