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they are not realities.
Zarathustra was born at a time, twenty five centuries ago, when all over the world, there was a great renaissance: In India, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Goshalak, Sanjay Bilethiputta, Ajit Keshkambal, and others, had reached to the same peak of awakening; in China, Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu and many others; in Greece, Socrates, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Heraclitus; and in Iran, Zarathustra.
It is a strange coincidence that suddenly, all over the world, there came a flood of consciousness and many people became awakened. Perhaps enlightenment is also a chain reaction -- when there are enlightened people they provoke the same revolution in others.
It is everybody's potential. One just needs a provocation, a challenge; and when you see so many people reaching to such beautiful heights of grace, you cannot remain where you are. Suddenly a great urge arises in you: "Something has to be done. I am wasting my life while others have reached the very destiny, have known all that is worth knowing, have experienced the greatest blissfulness and ecstasy... and what am I doing? -- collecting seashells on the beach."
Out of all these people, Zarathustra is unique. He is the only one who is not against life, who is for life; whose god is not somewhere else; whose god is nothing but another name for life itself. And to live totally, to live joyously and to live intensely, is all that religion is based on.
I feel a deep empathy, affinity, with Zarathustra. But perhaps because he was life-affirmative and not life-negative, he could not gather many followers. It is one of the strange things about human beings: anything that is easy, they cannot accept as worthy of being the goal -- the goal has to be very difficult and arduous.
Behind it is the psychology of the ego. The ego always wants something impossible, because only with the impossible can it exist. You will never be able to fulfill desire, and the ego will go on pushing you towards more and more -- more greed, more power, more money, more austerities, more spirituality, more discipline. Wherever you find "more", remember, that is the language
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