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SINGING, WEEPING, LAUGHING, AND MUTTERING I PRAISE THE GOD WHO IS MY GOD. BUT WHAT DO YOU BRING US AS A GIFT?'
WHEN ZARATHUSTRA HEARD THESE WORDS, HE SALUTED THE SAINT AND SAID: `WHAT SHOULD I HAVE TO GIVE YOU!
`BUT LET ME GO QUICKLY, THAT I MAY TAKE NOTHING FROM YOU!' AND THUS THEY PARTED FROM ONE ANOTHER, THE OLD MAN AND ZARATHUSTRA, LAUGHING AS TWO BOYS LAUGH.
BUT WHEN ZARATHUSTRA WAS ALONE, HE SPOKE THUS TO HIS HEART: `COULD IT BE POSSIBLE! THIS OLD SAINT HAS NOT YET HEARD IN HIS FOREST THAT GOD IS DEAD!'
ZARATHUSTRA HAD gone to the mountains in search of aloneness. In the crowd you can find yourself lonely, but never alone.
Loneliness is a kind of hunger for the other. You are missing the other. You are not enough unto yourself -- you are empty. Hence everybody wants to be in the crowd, and weaves around himself many kinds of relationships just to deceive himself, to forget that he is lonely. But that loneliness erupts again and again. No relationship can hide it. All relationships are so thin and so fragile. Deep inside you know perfectly well that even though you are in the crowd, you are amongst strangers. You are a stranger to yourself too.
Zarathustra and all the mystics have gone to the mountains in search of aloneness. Aloneness is a positive feeling, the feeling of your own being and the feeling that you are enough unto yourself -- that you don't need anyone.
Loneliness is a sickness of the heart.
Aloneness is a healing.
Those who know aloneness have gone beyond loneliness forever. Whether they are alone or with people, they are centered within themselves. In the mountains they are alone, in the crowd they are alone, because this is their realization: that aloneness is our nature. We have come into the world alone and we will be leaving the world again alone.
Between these two alonenesses, between birth and death, you are still alone; but you have not understood the beauty of aloneness, and hence you have fallen into a kind of fallacy -- the fallacy of loneliness.
To discover one's aloneness one has to go out of the crowd. Slowly, slowly as he forgets the world, all his awareness
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