3.	Nietzsche 

3.1 Introduction

In this chapter we look at one of Nietzsche's major works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism, contrasting its vision with the ecstatic poetry of Rumi and Kabir, and also looking at the work of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho).
Nietzsche's links in the popular mind with the Nazis have generally been refuted, though probably are still a widespread misconception. The historical connection via his sister (who married a notorious anti-Semite) to Mussolini and then to Hitler will always taint his ideas, but all the more reason to look without prejudice at what he says, especially as some of it seems to be exuberantly mystical. His own life shows a gently and kindly man, a committed teacher of his students, a hatred of pettiness and bigotry, and a compassion shown in his decision to serve as a medical orderly in the war between France and Prussia in 1870. Perhaps Bertrand Russell's appraisal of Nietzsche in A History of Western Philosophy may have something to do with his poor reputation, though I think it has more to do with Russell's style and his horror at the war, fresh in his mind at the time of writing. In the short section that Russell devotes to Nietzsche, Russell summarises his philosophy (which he describes as more literary than academic), rather than investigate the man revealed through his writings, as I shall attempt to do here. To bring home his views on Nietzsche, Russell pits him in an imaginary argument against the Buddha, and before God. Nietzsche speaks against the propagation of love and harmony that the Buddha seems to teach, on the grounds of producing a dull world. "I appeal to You, Lord, as the greatest of creative artists, do not let Your artistic impulses be curbed by the degenerate fear-ridden maunderings of this wretched psychopath." (Russell is really a bit unfair to think that Nietzsche would call the Buddha a psychopath! Nietzsche actually once commented on Buddhism as a system of mental hygiene — much as Jung is accused of in the next century.) Russell goes on to have Nietzsche say that if the Lord should decide for the Buddha's world, "I fear we should all die of boredom". The Buddha replies: "You might, because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. But those who really love life would be happy as no one can be happy in the world as it is." Does Nietzsche love pain? Is his love of life a sham? We will consider these questions. But what of Russell? How do we compare his comment that "no one can be happy in the world as it is" (a version of which is part of Buddhist thinking, though Russell probably misrepresents the Buddha as much as Nietzsche) with Whitman's acceptance and sober delight in it? (Sober versus drunk: this will be a theme for looking at Nietzsche.) For sure, happiness comes and goes, but it seems that to accept and love life is what makes you bigger, and the kind of bitterness shown in Russell's Why I am not a Christian (for example), can only diminish one. Having said that, Russell's final rejection of Nietzsche is on the grounds of a lack of the love that Russell desires to be in the world. While Nietzsche is as fiercely anti-Christian as Russell he does seem, in Zarathustra, to be offering something real in its place, something expansive. Zarathustra's vision of life is joyous, accepting of the polarities of good and evil.
Whitman used to say that even the best of his admirers (O'Connor, Burroughs or Bucke) only thought half as much of Leaves of Grass as he did himself, but Nietzsche spoke of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as in the azure distance and beyond anything that had gone before, including Dante, Shakespeare, and the Vedas. Where Whitman looked a little immodest in claiming that Shakespeare was the poet for the feudal ages past, and he the poet of the democratic age to come, Nietzsche's claims for Zarathustra are startling:

The highest and the lowest forces of human nature, the sweetest, most frivolous and most fearsome stream forth out of one fountain with immortal certainty. Until then one does not know what height, what depth is; one knows even less what truth is. There is no moment in this revelation of truth which would have been anticipated or divined by even one of the greatest. There is no wisdom, no psychology, no art of speech before Zarathustra; the nearest things, the most everyday things here speak of things unheard of. 

With this evaluation, admittedly by its own author, we should investigate it: even if it only ranks alongside the Gita and Leaves it will be worth it.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's mature work, though not his last. But first, let us look at his life and how it led up to Zarathustra. He was born in 1844 as the son of a Protestant pastor; his father died of a brain disease when the boy Nietzsche was young, and so he grew up mainly in the company of women. He was unusually intelligent, and gained a scholarship to Schulpforta (one of the best schools of the time) in 1858 at the age of 14, where he was mostly first in the class. He was often ill as a boy and had a conspicuous stare, sometimes with a wild or threatening look. He was very serious however, and nicknamed 'the little pastor' because of his religious interests, but his passion was for books and writing: he wrote an autobiography at the age of 14 and named it after Goethe's autobiography (who was to remain one of his heroes). He also liked to play war-games with toy soldiers, and would invent games with his sister and childhood friends, taking a dominant role in these. He went on to University to study theology in his father's footsteps, in 1864, and attempted to enter the usual social life of students in those days including the joining of an undergraduate fraternity. He persisted in spite of a lack of natural gregariousness, and apparently even visited a brothel with his fraternarians, though he confined himself to playing the piano which he discovered there to his great relief. Theology did not satisfy him however, so he changed to philology at which he excelled, and transferred to Leipzig under the tutelage of Professor Ritschl, where he founded the Leipzig Philological Society and contributed an impressive paper to it. Despite his brilliance at philology he began to take more of an interest in philosophy, and read Schopenhauer who was an important early influence, but whom Nietzsche never met. In 1867 he entered the army, but after serving for a few months he fell off his horse, broke his ribs, and suffered an infection that probably also weakened his health in later life. Nietzsche met Wagner, whose music impressed him greatly, and entered a period of orbiting this great man, writing to him and about him, and spending time with him and his mistress Cosima. It seems that Nietzsche saw in Wagner a role model, though later on he rejected the turn of Wagner's work and its narrowing nationalist focus. In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, Nietzsche was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel, and received an honorary doctorate for his writings in philology. He was noted for being a good and kind teacher to his students, who may have appreciated him also for being closer to their age than most of their lecturers. He even received a raise for excellence in teaching.
In 1870 Nietzsche enlisted as a medical orderly in the Prussian army (at war with France), which was quite voluntary, as he had given up his Prussian citizenship in order to work uninterrupted at Basel, an act that left him officially stateless up to his death. The human carnage he saw at first hand among both French and German soldiers appalled him and challenged his patriotism, turning him to philosophy for consolation. He soon became ill himself, with dysentery and diphtheria, and he was discharged to recuperate at home. It may have been this experience that made him a critic of both militarism and statism, a quite explicit stance in his writings that is at odds with the Nazi claims on him.
In his teaching years at Basel he continued his friendship with Wagner, though the relationship between Wagner and Cosima offends his rather prudish sensibilities (Cosima was then the wife of Hans von Bulow, the conductor of Wagner's operas). Wagner was enthusiastic about one of Nietzsche's early books The Birth of Tragedy (which the philologer Ritschl was hostile to), but the friendship eventually waned as Nietzsche considered that Wagner had 'sold out' to the German public. Nietzsche grew impatient with philology and began to consider that philosophy was more important to him, but the University refused to let him transfer from the one discipline into the other. In 1876 Nietzsche's health deteriorated to the point where he had to give up teaching, and from then on he lived on the tiny University pension he received, publishing his works at his own expense.
In 1881 he started on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but his health worsened and only a few works followed this (which he reckoned to be his finest achievement) before his complete breakdown by 1890. The first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeared in 1883, in the same year that Wagner died; the third part in 1884, and the fourth part appeared in 1885. In 1888 the first signs of madness appeared, and in his very last letter dated 6th January 1889 he begins: 'Dear Professor, in the end I would have much preferred being a  Basel professor to being God. But I did not dare to carry my private egoism so far that for its sake I should omit the creation of the world ...' He caused a public commotion soon after this letter by throwing his arms around an old cart-horse whose misery aroused in him such pity that he was overcome. Pity was one of the emotions he railed against endlessly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He was nursed, first by his mother and then by his sister, up to his death in 1900. In the last twelve years of his life he was considered insane, and was unable to converse or even dress himself, though he often left an impression on visitors of a grace or profundity, or some kind of greatness, through the wreck 'from which the mind had fled'. One such visitor was Rudolf Steiner (at the age of 34) who had been approached by Elisabeth Nietzsche for advice in setting up the Nietzsche archive (Steiner had been working for the Goethe-and-Schiller Archive). Steiner wrote this in his autobiography:

... But I am still grateful to Frau Forster-Nietzsche for taking me into Friedrich Nietzsche's room on the occasion of the first of the many visits that I paid her. There he lay in mental darkness on a sofa. I was struck by the nobility of his brow — the brow of an artist and thinker. It was early afternoon. Those eyes, in which though the fire in them was dead the workings of the soul could still be read, took in his surroundings, but conveyed no images to his mind. One just stood there, and to Nietzsche it meant nothing. But looking at that face that was so eloquent of the spirit it was almost possible to believe that this was the expression of a soul which had spent the morning piecing together thoughts, and now desired to rest awhile. My soul was seized by an inner convulsion, which could have been interpreted as understanding of the genius whose gaze was directed towards me but did not meet my eyes. The passivity of that prolonged stare blocked the understanding in my own gaze so that I saw but encountered no response.
I could think only haltingly about what I had seen; and these halting thoughts are the content of my book, Nietzsche, a Man against his Time. But the halting nature of the book cannot obscure the fact that it was Nietzsche who inspired it.

Steiner, a young academic easily as brilliant in his early promise as Nietzsche, published two other works on Nietzsche's philosophy and psychopathology. Steiner saw that what Nietzsche had destroyed (and which needed to be destroyed) Nietzsche could not replace: he had scorned the emerging scientific ethos of the age. Steiner himself pursued his own path, which started out in a scientific way, but became the occultism he is now remembered for.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written in short periods and in unusual circumstances. According to his notes on the subject in Ecce Homo, it was in August 1881, while walking in the woods by lake Silvaplana that the concept of eternal recurrence (a redemption of the past based on affirmation) came to him, and which forms a theme in the book. From this point to its 'delivery' in February 1883 took eighteen months, which he thought would suggest to Buddhists at least that he was really a female elephant. In this period he also wrote the Gay Science and a musical work, which, he says, bore the proximity of something incomparable — Zarathustra. Nietzsche lived in a quite bay of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, and spent his mornings, health permitting, walking in the woods up in the hills above, and in the afternoons in walking around the bay. The concept of Zarathustra grew on him in this period, or crept up on him, as he says. He considers that the book came from him almost as an act of revelation:

— Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. — If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with an unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightening, with necessity, unfalteringly formed — I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension somehow discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one's steps now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside of oneself with the distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickles down to one's toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light; an instinct for rhythmical relationships which spans forms of wide extent — length, the need for a wide-spanned rhythm is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension ... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity ... The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression. It really does seem, to allude to a saying of Zarathustra's, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (— 'here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride upon your back. Upon every image you here ride to every truth. Here the words and word-chests of all existence spring open to you; all existence here want to become words, all becoming here wants to learn speech from you — '). This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could say to me 'it is mine also'. — 

  We are tempted to whisper back to Nietzsche "Whitman?", but no matter. This passage that I have reproduced in whole is suggestive of the kind of transforming experience that brings a person to cosmic consciousness (to use Bucke's phrase), and reinforces our need to examine Zarathustra. Nietzsche spent a period in Rome, and then in Nice: for each of the first three parts of Zarathustra he required only ten weeks, and was an extraordinary period for him:

— my muscular agility has always been greatest when my creative power has flowed most abundantly. The body is inspired: let us leave the 'soul' out of it ... I could often have been seen dancing; at that time I could walk for seven or eight hours in the mountains without a trace of tiredness. I slept well, I laughed a lot — I was perfectly vigorous and perfectly patient.

This could almost be Whitman talking, as perhaps in this passage from Leaves:

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee.
				('Song of Myself', v. 10)

However, Nietzsche says that apart from those ten-week period the 'gestation' period for Zarathustra was a time of stress without equal (giving us a picture of his extremes of despair and elation). Nietzsche explains why he chose Zarathustra as the hero of his book — he had searched for a prophet or religious figure whose teachings were based on the conflict between good and evil. The Persian seer Zoroaster, and founder of the Zoroastrian religion, fitted the bill, though Nietzsche's Zarathustra bears no resemblance to his namesake, other than in his heroic or mythic status. Instead Zarathustra becomes Nietzsche's alter ego.

3.2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra have only a thread of a narrative running through them. Each part is broken down into sections which revolve around some theme or insight, and are mainly the sayings of Zarathustra, though sometimes replaced by a dialogue or a descriptive passage. The sayings of Zarathustra are in the form of aphorisms, and these crowd on top of each other, many of them representing penetrating insights into human nature.
In Part One Zarathustra has already spent ten years in solitude on his mountain-top, and is so overflowing with wisdom and beneficence that he feels the need to descend and share it with the populace. On his way down he meets a hermit and wonders that the old man has not heard that 'God is dead'. He arrives in the market place in the nearest town, where the people are about to watch a tight-rope walker, and he starts to preach his basic message: man is something to be overcome; they should prepare for the appearance of the Superman. In a reference to Darwinism he points out that all creatures have hitherto created something beyond themselves — man in turn must give way to the Superman. The Superman is free from the superstitions of the past and is true to the earth. Then comes a bizarre scene where a tight-rope walker appears from one of the two towers that support a rope above the crowd in the market-place, and begins his journey across it. Half-way across a 'buffoon' in brightly-coloured clothes comes after him and berates him for being between the two towers; why is he not back in the tower, locked up where he belongs? The buffoon then screams at him and jumps over him, causing the tight-rope walker to fall, mortally injured, at Zarathustra's feet. Zarathustra takes the corpse away to bury it reflecting that the people of the market-place would not understand his message, and so he resolves only to speak to individuals who could understand: his disciples. The rest of Part One is taken up with a series of discourses for them on a range of subjects, but all illustrating the necessity of sweeping away the old decadence and preparing for the Superman. Zarathustra makes known his views on a wide variety of subjects including the State, virtue, justice; and famously, the advice not to forget one's whip when visiting women. At the end of Part One he takes a loving farewell of this disciples and returns to his cave in the mountains.
In Part Two Zarathustra waits 'like a sower who has scattered his seed', i.e. his wisdom, and eventually has a dream that his doctrine is in danger, which revives his longing to preach again. He returns to his disciples and launches into a series of attacks on traditional values: in particular those groups held in esteem by his society, including 'sublime men': poets and scholars, priests and philosophers, the so-called virtuous, and the 'tarantulas' — those who would preach the equality of men. Part Two also includes the 'Night Song', one of the most poetic and rapturous passages in Zarathustra. Towards the end of Part Two Zarathustra seems to falter, having a strange nightmare and doubts about his role as great teacher, for he lacks the 'lion's voice for command'. He leaves his disciples again, grieving, and in Part Three after crossing the Blissful Island takes a ship across the sea. He is silent at first and then describes a nightmare, in which he is, or he sees, a shepherd with a snake down his throat choking him; he then introduces his idea of eternal recurrence. Once the shepherd bites off the snake's head, he is liberated, and Zarathustra's spirits are raised. There follows the thought that happiness runs after him — a kind of innocent state; and then a rather mystical section called 'Before Sunrise' where he becomes quite ecstatic. Zarathustra arrives in his own country, meeting on his way an 'ape' who has borrowed his teachings and distorted them; he also finds 'apostates', those of his disciples who turn back to Christianity. He returns to his cave in the mountains, where he is reunited with his animals: an eagle and a serpent. He ponders that up in the free air of the mountains all words become available to him, seek speech in him, while down amongst the people all speech is in vain. He speaks in solitude on some of his central themes, on the 'Spirit of Gravity', which destroys the spontaneous and natural in man, on good and evil, on the will to power, and on eternal recurrence. He undergoes a crisis which resolves itself into an ecstatic discourse with his soul, and an ecstatic ode to Life and a restatement of his theme as the prophet of eternal recurrence.
Part Four has a different style, as we would expect from the fact that it was a later addition, and in fact intended to be part of further additions, though these did not materialise. Zarathustra spends many years in his cave, becoming old and white-haired; again his beneficence is oppressing in its abundance and he reflects that his disciples will now come to seek him rather than he descend to them. He hears a great cry of distress in his forests below as a prophet warns him of the last seduction — to the sin of pity. Zarathustra goes down to the forests to find the source of the cries of distress — for they come from the Higher Man. He meets in turn, two kings with an ass, the conscientious man of the spirit, a sorcerer, the last pope, the slayer of God (the ugliest man), the voluntary beggar, and his shadow, each of whom he sends up to his cave for hospitality. Having still not found the source of the cries of distress, he suddenly hears it again, many-throated, but of one voice, and emanating from his cave. He returns there to meet them, the Higher Men. He tells them that they are not high enough or strong enough: they are only bridges for others to step over. Nevertheless, he prepares a feast for them — the Last Supper — and exhorts them to reach beyond themselves. The sorcerer sings a strange song, as does the conscientious man of the spirit (who turns out to be the archetype of the scientist), but Zarathustra berates them for falling prey to fear — he teaches them courage. Zarathustra's shadow (the wanderer) also sings a song, and Zarathustra is overjoyed to see that they have become convalescents in his company. They proceed with a strange festival in worship of the ass, but Zarathustra only congratulates them on their merriment and sings his own 'intoxicated' song for them. The next day, he is first to rise and realises that they cannot be his disciples after all: a flock of birds settle on him, and a climax is reached as a lion joins him and fawns upon him. The Higher Men awake to greet him, but are chased away by the roaring lion, and they disappear. Zarathustra is left alone and with the realisation that he had after all succumbed to his pity for the Higher Men, but it was of no consequence. His lion, that was missing at the end of Part Two, was now with him and his children were to come, for now it was time for the great noontide — his work was begun.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be seen as a book of insights into human nature, and its destiny. One of the best Neitzschean insights in Zarathustra is his idea, expressed early in the book that man is a bridge between the animal and the divine. This is a concept perhaps familiar in the East, but rarely expressed so vividly. For Nietzsche the bridge is from an ancient and restrictive concept of the human, to a man he calls the Superman: all of life should be an overcoming of the old man to reach to the new. He illustrates it in the episode where Zarathustra watches the tight-rope walker fall to his death as the buffoon rushes over him, shouting that he does not belong between the towers. This is a wonderful metaphor for the agony of human existence: stretched between the animal and the divine, in a state of tension that is only appeased by a return to the lower passions, or by a leap to the transcendent, the superman. The buffoon represents all the forces that are against the crossing-over, and the fall represents the possible consequences of attempting it.
  But the divine has to be redefined by Nietzsche, as, in his famous phrase, 'God is dead'. All afterworlds are to be discarded as the inventions of the 'sick and the dying who despised the body and the earth and who invented things of heaven'. Nietzsche was a pastor's son, we remember, and in his youth showed a religious tendency that led to his enrolment for pastoral studies. Nietzsche rejects all the old traditions wholesale, as does Krishnamurti, and in its place expounds the Superman. In many ways this is the last part of the Western revolution from feudalism to democracy: the feudal religious systems have to go, and Nietzsche is attempting to put something new in their place in the same way as Whitman. Much of Zarathustra seems at first glance to contain Whitman's themes: celebration of the body, of nature, and rejection of the renunciative tradition. Zarathustra says of the preachers of death (all the following quotes are from the translation by R.J.Hollingdale):

  They encounter an invalid or an old man or a corpse; and straightaway they say 'Life is refuted!'
  But only they are refuted, they and their eye that sees only on aspect of existence.
						('Of the Preachers of Death')

This is probably a direct attack on Buddhism (even though Nietzsche seems otherwise to respect it) as it is in the Buddhist tradition that the young prince Siddhartha saw, in the this order, an invalid, an old man and a corpse (exposure to which his father had prevented up to this point) and that led him to renounce his wealth and title and become a forest hermit in search of enlightenment. Nietzsche is against the simplistic rejection of life on the grounds of suffering, old age and death; in fact no religious tradition of either East or West is to be retained.
  Zarathustra transcends and reaches forward for the Superman — he lives alone, with only his animals for company, apart from those times when his soul is so full that he must descend and share his overflowing wisdom with the people. Nietzsche returns again and again to the theme that man as he is must be overcome, and much of Zarathustra is devoted to spelling out just what it is in man that is to be transcended. Nietzsche found the prevailing culture of middle-Europe at the middle and end of the 19th century stifling, and he ruthlessly attacked all the cultural icons: not just the Protestant religion of his family and country, but the geniuses of culture that in the popular mind had replaced the aristocracy. In crossing over the bridge there was no baggage allowed: only a lightness of spirit and an inner personal freedom. His idea of the will to power has to be seen in this context, as a personal statement, and not as a political one.
Nietzsche echoes Whitman and Jefferies in praising the body; that they did this at a similar point in European history is no coincidence, as the Victorian morality and dread of the body's natural functions laid a dead hand over the imagination of many of the great thinkers of that period. We live in a time where the body is largely restored its natural place, or perhaps too greatly emphasised even, and may find it odd that these writers should lay so much stress on it. Let us look at some of Nietzsche's thoughts on the subject, as expressed through Zarathustra:

  Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body: and then this contempt was the supreme good — the soul wanted the body lean, monstrous, famished. So the soul thought to escape from the body and from the earth.
  Oh, this soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished: and cruelty was the delight of this soul!
  But tell me brothers: What does your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and dirt and a miserable ease?
					('Zarathustra's Prologue')

  Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body, this is a pure voice and a more honest one.
  Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of earth.			('Of the Afterworldsmen')

'I am body and soul' — so speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body.

  There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.
					('Of the Despisers of the Body')

'Since I have known the body better', said Zarathustra to one of his disciples, 'the spirit has been only figuratively spirit to me; and all that is "intransitory" — that too has been only an "image"'.
					('Of Poets')

Compare these with some quotes from Leaves of Grass:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul.
					('Song of Myself', verse 48)

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
					('I Sing the Body Electric', verse 1)

Nietzsche is emphatic about Nature as a whole, not just the body, taking a delight in it as his long walks in the woods during the gestation of Zarathustra show. He would often take friends to the 'Zarathustra stone' a waterwashed boulder on the shore of Lake Silvaplana and wax lyrical in the beautiful surroundings on the origins of the book. There are not that many descriptions of nature in Zarathustra, but he spells out his views in these passages:

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are the poisoners, whether they know it or not. 
They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone!
Once the blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth.
					(Prologue)

A consistent theme throughout Zarathustra (and in much of his other, late work) is the breakdown of the conventional concepts of good and evil. Whitman said he was the poet of evil, just as much as good, and that his poems may do as much evil as good; Nietzsche echoes a more conventional view, held by many European writers at the time that 'everything was now permitted', as Zarathustra says:

O my brothers, is everything not now in flux? Have not all railings and gangways fallen into the water and come to nothing? Who can still cling to 'good' and 'evil'?
					('Of Old and New Law-Tables')

Zarathustra teaches that good and evil are intertwined:

— Now it is with men as with this tree.
'The more it wants to rise into the heights and the light, the more determinedly do its roots strive earthwards, downwards, into the darkness, into the depths — into evil.'
					('Of the Tree on the Mountainside')

Many of the mystics hint that their condition is beyond good and evil, or that evil does not exist (which is another way of saying the same thing), and this attitude is consistent with one who 'crosses over' the bridge. Let us take another example in Zarathustra:

'Man is evil' — all the wisest men have told me that to comfort me. Ah, if only it be true today! For evil is man's best strength.
'Man must grow better and more evil' — thus do I teach. The most evil is necessary for the Superman's best.
It may have been good for that preacher of the petty people to bear and suffer the sin of man. I, however, rejoice in great sin as my great consolation.
But these things are not said for long ears. Neither does every word belong in every mouth. They are subtle, remote things: sheep's hooves ought not to grasp for them!
						('Of the Higher Man' part 5)

Nietzsche is referring to Jesus in the 'preacher of the petty people', and is consistent here with his attacks on the teachings of Christianity. He points out that this 'truth' is not for long ears (i.e. those of donkeys) — the concept is subtle. His reference to sheep is again a dig at Christianity. Mystics in all the world traditions are divided on how they treat the prevailing religion: many use its language to convey their union with ultimate reality, and some of these do so out of choice, or innocence, while some had to in order to survive the enforcement of orthodoxies. Others denounce the prevailing faiths in one way or another, or run foul of them: Whitman mostly ignores his contemporary Christianity; Krishnamurti rejects everything, past and present, out of hand, Rajneesh rejected all traditions, but not the mystics; many Zen monks on reaching spiritual maturity rejected their Masters, almost as a tradition. That Nietzsche is so vehement in his denigration of Christianity, and that he rejects all prevailing notions of good and evil, therefore tells us little about his mystical credentials. Nietzsche's Zarathustra praises evil because the energy of it lifts a person from dullness and mediocrity, but Nietzsche himself committed no criminal or evil acts and his energy poured itself more into his writings. Nietzsche was not by temperament the warrior type, whose virtues he extolled, but Vivekananda was — we learn of an almost Nietzschean outburst from him on his way to the United States in 1899, from Rolland:

When people spoke of the rarity of crime in India he cried, "Would God it were otherwise in my land! For this is verily the virtuousness of death." "The older I grow," he added, "the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness; this is my new Gospel." He went as far as to say, "Do even evil like a man. Be wicked if you must, on a great scale!"

Nietzsche's insights alone might make Zarathustra a book of wisdom, but it is the expansivity and inspiration of it that also suggests a comparability with the Gita and Leaves of Grass. There are many ecstatic passages scattered throughout the book, of which parts of the 'Night Song' are good examples:

It is night: now do all leaping fountains speak louder. And my soul too is a leaping fountain.
It is night: only now do all songs of lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover.
Something unquenched, unquenchable, is in me, that wants to speak out. A craving for love is in me, that itself speaks the language of love.
Light am I: ah, that I were night! But this is my solitude that I am girded round with light.
Ah, that I were dark and obscure! How I would suck the breasts of  light!
And I should bless you, sparkling stars and glow-worms above! — and be happy in our gifts of light.
But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break from me.

We gather that Nietzsche himself was moved by the 'Night Song', because in 1884, when he gave a copy of Zarathustra to Resa von Schirnhofer (one of his female companions of the time) he immediately asked her to read it out to him, upon which he was left silent and emotional for some time. In another passage Zarathustra looks beyond the stars:

'You, however, O Zarathustra, have wanted to behold the ground of things and their background: so you must climb above yourself — up and beyond, until you have even the stars under you!'
Yes! to look down upon myself and even upon the stars: that alone would I call my summit, that has remained for me as my ultimate summit!
						(The Wanderer)

Compare this with a passage by Jefferies from The Story of My Heart:

I now became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe. I felt deep down into the earth under, and high above into the sky, and farther still to the sun and stars. Still farther beyond the stars into the hollow of space, and losing thus my separateness of being come to seem like a part of the whole.

Jefferies uses the same imagery of going beyond the stars, but seems to have already achieved Zarathustra's ultimate summit. (In fact, a reference to the stars as within one occurs regularly in mysticism from the devotional visions of Arjuna to the scientific headlessness of Harding.) Another lyrical passage in Zarathustra reminds one of Jefferies:

O sky above me! O pure, deep sky! You abyss of light! Gazing into you I tremble with divine desires.
To cast myself into your height — that is my depth! To hide myself in your purity — that is my innocence!
The god is veiled by his beauty: thus you hide your stars. You do not speak: thus you proclaim to me your wisdom.
						(Before Sunrise)

Jefferies also loved the sky:

Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards its, and there it rested, for pure colour is rest of heart.

(Jefferies' praise of pure colour reminds us of Krishnamurti's daffodils.) The whole of 'Before Sunrise' in Part Three of Zarathustra also has a mystical flavour, and would not compare badly with passages from Whitman or the Gita. The last section of Part Three is similarly buoyant: here is the seventh and last part of it:

If ever I spread out a still sky above myself and flew with my own wings into my own sky:
if, playing, I have swum into deep light-distances and bird-wisdom came to my freedom:
but thus speaks bird-wisdom: 'Behold, there is no above, no below! Fling yourself about, out, back, weightless bird! Sing! speak no more!
'are not all words made for the heavy? do not all words lie to the light? Sing! speak no more!'
Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings — the Ring of Recurrence!
Never yet did I find the woman by whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman, whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!
For I love you, O Eternity!				('The Seven Seals', part 7)

It is worth remembering that these would have been the last words in Zarathustra, had Nietzsche not chosen to add Part Four the following year. In this last passage from Part Three of Zarathustra Nietzsche is vowing love for eternity, and his concept of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche as a philosopher is remembered for his principle of eternal recurrence: is this idea the same as the mystics' sense of immortality? Nietzsche introduces us to the idea in a dream where a dwarf who represents the 'Spirit of Gravity' is carried by Zarathustra up a mountain. Zarathustra stops and tells the dwarf that the path ahead represents the future, the path behind represents the present and the gateway where they were halted at represents the present moment. The dwarf replies that time is a circle. Zarathustra then proposes the theory that everything will happen again, and everything has already happened; this theme is elaborated upon and leads up to the ecstatic ending to Part Three. Zarathustra hints at the meaning of it in this passage:

Then I wait impatiently, until the luminous sky at last dawns for me, the snowy-bearded winter sky, the white-haired, ancient sky — 
the silent, winter sky, that often conceals even its sun!
Did I learn long, luminous silence from it? Or did it learn it from me? Or did each of us devise it himself?
The origin of all good things is thousandfold — all good, wanton things spring for joy into existence: how should they do that — once only?
				('On the Mount of Olives')

Could this be a hint that Nietzsche is older than the sun, like Krishna? Zarathustra, in his crisis before the end of Part Three, shows that eternal recurrence also has its drawbacks:

'The greatest all too small! — that was my disgust at man! And eternal recurrence even for the smallest! that was my disgust at all existence!
'Ah, disgust! Disgust! Disgust!' Thus spoke Zarathustra and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness.
					('The Convalescent')

He recovers, with the help of his animals, and they tell him:

'Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal your soul with new songs, so that you may bear your great destiny, that was never yet the destiny of any man!
'For you animals well know, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!
'that you have to be the first to teach this doctrine — how should this great destiny not also be your greatest danger and sickness!
'Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.
					('The Convalescent')

Zarathustra is to be the teacher of the eternal recurrence: there are countless passages where Zarathustra states his mission as teacher, and also his frustration at the slowness of his disciples. He also echoes what all great teachers have said, including Whitman, that the disciple must outgrow the teacher. This passage is from the end of Part One, where Zarathustra is taking leave of his disciples and returning to his mountain-top:

I now go away alone, my disciples! You too now go away and be alone! So I will have it.
Truly, I advise you: go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why then, should you not pluck at my laurels?
You respect me; but how if one day your respect should tumble? Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead!
You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers: but of what importance are all believers?
You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.
					('Of the Bestowing Virtue')

(Note the reference to Jesus in the last sentence.) Consider now this passage from Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
					('Song of Myself' verses 46/47)

Whitman is more Zen-like here, but there are similarities: the repudiation of the teacher once the lesson is learned. In another passage Nietzsche echoes Lao Tzu's humbleness as a teacher:

Truly, you fill your mouths with noble words: and are we supposed to believe that your hearts are overflowing, you habitual liars?
But my words are poor, despised, halting works: I am glad to take what falls from the table at your feast.
					('Of Immaculate Perception')

Lao Tzu says:

How does the sea become the king of all streams?
Because it lies lower than they!
Hence it is the king of all streams.
Therefore, the Sage reigns over the people by humbling himself in speech;
And leads the people by putting himself behind.

Zarathustra has to create his disciples:

Once the creator sought companions and children of his hope: and behold, it turned out that he could not find them, except he first create them himself.
Thus I am in the midst of my work, going to my children and turning from them: for the sake of his children must Zarathustra perfect himself.
For one loves from the very heart only one's child and one's work; and where there is great love of oneself, then it is a sign of pregnancy: thus I have found.
My children are still green in their first spring, standing close together and shaken in common by the winds, the trees of my garden and my best soil.
				('Of Involuntary Bliss')

Zarathustra also compares himself to Jesus in several other sections. In the beginning of Part Four, where he waits for the Higher Men to come to him, he makes reference to 'fishers of men':

And when I desired honey, I desired only bait and sweet syrup and gum, which even grumbling bears and strange, sullen, wicked birds are greedy for:
the finest bait, such as huntsmen and fishermen need. For although the world is like a dark animal-jungle and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, its seems to me to be rather and preferably an unfathomable, rich, sea,
a sea full of many-coloured fishes and crabs for which even the gods might long and become fishers and casters of nets: so rich is the world in strange things, great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: now I cast my golden fishing-rod into it and say: Open up, human abyss!
Open up and throw me your fishes and glistening crabs! With my finest bait shall I bait today the strangest human fish!
				('The Honey Offering')

Another obvious reference to Jesus is in one of the last sections of Part Four, called the 'Last Supper', when Zarathustra provides a feast for the Higher Men who have come to his cave. Some commentators have also pointed out that the book begins with Zarathustra leaving his home for the mountains at the age of thirty, widely taken to be another reference to Jesus. Is Nietzsche really comparing himself to Jesus? Or is he using the implied parallels to comment on Jesus's life and teachings? Zarathustra never seems certain, though, of what he is teaching, but he sees this as no hindrance to teaching:

Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine to your friend? Many a one cannot deliver himself from his own chains and yet he is his friend's deliverer.
				('Of the Friend')

We have seen many passages in Zarathustra that suggest, at least on the surface of it, that Nietzsche is expressing some fundamental insights into the nature of man's existence, with similarities of intention and imagery to known mystics. Because we are looking for expressions of the inexpressible, we should not be at all surprised to find contradictions within a piece of mystical writing, or with other mystical writings, or to find completely new ways of putting things. An early problem in the study of mysticism is the extremes of avowal and disavowal of God or any kind of god: neither is it any good looking for personal convictions on the subject of celibacy, vegetarianism, or even the taking up of arms, as these are not common factors. We have to look at Zarathustra as a whole, and Nietzsche's life as a whole, past all the seeming contradictions to enquire of any mystical content.
Our first stumbling block, both in the man and his writings, is with his attitude to others. It is accepted that Nietzsche had a contempt for the mediocre — but so did Krishnamurti to some degree; however, it is crucial in considering Nietzsche's reality that we have a clear idea of his feelings for others, and we cannot overlook the fact that his expression of contempt is consistent and monumental. To love your neighbour is not a moral exhortation in mysticism, but a measure of union with the whole — it is not, however, the kind of love that many assume, and also rightly assume to be near impossible to genuinely feel for all people. That Whitman expresses love for the multitude, or rather for each individual in the multitude, is exceptional, even by the standards of mystics; the kind of love that one begins to expect in the mystic is more of an acceptance. Whitman himself remembers only four or five people in Specimen Days as being particularly close: perhaps one is lucky to find even that many in a lifetime. One's attitude to all the rest is what is under discussion here: a love that does not necessarily seek out an individual's company (for it might in fact be worse than no company at all) but that is simply a bigness: one is big enough for every one of the six billion people on this planet to exist, but more than this: a sense of proportion that tells one that Nature's profusion is good. Numbers are irrelevant; antipathies are irrelevant; this love can find fault as well as the next man, but somehow it tolerates, more than tolerates, it celebrates this diversity, even when nailed to the cross. It is this bigness that Nietzsche lacks so visibly, and makes one question his insights. Let us look at some examples of his intolerance:

Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean. How I wish they possessed a madness through which they could perish, like this pale criminal.
					('Of the Pale Criminal')

You look up when you desire to be exalted. And I look down, because I am exalted.
					('Of Reading and Writing')

There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom departure from life must be preached.
The earth is full of the superfluous, life has been corrupted by the many-too-many. Let them be lured by 'eternal life' out of this life!
					('Of the Preachers of Death')

Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!
Just see how it lures them, the many-too-many! How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them! 
...
Just look at these superfluous people! They steal for themselves the works of inventors and the treasures of the wise: they call their theft culture — and they turn everything to sickness and calamity.
Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves.
Just look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves poorer with it. They desire power and especially the lever of power, plenty of money — these impotent people!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
					('Of the New Idol')

Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!
Flee into your solitude! You have lived too near the small and pitiable men. Flee from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.
No longer lift your arm against them! They are innumerable and it is not your fate to be a fly-swat.
Innumerable are these small and pitiable men; and raindrops and weeds have already brought about the destruction of many a proud building.

(and so on for a while ...)

Your neighbours will always be poisonous flies: that about you which is great, that itself must make them more poisonous and ever more fly-like.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude and to where the raw, rough breeze blows! It is not your fate to be a fly-swat.
					('Of the Flies of the Market-Place')

But that which the many-too-many, the superfluous, call marriage — ah, what shall I call it?
Ah, this poverty of soul in partnership! Ah, this filth of soul in partnership! Ah, this miserable ease in partnership!
All this they call marriage; and they say their marriages are made in Heaven.
Well, I do not like it, this Heaven of the superfluous! 
					('Of Marriage and Children')

Life is a fountain of delight: but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned.
...
And many a one who turned away from life, turned away only from the rabble: he did not wish to share the well and the flame and the fruit with the rabble.
And many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with beasts of prey merely did not wish to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers.
And many a one who came along like a destroyer and a shower of hail to all orchards wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and so stop its throat.
And to know that life itself has need of enmity and dying and martyrdoms, that was not the mouthful that choked me most.
But I once asked, and my question almost stifled me: What, does life have need of the rabble, too?					('Of the Rabble')

I do not want to be confused with these preachers of equality, nor taken for one of them. For justice speaks thus to me: 'Men are not equal.'
And they should not becomes so, either! For what were my love of the Superman if I spoke otherwise?				('Of the Tarantulas')

I once vowed to renounce all disgust; then you transformed my kindred and neighbours into abscesses. Alas, whither did my noblest vow flee then?
					('The Funeral Song')

I would rather be a day-labourer in the underworld and among the shades of the bygone! — Even the inhabitants of the underworld are fatter and fuller than you!
This, yes this is bitterness to my stomach, that I can endure you neither naked nor clothed, you men of the present!
					('Of the Land of Culture')

I go among this people and keep my eyes open: they do not forgive me that I am not envious of their virtues.
They peck at me because I tell them: For small people small virtues are necessary — and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are necessary!
					('Of the Virtue That Makes Small')

Alas! They are always few whose heart possesses a long-enduring courage and wantonness; and in such the spirit, too, is patient. The remainder, however, are cowardly.
The remainder: that is always the majority, the common-place, the superfluity, the many-too-many — all these are cowardly!
					('Of the Apostates')

I have deliberately collected all these sections together, and they make for depressing reading in this concentrated form. They are of course scattered throughout the text, and have a different effect because of it: they tend to cancel out the ecstatic or otherwise benign sense of the sections they are found in. I will return to this idea of Zarathustra being a self-cancelling text, but for now we will look at some of the above passages more closely. Nietzsche says that he finds it hard to understand that 'small people are necessary'; Whitman that he is curious for each and everyone — is this merely a matter of expression? Krishnamurti had little patience for the commonplace; we may remember that he was more interested in the daffodils than his fellow-diners in the restaurant, and, although he had endless energies for the seekers that came to him, his preference was to retire from society and criticise its shortcomings from a distance. Temperamentally Nietzsche was more like Krishnamurti than Whitman, but Krishnamurti does not propose that the 'superfluous' do not exist! A mystic also lives skilfully, though. One doesn't deliberately live with people one doesn't get on with; and if one has to, one attempts to do so with grace. Nietzsche is so graceless in his despising of the common people that we are ashamed for him. Rajneesh (and we shall look at affinities between him and Nietzsche shortly) repeated over and over again that each individual was unique and needed in the universe.
Let us look in this context at another popular view of Nietzsche as a misogynist: is this as mis-attributed to him as his alleged anti-Semitism? Unfortunately not, as  the following passages show:

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman?
					('Of Chastity')
These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.
					(ditto)
In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.
In a woman's love is injustice and blindness towards all she does not love. And in the enlightened love of a woman, too, there is still the unexpected attack and lightning and night, along with the light. 
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best, cows.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship. But tell me, you men, which of you is yet capable of friendship?
					('Of the Friend')

Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of warriors: all else is folly.
...
The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will.
'Behold, now the world has become perfect!' — thus thinks every woman when she obeys with all her love.
And woman has to obey and find a depth for their surface. Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters.
But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it.
...
'Give me your little truth, woman!' I said. And thus spoke the little old woman:
'Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!'
					('Of Old and Young Women')

The 'whip' passage is possibly the most famous in Zarathustra and should really be forgotten, but it is not an isolated comment as we see, and is part of our picture of his views on women. It should be noted that Nietzsche does not even have the courage to put the words into Zarathustra's mouth: they are spoken by a woman, and an old woman perhaps to lend authority to them. Nietzsche slips up though: he follows the whip statement with the usual 'Thus spoke Zarathustra', which he leaves out in other sections where another person is the last to speak. Interestingly women who knew him have defended this statement in a variety of ways, in particular his sister.
We might remember Anne Gilchrist's observation in the last chapter that "The full spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul of a woman above all," quoted in appreciation of Whitman; perhaps a similar sentiment to "The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will". But we don't accept it from Nietzsche, in particular when it is elaborated on so unremittingly, and with no balance. Nietzsche's culture and time was misogynist but he had in addition a good mentor in erudite misogyny: Schopenhauer, who compared women to spiders (it is unfortunately true that the great C.G.Jung was also happy to use the same metaphor).
Despite the mass of negative passages in Zarathustra on the subject of Nietzsche's fellow-man and fellow-woman, we still have many ecstatic passages, and many insights, that should make the book of value to us. The negative passages do tend to cancel out or dilute the life-affirming nature of the more visionary and uplifting passages, so let us look again and more closely at some of the insights in Zarathustra. Are they flawed? An obvious feature of Nietzsche's prose is hyperbola: can we see this as just his style, or does it damage his work? Let us look at passages that typify his exaggerations:

But to reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.
			('On the Blissful Islands')

And the enlightened man shall learn to build with mountains! It is a small thing for the spirit to move mountains — did you know that before?
			('Of the Famous Philosophers')

The claims of the mystics could equally be considered full of exaggeration: the very starting point of Pure Consciousness Mysticism that we can apprehend the infinite and eternal seems to be exaggeration. Hence, we cannot criticise Nietzsche for this alone, for perhaps he is hiding his truths in them. Where we do find a strong counter-indication for a mystical claim to Nietzsche's work is in his attitude to the future. As we have seen the mystic's most common expression of their relationship to time is that they live in the eternal now, Krishnamurti stating that the process of thought was the biggest barrier to this state; Jefferies, dipping his hand in the brook, tells us that his soul can never 'be dipped in time'. Nietzsche, in contrast, sees no value in the present, other than to prepare for the future:

If you believed more in life, you would devote yourselves less to the moment. But you have insufficient capacity for waiting — or even laziness!
			('Of the Preachers of Death')

May the future and the most distant be the principle of your today: in your friend you should love the Superman as the principle.
My brothers, I do not exhort you to love of your neighbour: I exhort you to love of the most distant.
			('Of Love of One's Neighbour')

Could you create a god? — So be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the Superman.
Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could transform yourselves into the forefathers and ancestors of the Superman: and let this be your finest creating.
  			('On the Blissful Islands')

Again, this is not conclusive, because we must bear in mind the difference between a mystic describing themselves and a mystic teaching the novice. Many teachings do stress that the initiate has to work towards a realisation in the future, though many also recognise that this emphasis is dangerous because it merely becomes a life-style (Harding's response to the fictional acolyte in The Trial of the Man who said he was God is a good analysis of the dangers). Nietzsche's metaphor of the tight-rope over the abyss is part of his stress on a movement towards a better future, but one is beginning to suspect that it lies in a despising of the present.
More puzzling is Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence. Although in the text it is intended mainly to convey an optimism about life, an optimism that can contemplate the infinite repetition down to the minutest details of our life, it could also be a profoundly pessimistic view. It is also at odds with the conviction that man needs to evolve into something better; does this repeat itself too? Few thinkers have taken Nietzsche's eternal recurrence seriously, and the fact that Ouspensky did for a period does not cast any further light on it (Gurdjieff teased him on the subject, calling it Ouspensky's 'little hobby'). It may explain deja vu, but the theory is not that plausible, either from a mystical viewpoint or from a scientific viewpoint. No mystic has ever promoted it, and no scientist either; this is notwithstanding the particular problem that time causes for modern science. Science is generally at a loss to explain the privileged position that the present has for human consciousness, as opposed to the past or future, though it may be that recent developments linking chaos theory and quantum theory may help. For the mystic the problem is the reverse: how to make the pupil fully aware of the privileged position of the present, or rather to show the non-existential nature of past and future, the one a function of memory and the other of imagination.
The concept of the eternal is central to Pure Consciousness Mysticism; one of its means of expression is the imperishable or intransitory — this usually being associated with awareness. Nietzsche is opposed to this idea.

I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory.
All that is intransitory — that is but an image!
			('On the Blissful Islands')

This is precisely the teaching of the mystics: the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. Gandhi was sure that the Unmanifest was not apprehendible, Jung convinced that nirvana was an amputation, and Nietzsche considered teachings of the intransitory evil and misanthropic. But the mystics show that the intransitory is not only apprehendible, but fundamental to man! The elusiveness of it makes Nietzsche's stance understandable however, as is also Jung's and Gandhi's, but it begins to remove Nietzsche from serious consideration under PCM.
This might be a good point to consider more generally the idea that mankind as a whole evolves from a spiritual point of view, as this is the premise on which Zarathustra is based. R.M.Bucke's analysis of mysticism is strongly dependent on the idea that cosmic consciousness, present now in only a few individuals, will become widespread as the human race evolves; indeed its presence indicates such an evolution. (We have pointed out earlier that his work is underestimated, but this view on evolution is probably another flaw in it.) Darwinian theory tells us that in the period from the birth of the Upanishads to the present day, approximately 3,000 years, is far too short a time for any significant evolutionary changes in our genetic makeup, but is there evidence that we have evolved spiritually in this time? It is hard to make a claim that recent mystical writings are any more advanced than the Upanishads, our oldest, though it is reasonable to assert that each new mystic can improve our understanding through new expressions of the perennial reality. It is also hard to see from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism how an identification with the infinite and eternal can be a matter of degree or improvement. The kind of spiritual evolution that Rudolf Steiner preached is also not related to the infinite and eternal, but to a separate world of disembodied entities that PCM neither accepts nor dismisses, but makes no comment on. We are left only with the possibility that a bigger proportion of the population is reaching self-realisation, or that this will be the case in the future. However, the only evidence for this offered by Bucke is that during the period from the Buddha to Dante, eighteen hundred years, he counts five cases of cosmic consciousness, and during the following six hundred years he counts six cases, proving an 'acceleration' in modern times. His inclusion of Balzac and Edward Carpenter in the modern period as fully developed cases of the cosmic consciousness is debatable and casts doubt on his overall tallies, as does his omission of dozens of other more suitable candidates in the earlier period.
That society and culture evolve is not in dispute, but the implications of this for the spiritual life are ambiguous at best. We may note that a parallel concept to the spiritual evolution of the race is the psychological development of the individual; attempts have been made to place enlightenment in the context of the psychological stages of infant, child and adult: Robert May does this in his Cosmic Consciousness Revisited, and it is central to the work of Ken Wilber. This approach cannot however deal with the cases of Krishna and Lao Tzu (both understood to have been enlightened from birth); and if these are dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence we have the case of Mother Meera, and examples that May quotes of children having transcendent experiences.
 The converse view, that mankind as a whole is devolving spiritually, is just as widespread and just as unsustainable from the evidence. The hankering after a 'golden age' is a natural human tendency and finds expression in religious mythology all round the world: in the West it is found in the story of the 'fall' and expulsion from paradise, and in the East in the notion of our present age as the 'Kali Yuga' or of the lowest spiritual attainment. As metaphors for the reality of any present individual they may be useful ideas, but taken seriously they imply a lack of proportion.
That Zarathustra contradicts himself in espousing both eternal recurrence and the dawning of the age of the Superman in itself is no counter-indication of the mystic: take this quote from Whitman for example:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
			('Children of Adam', verse 51)

In Zen Buddhism the contradiction has been taken to its extreme in the Zen koan which is a teaching device in the form of an unanswerable question put to a student. The attempt to engage in the paradox may result in an insight, or even better for Zen, a sudden experience of no-mind, as the mental processes lose familiar landmarks and falter. Why then, if contradiction in all its various guises is a part of mysticism, should we be critical of it in Zarathustra? Because, taken to the extreme that we see in this book, it becomes a cancelling, a self-cancelling, that simply undoes any value for us in the insights propounded.
We see then that as the book progresses there are a growing number of contradictions, and of course the continuing antipathy to the ordinary person, and women. Zarathustra is maturing however in himself and in his teachings, so can we not accept these blemishes, blemishes that make him possibly endearing to us? The life-affirming nature of his teachings do seem to grow, to the point where he even accepts the idiocy of the Higher Men's ass-worship in a good-humoured and friendly way. Unfortunately the signs of Zarathustra's immaturity do not seem to wane. Let us look for these signs through the book: there are of course the exaggerations mentioned earlier; these are arguably way beyond the poetic and artistic license that any work like this has a right to. In the 'Funeral Song' Zarathustra laments that his enemies have destroyed all that was dear to him — is it poetic exaggeration or is it the type of immaturity that we call paranoia?

And when I achieved my most difficult task and celebrated the victory of my overcomings: then you made those whom I loved cry out that I hurt them most.
Truly, all that was your doing: you embittered my finest honey and the industry of my finest bees.
You have always sent the most insolent beggars to my liberality; you have always crowded the incurably shameless around my pity. Thus you have wounded my virtues' faith.
And when I brought my holiest things as sacrifice, straightway your 'piety' placed its fatter gifts beside it: so that my holiest thing choked in the smoke of your fat.
And once I wanted to dance as I had never danced: I wanted to dance beyond all heavens. Then you lured away my favourite singer.
And then he struck up a gruesome, gloomy melody: alas, he trumpeted into my ears like a mournful horn!
Murderous singer, instrument of malice, most innocent man! I stood prepared for the finest dance: then you murdered my ecstasy with your tones!
I know how to speak the parable of the highest things only in the dance — and now my greatest parable has remained in my limbs unspoken!
My highest hope has remained unspoken and unachieved! And all the visions and consolations of my youth are dead!
How did I endure it? How did I recover from such wounds, how did I overcome them? How did my soul arise again from these graves?
					('The Funeral Song')

The answer to his last question is his Will. But who is it that murdered all these great and wonderful things in him? His enemies, one understands from previous passages, but who are they? It is simply not in the nature of things that your faith can be attacked from outside: if your faith is wounded then it is an internal matter; if external events test your faith, then what kind of faith is it that crumbles? It is only worth calling faith if it stands the test of adversity, otherwise what kind of fair-weather faith is it? And similarly for his other achievements — it is immature to even call them achievements. That he struggled to achieve is something worth saying, but then we all struggle.
Perhaps I am too hard on Zarathustra — the above passage may simply be overstating his struggle, losses, and victories — in keeping with his style. Perhaps it is just style that Zarathustra is so arrogant in the this passage:

'I heard you say that once before,' answered the disciple; 'and then you added: "But all the poets lie too much." Why did you say that the poets lie too much?'
'Why? said Zarathustra. 'You ask why? I am not one of those who may be questioned about their Why.
'Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions.
'Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons, too, about with me?'
					('Of Poets)

Zarathustra firstly is arrogant enough to say that he may not be questioned, and then seems to soften, making excuses for his rudeness by saying that his memory is not big enough. He then goes on to include himself among the poets who lie. This might be part of self-deprecation or a caution to his student to be wary of the teacher, but one is beginning to suspect that it is because Zarathustra is unsure of himself. In this next passage the Ugliest Man is explaining why God had to die:

'But he — had to die; he looked with eyes that saw everything — he saw the depths and abysses of man, all man's hidden disgrace and ugliness.
'His pity knew no shame: he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most curious, most over-importunate, over-compassionate god had to die.
'He always saw me: I desired to take revenge on such a witness — or cease to live myself.
'The god who saw everything, even man: this god had to die! Man could not endure that such a witness should live.'
					('The Ugliest Man')

What is Nietzsche getting at? First of all, from the beginning of the book Zarathustra's message is to welcome that God is dead; surely all honour belongs to his slayer? Then why make him the ugliest man? Surely such a man is the Superman, or his predecessor, not just one of the Higher Men (and the ugliest and most rabid at that) who are dispensed with in the end anyway? And why does he make this speech, where it is spelled out why God should die? Why does not Zarathustra make it? For, as you might have guessed, I am not convinced that the words belong in the Ugliest Man's mouth, any more than 'Do not forget your whip' belonged in the words of the old woman. The speech itself is in its essence the speech of a child — a naughty child that doesn't want to be found out — the child that in adulthood invents God or gods for just that purpose: to see into its shame. The child that does not grow up properly, who has problems with authority, precisely because they cannot become authority in their own right, cannot develop a sense of their real relationship with the world.
At the end of Part Four, Zarathustra returns to his cave where the Higher Men (which remember include two kings and a pope and other exalted types which commentators take to represent figures like Goethe, Wagner, and Schopenhauer) wait for him. He welcomes them.

Thus spoke Zarathustra and laughed with love and mischievousness. After this greeting, his guests bowed themselves again and held a respectful silence; the king on the right, however, replied to him in their name.
					('The Greeting')

The honour done to him by the 'Higher Men' is quite in keeping with Zarathustra's view of them, but seems to us more like a childish delusion of grandeur. Perhaps this is to be redeemed in the finale of the book, perhaps Zarathustra finally reveals the depth of his wisdom, that would cause kings, popes, philosophers and poets to revere him. Perhaps all the contradictions and disparagements are to be resolved. What actually happens then, at the end of the book, that could redeem Zarathustra as a true seer, and the founder of a new vision? What actually happens is that the Higher Men are 'healed' by Zarathustra's wisdom (or the fresh air in the mountains, we are not sure): they become convalescents, and their first act as Zarathustra's disciples of the affirmation of life is to invent a new ritual: the Ass festival. Zarathustra takes it in his stride — this must mean that the real teaching is about to come. Not a bit of it: they eat, drink and make merry, and the following morning when Zarathustra gets up before his guests he walks out to a rock, and is flocked about by gentle birds and in the midst of this confusion he finds himself stroking a lion.

But, as he was clutching about, above and underneath himself, warding off the tender birds, behold, then something even stranger occurred: for in doing so he clutched unawares a thick, warm mane of hair; at the same time, however, a roar rang out in front of him — the gentle, protracted roar of a lion.
'The sign has come,' said Zarathustra, and his heart was transformed. And in truth, when it grew clear before him, there lay at his feet a sallow, powerful animal that lovingly pressed its head against his knee and would not leave him, behaving like a dog that has found his master again. The doves, however, were no less eager than the lion with their love; and every time a dove glided across the lion's nose, the lion shook its head and wondered and laughed.
					('The Sign')

The Higher Men then get up to offer Zarathustra their greetings, surely now at this eleventh hour Zarathustra will enlighten us and them from the depth of his wisdom, that the lion must be a symbol of? Not a bit of it. The lion roars at them and they disappear, leaving Zarathustra alone to comment that his pity for them had had its day and now it was time to get on with his work. But what work?
Let us step back for a moment: we are not considering Zarathustra from the point of view of philosophy or poetry or literature (as a work of art it is universally felt to be superb) — we are considering it from the point of the mystics who are a tough, realistic bunch, some of whom may have been in reality eaten by lions. From this perspective we can only say one thing about the finale to Zarathustra: it is childish nonsense posing as wisdom. The lion is the last straw: for it to behave like a fawning dog would be a betrayal of its nature fit only for a circus, and a betrayal of the reality which the mystic is the sober inhabitant of (even if they sing ecstatically of it). The lion here is no sign of Zarathustra's wisdom or 'voice of command' that he mourns the lack of earlier in the book, but a teddy-bear, a comforter and protector, a mummy. Zarathustra has returned full-circle to childhood; in real life Nietzsche was reduced to the same dependency on his mother that he had as an infant.
The capacity to be child-like is often cited by the mystics as essential to apprehend the infinite and eternal, and the behaviour of mystics is often mistakenly seen as childish: Ramakrishna even in old age confused many by appearing to be like a child. This confusion has been usefully analysed by Ken Wilber as the pre/trans fallacy; in opposition to Freud who thought that the mystical or religious psychologies were regressive (looking back to infancy, or pre-adult) Wilber sees them as transcendent and a necessary development of the individual. In Nietzsche's case the complexities of his illness and breakdown mean that any conclusion can only be tentative, but we have observed many signs of a pre- state rather than a trans- state in the text.
The episode of the tight-rope walker at the beginning of Zarathustra is a symbol for Nietzsche's eventual madness: Nietzsche is the buffoon who jumps over the tight-rope walker, despite his own advice:

There are diverse paths and ways to overcoming: just look to it! But only a buffoon thinks: 'Man can also be jumped over.'
				('Of Old and New Law-Tables')

Nietzsche is also the tight-rope walker who fell to his death. The ecstatic moments in Zarathustra derive from an aesthetic source, not an existential one, and Nietzsche lost his sanity. It has been shown, contrary to popular myth, that the incidence of insanity is no greater amongst gifted people than amongst the population at large, but I think that it would be too broad-brush to assume that the path to madness for geniuses has no special interest. Zarathustra can be seen, in this analysis, as the diary of descent into madness, and as such is illuminating about how it takes place in a highly gifted individual. The catatonic state that Steiner found Nietzsche in is not certain to be caused by the tertiary stage of syphilis, as some commentators think, despite the attempts by his family to insist on an organic origin of his illness. (Nor is the intention here to denigrate Nietzsche, but to view his work from a certain perspective.)
Let us leave Nietzsche for a while and consider some mystics whose ecstatic utterances have similarities with Zarathustra in order to cast light on it and his author's state of mind. First a digression on the subject of mental illness in the author's own experience which may suggest something about the catatonic state that Nietzsche found himself in shortly after the completion of Zarathustra.

3.3 My own madness

In my twenties I came very close to a nervous breakdown, but it was only as I explored my past lives that I eventually discovered that I had (as far as I could tell) suffered a breakdown so complete at the end my last life that only death resolved it. The Buddha, while conversant with reincarnation (there is a complete history of his previous lives) introduced the concept of anatta (no self or no soul) as a useful antidote to counter obsessions with one's history. Although something reincarnates that carries with it a history, and is subject to the laws of Karma, enlightenment involves the loss of identification with this self or soul that has a history, and in keeping with this notion I shall use the more neutral term entity to refer to my previous incarnations (Edgar Cacey used this term in his past-life readings). In terms of a broad sweep of (my) personal history it seems that tendencies in the makeup of my self or spirit had urged me to live as predatory animals and in positions of power as a human. The typical instincts of a predator: focus, fast reactions, and a solitary perspective, developed in human lives, but unfortunately outstripping the balancing qualities of love and community. These led to the abuses of power in the tenth century as a Welsh feudal leader (already mentioned), and in the fifteenth century as a cardinal enthusiastically prosecuting for the Inquisition. As far as I can tell, that entity fell foul of his own persecutory machinery, and the entity's come-uppance was a progressive degradation, not only of the body but of the spirit, leading to some five hundred years of various existences as a tramp, a vagabond, an alcoholic, and an autistic maker of children's toys in the nineteenth century. This poor fellow was wrongly imprisoned for rape, and when finally released, wandered confusedly about Victorian London only to be crushed under the wheels of a hackney carriage. In karmic terms, the entity was undoubtedly serving out a fair sentence over these hundreds of years for the short periods of intense wrong-doings earlier. What is interesting is that the next life ended in madness, although the entity was born into happier circumstances and with greater intelligence. It seems that this entity served in both world wars; in the trenches in the first, and as an engineer and bomber with the Sunderland flying boats in the second. The inherent tendencies to excess in the entity's karmic makeup, already having reaped a great harvest of suffering, now witnessed death and destruction on a scale not seen in human history, and worse still by some instinct for mayhem, the entity spent some of the years between the wars with Gurdjieff at Fontainebleu, a further destabilising experience.
During my early thirties, a little after the first discoveries of previous existences, I visited Croydon, in South London; on the train returning I began to experience a depression so acute as if I had been pole-axed. This lasted for about six weeks, and, in return visits to the area, I could dimly perceive memories of living there after the war and up to an eventual institutionalisation at Colney Heath, a large mental hospital north of London (in Victorian times it had been the infamous Colney Hatch, and up to quite recently was still the 'sink' for London's casualties of peace). This depression gave me some picture of what Nietzsche's state of mind must have been when Steiner visited him: a complete withdrawal from existence. I can only guess that there can come a point for the spirit, after life after life of intense suffering, where it attempts a retreat, a form of existential suicide. In 1953 the entity died as a catatonic schizophrenic, that is in the state of death-in-life — this state is the mental equivalent of a black hole: any phenomenon nearing its surface is simply sucked in with no possibility of response or human intercourse.
The relevance of this state to Pure Consciousness Mysticism is that it gives us the opposite pole of consciousness, by which to help understand its complete spectrum (any complete theory of consciousness will have to account for both poles, though I have to add the caveat that I am wary of too literal a reliance on a spectrum concept). In the meantime I can only offer the crudest of an outline for the descent of the human spirit into the catatonic state: it lies in the loss of the proper functioning of the heart. Whitman chose his words very carefully when he spoke of "death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones". The heart dies, and in the skull hell rages. We do not have the language to talk about the death of the heart, or how it lives even, in order to understand its death, so I can only postulate that it comes about through a mistaken attempt by the spirit to become a thing; by the continued error over thousands of lifetimes to identify with the body and the horrors that are entailed by its inevitable dissolution. 
Catatonic schizophrenia can, perhaps, be thought of as the end result of a process of self-reification; the sure antidote then is Pure Consciousness Mysticism. We will return to the theme of madness, and to be more precise alienation, in the chapter on Sartre. It is not necessary however to see it in connection with reincarnation; it has only been introduced this way because the author's own understanding happens to have evolved in a particular way, and it is only fair for the reader to know this when reflecting on the possible value of any conclusions drawn.
Nietzsche's insanity is foreshadowed in Zarathustra as a form of ecstatic poetry that fails because it has no firm base in reality. There is no doubt that the transcendent impulse is there (his desire to look down on the stars is one of many indications of it), yet he has shut out both conventional religion and all talk of the intransitory because he cannot bear to listen to the teachings of others, to let in the love and wisdom of the truly religious. We will look now at two personifications of the love and wisdom he lacked.

3.4 Rumi and Kabir: God's drunkards

In the 'Night Song' Nietzsche gives us ecstatic poetry that appears to have a mystical origin. Although we have shown that in Nietzsche's case the picture presented by his work and life exclude this possibility in any substantial form at least, we should look at ecstatic poetry of acknowledged mystics to better understand Nietzsche's failure. We will look a the work of Rumi first, as his artistic heights match the best from Zarathustra.
Jelaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 within the frontiers of modern Afghanistan, and is known as the author of a vast collection of Persian poetry of which the Mathanawi is the largest. He is also considered to be the originator of the dances of the whirling dervishes, and of the religious sects of Sufi or Islamic nature associated with this practice. On the dust-jacket of one collection of Rumi's poems it is noted that 'Western culture has no convenient category for Rumi.' However, for Pure Consciousness Mysticism his life and work are a conventional case of the devotional mystic. Although Bucke did not quote the case of Rumi, it would have fitted his general scheme of an unremarkable early life transformed, typically in the person's thirties, by an experience of illumination into the cosmic consciousness. For Rumi, at the age of thirty-seven, the transformation was triggered by the chance association with a wandering dervish called Shams al-Din. Western biographers consider the 'circumstances which attended Rumi's transformation from sober theologian and preacher into ecstatic dancer and raptured poet' curious. Even in Iran today the relationship between Rumi and Shams is often understood only in homosexual terms, and in the thirteenth century Rumi's obsession with Shams caused problems with both his family and pupils. However, we can understand it in terms of  the many known cases of master and disciple, such as Krishna and Arjuna, Whitman and Bucke, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and so on.
To really enter Rumi's world, one needs to read it continuously because his imagery, already unfamiliar to us because of its Moslem and other cultural differences, develops in a personal way over thousands of stanzas. Nevertheless the following poem has many recognisable allusions.

That spirit which wears not true love as a garment is better not to have been; its being is nothing but a disgrace.
Be drunk in love, for love is all that exists; without the commerce of love there is no admittance to the Beloved.
They say, "What is love?" Say, "The abandonment of free will." He who has not escaped out of free will, no free will has he.
The lover is an emperor; the two worlds are scattered over him; the king pays no heed to the scattering.
Love it is and the lover that remain till all eternity; set not your heart on aught but this, for it is merely borrowed.
How long will you embrace a dead beloved? Embrace the soul which naught embraces.
What was born of spring dies in the season of autumn; love's rosebower receives no replenishment from spring.
The rose that comes of spring, the thorn is its companion; the wine that comes of pressed grapes is not exempt from crop-sickness.
Be not an expectant spectator on this path; for by Allah, there is no death worse than expectancy.
Set your heart on the true coin, if you are not counterfeit; give ear to this subtlety, if you lack an earring.
Tremble not on the body's steed; fare lighter afoot; God gives wings to him who rides not on the body.
Let go care and become wholly clear of heart, like the face of a mirror without image and picture —
When it has become clear of images, all images are contained in it; that clear-faced one is not ashamed of any man's face.
Would you have your self clear of blemish? Gaze upon Him, for He is not ashamed or afraid of the truth.
Since the steely face gained this skill from purity, what shall the heart's face, which is without dust, discover?
I said, "What shall it discover?" No, I will not say; silence is better, lest the heart-ravisher should say, "He cannot keep a secret."

Even in this tiny fraction of Rumi's outpourings are contained the essence of all the perennial teachings! We recognise the eternal in Rumi's exhortations to embrace the soul, we recognise the infinite in Rumi's clear mirror that is not ashamed of any man's face, and we recognise the particular embraciveness of the devotional right throughout the passage. Rumi also echoes Harding's headlessness, though for Rumi it is the clear heart that allows all images to reflect in it. Here is another passage.

My soul, spiritual beauty is passing fair and glorious, yet your own beauty and loveliness is something beside.
You who spend years describing spirit, show one quality that is equal to his essence.
Through his phantasm the light of the eye increases, yet for all that in the presence of union with him it is clouded.
I stand open-mouthed in reverence for that beauty; every moment "God is greater" is on my tongue and in my heart.
The heart has acquired an eye constant in desire of you; ah, how that desire nourishes the heart and eye!
Speak not of houris and moon, spirit and peri, for these resemble Him not; He is something other.
Slave-caressing it is that your love has practised, else where is the heart that is worthy of that love?
Every heart that has been sleepless for one night in desire for you is bright as day, and the air by it is illumined.
Every one who has become without object is as your disciple; his object is realised without the form of object.
Every limb of hell who has burned and fallen into this love has fallen into Kauthar, for your love is Kauthar. [Kauthar is a river in paradise — author's note.]
My foot does not reach the ground out of hope for union, withal through the separation from you my hand is on my head.
My heart, be not sorrowful at this oppression of foes, and meditate on this that the Sweetheart is judge.
If my enemy is glad because of my saffron-pale face, is not my saffron-pale face derived from the red rose?
Since my Beloved's beauty surpasses description, how fat is my grief, and how lean my praise!
Yes, since it is the rule that the more the pain of the wretched sufferer is, the less is his lament.
Shams-i Din shone moonlike from Tabriz; no, what is the moon indeed? That face outshines the moon.

We can see how the reference to Shams may have confused the secular reader! However, what is interesting here and in the other passage is that at times the Beloved is spoken of as separate and beyond Rumi, something to yearn for and be united with after painful absences, and at other times is equated with Rumi's own soul. Otto's conception of the 'wholly Other' is much too rigid to encompass this phenomenon: that the mystic can see God as both wholly Other and wholly the same as himself. It is perhaps a useful way of demarcating religion from mysticism however.
In examining Zarathustra we were looking for evidence that Nietzsche's source of inspiration was of the same type as Rumi's; the ecstatic prose often giving a good indication of this. However the conclusion reached was that the inspiration was artistic, and devoid of a grounding in the infinite and eternal, and further, that the artistic excess coupled with the lack of grounding either led to his madness, or was part of it. Rumi's outpourings are, if anything, an excess of a greater order than Nietzsche's, yet what is that kept him sane, and what is it that lets us easily judge him a dweller in the infinite and eternal, i.e. a mystic? The answer, simply, is love. It is true that there is confusion in the minds of the biographers, and perhaps even in Rumi's whether this love is for Shams or for God, but we have seen that Krishna and Ramakrishna make no distinction here. It is irrelevant whether the devotional impulse is offered to a living person, to a dead person, to an imagined person (a deity such as Kali), or to the Unmanifest; what counts is its purity and intensity. With Rumi the intensity is that of a drunkard; his songs are pure intoxication. But how does this intoxication differ to that of Nietzsche's? It is of the heart and not the mind.
Because, however, it sounds so trite to say that Nietzsche's intoxication was artistic and of the mind, and that Rumi's was spiritual and of the heart, we need to go further into it. Why is it, for example, that intoxication is clearly part of the lives of some mystics and not others, generally speaking making for a demarcation between those who could be called love-mystics, and those called awareness-mystics (between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda for example)? Look at these lines from Zen:

The monk Zuigan used to start every day
by saying out loud to himself:
Master, are you there?
And he would answer:
Yes, sir, I am.

Then he would say:
Better sober up.
Yes, sir, I'll do that.

Then he would say:
Look out now, don't let them fool you.
And he would answer:
Oh no, sir, I won't, I won't.

In Zen, the emphasis is on being sober; as we see for Zuigan it becomes his morning prayer. Whitman too is immensely sober, despite the staggering expansivity of Leaves (it is no wonder that, on the surface of it, one may not see that there could be a common ground to the utterances of a Zen master, Rumi, and Whitman). The emphasis on sobriety can be understood: the precious core of awareness (Ramana's sense of "I") is easily lost through forms of intoxication, whether caused by drink or drugs, or whether of a literary nature like with Nietzsche. The intoxication of the heart is quite a different matter, and in modern Western culture is only known in connection with romantic love, with all its pitfalls. The divine intoxication has a language to describe it that has no common currency today, and the language of its distant relative and poor reflection of it — romantic love — has become the substitute. We could say that sex and sport are the intoxications of the body; literature, philosophy and the arts the intoxication of the mind, and romantic love the intoxication of the heart with a small 'h'. Intoxication of the heart with a big 'h' — this is the real thing, and the subject of Rumi and Kabir's poetry.
Kabir was a mystic poet, this time from fifteenth century India. He shared with Rumi a Muslim background and Sufi influence, but was just as much a Hindu, and to confuse matters even more, much of his inspired poetry is found in the Adi Guru Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs. Little is known about his life, other than that he was born in 1440; some sources indicating that he was a weaver and married, but others insisting that he was a celibate renunciate. He lived for many years in Benares, at that time under Muslim rule, and offended both Muslim and Hindu communities with his teachings which sought to both integrate the two traditions and go beyond them. Abhayananda sums up Kabir's teachings as follows: 'Keep the mind rooted in Truth by the steadfast remembrance of God; keep His Name continually in your mind by repeating it with every breath. The mind will thereby become coloured with unity-awareness; and all will be seen as God, as it truly is.' In Kabir's poetry we discover an imagery with its base in the metaphor of erotic love, as with Rumi. He weeps when his Beloved is absent, continually prepares the bed for Him, and chides others for wasting their time when they could likewise make preparations for union with Him. Here is an example:

With my friends and companions 
I was playing all day and night.
Closeby was my Love's tall mansion
the apex room is where he lives.
To ascend to it
I shivered in fear and shame 
and wondered how
I could have union with my Love
unless I shed my bashfulness,
uncovered my face, made body bare
and clasped and clung to Him
and in the light of my eyes
offered aarati to the Lord.
Says Kabir — O my friend listen!
she alone can comprehend 
if her love for Him is true and deep
but if not so
futile will be all her make up.

For Kabir the Lord is male and the devotee (or the soul of the devotee) female. Kabir speaks endlessly of union with the Lord of love, using the imagery of the bedroom.

My eyes are drooping with sleep, my Love
come, let us go to bed.
Love-lorn my body quivers like a butterfly
I cannot utter two sweet words.
The flowers I decked my bed with
are getting stale and drying up.
Do step cautiously on to the bed, my Love
my sister and aunt are still awake!
Says Kabir — O gentle folk listen,
for fear of others' ridicule
I am shy of uniting with my Love!

In this poem Kabir is drunk with love, and through it reaches the deathless.

I was in deep slumber
when my Love woke me up.
I collected the dust of His feet
and put it in my eye as anjan 
to hinder sleep and indolence.
The words of my Love 
did flow like the love tide
and formed a precious lake.
Let us have a dip there
and wash our sins of many lives.
I shall make my body the lamp
and the wick of love
and the elements five as perfumed oil,
then generate the spiritual fire
and light the lamp with it.
I have drunk from the cup of love
like mad I am shouting Love! O my Love!
the fire of yearning for my Love
is consuming me
I am in constant agony.
In ecstasy I went up the steps 
of my Love's lofty mansion
where death has no access.
Says Kabir — now the King
of death is dreading my very sight!

In Zarathustra we find a ecstatic moments but never expressed with the erotic imagery we find in Kabir and Rumi, or for that matter, in Whitman. Although Nietzsche says that in the body there is more reason than in our best wisdom, the body's sexuality is not mentioned, other than in its perversion (as the bitch 'sensuality' that glares from the actions of the renunciates). Love of the body (sex is ignored), love of the heart (the heart is absent), love of the soul (the soul is denied in favour of the body); all are absent in his ecstasy. His ecstasy is non-existential because love is the ground of existence (the 'kelson of creation') and Nietzsche had not known it.

3.5 Rajneesh

Before concluding this chapter on Nietzsche, let us look at the 20th century mystic, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known just as Osho) whose temperament reminds us both of Zarathustra and of Vivekananda. Rajneesh was born in 1931 in India; a good account of his life and the basics of his teachings is to be found in a biography by Vasant Joshi. Astrologers at the time of his birth predicted that he would face death every seven years and certainly die at the age of 21, and this prediction was partly born out. At the age of seven his maternal grandfather, to whom he was greatly attached, died, and the young Rajneesh felt this as intensely as if it had been his own death. The loss of his grandfather made him wary of any deep attachments; later he was also very shaken by the death in her youth of his girlfriend and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. At the age of fourteen he became convinced that he was going to die, and requested seven days leave from his school principle to face it as fully as possible. Like Ramana Maharshi, Rajneesh was determined to turn his premonition of death into an enquiry, and made arrangements to lay as if dead in a ruined temple, the caretaker monk being requested to bring him just a little food and water each day. Like Ramana he became convinced that the death of the body was independent of his own self, and survived the experience with a deepened sense of the eternal. Unlike Ramana, whose realisation was full and permanent, Rajneesh took another seven years to become fully enlightened, spending this period in intense experimentation and searching. The prediction of his death at the age of twenty one was partly fulfilled in the sense of a loss of identity with the past that Rajneesh experienced as part of his enlightenment (described in the previous chapter).
Rajneesh kept his enlightenment a secret for nearly twenty years, continuing to study firstly for a BA in philosophy and then an MA. He gave up the academic life eventually, and began to tour the country as a teacher, saying much later that he had kept his secret in order to avoid assassination while travelling (probably an over-dramatisation). He only settled in one spot once he was well-enough established to be sure that seekers would come to him in sufficient numbers, and this enabled him to create the security he needed to be more open about his own nature. Despite this, he was the subject of an attempted knife attack in the ashram he established in Pune.
Although Rajneesh loved his parents deeply he was a rebellious and daring child. His daring was typically shown by his habit of diving into dangerous whirlpools in the local river, commenting later that the loss of control was exhilarating, and that the secret of the whirlpool was to relax and allow it to drag one into its depths where it spent itself and discharged the swimmer to safety. To attempt to swim out of it was fatal. Perhaps the whirlpool is a good metaphor for his life, for he created a community of seekers round him that seemed just as out of control, resulting in the debacle of Rajneeshpuram, his commune in Oregon in the States.
An important aspect of his life and community that has brought more hostile reaction than almost anything else was his ostentatious display of material wealth. It is quite possible that he did not legally own any of it, as he claimed, and that the 92 Rolls-Royces and other absurdities were totally owned by the Ashram, but he explicitly stated many times that he rejected the notion that spirituality had any a priori connection with material poverty. This was part of a grand rejection of all aspects of renunciation, including a rejection of celibacy. It is true that Rajneesh took most things to extremes, in a prankish kind of way, but I suspect that his reaction to renunciation was because of its development in India to fanatical proportions. We have seen in the Gita quite a balanced view about renunciation, and remember also that this was in a feudal period where wealth was extremely limited and renunciation more appropriate. That India should cling to a grotesquely distorted valuation of renunciation in the industrial era was something he found quite objectionable. If we think of Ramana Maharshi's initial total neglect of his physical well-being and Gandhi's extremes of self-denial, we can see that India was ripe for an extreme reaction, and it certainly got it with Rajneesh, but to Western eyes it was incomprehensible. Rajneesh's deliberately absurd materialism was the introversion of Gandhi's renunciation; we could also say that Gandhi's attempted self-effacement was just as absurd an introversion of Rajneesh's apparent egotism. Although Gandhi's assassination had deeply affected Rajneesh in his youth, he was unsparingly critical of the Mahatma, something that made him many enemies in India.
Despite the controversies he stirred, it is clear from his teachings that he was totally committed to helping the thousands of seekers that came to him for enlightenment. His routine for many years while in India was to give a morning discourse early enough for local office workers to attend before work (though eventually the bulk of his audience were Westerners), and an evening darshan. The morning discourse would usually be based on a text from one of the world's mystics, and he alternated each month between the English and Hindi languages. The discourses were recorded and transcribed, with most of them being published in a collection of some five hundred titles. The sheer volume of printed discourse from Rajneesh makes the selection of representative passages very difficult. He said many times that he allowed as much as possible the original mystic to speak through him, though his own style is unmistakable even in short passages. He also interspersed the discourses with jokes, often rude, which he used to break up the solemnity of the unremitting debate on the infinite and eternal. In his last years he sometimes complained that in allowing himself to be the voice for the world's mystical teachers, he had neglected his own message, but there is no knowing how serious he was about this.
If my observations on Rajneesh seem a little critical, it is only in the context of being a devotee — my development has been crucially influenced by him, and so I would prefer to err on the side of being critical than of being uncritical. I came to him fairly early in my searchings, having read only a little that could prepare me for him. I was about 25 when I started reading religious texts, firstly a volume entitled 'What the Buddha Said', and then the Sufi stories made fashionable by Idries Shah. The Buddhist volume struck me at the time with the notion that the mind was simply another sense for the perception of sensory data appropriate to that sense, being in the case of the mind, thoughts.
I took up Hatha Yoga at that point with an excellent teacher called Kofi Busia, and had my first mystical experience while practising some postures on the carpet in my mother's living room (she was away at the time). The experience was a sense of mild possession, in that my body wanted to make its own movements, to which I abandoned myself. Looking back on that now, I would call the experience the first inklings of the mystical union, though only very partial. It was sufficient to set me searching for more, and I took the opportunity to go to India to take a yoga intensive course with B.K.S.Iyengar. The course was gruelling, and I found him a man of limited spiritual insight, but chance would have it that in the same town (Poona or Pune) was the ashram of  Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, where I subsequently stayed for five weeks. The ashram, with its luxurious vegetation, fountains, and well-appointed buildings seemed a little unreal, and struck me at the time as a kind of hot-house.
Rajneesh offered a mixture of meditation and psychotherapy courses which I plunged into, to overwhelming effect (the intensive yoga course and the culture-shock generally contributed to my vulnerability). I fell ill at one point and was confined to bed for nearly a week by the ashram in Koregaon Park, during which time I practised a range of meditations from Rajneesh's The Book of the Secrets, a commentary on the 'Vigyana Bhairava Tantra' — Shiva's listing of meditation techniques to his consort. At the end of this period, at sunset, I experienced my first satori, or temporary state of union. It was indescribably blissful, a state in which the mind had slowed down to the merest trickle, and from which I returned (in an expensive restaurant later that night) through an anxiety that I had lost my mind. It was probably the first time that I became aware of thoughts as independent entities, and of an identity beyond them and not constructed through them: Ramana's "I". I was aware that this is what Rajneesh had been talking about in lecture and in his books, but oddly, I felt that I owed the state more to the scruffy dog that hung around the halls of residence in Koregaon Park than to Rajneesh. I had been sitting outside still feeling weak from the illness, enjoying the sunset, and observing also the dog rib-thin, but alert and contented on a mound of dirt a little way away. The mind had receded as if a horrible noise that one had grown so accustomed to that one was no longer aware of its presence, had suddenly stopped; though in fact it merely slowed to a rate that made it observable. Perhaps awareness had grown to reach the same point, I do not know. I was naively hoping that I could share this with someone, but something about the preoccupied faces of other seekers returning from the ashram stopped me confiding my state to them. Instead I wandered out in this blissful state, and gradually became frightened that I could not regain my 'normal' state: in looking back on it now, it is clear that I did not have the maturity that Ramana or Douglas had in such a moment to allow it to remain. In the restaurant I was still hoping for an acknowledgement of my condition, but this time from Rajneesh, as he often dined there, but he did not show up however, and gradually the state wore off.
The purpose of recounting this episode is partly to show why I am predisposed to see the accounts of the mystics in a certain way; again this is in fairness to the reader. It should also account for the special place that Rajneesh holds for me, for I do now consider that his teaching and presence had much to do with the experience just described. The depth of feeling I had for him was never clear until I heard the news of his death however in January of 1990. I can honestly say that he is the only person over whose death I have wept, and this went on for several days, quite to my surprise.
As with Rajneesh, a common feature in the lives of many great mystics devoted to teaching is that communities of seekers grow up around them. Andrew Cohen, a relative newcomer to the teaching of enlightenment commented recently that he only met seekers now. He follows a demanding world itinerary, being invited to teach by many organisations including his own: his immediate support group make sure that his modest needs are met, but this allows no time for mingling with the rest of society, as Whitman by contrast was able to all his life. This is a typical example perhaps of how rapidly this overtakes great teachers, and the results are not always for the best. Seekers are by nature often immature, vulnerable or disturbed; they often see in the religious community the lost warmth of a broken home, and in the teacher the lost support of failed parents. The many seekers who are stable and balanced make a leaven in this bread, but the inevitable tendency is for the community to become inward-looking and suspicious of the outside world. This is when the nature of the teacher becomes catalytic, or perhaps, in chaos theory terms, the potential amplifier of instability — Rajneesh was certainly that. I mentioned earlier the hot-house nature of the ashram in India: it was an emotional and spiritual hot-house, and, I suspect this analogy holds good for the fate of the plants that grew in Oregon and were suddenly returned to the 'normal' world (one reported that the simple act of opening a bank account terrified him after the years of the sheltered life in the ashram).
This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the events at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon; Kirk Braun, Juliet Forman, Hugh Milne, George Meredith and others give various and somewhat contradictory accounts of the period. What is reasonably clear is that the commune turned a large area of heavily depleted and almost useless farmland into a thriving agricultural success, using methods reminiscent of the Israeli kibbutzim. Once the ranch was established, Rajneesh entered a three-year period of silence in which all authority was handed over to his manager, a lady called Sheela. She and her immediate colleagues gradually entered on what amounted to warfare with the indigenous community, resulting in poisonings and attempted murder (for which she served a prison sentence). To what extent Rajneesh had direct knowledge or assent to any of this is difficult to tell, but in his attitude and teachings there were certainly the seeds for the massive disrespect for the law that brought the community to its untimely end.
Rajneesh's life and teaching methods were based on confrontation: he confronted his possible death at the age of fourteen, he confronted the physical dangers of his environment, he confronted what he regarded as the corrupt bureaucracy of official India, he confronted what he regarded as the corrupt spiritual pretensions of India. He engineered situations in which his pupils had to confront themselves; for example in the early days before Aids he made and broke sexual relationships between them; he also insisted on demanding work-loads in the ashram. In this he resembled Gurdjieff, who he admired, and there are many other similarities in their characters.
It may be possible to understand the train of events in Oregon as simply the creation of confrontational situations on a vast scale; however this is probably only a small part of the truth. In fact Rajneesh created a whirlpool that did release him initially, but in the end was the cause of his death — the official line from the commune is that he died from thallium poisoning administered to him while in jail in the US awaiting trial. (He was charged only with conspiracy to arrange false marriages, but, as an indication of the authorities' over-reaction — typical of the reactions he provoked in all spheres of life — he was held in handcuffs and leg-chains.)
Commentators are quick to say that one should judge the mystic by their fruit, and say that the collapse at Oregon makes Rajneesh a fraud. However, his hundreds of books are a consistent and high-quality exposition of Pure Consciousness Mysticism, and a treasury of insight. Also, because of the profound influence of Rajneesh on my own thinking, this book must be regarded also to some extent as part of his legacy; if it has any value it derives considerably from his teachings.
The physical daring and courage of Rajneesh, coupled with his lack of respect for conventional authority, gave him what could only be called an arrogance. His arrogance is a little reminiscent of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but Rajneesh backed this up with the inward authority of his enlightenment and a vigorous personality closer to that of Gurdjieff or Vivekananda, making him potentially more dangerous than the scholarly and poorly Nietzsche. It may not come as a surprise however to find that Rajneesh gave a discourse series on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Although he made it quite clear that Nietzsche was no mystic, he found passages that illustrated his own ideas, and Rajneesh was always searching for suitably aphoristic material. I suspect that there are few mystics with the poetry and inventiveness of a Rumi (Rajneesh had used up most of the world's supply by then), that Nietzsche's overflowing artistry attracted Rajneesh, despite its flaws. There is also something in Zarathustra's style that relates to Rajneesh's: an iconoclasm and irreligiosity; Rajneesh says this of his commentary:

It is a very complicated affair. I was not speaking directly on Zarathustra, I was speaking on the Zarathustra who is an invention of Friedrich Nietzsche. All the great insights are given by Nietzsche to Zarathustra. Zarathustra — many times his original books have been brought to me, and they are so ordinary that I have never spoken on them. Nietzsche has used Zarathustra only as a symbolic figure, just as Khalil Gibran was using Almustafa — who was completely fictitious. Nietzsche had used a historical name but in a very fictitious way.
So, first, it is Nietzsche's Zarathustra, you should remember; it has nothing much to do with the original Zarathustra.
And secondly, when I am speaking on it, I don't care what Nietzsche means — and I don't even have any way to know what he means. The way he used Zarathustra, I am using him! So it is a very complicated story. It is my Nietzsche, and Nietzsche is my Zarathustra. So what heights you are flying in has nothing to do with Zarathustra.

Rajneesh generally took as his theme the writings of other mystics, and generally those that spoke in an aphoristic way, as in the Bible, or Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Thus his own works tend to be the opposite of aphoristic, rather they were expansive and also somewhat hypnotic in their delivery. He said many times that what he was saying was in itself of no importance, but that it was the presence of the master and the silence between the words that were effective. I include one extract from the Zarathustra series to give an impression both of his style, and also the way in which he found Nietzsche's imagery a suitable vehicle for his own thoughts (italic text are quotes from Zarathustra, the rest are Rajneesh's).

Where is the lightening to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness, with which you should be cleansed?
One needs almost to be so extreme, if he is to transcend this ugly humanity, that people will call him mad. They have called Gautam Buddha mad, they have called Jesus mad, they have called Socrates mad. Anybody who is not part of the crowd insanity, who goes beyond it, is condemned by the crowd as mad. But such madness is the only way to be cleansed.
Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightening, he is this madness!...
Man is a rope fastened between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss. Man is not a being, but a process — not a being but a becoming. A dog is born a dog, and dies a dog. It is not absolutely so with man.
Gautam Buddha is born as a man and dies as a god. But to attain to this state, one has to be the lightening that burns all that is rotten in you, and one has to be mad enough to go beyond all the hypocrisies, all the mannerisms, all the facades that man has created to remain where he is without growing.
Man is a rope fastened between animal and superman — a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.
Man is not static: he is change, and that is what is beautiful in him. Man is not dead but alive — that is what is loveable in him. He has to go across from animal to superman. He has also to gather courage to go down from his high peaks of being a superman, to give the message and the joy and the dance to all those who are left behind, who have become static and who are not moving, and who are not changing.
I love those who do not know how to live, except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going across.
One of Zarathustra's great contributions is this: that once you have reached to the point of enlightenment, to the point of awakening, you should come back. Because millions of people are there; perhaps their thirst is asleep, perhaps they are not aware of their hunger. You have to provoke them and challenge them, and you have to guide them and you have to show them the path: how they can also go across, how they can also change from the animal to the superman.
I love the great despisers, for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other bank. These words should be written in gold: I love the great despisers, for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other bank. A man who has no longing to go beyond, no longing to climb the Everest of consciousness is not worthy to be called a man.
I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman. You have been told by all the religions that to sacrifice yourself to attain the kingdom of God. Zarathustra says "Sacrifice yourself to the earth that the earth may one day belong to the superman." Become the herald of the coming morning. Make the way for the superman to happen.
I love him, who lives for knowledge and who wants knowledge that one day the Superman may live. And thus he wills his own downfall. A man who wants the superman is certainly wanting that the man should disappear: the man should disappear into the superman.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is will to downfall and an arrow of longing.... I love him who does not want too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for fate to cling to.
One should be one-pointed, a single arrow with your whole energy. Only then you can pass the dangerous abyss between animal and superman. Many virtues are not needed.
Zarathustra says, I conceive only one virtue: the longing for transcendence, the longing for the beyond. The longing not to remain man, but to go beyond man, to become God.
I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour and who then asks: Am I then a cheat? — for he wants to perish. It is not a great virtue to be successful, successful as a man, because success needs all kinds of meanness, all kinds of fallacies, all kinds of false promises. Success needs violence. The successful man is not a man of love, is not a man of compassion.
The truly compassionate man, the truly loving man is ready to dissolve himself, so that something great may arise. He wants to become the manure for the roses to grow.
I love him who throws golden words in advance of his deeds and always performs more than be promised: for he wills his own downfall.
I love him who justifies the men of the future and redeems the men of the past: for he wants to perish by the men of the present.
I love him who chastises his God because he loves his God: for he must perish by the anger of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge.
He is not afraid of death, because he knows, unless the seed dies the plant will not grow. Unless the seed dies there will not be any flowers. He is ready to die. In this courage he is capable to go gladly over the bridge, which is dangerous.
The journey of transcendence is dangerous. You will be disappearing and something new will come into existence. You will be sacrificing yourself for the new to arrive, but this sacrifice is a great bliss, because you are a creator — you have become a womb for the new, and for the great.
I love all those who are like heavy drops falling singly from the dark cloud that hangs over mankind: they prophesy the coming of the lightning and as prophets they perish.
Behold, I am the prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman.
Zarathustra is saying that the prophet proclaims about the future, stakes everything for the future, dies for the future, so that this planet can become a paradise; so this humanity need not be mean, need not be anymore full of things which have to be condemned; so that this humanity becomes pure and innocent.
Just as at the beginning of the rain and the lightning the clouds come — they herald only the beginning of the rain and the lightning.
Zarathustra says, "I am the prophet of the lighting. I want you to be aware that soon the superman will be appearing. Be ready to receive him. The only way to receive him is to be ready to sacrifice yourself."
This lightning is called superman, because this lightning is the beginning of a new season, of a new climate.
The earth will become green, and the dead trees will become alive, and the naked branches will be with foliage, and there will be flowers all around.
I have told you that my word for the superman is the new man, because the word superman carries in it the idea of superiority. In existence nothing is superior and nothing is inferior — things are only unique, and different.
The new man will be different and unique. The new man will not be serious, the new man will have a sense of humour, the new man will not be tense and anxious, and full of anguish; instead he will be full of joy. The new man will be able to dance and sing and play and able to be a small child.
The new man is the hope for the whole of humanity.

We note that Rajneesh has given a meaning to Nietzsche's down-going that is not obviously there in the original: that it should imply the return of the enlightened one to the market-place, to the ordinary life. We have seen that Nietzsche did not intend this, as he did not even know what the height was that his Superman would descend from, and was not in the least comfortable with the many-too-many. However, this was a constant theme with Rajneesh, that he wanted enlightenment to be ordinary, part of the every-day world, but his paradox was that everywhere he went he created an artificial atmosphere (this probably is the inevitable result of creating a commune). The ordinariness he aspired to and never achieved Walt Whitman effortlessly took part in; and the most obvious reason for Rajneesh's failure in this respect is that he was a product of Indian thought, despite his endless reaction to it. India is so steeped in the idea of enlightenment as an achievement that Rajneesh, despite every attempt to convey an ordinariness about it, and to be part of the market-place, could not avoid an elitism. His struggle to proclaim a new man that was not a superman, but was merely different and unique, eventually led to a commune that so elevated its difference and uniqueness that it held the wider community in contempt. 
Rajneesh is usefully considered in the context of what is sometimes known as 'crazy wisdom', that is as part of a group of enlightened teachers who set out to shock. Georg Feuerstein's Holy Madness gives a good account of this phenomenon, including in his book the many Tibetan Buddhist teachers, especially Drukpa Kunley, whose unconventional lives seem to break all religious and social conventions. Gurdjieff also features, and a good account of Rajneesh is given, though with greater weight to Milne's account than is probably fair, as there have been detailed refutations of the accuracy of his reporting. Feuerstein quotes Milne as saying that Krishnamurti viewed Rajneesh as a 'criminal'; however, Rajneesh always spoke of Krishnamurti as enlightened (even though he was baffled by Krishnamurti's habit of reading second-rate detective novels). What is clear is that Krishnamurti represents the sober end of the mystic spectrum, while Rajneesh its drunken end. 

3.6 The Problems of the Guru

Nietzsche took an ancient teacher, Zarathustra, probably more inaccessible than others of approximately that era (Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira, Socrates, Lao Tzu), and reinvented him. Nietzsche had no personal experience of such a teacher, though biographers consider that the writings of Schopenhauer and the person of Wagner had the kind of formative influences on him that occur between guru and disciple (note that I am refusing to accept the widespread assumption that the word guru has a more negative connotation than teacher, sage, master or avatar — the words are interchangeable and only in a more specific context than this are any distinctions meaningful). This is a useful point however to look at common misconceptions about the guru, some of which are apparent in Nietzsche's invention, and some of which he avoided. 
The root misconception lies in a misplaced perfection. The acolyte has a natural tendency to assume that the person of the master is in some ways perfect, or is at least perfect in contrast to the person of the seeker — this shows itself in various ways, starting with the health of the master. The very reason that a seeker is a seeker lies in their false identification with their own body, so they tend to translate the teachings about the pristine nature of the eternal and infinite into the bodily: hence the master cannot be ill, and in extreme cases (like Sri Aurobindo) cannot die. Illness in the acolyte is often seen as a form of impurity or 'resistance' to the teachings of the master, and may result in all kinds of cruelty being perpetrated, not, in most cases by the teacher, but by followers who have been given, or assume, responsibility within the organisation that forms around the teacher. Radha Rajagopal Sloss, daughter of Krishnamurti's close friend Raja, made this comment:

It would have been difficult for many people to accept that anyone living so close to Krishna[murti] could have problems at all. Many years ago Raja had flinched when a devotee had given him a vigorous handshake. 'I have arthritis,' he explained. 'You have arthritis when you live so close to Him?!' was the incredulous response.

It seems that this particular devotee had not listened to a single word that Krishnamurti had ever said! But, sadly, this attitude is widespread. Rajneesh asked that his followers did not refer to him as dead once he had gone, but merely 'no longer in the body' — almost immediately a mythology sprang up that, while resisted by many, was fuelled by the inevitable tendency to elevate his person. Rajneesh, like Krishnamurti, tried to make it clear that as a person he was subject to the same laws of nature that anyone is (Krishna's forces of nature acting on other forces), but is clearly more open to misunderstandings because of his encouragement of the devotional. Andrew Cohen, the young teacher of enlightenment mentioned previously and whose temperament is closer to Krishnamurti than Rajneesh, was run over by a cab in New York and injured, suffering a deep gash in his calf and bruising. He says this about the reaction from his followers:

As I lay there, I began to wonder what kind of conclusions others would draw about the meaning and significance of what had happened the night before. Then I smiled to myself, thinking about the likelihood that the conclusions my friends and supporters would draw would differ greatly from those of my detractors.
Within twenty-four hours, I was informed that my students in America and Europe had been deeply affected by the accident. The results were twofold: first their superstitious ideas were shaken to the core, as many admitted that they never thought that something like this could happen to me. But even more importantly, they discovered a renewed sense of urgency in their own relationship to becoming free in this birth. They knew in a way that never had before that they could take nothing for granted. The preciousness of life, the immediacy of death and the unbearably delicate possibility of enlightenment were revealed in a way that was ruthless, overwhelming and profound.

As mentioned before, Cohen believes that the purity of nirvana (or the unmanifest, or nothingness) must be visible in the person of those oriented towards it (I am rephrasing his words a little), and criticises Rajneesh for example because of the events in Oregon. There may well be a moral elevation (to use Bucke's terminology) in the enlightened ones, but by stressing it in his teachings Cohen gives rise to exactly the kind of 'superstitious ideas' that he criticises his students for. The instinct for purity in Cohen's temperament is part of his appeal, but what happens to his teachings if he succumbs to the many temptations he is now exposed to? Even if he does not, and all credit to him if he does not, stories are easily fabricated and believed: his teachings in turn will be diminished. The crazy wisdom teachers including Gurdjieff, and to some extent Rajneesh, make efforts to appear morally degenerate to avoid this trap, though whether they succeed or not is debatable.
We see that even when we leave out the occult and paranormal, acolytes wish to believe in the special nature of their guru: some, some for example have never accepted Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi as great teachers simply because they died of cancer. The real problem of the elevation of the guru lies in the postponement of seeing one's own nature, or, in the terminology of Pure Consciousness Mysticism, the postponement of an orientation towards the infinite and eternal. The guru is finite and temporal, and above all human. I have witnessed Rajneesh, Krishnamurti, and Douglas Harding all losing their tempers: so what? The Buddha is reputed never to have lost his, for example upon being spat upon he thanked the furious spitter, but this merely shows something about his temperament, and something about the sheer variety amongst the great teachers, a variety that is part of the manifest world where purity is relative: has to be relative. However, to point all this out may be as futile as trying to prevent someone who is falling in love from seeing all kinds of imaginary perfections in the object of their affections, and for that matter seeing imaginary defects when they fall out of love.
Nietzsche's Zarathustra is endearingly full of human frailties, and in the end we see him as a fictional teacher with no teachings to teach, but Nietzsche's concept of a Superman is based on just the misguided quest for perfection in the manifest realm that we have just discussed. The Superman, or ubermensch (overman) in the original German, combines the problems of misplaced perfection with a more insidious one: that of a superiority which justifies the contempt for the ordinary person. Luckily in English the word Superman is more likely to be associated with a comic-book hero.

3.7 Nietzsche and Pure Consciousness Mysticism

To conclude: Nietzsche's best legacy is as destroyer of the false and hypocritical of his age, and previous ages. Here he has perhaps served us in a way that Whitman had no need of in the America of his day where the European life-killing ghosts had little substance, and could be laughed at in the bigness and brashness of the open prairies and new cities. Nietzsche could not laugh at them, but in taking them so seriously he had to create a fictional world that does not stand up to scrutiny. He rages against a decadence so profoundly that in the end he tears himself apart. He says:

O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: That which is falling should also be pushed!
Everything of today — it is falling, it is decaying: who would support it? But I — want to push it too!
				(Of Old and New Law-Tables)

Nietzsche is hurling all the decadence of his age of a cliff, and himself with it. His exposure of decadence is to do with honesty:

There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God: they have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty.
				(Of the Afterworldsmen)

Why is honesty the youngest of virtues for Nietzsche? My guess is that it is a certain type of honesty that he is talking about, not the traditional distaste for lying and the honouring of promises, but an honesty to oneself — the type of honesty that separates 20th century thought from the previous eras (we shall examine this further with Sartre). This youngest of virtues became needed when man became false, and Nietzsche is one of the first prophets of this honesty, and partly for this reason is seen as the precursor of the existentialists. Perhaps Nietzsche sees it as the youngest of virtues because he cannot grasp it fully, existentially, in his own life; if he had, his writings would have amplified themselves in their meaning, and reduced in froth. Nietzsche has no strong roots in existence, he says: "Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world and the existence of man eternally justified".
Both from Zarathustra, and from comments like these, we can view Nietzsche as aesthetically intoxicated. From the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism we have to ask is this kind of intoxication, on the surface of it similar to the ecstatic verse of Rumi or the divine-drunk behaviour of 'crazy-wisdom', a door to the infinite? It is clearly an expansive phenomenon, and one at the heart of any culture; its artistic impulse, whether expressed through art, dance, literature, poetry or countless creative acts lifts the spirit. In less secular societies than in the West all the arts have a religious ground, so we can see that in its origins the aesthetic and sublime serve an expansive role that is related to the mystical expansion. Secular art, although expansive, has a function linked to the elevated status of the individual that has replaced the religious function. After the collapse of the feudal hierarchy of God, king, aristocracy and peasants, it is the artistic genius who is often the target of the adoration previously reserved for the aristocrat of divine endorsement. This has resulted in art as a means of strengthening the identity of the artist, and providing society with individuals elevated through the sanction of their perceived genius. However the expansion of the artist through the overflowing of their talents, as with Nietzsche, has no necessary link with the expansion of the mystic to become the universe. It led to the opposite result in his case, as we have seen: a shrinking, and the same shrinking can be seen in those who seek expansion through material gain, or through a false spirituality. The impulse to be larger than one appears to be is universal and leads to all human endeavour including the sublime achievements of art, but they are bound by the same laws of expansion and contraction that the Sufis comment on so well. In Pure Consciousness Mysticism we see that to genuinely expand one has to come to zero at the same time. In the next chapter we will explore more deeply the experience of nothingness that provides the basis of a true and permanent expansion.

References for Chapter Four (Nietzsche)