The question of the saint is the question of all the saints of the world, all the buddhas, all the mystics, all the awakened ones. You have become a child, you are awakened: What do you want now with the sleepers? You are an absolute stranger to them. They will punish you, they may kill you. Your very presence will become a danger to their sleep, a danger to their misery, a danger to their blindness.

“You lived in solitude as in the sea, and the sea bore you. Alas, do you want to go ashore? Alas, do you want again to drag your body yourself?”

Have you forgotten the day you had come to the mountains? Do you want to be the same old self again? Why are you going downwards, leaving your sunlit peaks? You know in the valleys there is darkness alone? What is the purpose of your going?

Zarathustra answered,”I love mankind.”

In those three words is contained Zarathustra’s whole philosophy: “I love mankind. I love life. I had not renounced the world. I had not come to the mountains as an anti-life escapist. I had come to the mountains to find myself, my aloneness, my freedom, my wisdom. I have found it.

“Now there is no need for me to remain on the heights. On the contrary, I am so full that I need people to share with. I want to share my love, I want to share my wisdom, I want to share my freedom. I am too overloaded – I am overflowing.”

“Why,” said the saint, “Did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved mankind all too much?”

The saint says, “I have also gone into the mountains, into the forest because I also loved mankind all too much, that has become a slavery, and that has become a dependence, and that was bringing only misery to me and nothing else.”

But there is a difference. He loved mankind “all too much” when he was ignorant, when he himself was asleep. Zarathustra loves mankind when he is fully awake, when he is enlightened. The love of the unawakened is nothing but lust. Only the awakened knows the beauty and the spirituality, and the divinity of love. It is no longer a bondage.

The love of the awakened gives you freedom.

The love of the unawakened is that of a beggar’s love: he wants you to love him, he wants to get more and more love.

The love of the awakened is just the reverse. It is the love of an emperor. He wants to give to you – he has so much, such an abundance. It is giving, it is sharing without any desire to be rewarded and without any desire to get anything in return.