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the symbol. He was against these people for the simple reason that they were against life; they were against people enjoying the simple things; people living playfully, laughingly; people having a sense of humor, not seriousness; people loving songs and music; and people capable of dance and love.
Nietzsche was attracted to Zarathustra because he could see that this man alone, out of the whole past, was not against life, was not against love, was not against laughter.
In these fragments, you will see tremendously meaningful statements which can become the foundation of a life-affirmative religion. I am all for life. There is nothing for which life can be sacrificed. Everything can be sacrificed for life. Everything can be a means towards life, but life is an end unto itself.
Listen very carefully, because Friedrich Nietzsche writes in a very condensed form. He is not a writer, he writes aphorisms: anybody could have written a whole book but Nietzsche will write only one paragraph. So condensed is his writing, that unless you are very alert in listening, you may miss. It is not to be read like a novel.
These are almost like the sutras of the Upanishad. Each single sutra, and each single maxim, contains so much, has so many implications. I would like to go into all the implications so that you do not misunderstand Nietzsche because he is one of the most misunderstood philosophers in the world. And the reason for his being misunderstood is that he wrote in such a condensed form -- he never explained; he never went into detailed explanations about all the possible implications.
He is a very symbolic man, and the reason why he was so symbolic is that he was so full of new insights that there was not time enough to explain. He could not write treatises, and he had so much to share and to give, and life is so small.
Because his work was so condensed and crystallized, people in the first place did not understand him; in the second place, if they "understood", they misunderstood. In the third place, they found him unreadable; they wanted everything to be explained. Nietzsche was not writing for children, he was writing for mature
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