Nietzsche had a huge impact in the world on Philosophy, Spirituality and Religion. In this first episode of the series we explore one of his classics, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and explore Nietzsche's map of spiritual evolution.
Copyright 2023 by Letters to the Sky
Nietzsche had a huge impact in the world on Philosophy, Spirituality and Religion. In this first episode of the series we explore one of his classics, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and explore Nietzsche's map of spiritual evolution.
Copyright 2023 by Letters to the Sky
Stephan Downes:
Hi, I'm Stephan Downes.
Adam:
And I'm Adam Rizvi.
Stephan Downes:
And this is Letters To The Sky, a podcast about the metaphysical iconoclasts, philosophical visionaries and religious leaders of the world.
Adam:
Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, neither or something in between, we invite you to take a deep dive with us down metaphysical radicals and learn to see your life from a new perspective.
Stephan Downes:
All right, are you ready for this?
Adam:
Yeah, let's do this.
Stephan Downes:
All right. Adam, how would you describe yourself?
Adam:
Well, there's a lot in that, but I'm a doctor. I'm an ICU doctor in particular and we call ourselves intensivists. I also am a product of a multicultural marriage, multireligious marriage. My mom was raised Catholic, my dad was raised Muslim and I ended up being fascinated by those worlds and other spiritual worlds. I majored in comparative religion when I was in college because of all these questions that kept popping up in my mind. Yeah I'd say I'm spiritual, if you can use that word, meditation practitioner and scientist. There's a lot in that question. How would you describe yourself, Stephan?
Stephan Downes:
I would describe myself a lot along the same lines, although I'm not a doctor. I tried to be, thanks to you, but failed. I hold you legally and financially responsible for that position. I'm also someone who's been a meditator and training in a spiritual lineage for a long time now, for me anyway, about around 15 years. Currently, I work in publishing and I love having the conversations about the sacred and the profane about what is meaningful in life, how do people transform, what is spiritual awakening, is it actually the same across different traditions or different traditions pointing to different things, what are the strengths of studying with one path versus studying with many, the path of learning versus the path of devotion. I just love these questions and they are definitely what drives me.
Adam:
I feel like there are insights to the spiritual path and just personal growth that can be found in areas not typically relegated in that domain. The conversations I have with my colleagues, these sort of conversations and topics come up, but people don't label them necessarily as religious or spiritual. They're just curious about what is this all about.
Stephan Downes:
Absolutely. I mean, we typically think of them kind of relegated to explicitly spiritual traditions, but I agree. That's not my experience. All right, so what are we talking about today?
Adam:
This time, we chose a classic in the philosophical world, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche and not the whole book, but one particular portion of it called the three metamorphoses, which I found particularly compelling because of its applicability to how one grows psychologically and spiritually.
Stephan Downes:
Just for people listening, neither Adam or I are subject matter experts in anything ...
Adam:
That's right.
Stephan Downes:
... other than the spiritual path. We are not Friedrich Nietzsche experts. We are not scholars. We are having these conversations in the spirit of serving people and ourselves in our personal growth. If you are coming to this conversation expecting for a dissertation on Nietzsche's nihilism and how it relates to the spiritual path, keep listening, but I'm not promising any satisfaction.
Adam:
I think you can tell that we're not professionals at this. By the way, Stephan has mispronounced Nietzsche's name.
Stephan Downes:
Yes that's correct. I don't speak German or know much about Friedrich Nietzsche.
Adam:
Got it. That's really good the second time around.
Stephan Downes:
Alright.
Adam:
This particular section, the three metamorphoses, Nietzsche or I guess his avatar, if you will, Zarathustra in this book, is going to a town called the Pied Cow. We're going to go into that a little bit more. He is sharing his wisdom to the townsfolk. He basically says that, "Man," although he used the word spirit, "undergoes three metamorphoses." The first one being a camel. We start off as a camel and are laden with the heavy weights of the traditions that came before us. Our job is to take on those weights to the point that we metamorphose into a lion whose job is to destroy previously held values and kill a dragon that is represented by the term thou shalt. We're going to go definitely into that a little bit more. Then after that, the lion turns into a child who represents innocence. Those three stages, according to Zarathustra at least, are the three major stages that one takes as one evolves, psychologically, spiritually on multiple levels.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah that sounds about right. This text is written almost biblically, I would say. The English used takes a bit of work to decipher. Again, we're reading a translation. I don't speak mid-19th century German. We're doing the best we can off of the English translation that we have here. This text is a little over a page and a half long maybe and a much longer book. As Adam said, we're not going to get into the rest of the book because that would be a monumental task. Without further ado, Adam, what the hell is the Pied Cow?
Adam:
I feel like I'm answering this as if I somehow know, but from what I've read and dived into a bit of a rabbit hole, the Pied Cow is a multicolored cow. It's a multifaceted cow that I think symbolically represents the source of the town's knowledge and collectively held values. There's this comment that Nietzsche makes a little later on that the townsfolk are suckling on the utter of their Pied Cow values, distracting them from the truth. It seems like he talks about it derogatorily and that this cow, I think, represents where we all are, ignorant of the truth, ignorant of another way of being really and that we continually get our sustenance from a source that just keeps us in ignorance and yet thinking that we're getting what we need to sustain ourselves. I think Nietzsche made that comment there towards the very end of that page and a half that you talked about for I guess the reader to realize, "We are the townsfolk," or he treats the reader, he assumes the reader is the townsfolk and it's time for us to wake up and no longer sustain ourselves on something that is keeping us dealt down in and stupid essentially.
Stephan Downes:
I don't know about you, Adam, but I'm definitely not sucking on the teat of the Pied Cow nor have I ever been. Completely I didn't relate to this story, whatsoever, not one bit. All right, so even right there and then the Pied Cow is mentioned in a single line of the three metamorphoses. It's the last line and just says that Zarathustra spoke these things in a town called the Pied Cow and a lot of that information you gave is from the larger text. Right away, we are set that this is some kind of secret revelation, some secret knowledge that Zarathustra is giving people that they don't already have. The secret knowledge in this case is the three metamorphoses, and as you said, the camel, the lion and the child. So what is the camel? What does Nietzsche mean when he says the camel?
Adam:
Well, I'll tell you what I thought and then I'd love to know what came to you when you read this. So the camel, I got this image of going out in the desert and you're going to go on a journey and there's this camel and you have to put all your luggage, all the water that you're carrying, all your stuff on this camel and then you get on it yourself and you traverse the desert. I have this image of a camel whose job is to take on heavy loads. It seems like Zarathustra meant it that way because when he first talks about the camel, he says, "It's happy to be heavy laden." I feel like the camel is a like a young kid. It's taken on everything his parents, her parents are telling them, society, TV, media, teachers. They don't know that they could say no to some of this. They're just taking it all on, at face value, as truth. I think the job is to take as much on as you can to be exposed to as much as possible in order to then go beyond what you think is appropriate and what isn't. You basically supersede those values to create your own, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. I think the camels job is to take everything and take it then on. What do you think?
Stephan Downes:
I like that analysis in general. For me, when Zarathustra's speaking, he's speaking almost on a societal level and he's talking about societal norms. I feel like this is a part of life where we take on dogma. We take on the way things should be pridefully. We take them on and it's our pleasure to do so, just like you said, and we're less concerned with some sort of individual identity and we're just happy to be a part of group and we're happy to help carry the load, the load of tradition, the load, like I said, of dogma, of shoulds and this is the way things have always been.
Adam:
That's interesting. I hadn't considered that. Are you saying that the camel is actually society and society is the one changing, not an individual?
Stephan Downes:
No. I think what the camel is carrying is the societal norms in a way. I'm not personally clear on whether the camel is an individual or if the camel is spirit and what the distinctions are that Nietzsche makes between what is the "spirit" and what is the camel here.
Adam:
That's interesting. I'm going to read the very first line here.
Stephan Downes:
Is it going to answer my question on the first line?
Adam:
No, just to highlight what you're saying. Zarathustra says, "Three metamorphoses of the Spirit do I designate to you, how the spirit becometh as a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child."
Stephan Downes:
You did answer my question, the literal first sentence. This is so typically me.
Adam:
Did you not read this?
Stephan Downes:
I did read it. This always happens to me where I read a text, it's very profound, it has a lot of meaning and I still have these really foundational questions about the author and the author's underlying beliefs that led to this story or text. I've been guilty, not once, not twice but many times of missing the first line that sets up the whole thing. Yes, that's what happened.
Adam:
Yeah so it's interesting, a couple of comments, spirit at least in this text is under case, lower case, I should say as opposed to, let's say, spirit in an upper case situation, which would imply some sort of divinity.
Stephan Downes:
You know we should do? We should become Nietzsche scholars. I think that's the answer here. It's the only way.
Adam:
Oh, God, no.
Stephan Downes:
Does anyone here run an academic program, at an institute of higher learning and wants to just take us, Adam and I, as students, so we can get our PhDs in Nietzsche?
Adam:
I have a feeling as we go on and have other conversations, this is going to keep coming up, our wannabe PhD status.
Stephan Downes:
I love it. I love it.
Adam:
We're just two guys that have a lot of interest in this, trying to make sense out of this text. Here's the thing, Nietzsche, I imagine, is not writing to PhDs.
Stephan Downes:
What?
Adam:
I think he's writing to anyone who's willing to read his book. I'm sure he has that in mind, but I liked what you said, Stephan, about society. Krishnamurti, who is also a philosopher that I enjoy reading, talks a lot about the interplay between the individual and society and that there are sometimes false dichotomies set up between the two where the individual is society and society is the individual. We create this amorphous being that's somehow separate from us and we label it society, but it really isn't. Society really is us. It's us individually. Krishnamurti does a much better job of expressing that.
Stephan Downes:
No, I don't think he could. I like Krishnamurti. I think his writing is great. I think if Krishnamurti had tried to said that, it would have been like four books long.
Adam:
That's true with a lot of ... If you listen to his YouTube with maybe 10 seconds of silence between each word and then you would pause and be really frustrated about something and ask the listener to really pay attention to what he's saying.
Stephan Downes:
I would love to hear you do Krishnamurti. Okay, anyway, this, I think, is where it's going to go is how much of this is an external literal metaphor and how much of it has to do with ourselves and I think the answer is both here. We can literally talk about how the society, the quoteon quote "society", the collective group of people that are all in doing something together, how that's not really congruent with the individual's needs and how a lot of our development is based around finding those boundaries and finding out what works for us as individuals versus society. Now, I think you could also, at the same time, have the conversation about these are internal states, right? These are internal levels of development. You can call them psychological development. You can call them spiritual development, personal development. I tend to go internal. I tend to talk about these things internally because I think in a lot of the conversations that we've had over the years, Adam, we love talking about and love exploring how does one go from fear from misunderstanding to understanding to freedom. Okay, so eventually, the camel is walking along and the camel is carrying this heavy load. At some point, something in the camel happens. It switches like a switch flips and the camera is like, "No, this isn't mine. I don't like carrying this anymore." The problem is the camera has a lot of momentum, right? People don't want the camel to stop carrying the stuff. The camel says, "F it, screw this, I'm done." At this point, the camel becomes the lion. The lion is a reaction against what the camel is carrying. A lion is talking about, "I'm going to fight this construct. I'm going to fight this part of myself that thought that all of these things were correct. I'm going to do so in order to be free, right? The part of Zarathustra is the lion battles this dragon. Okay, now take it away.
Adam:
Well, first of all, I love your interpretation, the camel saying, "F it," and becoming a lion.
Stephan Downes:
That's actually if I were the camel.
Adam:
That's if you were the camel, I was going to say, let me quote that passage in here. In this paragraph, Zarathustra says, "And like the camel which when laden hasteneth into the wilderness, so hasteneth the spirit into its wilderness. But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis. Here the spirit becometh a lion." The couple of things about that quote, one, it's pretty obvious that Zarathustra or Nietzsche, I should say, is equating what the camel is doing to what the spirit is doing. He said, "Like the camel, the spirit is also going into its wilderness." So what is the spirit's wilderness? I do want you to take that on Stephan, but also the other thing is he says, "In the loneliest wilderness happens the second metamorphosis." Why would he say that that is lonely? What are your thoughts on this wilderness?
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, I think a lot of people who have studied symbolism, whether it be in writing, in film and in story, wilderness is a lot of times it kind of represents the unknown at least for the person who's entering it, right? We talk about entering the wilderness and this is in the Bible. This is all over our culture. The wilderness is the wild. It's untamed. It is uncontrollable. It is bigger than you, bigger than society. It doesn't care. There's the sense that nature doesn't really give a damn about us and what we want as you know creatures who create meaning in cities and all these constructions that we rely on that nature doesn't really care. He talks about that the loneliest wilderness and I love this line. I love the word loneliest too because I really think that at a certain point, people have to be willing to be alone in this thing that they believe and I've seen this in a lot of people and a lot of students that happens many times throughout the spiritual path. It first happens when you have a group of friends that you're hanging out with and you spend time with and they're your group. Then you have some sort of initial spiritual awakening where you realize maybe you need to be kinder to people, maybe you need to do less drugs if you're a young person or somebody who's been doing a lot of drugs. That's the way you've been living your life. Then at a certain point, you have the spiritual awakening, whatever it is, it's not actually particular and you realize that there's a different way of being. You have this experience alone, but then you go back to your group or your culture, your society and all of a sudden, they're like, "What are you talking about? You're insane. You are crazy right now." I've made this choice many times, I'm sure you have too, you make this choice about, is what I'm experiencing true enough that I'm willing to sacrifice for it? This, for me, is that transformation from camel to lion. Again, Nietzsche or Zarathustra is talking about this really in three stages. In my experience, these three stages are continually unfolding. It's not like you ever stopped being a camel and you're 100% lion. I feel like we are all camels in some way. We're all lions in some way. To a certain extent, we're all children in some way, although I can see that most people stop at lion and lion is kind of where a lot of people land. That's how I take this. Wilderness is that moment when you are alone and you are deciding that what is true for you is important enough that you are going to take off the heavy load, right? You're going to remove this heavy load and you are free. One of the words that Nietzsche uses here or Zarathustra uses, he says, right after you actually stopped reading, he said, "Here, the spirit becometh the lion." The next line I thought was really important, "Freedom, it will capture and lordship in its own wilderness." This is an important stage. The word capture, that verb, it's such an active possessive verb that it's very evocative. He's going to go after something and get it. Then the lion is, we all know, lion is very symbolic of the king, the lord of their domain, "It's mine. What I'm doing is true, not what they're doing." There's a huge surge of individualism in this phase of development that's kind of ongoing.
Adam:
So a couple of things, I think about the wilderness as a place where there are no paths. You can have nature and then you can terraform it, you can landscape it, you can create your path. That's the effect of those who have gone before you and then you walk those paths and the paths that are walk more often are deeper tread. Then you enter the wilderness and there's nothing. It's just wild. You have to cut and slash through the brush, or in the case of where I live, the desert. There's just nowhere to go. There's just mountains maybe or sand. That sense of, "I don't have a path to follow," is a very critical one because you can either freak out and turn back the way you came or you could say, "I'm going to create my own path. That's the whole point of this, and with the strength that I've been given, having built the muscles as the camel, so to speak, I am now turning into a lion." There's something about if the camel were laden more, it would be a stronger lion. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but physiologically at least, I imagine that to be the case, right? You carry a heavier load. You build stronger muscles. In my life, I have had many normative values put on me from multiple traditions and chose to step away from religious norms that I was raised in and then entered into a different spiritual path which had incidentally its own norms. That's what I loved about what you said in that, "We are all camels. We're all lions. We're all children." No matter if you've become a lion in one domain in your life, you will then, in my experience, become a camel again, only to then be aligned in that world and the cycle just keeps cycling over and over and over again. In Zarathustra's description of the lion, you're spot on. There's a strength in individualism that comes from becoming the lion. Tell me, Stephan, let's say we're lions now. What do you think the purpose of the lion is?
Stephan Downes:
I would love to tell you, but I think Zarathustra stressed it quite well here. Nietzsche and Zarathustra go on to talk about how the lion's battle now. We've talked about how the lion is going to become a lord of his own wilderness, right? Lord of the wilderness. Next, Zarathustra goes on to talk about how he's fighting a dragon. I love that description here. It says, "Thou shalt is the great dragon called, but in the spirit of the lion saith, 'I will.'" I love that. It's giving me chills. It's really lining up to be this epic battle between should and will. It's super individualistic. It's super empowering. There's a different kind of identity that comes along with being lion. Next he goes on and says, "What is the great dragon, which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? Thou shalt is the great dragon called." It says, "Thou shalt lieth in its path," talking about the lion, "sparkling with gold, a scale covered beast and on every scale glitter with golden, 'Thou shalt.' The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales and does speaketh of the mightiest of all dragons. All the value of things glitter in me, all the values have already been created, and all created values I do represent. Verily there shall be no 'I will' anymore. Thus speaketh the dragon." For me, this is such-
Adam:
Oh, I love it.
Stephan Downes:
This is combat, right?
Adam:
It is combat.
Stephan Downes:
This is another hugely important part of the path and I feel like in using the language that Zarathustra set out, most people oscillate between camel and lion in different ways, in different parts of their lives. I think that the teachings of the child are so subtle that I think a lot of people misidentify the lion for the child at a certain point. They think that they've reached the child that kind of state of development called the child, but they're really just a trickier, more skilled lion that's learning new subtle ways to fight the dragon called Thou shalt.
Adam:
Yeah, I think it's worth talking a little bit about the child. The child, he says, his innocence. It's not that he's suggesting we revert to an infantile state. I think he's using-
Stephan Downes:
I think I'm pretty sure he was being extremely literal because this whole story is extremely literal.
Adam:
Pure literal.
Stephan Downes:
That Nietzsche, always the literal one.
Adam:
Yeah, exactly. Having said that, about the child. God, I love, "The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales." I love that phrase because I guess for you or anyone here listening, the feeling of going against the shoulds of your society, of your family, of your religion, of everything that's come before you can often feel like you're fighting a dragon. I love that that Nietzsche says here, "The dragon represents the values of a thousand years," because when you push back, you're not just pushing it back against the opinion of your parent, for example. No, you're pushing back up against the opinions of their parents and their parents' parents and their entire family and generations beyond, all of which have built up a particular way of being in the world that they are now offering to you and sometimes forcing upon you and certainly it feels that way as a kid or maybe even a teenager. The strength that one needs, emotionally, psychologically, to say, "That's not who I am," and to kill the dragon, metaphorically speaking, I don't think Nietzsche is saying all of us need to fight our parents and to slay all values, but we have to be willing to do so. When the time comes and we'll all face that time in, in my experience, to have the strength of that lion to slay the dragon and to know what the dragon represents.
Stephan Downes:
Absolutely. I mean, this imagery is so powerful. Zarathustra says, "To create itself freedom and give a holy Nay, even unto duty, for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion." He talks about here a couple things. One is the word Nay. The lion is a negation of the sanctity of what has come before, right? Everybody pretty much values tradition in some way, some more than others. Some people for them tradition is everything. For some people like I grew up in a household where I grew up kind of far away from all of my extended family. I would see them maybe once a year or once every other year, but we didn't grow up with big family traditions other than going to my grandparent's house at Christmas. There's a lot of people that grew up close to their families. They have a lot of strong connections to family and to tradition. Those things are really kind of like anchors for them. In order to create freedom for an individual, the lion has to say no to those things and especially to duty. Nietzsche talks about, he uses the word need. This is why there's a need for the lion. That word need, I don't think is accidental. In order to create this freedom, I mean we'll find out it's not even creating the freedom, it's creating the potential for freedom, right? This needs to happen. One does not become a lion, because it is like, "I guess." There's no thing, "I guess I'll do that," like non-commit, like beveling commitment. The lion is very strong and very firm and very direct and says no to the dragon says no to Thou shalt.
Adam:
Right, if you go back one sentence, so there's this idea of, "Okay, if you're saying no to the values cherished by society, clearly the idea is that there will be a new set of values that is created." Zarathustra actually speaks to this. He says, "To create new values, that even the lion cannot yet accomplish, but to create itself freedom for new creating, that can the might of the lion do." That right there, I think, is the difference between the child and the lion. The child will create the new values from a place of total freedom and the lion's job is to create that freedom so that new values can be generated.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we have this lion here. We have this individual, this rugged individual, who has said down with the system, down with tradition, no, no to all of it. "I am me and I am not that tradition," right? Then there's another transformation right, and this transformation is called the child, Nietzsche calls the child. I think I want to hear your take on this.
Adam:
Okay, okay. I can't help but equating the child to Jesus and let me tell you why.
Stephan Downes:
Of course, of course. Hold on, for those who are listening, I just want to say we have had been having conversations like this for years and years and there is so much subtext here that you are, unfortunately, not picking up on, but one of those is that Adam here has a much stronger relationship, I would say, to the Abrahamic religions than I do. A lot of the back and forth tends to be poking fun at each other for our particular tradition that we end up interpreting.
Adam:
When you think of a child or a Holy Child, how can you not think of the child in the manger? I know Nietzsche, being a well-rounded German that he was, would have read the Bible and be very familiar with biblical story. Child and Madonna in the world of art, they use that word Child and Madonna. They don't say Jesus and Madonna or Baby Jesus. They used the word child. I think that particular word has a connotation to reference Jesus Christ. That said, the other reason why I think this is potentially a reference to a Jesus-like figure is because his predecessor, the person who actually cleared the path for him who resided in the wilderness was John the Baptist.
Adam:
John the Baptist was the crazy man and I would say, John the Baptist was the lion. He refuted many of the traditions and values of the Judaic tradition before him and said that the Messiah was coming and he would baptize people. There's a lot of symbolism there, but I just want to point out the stark comparison here between someone in a wilderness who is negating the tradition of the past to make way for something new. In this case, I am pretty sure, this is taking a leap for, but I'm pretty sure Nietzsche is suggesting we all have the child within ourselves. He's not speaking about one particular individual, but the child within the innocence within, the part of us that is willing to create new values for ourselves. There's a part of us in my experience that is able to generate a new set of values, a new perspective that's independent of what's come before us, right? That place has to be informed by something, and if it's not by the values of the world, it's informed by an inner sense of knowing. I think that I'm referring to that space.
Stephan Downes:
The lion was very reactionary, right? The lion was a reaction to that camel essentially. The spirit was the camel and now the spirit is the lion and now the spirit is the child. It's not as if they're different people, right? It's all the same person, potentially the same spirit, right? One of the things about the lion to real quickly jump back is it says, "Now it is forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, right?" This is really the lion is being like, "No, none of it is holy." It says, "But tell me my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do. Why hath the praying lion still to become a child?" Then it goes on to say, "Innocence is the child and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy yay." Here we have the child is saying, "Yay," where the lion said, "Nay." The child is a yes, an affirmative yes and it's not a yes based on tradition. It's not a yes, based on a preconceived value system. It's not the camel. It's not saying, "Yes, tradition is important." It's saying yes to the sacred and it's saying yes to the lion's profanity, right? To me, the child is saying yes to both of those things. It's not reliant on any one of them. The child is not only accepting of both of those things because the word he uses a game, especially like a forgetfulness. There's no charge to anything anymore. There's no emotional attachment to either the lion or the camel. All of that stuff is in the past. I think this is a really developed state of being and I think it takes a lot of work to go from the lion to the child. Personally, I think it takes more work than for the lion to emerge from the camel. The lion emerging from the camel is almost a given, it seems for a lot of people, you know. A lot of people reject tradition, especially as individuals. We grew up in maybe a religious household and we've rejected it and now we're atheist. I think the child is a bit of a mystery for a lot of people. Once I have invested in my identity as a lion, I found something, right? I found something true and that is me and what I think is true. My identity and the child is beyond both the camel and the lion. I just think it's a more difficult place to get to. I think it is almost impossible to identify the child. I think a lot of things that appear to be quote on quote "the child in myself" end up being the lion, especially the lion, maybe less of the camel, but for sure, the lion. This is what it's all about for me is what is the child, right? How do we identify the child? If the child is already existent in us, how are we recognizing the child, right? Can the lion actually become the child, right? Nietzsche here says there's a transformation, but is the child there regardless of the lion and the camel?
Adam:
Oh wow. That's really interesting. Well yeah, if you take the Eastern perspective, the argument is that the child has been there all along, right?
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, that's certainly one Eastern perspective.
Adam:
Then the lion becoming the child is the realization that it's always been there. I think about many Eastern saints or teachers, spiritual teachers, who are iconoclasts and who are reportedly to be enlightened, but they behave in a way that's extremely iconoclastic. We can think of many Buddhist teachers and masters who will just do the craziest things after apparently becoming enlightened. I think from an onlooker's perspective, they would say, "Oh, that's a very lion-like behavior," but underneath it all is the child. I think what Zarathustra is talking about is, this is an interpretation, these stages represent how we feel internally, our internal approach to reality and circumstances. It might seem like we're in a particular stage from the outside, but internally if we are destroying idols, both metaphorically and symbolically, being very iconoclastic, but internally, we realize it's just a game and it's just happening, not necessarily as a reaction to anything but just the way we are, is that. I'd say that that person is a child but being perceived as a lion.
Stephan Downes:
I think we've gone from very concrete internal examples of what the camel is and the lion is, but I feel like we haven't quite landed on how we can talk about the child, experientially you know, because even if you say like, "Oh, it's just a game," there's a huge tendency in spiritual communities all over the world from all sorts of major traditions that say, "Oh, the world is just a game. Therefore, it doesn't matter. Therefore, I can do whatever I want." It's a nihilism, right? It's a nihilism that because it's a game, nothing matters. This for me, this is why people think they're the child when they're really the lion because that's not what it means to say it's a game, right? Games aren't meaningless. Games are full of meaning, right? It's just that it's a game. There's no charge to the meaning, "I'm playing a character. I'm playing an identity. I'm playing all these things." They are meaningful and there are consequences. There are consequences everywhere we look. It's not that the game is to say, "Oh, it doesn't matter and I can do whatever I want." That is the biggest trap that I see spiritual practitioners especially, I was going to say Western spiritual practitioners because that's most of my experience that they fall into is they awaken to this cosmic joke that it's a game, but they interpret it as if that means that they can do whatever they want and nothing's true.
Adam:
One other thought I had which relates to misinterpreting what the child really is, is how the Nazis actually took the writing of Nietzsche and you served it for their own purposes. Nietzsche talks about the Ubermensch, the Superman or the Overman and used it to describe the man who has gone through all those stages, the man who is the child in many ways and the man who's transcended the values. For those who have fully read Nietzsche and I don't claim to be one, but I imagine if you've really gone down that rabbit hole and read all of Nietzsche, you'd know that his Ubermensch was a referent to that higher stage of psychological spiritual growth and yet the Nazis took it and made it be about the area and race and their particular group and that they were destined to be the Ubermensch. That's one of the most, I think, superficial ways of interpreting this teaching.
Stephan Downes:
Yeah, to go from the lion of child, it really does take a teacher because there's a lot of trial and error in it and there's a lot of having to learn what looks like the child but is actually the lion. It's a process just like anything else. You can have an awakening to the child, you can think you know what the child is, but unless you have somebody to give you a reflection, who also knows who the child is, right? who has also seen the child who has part of them has become the child. I really personally don't know if it's possible. Maybe there's been a few outliers historically who have somehow done it spontaneously, but I don't know how you can get to this stage without a teacher. One of the greatest dangers the above all else is premature claims of enlightenment. It's exactly for this reason. It's because the lion thinks that he has found something right? And then that thing becomes part of its lionness. If we don't have someone who'd be like, "Hey, you're a lion. Actually, you're cub. You think you're lying. You're still a bit of a cub. Maybe knock it off," it's a danger. There are people out there who have gone through this and are still lions pretending to be children and they think that they are children. They really legitimately believe that they are the child and they're not. For people who have had more development inside of the child stage and have had a teacher and have had someone help point out what the child is and what the child isn't and how subtle it is and how precise, it's like a razor's edge. You know? You can see it right away. Alan Watts is someone, he's served me a lot in my life in different ways, but one of the things he says that is so profound about this moment is like, "When you wake up, the people who say they're awake, but then pretend like what they're doing is something special right? As if they weren't just acting all along, they weren't just being a lion or camel all along, that something's different now, those are people who haven't gotten the second cosmic joke which is that it doesn't change it doesn't go away you know? Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." There's a reason why there's all of these sayings pointing to the fact that nothing changes you know? That it's not some monumental like, "Oh, now everything I do is sacred, whereas it wasn't before. Oh, there's this divinity now, whereas there wasn't before." The people who really have that awakening, they see that sacredness everywhere and they see the profanity everywhere as well. The distinction doesn't exist anymore and it applies to who they were before as well and it applies to our limitation, it applies to the sacredness, it applies to the profanity.
Adam:
"He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."
Stephan Downes:
Is that why you still teach?
Adam:
Yeah, that's Lao Tzu. I think he's spot on. There's when you get-
Stephan Downes:
Huge dum-dum by the way. God, Lao Tzu, such a major dum-dum.
Adam:
Major dum-dum. Plus, there's the whole thing about whether words can even begin to capture the reality of that experience.
Stephan Downes:
Oh, man, we've gone so beyond this page and a half. I was worried about this when we started. I was like, "I know it's going to happen." There might be someone out there who's still listening, and to that person, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?
Adam:
Don't you have a life.
Stephan Downes:
Oh, my God. No one's driving to work anymore. There's no reason to be listening to this.
Adam:
I would summarize this as saying, before, there was Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Monomyth. Before there was a clear outline of the structured path of individual growth, there was Nietzsche and Zarathustra who gave us a very basic, but I think as we just found out, a really powerful outline for the development of men in the case of the camel that becomes a lion who becomes a child.
Stephan Downes:
I think what matters to me is that it's useful to people to hear these conversations and to hear they're applicable to their lives which gets us into, how is this information applicable to people's lives? What I would take away from this conversation for someone living their lives every day, just know that these stages are within all of us at all times and that there's times in our lives when we have been the camel and there's times in our lives when we've been the lion. There's probably times in our lives when we've been the child as well, even if we maybe didn't even recognize it.
Adam:
What I would say about this in terms of its applicability can be evidenced by how Nietzsche lived his life. I didn't get a chance to talk about this earlier, but Nietzsche-
Stephan Downes:
Now is the time. Now is the time.
Adam:
Now's the time. He actually lived with Richard Wagner. For those of you who don't know Richard Wagner, he's the famous German composer who wrote the Flight of the Valkyries and you can just google that and listen to it.
Stephan Downes:
Hold on, hold on, this is how it goes. (singing).
Adam:
Right.
Stephan Downes:
That's the Flight of Valkyries. You don't need to google it. My version is better.
Adam:
Yes, it is. That's well done, sir. Well done. Richard Wagner, there's so much I can say about him, but he was a father figure in many ways intentionally or unintentionally for Nietzsche. He would be the appropriate age to be Nietzsche's father. Nietzsche, at one point, I'm going to paraphrase, said, "There isn't much to live for necessarily in this world except for people like Wagner, knowing that someone like Wagner could produce the art and the beauty that he produced for society." He really much held him in esteem. Now at some point there was a breaking away and Nietzsche did not feel like Wagner was representing where he wanted him to go. Then they broke away. Now that I feel represented in Nietzsche's lion stage and I think most of Nietzsche's life was the lion. He tore down the values of centuries of human society. Nietzsche is also the one who famously said, "God is dead." If that's not iconoclastic, I don't know what is. In many ways, Nietzsche totally epitomized the lion.
Stephan Downes:
Nietzsche wasn't in like 2020 America. It wasn't an agnostic or atheistic society by any stretch of the imagination.
Adam:
Right, so say that in a society that was still very, very religious, was so, so iconoclastic. That's what I would say. I feel like we have a lot to learn about Nietzsche and now looking back on it, if I was a young man going through what I went through in my childhood, this is helpful to me and that I know there is a future to the struggles I'm going through. As a teenager going through my rebellion and young adult going through my rebellion against the values I've been given, I know that can become a lion. Not only that, a lot of teenagers might think who are rebelling, I think the lion is the way to be, but no. If they were to read Nietzsche, they would know not only could you become a lion, but there is a stage above that where there's an innocence there.
Adam:
I would even go so far, Nietzsche didn't say this, but I would go so far as saying the child doesn't suffer. There's no suffering in that state. That's something to look forward to, to know that, yes, your evolution and your development can grow to the point where there's no more suffering. That would be very meaningful to me and applying it well.
Stephan Downes:
I think that was beautifully said.
Adam:
On that note, I think we got this.
Stephan Downes:
I think we nailed it.