One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 36: The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Tragedy of his Teaching

CHAPTER 36

The Brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche,

and the Tragedy of his Teaching

         

“I am Zarathustra, the godless; where do I find my equal? All those are my equals who determine their will out of themselves, and who push all submission away from themselves,” declared Nietzsche’s hero with no less hubris than Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who cut off his nose to spite his face rather than bow to God’s will.

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” said Satan, and Nietzsche followed suite by declaring God dead rather than submit to God’s imperative; but—and this is the but that opened the gates of hell and set loose all those nasty heathen demons upon the world—did Nietzsche know what God’s imperative was, or did he misperceive Christianity for God’s will? That’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching; by honoring man’s free will in his tendentious teaching of the Superman, he dishonored God’s imperative, because brilliant little Nietzsche had to have his cake and eat it too…

“I was fascinated…yet repelled at the same time. I found it difficult to discover the right attitude toward Nietzsche,” wrote Rudolf Steiner in his book Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom. And after much study, Steiner concluded: “This was the picture of Nietzsche that appeared in my thought. He revealed to me the personality who did not see the spirit, but in whom unconsciously the spirit fought against the unspiritual views of his age,” making of Friedrich Nietzsche a paradoxical man who drove himself insane rather than submit to the imperative of his divine nature and reconcile the dual consciousness of his  essential and existrential self, the being and non-being of his false and true self.

I never understood my fascination with Nietzsche either when studying philosophy at university, and it wasn’t until I found the answer many years later to the question that had called me to university (who am I?) that I learned that the Logos, the omniscient guiding principle of life, was responsible for the authors that changed my life, like P. D. Ouspensky, whose book In Search of the Miraculous introduced me to Gurdjieff’s teaching that awakened me to the secret way, C. G. Jung, whose Memories, Dreams, Reflections opened me up to a psychological understanding of the individuation process that helped resolve my deep-seated issues with Christianity, Dr. Victor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning confirmed my understanding of the gnostic way, and many more authors whose books were just what I needed at that time in my life; but never Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom I always had an instinctive antipathy and could never bring myself to read.

One can, and many have made a lifelong study of Nietzsche but never understanding why he turned on God and embraced the idea of eternal recurrence which justified his Satanic pride and trapped his soul in the recurring cycle of the same life forever; but having broken the cycle of eternal recurrence, which I explored in the memoir of my parallel life in The Summoning of Noman, I know that Nietzsche was wrong in the basic premise of his teaching that there is no God and we either embrace our fate or be crushed by it.

Nietzsche was trapped by his fate in the meaninglessness of life until he was granted an insight of eternal recurrence while out on a walk one day in the Swiss village of Sils Maria, and he took up the intellectual challenge of the idea of eternal recurrence and grew to love his fate so he could overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism, which gave birth to his Satanic hero Zarathustra who proudly justified why he had turned on God; but was it God the Logos that he had turned on, or the God of Christianity for whom he had a pathological antipathy? Wasn’t his amor fati just an ironic rationalization of his unhappy, miserable life?

I understand why he would believe that God was dead and that we had killed him (I also walked away from the God of Christianity), which drove Nietzsche insane trying to resolve the enantiodromiac nature of his dual self, but the teaching that his Satanic hero Zarathustra gave to the world has led the world down the garden path and left the world dangerously wanting; which brings to mind a spiritual musing that I wrote on how I resolved the issue of my own dual nature by adopting a special attitude to life that satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness, and made me happy:  

My Secret to a Happy Life

Yesterday Penny and I made our first batch of Italian sausages in Georgian Bay, just like my parents used to make; well, not quite the same, because in this batch we did not add fennel seeds to our spices of salt, black pepper, chili pepper flakes, granular garlic, and paprika. We made the first batch without the fennel seeds, because I’m going to give some to my neighbor Tony who does not like fennel seeds in his homemade sausages; and today we’re going to make the second batch with fennel seeds, and with less paprika.

After we ground the meat and mixed in the spices, Penny fried up a couple of small patties to taste the result, and we found it a little dry; so, I added a cup or so of red wine that I had made last fall with Tony and mixed it into the meat, and Penny fried up two more patties and it tasted fine; and then we spent an hour or so stuffing the meat into the casings that we slid onto the funnel attachment of our electric meat grinder.

I like fennel seeds in my Italian sausages, but there was a time when I denied myself the pleasure of eating sausages altogether because I had taken up a special way of life that was inspired by the Sufi path that Gurdjieff’s teaching had introduced me to. Serendipity had introduced Gurdjieff into my life by way of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous in my second year of philosophy studies at university, and as I “worked” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching I created what Gurdjieff called a “magnetic center” which attracted me to teachings of a similar nature, like Sufism and the sayings and parables of Jesus. Actually, Gurdjieff called his Fourth Way teaching “esoteric Christianity,” which was inspired by the secret teachings of the Essenes that Jesus was initiated into when he was a young man.

The premise of the Sufi Path is that one must “die before dying” to become their true self, which is a very difficult teaching to understand, let alone practice; but this is what Jesus meant with his paradoxical saying: “He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” And since I was on a quest to find my true self, I took Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” to heart, which over time pulled the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables into my life; and by secret way, I mean cultivating a special attitude with life that nourishes one’s inner self.

This, then, is the subject of today’s spiritual musing that came to me this morning while  “talking” with St. Padre Pio for my book A Sign of Things to Come, a creative exercise in what Jung called “active imagination,” not unlike Neale Donald Walsch’s “conversations” with God; and as I shared yesterday’s sausage making experience with my fellow countryman (Padre Pio was born in the village of Pietrelcina, not too far north from where I was born in the village of Panettieri, Calabria) I got the strongest feeling to write a spiritual musing on this special attitude that is essential for the growth of one’s inner self, an attitude of conscious living which is reflected in a poem that I wrote a number of years ago—

Sufi Sausages

The best sausages that I ever tasted

are made from a secret recipe that I found one day

while looking for the secret way.

I was so hungry for God that I would have eaten anything

to preserve my spiritual strength;

and I did, a cult concoction of sun and nonsense

that gave me spiritual cramps for many years.

Then I chanced upon a Sufi sausage maker who gave me

a secret recipe that changed my life forever.

“You take the casing that you have,” he instructed me,

“and stuff it with the meat of the last supper.”

I had no idea what he meant, until I re-read the Christian Bible; 

and from the moment I caught the light that Jesus shone,

I discerned the Sufi sausage maker’s wisdom,

and I began to practice the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making.

The first few batches that I made were much too spicy,

because I stuffed my casing with every esoteric meat

that I could find;

but with time, patience, and an ardent desire for God,

I learned to stuff my casing with the freshest meat of all,

the tender flesh of my own simple, daily life;

and the more I died to my mortal flesh,

the sweeter my sausages tasted, and the more strength

I gathered for my long journey back home to God.

            The most difficult aspect of my quest for my true self was decoding the language of the secret way, which is so well hidden that only the most devout seeker will ever decode the meaning of life’s purpose; but once I did, the secret way of the Sufi Path and Christ’s sayings and parables gave up their secret, and life finally began to make sense to me.

But I still had a lot more living and many years of writing before I could explain the secret way, until one day I realized that it all came down to a special attitude with life that reflected the essential truth of every spiritual teaching, and by special attitude I mean the secret of conscious living that Gurdjieff’s teaching made me wise to.

Of course, we are all conscious despite what Gurdjieff said about man being asleep to life, but consciousness is relative to every person, and waking up to life is a matter of degree for everyone; but it was Gurdjieff’s purpose as well as the Sufi Path and the sayings and parables of Jesus to speed up the process of self-realization and waking up to life, which in the language of the secret way means taking evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish.

Nature will only evolve us so far, said Gurdjieff; and to complete what Nature cannot finish we have to take evolution into our own hands by cultivating a special attitude with life that speeds up the process of becoming our true self, which is the essential meaning and purpose of our existence.

It took years for me to realize why Nature cannot evolve us to our full potential, but the more I “worked” on myself (which I encoded in my poem as the sacred art of Sufi sausage-making), the more I grew in truth and understanding, and it finally dawned on me one day that the secret way was all about resolving the consciousness of our dual nature; or, as Jesus expressed it in the secret language of his teaching, making our two selves into one.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, and he replied, “When the two will be one, and the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” And the two are one when we speak truth to each other and there is one soul in two bodies with no hypocrisy, as the saying is explained in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus, by Marvin Meyer.

This special attitude with life then is nothing more than learning how to live one’s life with conscious intention, which means karmic responsibility; because as long as we refuse to wake up to the governing principle of life, which in A Sign of Things to Come St. Padre Pio called “the law of corrective measures,” we remain trapped in the endless cycle of karma and reincarnation, which is why we have to take evolution into our own hands to complete what Nature cannot finish and become our true self. And if I were asked to define what I mean by this special attitude of the secret way, I’d be forced to say: simply be a good person, and let your conscience be your guide. That’s my secret to a happy life.

———

            For whatever reason Nietzsche lost his faith in God, he cut himself off from the spark of divine consciousness that he was born with and was never able to reconcile his existential self with the imperative of his divine nature; and in his effort to overcome the oppressive spirit of nihilism born of the emerging scientific age and his willful denial of God’s imperative to resolve the consciousness of his lower nature, he forged a teaching of “the eternal recurrence of all things” and embraced his existential self—over and over in a never-ending cycle of time eternal, a fate that he was forced to love by the imperative of his logic.

“And if you should die now, O Zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would say to yourself… ‘Now I die and decay…and in an instant I shall be nothingness…But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! ...I shall return…not to a new life or a better life or a similar life; I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life…to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the Superman once more…” wrote Nietzsche, staking his salvation on an idea of eternal egocentrism (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Classics; translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Introduction, p. 24).

“Alright,” I imagine proud little Nietzsche saying to himself, after he walked away from his Christian faith—for whatever reason, we will never know; but it was enough for him to deny the existence of the God altogether (probably crystallized by the love of his life, Lou Salome, who drove him into deep despair when she refused to marry him)— “if this is the way it’s going to be, then I’ll embrace my fate and be done with it!”

And like Satan in Paradise Lost, who turned on God and embraced hell forever, Nietzsche’s unconscious gave birth to the compensatory idea of the eternal recurrence of life, and he made a sterile heaven out of his own miserable existence by embracing his fate like Milton’s proud Satan; and he created his own stagnant heaven by giving birth to the Superman, whose sole purpose for being was to “overcome” his miserable existence over and over again for time eternal. “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power…And life told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again,” wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, echoing Milton’s Satan’s “The mind is its own place, and in itself /Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

“The Superman, the will to the Superman, the will to power and self-overcoming. Live dangerously! Amor fati, eternal recurrence, total affirmation of life. The great noontide. These are the slogans, the ‘signs’, by which Nietzsche surmounted his nihilism and resolved his crisis,” wrote R. J. Hollingdale; but it was a false resolution, because Nietzsche drove himself insane trying to satisfy the divine imperative of his inner self for wholeness and completeness by sacrificing his divine self to his existential self (eternally recurring or not), the obverse of Christ`s salvific teaching of making our two selves into one self whole and complete.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, which proud little Nietzsche so wrongly misperceived that he violently denounces Christianity for its redemptive nay-saying to life (self-sacrifice is the secret way of Christ’s teaching, which Jesus symbolized with the death of his lower self on the cross); and that’s the brilliance of Friedrich Nietzsche and the tragedy of his teaching—the same dilemma that haunts the pages of professor Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and my call to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good…