The most egregious examples of sentimentality are novels and films where characters can be separated into groups of good and evil. The most angelic are the protagonists, with whom the reader cries and laughs, almost merging with them; but if we look closely at these protagonists, they are not so much angels: they are driven by their petty, greedy, sweet desires. The other characters are classified as good and sympathetic or evil and hateful according to whether they support or hinder the protagonists. Most people today look at the world in the way of sentimental novels: those who are guided by their desires and those who support those desires are the good; those who hinder their desires are the bad.
Today's average man's knowledge is astonishingly simple-minded. Most men of today see only the surface of you that you present to their likes and wants; they do not look at your inner self; women judge you by whether you amuse and excite them, men by how you fit into their principles, plans, and convictions. Exchanges the good for the attractive, the seductive; no wonder that in private life as well as in public life is mostly led by adventurers. He is perpetually disappointed and disillusioned; he blames all the powers of heaven and earth, the wickedness of others, sometimes even his own folly; only he does not think of looking at his fellow-men not through his needs, but through their selves.
The most common and typical symptom of a disordered, foggy mind is hatred of a community. The cause of all trouble is the Jews, or: the Catholics, or: the money-men, etc.: the hated community must be destroyed and all will be well. Angry outbursts against the group in question, but preferably when there is no possibility of unpleasantness. And the hatred for one member of the hated community is considerably less than for the community as a whole; the closest good friends are the exception, only the rest are fiery.
Such hatred is very easily infected, for it is easier and more convenient to vent the bitterness and disappointment of our failures by a general fit of temper than to control ourselves. In fact, there is no group of people more justifiable to hate than, for example, the fat or the tall.
Ask yourself often: "Is there a community or individual I would lustfully harm?" And if there is, seek out the cause of your grievance; you will find that the real cause is never in the person, even if he may have been a nuisance to you, but in yourself, in your unfulfilled desires. By revenge, or idle hatred, you will not improve anything, but you will poison your own soul.
Don't have the seeds of any social betterment in you. For every abstract community is a mist; and he who runs in the mist will sooner or later stumble on the living.
Respect and cherish your narrow and wider home: family, nation, humanity. But do not confuse any of these with those who claim harm by reference to these concepts.
What is harmful? if thou wouldst help Peter by restraining Paul.
"I identify with Peter, I dislike Paul; I kiss Peter, I beat Paul" - this is sentimentality; this is the common skeleton of public thought; the present age begs for. The only way to help anybody is not at the expense of others.
You can improve your people and humanity only by improving yourself.
Truth can never redeem mankind, always only the one-man.
There are four types of leader: Procrustes, Napoleon, Uncle Sam and Solon.
Procrustes is an advocate of an idea that he wants to force his nation into, if it breaks, if it tears.
Napoleon is a passionate gambler, and whether he wins or loses, he will always be wasted.
Uncle Sam sits in the royal hall like in a spice shop, cunning with dekagrams and dimes.
Solon is attentive to divine inspiration, all his actions spring from eternal measure and his kingdom flourishes.
"What you give to me, you give to all", proclaims the power on earth.
"What you give to all, you give to me," proclaims the heavenly power.
Whichever nation wants to be superior to other nations: becomes an executioner or a clown.
The life of their nation is polluted by those who extol the real or supposed virtues of their nation and refuse to tolerate harsh criticism.
The greatest scourge that can befall a people is to destroy its judgment by one-sided rule. Such a people is debauched, and the more tramp adventurer reaches for it, the more easily it throws itself at him. There is no outside menace, no endless ravages, no millennia of oppression to equal it.
The value of money, wealth, rank, prestige above all else, the economism that today's man sees as the ultimate realism: it is in fact idealism, albeit in a negative and parodic way. Money is not food, not drink, not clothing, not a work of art, something essentially useless, in fact it does not exist, it is a mere idea and ideal; and the accumulation of this fictitious thing is regarded by modern man as the whole of sanity. The accumulated wealth, which over-abounds beyond necessity, is only a nuisance and a problem, and sooner or later it slips out from under its owner, so that even the necessary will not remain. Rank removes all that is tolerable in man, and sets up senseless barriers, which breed hatred and envy. Validation leads nowhere, because there is always further and further down this road, the desire for validation is an unbearable itch, like a skin disease. In addition, modern man is heaping on himself a pile of the most obdurate community principles in impossible handcuffs. In the confusion of obsessions and emotions, community, nation, race, people, home, public safety, duty, the defence of our borders, the raising of our standard of living, the spread of our culture, have become a man-eating idol. If you look around you: prohibition, coercion, slogan, rubbish, drivel, hogwash, propaganda, profiteering, pushing, fear, insecurity. The intolerance of our systems is something that people today groan about the most and would like to compensate for with some pompous respect for culture: each system calls itself the saviour of culture and the others the destroyers of culture. But today's man, this negative idealist, detached from all reality, wants to adore culture in vain, his adoration is an empty set of words, a grab-bag of measures, a constant cloaking of his own yawns; and he sees culture as a fairground gibberish, an incessant saving of people, nations, communities, a tasteless self-adulation of "geniuses", a social event. Culture is static, calm, non-institutionalizable; the more today's fidgety-moving man jumps around it, the more he crushes it. The more he 'takes culture to heart', the more he seems to have no feeling for it; the more he 'saves and protects' it, the more he seems to need a protection of it. He moves money, armies, a deliberately dumbed-down herd of people, and he is destroyed, when a single breath of culture could save him. But that one breath is missing, and the money, the army, the herd of men continue to grind onwards.
There is only one way out of this cave of human suffering of human life, of human emotions, but it will not happen: if humanity were to change to a sober, stable basis: to satisfy its needs and not its fears and emotions. Since there is no hope of this, each man can only create a tolerable world within himself, for himself, if he is strong enough to renounce all prejudices and see with his own eyes, like a child: Everyone can only achieve realism instead of negative idealism, internal, unshakable security instead of the nightmare of external order, money, wealth, rank, prestige. And only the few can achieve it, even for themselves, who have been given the sense to do so.
To say that someone is a "patron of science and art" is almost as ridiculous as saying that a religious person is a "patron of God". Just as God is not dependent on being believed in, science and art are not affected by being cared about. The home of science and art is not existence, the 'esse' , but possibility, the 'posse' , and if it manifests itself in existence, existence is enriched; it is infinite humility on the part of science and art to allow itself to manifest itself in existence, since all its form-filling is handicapped. And if science and art disappear from human destiny: it is not their destruction, but that of their handicapped manifestations, and of the master of these manifestations, man.
Why is there a snake at the entrance of the pharmacy? In its place, the modern man could paint some cheerful little pigs, almost bursting with health.
Why is there a blindfolded goddess over the judge's chair? The man of today could take the blindfold off the goddess's eyes: let her be like a saleswoman seeking to please the public.
Why is there a crucified corpse on the altar? The modern man could have replaced it with a street vendor offering his wares.
Sin is most dangerous, not when it openly and boldly opposes virtue, but when it disguises itself as virtue and infects the cognitive sense.
The chief vice of love is not hatred, but sentimental benevolence; that of patriotism is not denial of one's nation, but dignified lechery and gibberish patriotism; that of love's morality is not amorous immorality, but social decency, which, while it persecutes unconcealed lust, offers a hundred substitutes for lust.
The invention of our time is compulsory enthusiasm, the revolution institutionalised by authority and the revolt of the oppressors against the oppressed.
Today's regimes of domination are characterised by the fact that they do not necessarily want their lies to be believed, only to be accepted. All military forces must sing about themselves that they are the best, without anyone believing it; all citizens must profess about the head of state that he is wise, heroic, a benefactor, without anyone believing it; and so on.
Now even a plausible lie is an unattainable height. We are in a pit, lower than the bottom of the frog.
Today's man, disconnected from the universal context of existence, shrunk into individuality, will soon lose his individuality, not upwards, but downwards. Since he cannot rise above his individuality, he will fall below it. Soon it will be officially decreed which leader's picture you must hang on the wall, what books and other objects you may have, what you may eat and when, and not only work but also entertainment will be compulsory, in a prescribed way and at a prescribed time; and people who have sunk below their individuality will like it. After a thousand years of European man's individualism, in which he has pitted his personal whims against universal possibilities, now the diabolical order of whims is submerging not only his individuality but his humanity.
And the man of today would be content and happy with this, if the barn were not continually swirling around him.
Helpless submission is called civic duty, shouting along with the crowd is called courage, sentimentality is called poetic spirit, the rattling of nuts is called progressive spirit, greedy, narrow-minded edulgence is called wit, group boredom is called entertainment, the play of the glands is called pleasure.
The combination of civic duty, courage, poetic spirit, progressive spirit, wit, amusement and pleasure is called social and economic equilibrium.
The social and economic equilibrium becomes more and more delicate: more and more regulations, restrictions, punishments; soon the people will abhor peace more than war; finally, the equilibrium must be maintained by a permanent state of war. The war begins, in which the will to win is only a rhetoric inherited from the past, the real, secret aim is to drag the war on: neither belligerent dares to take on the economic Gordian knot that peace would mean. Those who can be soldiers are glad because they are better provided for and safer than the general population; and they try to get into the field of battle because there the greatest freedom is promised. Peace will not be order, war will not be confusion, but vice versa; it will be an age of perpetual war. Not one moment of it will resemble a game of chess in reverse, where the winner is the one whose pawns have all been knocked out.
This state of affairs is already partially reached. Now comes a short, serene period, but this is just the bait sunshine of the autumn before the long winter. Within thirty years the era will begin when not man will lead the war, but war will lead man.
Every manifestation of you that unfolds beautifully, freshly, freely: your gift; every manifestation that stinks of your greed: your excrement. From any one of us there is far more dross than bounty, and there is no remedy for this but to clean up our dross; instead, from the beginning and more and more, European man builds from his dung a system, a law, a morality, which he guards with arms, with money, with the seal of authority, with a prestigious body, and demands of all to conform to these palaces of excrement and solemn statues of dung. These are continually cracking and crumbling, spreading a general stench and itching; and they must be repaired and repaired with more and more fresh and softer dung. By degrees mankind has raised over itself a whole metropolis of excrement, which now, in the twentieth century, has fallen upon its masters. Just as once a flood of fire and water fell upon mankind, which had grown into a giant besieging the sky, now mankind, dwarfed into a manure worshipper, has been overtaken by a flood of dung. For centuries there will be nothing but a stifling stench, a stinking stink, a warfare in filth, with rumbling, roaring, dung-smelling weapons instead of the shining weapons of old, until the man of the manure-age is extinct. He who made the whole globe a cesspool is drowning in it.
What can we do about the flood of manure? hold our noses, nothing else. Because anyone who wants to tear down a manure tower is just moving it from one place to another, and in the process is multiplying the ugliness himself. The flood of manure will drain itself away, slowly, until the man of the manure-age has drowned in it to the last. He who has yielded heart and soul to any direction, system, human contrivance, has been swamped by the dung-flood; he who keeps pure feeling, free vision, eternal measure, floats in an ark above the dung-flood. And as after the flood the rainbow appeared in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood: so shall the pure linen appear in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood of dung.
What can you do about the plunge into darkness, the general destruction, the universal suffering? nothing and everything. This is nothing and everything: if you do not participate in the darkness with your own feelings and create in yourself a state of whole-manhood: you are guided not by your desires but by the eternal measure. Wherever the tide takes you: to misery, to prosperity, to forced labour, to the battlefield, to the driving-place, to the perishing-place: care not; the dark power can give you nothing and take nothing from you, if the only-virtuous measure is at work in you. You may lose your comfort, your wealth, your health, your freedom, your life; you will lose them all sooner or later, you cannot take them to the grave; but the perfect measure in your depths cannot be violated even by the destruction of the world, so you must wish to be true to it. Trust thyself to the eternal measure: it is the Noah's ark above the all-covering flood.
For your fellow human beings you can do no more than let them know the only way of escape. No one can be saved by force when the flood covers everything.
It is not true that in a flood the crowd wants to climb Noah's Ark. The Noah's ark seems to be the weakest, most clumsy piece of wood, worth more than the bottom of a bush.
Some man looks upon religion as a barter: it is man's duty to behave himself, to obey God's commands and the ordinances; it is God's business to provide man with earthly goods in the same proportion as he has behaved himself, obeyed the commands, performed the ordinances. Accordingly, the most religious and best men ought to be the richest, and the non-religious and law-breakers ought to be miserable.
He who is religious in order to obtain the goods he covets in return: he has already proved his greed and unworthiness. The goodness of God is not fattening and not a charitable institution. The unvarying radiance of divine love is like nothing less than charity, the gratification of desires. If you can grow out of your desires, you will reach God.
There are many fervent and militant Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, who believe in God only half-heartedly and cannot believe in the dogmas of their religion at all, yet they will fight for their denomination. Of the locomotive they take only the boiler, which is explosive, but not the wheels, which can be used to walk.
To the individual man, pleasure, profit, seems to be the most important thing; he does not distinguish pleasure from good, profit from purpose. He even conceives of the improvement of the destiny of mankind as the putting of as many people as possible in a more pleasant condition. And he conceives of salvation as eternal enjoyment and eternal profit; whereas salvation is the dissolution of the nightmare of the desire for enjoyment and profit.
The desire for pleasure and profit is nothing but an elementary demand arising from your carnal nature; do not let your soul yield to this demand. The soul's elementary need is different: to be in harmony with everything. And the striving for harmony is disturbed by pleasure and profit as soon as it exceeds the need.
Self-torture is mostly a dead end; sometimes a big detour; very rarely the shortest way.
For most people, a complete abandonment of pleasure is as harmful as indulgence in pleasure. And what lies between the two, moderation ("I enjoy, but in small doses, cautiously, sparingly"): it is constricting.
Educate your desires so that they are not directed towards pleasures and benefits: this avoids both renunciation, self-indulgence and moderation. Shape your desires in such a way that whether you receive the pleasures and benefits of life or the lack of them casually, you need not worry too much about whether you are receiving them or not. If your world of feeling is directed not to the variable but to the constant, if you look at the variable from the outside, as a stranger, if you seek harmony with everything, if you look to the eternal measure: thus you will draw the fangs of your life desires, and the benefits and harms of life will no longer be a danger to you, but will only affect you superficially.
Be strict with yourself, but don't torture your nature. Put down your whims, your desires, not that you may be miserable without them, but that you may flow like water and be as sure as the sky.
The rule is not to imprison yourself in it; let it be your dwelling, free to go in and out as you please.
A rule is no good if you wear it with determination, if it rattles on you gloomily and stubbornly; a rule is good if it is absorbed in your feelings and supports you gently and pliantly.
Morality, which you wear compulsively and unkindly: it is not virtue, but weakness.
Virtue is always prominent. There is no sin that is not nearer to virtue than a multitude of shrinking pseudo-virtues.
If you have virtue, the test of it is that you feel not the yoke of your virtue, but its splendor, its lusciousness, its power.
If you're virtuous, the test of it is that you love virtue and sin alike, and without covetousness.
It is in vain to avoid sin, if you leave the false virtue to yourself. The more virtue and sin are developed, the broader they are; the more pseudo-virtue is developed, the more convulsive it is. Virtue can always be made of sin, but out of pseudo-virtue it is difficult.
All pseudo-virtues prey on some real virtue, with which they are mistaken. Religious virtue is the impatient denominationalism and pious piety, patriotism is violent chauvinism, philanthropy is the self-important public zeal, science is the pseudo-scientific tunnel vision, art is the social urgency of art-artistic patronage, of everyday diligence, the mud-slinging toil; of goodness, the dripping-hearted charity and intrusive consolation; of loving honesty, the spouse-fishing greed and rummaging in other people's dirty laundry, etc.
Virtue is never violent; by contrast, the motto of any pseudo-virtue might be, "What I do not do, no one else may do."
The pseudo-virtues strangle faith, truth, morality, knowledge, beauty; they poison all that is the permanent treasure of humanity by making their own fragmentation obligatory by reference to them.
Virtue is that which conforms to the eternal standard and lifts us up to perfection; sin is that which opposes the eternal standard and moves us away from perfection.
He who attains to perfection is identified with the eternal measure: he has no virtue and no more sin; just as the nature of fire is not virtue but light, so the nature of a being identified with perfection is not virtue but action according to the eternal measure. In wholeness there is no good and evil, no merit and fault, no reward and punishment.
The individual man abhors old age: he regards it as a debilitation, a helplessness, an undeserved humiliation. The true man does not abhor old age, for in it he can attain his undisturbed unfolding; his years are steps, higher and higher.
If you fear not sickness, misery, old age, death, any calamity: for you, old age will be a more and more certain fulfilment, poverty a burdenless freedom, any misery an increase, and you will know death before you die.
The natural need of childhood: freedom. And today's child is caged by constraints.
The natural need of adulthood: life. And today's adult either barely lives, or lives at the expense of himself and others, on hidden paths.
The natural need of old age: rest. And today's old man, as if his earlier needs could not be satisfied, wants freedom and life even at the edge of the grave.
Would you swap fates with someone?
Do you want to be rich? You would trade your wealth with a billionaire, but not your destiny. Would you like to be a people pleaser? With the king or the people's leader you would trade your power, but not your destiny. Would you like to be a saint? With a saint you would exchange your state of development, but not your destiny.
Each man can bear only his own fate; he would collapse under the fate of another.
Fate gives to each one the food that is alone suited to him; but he who cannot like all flavours alike, gnaws one food with satisfaction, and is nauseated by another; and digests one food with difficulty because he is greedy to gobble it, and another because he would spit it out.
A moving object can be injured, movement is inviolable; the things of life can be injured, life is inviolable. Recognize separately in yourself that which is moving and is the thing of life: all that is your temporary part; and that which is movement and is life itself: all that is your final whole.
Observe the uninterrupted flow of phenomena: all different and always different and yet always the same. Observe the aches and pains of your body: from the dull ache to the sharp flash of pain, how many varieties! And they are constantly changing, layered on top of each other, like the motifs of a musical score, or the lacework of leaves, twigs and flowers on a tree. Observe the intertwining of goodwill, passion, lies, violence in history, in the present and in your own everyday life: all that you know to be bad, ugly, petty, in itself, weaves itself into a harmony as harmonious as the wandering of clouds or the chain of mountain peaks.
Life must be understood like a piece of music. If you can disassociate yourself from all the pleasant or unpleasant effects that the things of life, one by one, have on your individuality: you will recognize the common beauty in the play of the waves and the aches and pains of your body and the alternation of events and the flow of your feelings and thoughts and everything. All different and always different and yet always the same. Pay attention not to the role and effect of things, but to their pattern and pace: only in this way can you understand life, nature, your fellow human beings and yourself.
That which has not yet started on the road, or is at the beginning of the road - the stone, the baby - has not yet acquired any treasure for itself, and is in itself worthy of love. And the being who has arrived at perfection, who has already absorbed the treasures he has acquired and has nothing, just like the stone or the infant: he is also worthy of love in itself. And the not-yet-departed and the already-arrived are the same.
The man on the way of increase, who is crumbling under half-acquired truncated treasures, can only be loved from the delusion of the mischief of idle treasures, or from kinship, or from compassion, or from the heatless, perfect equanimity of infinite love.
The main form of disruption of completeness is that it becomes female and male. The infant who is only approaching womanhood or manhood is as complete as the being who rises above individual separateness, who unites womanhood and manhood, dissolves them into the unchangeable.
Just as the female body and the male body need to be completed, so the female soul and the male soul are incomplete. Woman knows not light, man knows not warmth. Woman lacks the true creative power, man lacks the true life-force. Woman, if she strives for the lasting treasure of humanity, only truly grasps what is in her like a moving, lively, effervescent event: she regards the temple of creation as a snack-bar, a gossip corner. The man, when he is in the sweet games and warm intimacy of human breeding, becomes obscured, mechanized: he sees the temple of life as an occasion for comfort. The woman floats in the moving, hot current of life, detached, and only looks at that which is organically connected, breeding, nature: the man paddles in the universe, enclosed, and contemplates the objects of his interest as islands.
If a man sometimes sees into the soul of a woman, or observes a woman hidden beneath her own male being: he sees that in the reddish twilight, formless things that are washed into each other live in a hot pulsation like germs: if a man's soul or a man's being hidden within himself is revealed to the woman: she sees that things shimmer in a bluish grey light, separated from each other, statue-like.
A woman, when she works, radiates her joys, her sorrows, her whole world into her work; a man, when he works, shuts everything else out. The woman, when she plays cards, dissolves herself in the group of players and wants to win from the players: the man, when he plays cards, is drawn to the vicissitudes of the game and wants to win at the game. A woman, when she opens an orange and offers you a few cloves of it with a good heart, has almost opened herself, offering you from her own world of feeling what is hers to give you: a man, when he offers you food with a good heart, is glad to give you what is his. A woman wants to merge the life of the man she loves with her own life; a man wants to draw the woman he loves more closely to his own being. The woman seeks in love the intoxicating fulfilment of her life; the man seeks in love the intoxicating, ever-increasing wholeness of his.
The needs of woman and man do not overlap: that is why the woman's complement is not the excellent creative man, but the cavalier who is always hurrying and who is always carrying her along, dazzling her again and again, until this double flight finally becomes a family security; and the complement of the man is not the excellent, vitalizing woman, but the enchantress, who can stimulate his senses, and through this, enrapture his whole being, and, moreover, take over his convictions, his preferences, his plans. As it is rare for a woman to find in one person the cavalier and the head of the family, and a man the enchantress and the adaptable, hence the many disappointments.
A man's being is a hard core, a woman's being is all references. Family, wealth and other circumstances are, for the man, the shapers of his life: for the woman, life itself. A man can be truly known by examining him in himself, free from his circumstances; a woman by examining her relations to people and circumstances.
If a woman's novel is about the 'ideal man': a great conqueror of women, the perfect head of a family, a brave and decisive man, a man of great talent in everything, but we do not know where all this excellence fits in, because his being is no more than a dressed-up man-face in a clothes shop window. And the 'ideal woman' in the man's novel is all rosy delicacy and golden cleverness, but the only real aspect of her is that she is madly in love with the male hero, with whom the writer and the reader identify themselves involuntarily: she floats through the world as groundlessly as the sweet angels in Christmas cards.
Which is worth more: the woman or the man? It doesn't matter. Either can reach the ultimate: wholeness. But each in a different way: the man develops his own closed being into an ever more open, fuller one; the woman, like a soft warmth, flies into the ultimate soft, warm nest.