We need, every one of us needs, to pause from the hectic pace of our lives and to reflect upon things sacred and divine. Where the danger is, also grows the saving power. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was a German philosopher and poet, and is one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy. In 1848 his father, Ludwig Nietzsche, became seriously ill as consequence of a fall, and after his death in 1849, his skull was opened, and it was discovered that he had softening of the brain and that caused him to die early. In January of 1850, Nietzsche’s widowed mother lost her youngest son (who was born in 1848) and the family then moved to Naumburg. Friedrich accepted free admission to Pforta in 1858, it was a famous boarding school just a few miles from Naumburg. He was often at the head of his class and acquired an excellent classical education. In 1861 he wrote an enthusiastic essay on his favorite poet Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin, of whom the majority of his people scarcely even knew the name. Holderlin’s childhood was marked by bereavement, and he never recovered from his grief and spent the last years of his life hopelessly in agonizing pain. However, six years after Friedrich wrote his essay, Holderlin was widely recognized as Germany’s greatest poet after Geothe. The teacher wrote on the paper, “I must offer the author the kind advice to stick to a healthier, cleaner, more German poet.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

The medical records from the school of Friedrich Nietzsche contained an entry, recorded in 1862: “Shortsighted and often plagued by migraine headaches. His father died early of softening of the brain and was begotten in old age [actually, when his father was 57, his mother 35]; the son at a time when the father was already sick [most experts deny this]. As yet no grave signs are visible, but the antecedents require consideration. Throughout his life Friedrich’s health was poor. His doctors kept warning him to preserve his very bad eyesight by reading and writing less. He disregarded this advice, fought severe migraine and gastric pains with long walks and much writing, and took pills and potions to purchase a little sleep. Nothing of his brilliance relieved the sadness in his mind. Friedrich Nietzsche’s books became his life. He vegetated until his death. When the novelist Arnold Zweig wanted to write a book on Friedrich Nietzsche, Dr. Sigmund Freud wrote him that Friedrich Nietzsche’s psychological development could not be reconstructed and that he had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other person who ever lived or was ever likely to live.” What has always made the state a Hell on Earth has been precisely that humans have tried to make it a Heaven without correcting their own behavior. We are nothing; what we search for is everything. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

Socializing is an important aspect of life. We encourage people to cultivate friends with happy conversations among people who are similar to them. The offering of the prayer is not a ritual to be thoughtlessly spoken. It is, rather, the voicing of an obligation and a promise. Cleanliness of hands, as well as purity of heart, should be a common cultural practice. When I was a young boy God often rescued me from the shouts and the rods of people and I played among trees and flowers, secure in their kindness and the breezes of Heaven were playing there too. God is friendly and faithful, and I wish he could know how much my soul loves him. As we grow, we learn to know God better than we have ever known him. Standing under the stillness above the sky, some never know the words of humans. Trees are our teachers, melodious trees, and we learn to love among flowers, as we grow up in the arms of God. Sometimes people like us more when we are prouder and wilder, more full of works, yet emptier. Giving style to one’s character is shown to be a sign of power, while it is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style, who become salves as soon as they serve, and who hate to serve. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

The one thing needed is that a human being attains one’s satisfaction with oneself; those who do not will make others pay for it. The only thing that all people want is power, and whatever is wanted is wanted for the sake of power. If something is wanted more than something else, it must represent more power. Most people would rather be Socrates in prison than Nero on the roof; hence, Socrates must be more powerful. However, the acme of power is embodied in the perfectly self-possessed person who has no fear of other people, oneself, or of death and whose simple personality, unassisted by any props, changes the lives of those who meet the individual and even imposes itself on the minds of those who encounter the person only at second hand, in literature. We must surpass even Socrates insofar as he suffered life; to have to fight the instincts—that is the formula for decadence. Friedrich Nietzsche and some others considered Goethe superior even to Socrates. Our personality must equal self-mastery and that is considered exemplary. A person of passion must come to master one’s passions, while a pure fool, destitute of passion, is hopeless because they are s synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman. Heroes are admired for surpassing intelligence, mastering their passions and employing them creatively. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. Human behavior is generally capable of being overinterpreted, and indeed, people are demanding nothing less than this before they can be fully understood. Even if almost all behavior can be illuminated by finding the will to power at work in it, it does not follow that this is the only ultimate motive and the only way of illuminating such behavior. Moreover, in some cases an appeal to the will to power is farfetched and not very illuminating. No poll can actually settle the question of what all people would prefer. What matters is not what they might say they prefer but what they really prefer, and we could say that something is really wanted if, and only if, failure to get it results in frustration that disappears with attainment. The human being who has organized the chaos of one’s passions, given style to one’s character, and becomes creative is aware of life’s terrors, and affirms life without resentment. Once you have lost faith in anything great, you are doomed, then, doomed to perish unless that faith returns, like a comet from unknown skies. If we renounce supernatural religious and accept a scientific approach to humanity, we lose the right to attribute to human beings as such a unique supernatural dignity. Such dignity is not gegeben but aufgegeben, not a fact but a goal that few approach. There is no meaning in life except the meaning we give to our lives, and the aims of some people has no surpassing dignity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

To raise ourselves above the senseless flux, we must cease being merely human, all-too-human. We must be hard against ourselves and overcome ourselves; we must become creators instead of remaining creatures. Near and hard to grasp is the God. However, where danger is, deliverance also grows. Is not everything alive not already in your blood? If we could truly understand the Atonement of the Lord, we would realize how precious is one son or daughter of God. We would wish them well and pray that all suffering, being forsaken, profound self-contempt, the torture of mistrust of oneself, and the misery of one is overcome. The select individual is not the petulant person who thinks oneself superior to the best, but the person who demands more of oneself than the rest. The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands of themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves. It is a privilege to serve the Lord. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

After our planet has been destroyed, it will eventually be reconstituted as the power quanta that make up the Universe once again reach a previous configuration and thenceforward repeat all the following patterns, to the point where some of us will be born again on the same timeline that we once existed. “The LORD is going to completely destroy everything on Earth. He will twist its surface. He will scatter those who live on it. Everything of value will be taken out of it. The Earth will dry up completely. The World will dry up and waste away. The Heavens will fade away along with the Earth. The Earth is polluted but its people. They have not obeyed the laws of the LORD. They have broken the covenant that will last forever. So the LORD will send a curse on the Earth. Its people will pay for what they have done. They will be burned up. Very few of them will be left. Those who used to have a good tie will groan. The happy sounds of the tambourines will be gone. Those noise of those who enjoy wild parties on the boat will stop. The joyful music of harps will become silent. People will no longer sing as they drink wine. Beer will taste bitter to those who drink it. Destroyed cities will be empty. People will lock themselves up inside of their houses. All the buildings will be knocked down. Those who are left alive will shout for joy. People from the west will praise the LORD because he is King. So give glory to him, you who live in the east,” reports Isiah 24.1-15 #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

In 1882, while taking a walk, it suddenly struck Friedrich Nietzsche with a force of a revelation that this was the most scientific of all the prophecies and that the prospect of eternal recurrence is gruesome unless one has succeeded in giving style to one’s character and meaning to one’s life to such an extent that one can joyously affirm one’s existence and say, unlike Goethe’s Fast: Abide, moment—but if you cannot abide, at least return eternally. “Then I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth, for the first Heaven and the first Earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea,” reports Revelation 21.1. The power to will contains attempts to show why eternal recurrence is the most scientific hypothesis. If we assume a finite number of power quanta in a finite space and an infinite time, only a finite number of configurations are possible. However, no end state has been reached yet; hence, unless we follow Christianity in positing a beginning of time, the same configurations must recur eternally. Even if there were only a few things in a finite space in an infinite time, they need never repeat the same configuration. Imagine three wheels of equal size, rotating on a single axis, one point marked on the circumference of each and the three points lined up in one straight line. If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first and if the speed of the third was 1/3.14 of the speed of the first, the initial line-up could never recur. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

However, if time was infinite, eventually the same patters on the three wheels will recur because they have a countless number of times to reconfigure. The soul that, living, did not attain its divine right cannot repose in the nether World. But once we are bent on, what is holy, our poetry, is accomplished: Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ World! We shall be satisfied though our lyrics will not accompany us down there. Once we lived like the gods, and more is not needed. “At that time the LORD will punish the spiritual forced of evil in the Heavens above. He will also punish the kings on the Earth below. They will be brought together like prisoners in chains. They will be locked up in prison. After many days the LORD will punish them. The LORD who rules over all will rule on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The Elders of the city will be there. They will see God’s great glory. His rule will be so glorious that the Sun and Moon will be too ashamed to shine. However, we are warned against judgment and against being too resentful toward unbelievers and, indeed, toward the World. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. She is a beast, I call her Karma. Lady Justice (Justitia) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems, and she will eat their hearts out like Jeffrey Dahmer. Be careful, try not to lead her on. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

Thus far, we have learned about dealing with the errors of confusing cause and effect, the error of false causality, the error of imaginary causes, and the error of free will. However, our concern is primarily with mortality and religion. Morality and religion teach that if you are good you will be happy. Virtue is the effect of happiness and vice is bred by unhappiness—a commonplace in the twenty first century, but not in the nineteenth. Against the error of a false causality, there are no mental causes at all, no spirits as entities or agents. Imaginary causes include events in dreams that explain ex post facto such events as noises outside, but they also include sin as a supposed cause of suffering. One should speak only where one may not remain silent, and speak only of that which one has overcome—everything else is chatter. Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent. Many people have gotten stuck in the snares of grammar. Language talks of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation. The misleading errors of language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become petrified in it), which understands, and misunderstands, all activity as due to an agent, a subject. It is very important to know what you are saying because if you expose someone to something they are allergic to and they die, the difference between the using the words could and would could send you to jail for murder. We are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Without music, life would be a mistake. People sometimes tear coinages and even whole sentences out of context to suit their purposes. However, what love and spirit give cannot be extorted. The God, when he draws near, will the heart stand fast. And let me say at once that I approached to see the Heavenly. We must turn to the sciences for knowledge or reality, and there is high hopes for the future development of psychology and physiology and their relevance to issues previously considered philosophical. Too long now things divine have been cheaply used and all the power of Heaven, the kindly, spent in trifling waste by cold and cunning people without thanks, who when he, the Highest, in person tills their field for them, they think they know the daylight ad the thunder, and indeed their telescope may find them all, may count and may name every star of Heaven. Yet will the Heavenly Father cover with holy night, that we may last on Earth, out too knowing eyes. Never will our free-ranging power coerce his Heaven. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. However, no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. We love life, not because we are use to living but because we are used to loving. What peace, what comfort this great gift is which comes through the loving grace of God.  #RandolphHarris 11 of 11