those who make them expect an inhuman return.
This is why fathers expect the impossible
from their sons.
If each father lives for his son who will live for himself?
For every son is a potential father.
No, I want everyone to live for himself –
for his own happiness, his own state of rest.
When a father is happy he does much more for his son –
and easily, because it comes out of his happiness.
Then there is neither sacrifice nor renunciation;
what he does comes naturally out of his being a father –
and a happy father at that.
Then he has no inhuman expectations of his son,
and where there is no pressure from expectations,
expectations are fulfilled – out of the son being a son.
In short, I teach each person to be selfish.
Altruistic teachings have taught man nothing but suicide,
and a suicidal man is always homicidal.
The unhappy sow their sorrow amongst others.
I am also against the sacrifice of the present for the future,
because what is is always present.
If you live in it totally the future will be born out of it –
and when it comes it too will be the present.
For he who has the habit of sacrificing the present for the future,
the future never comes
because whatever comes is again
always sacrificed for that which has not yet come.
Finally, you ask why I too work for others
and for the future.
First of all, I do not work.
Whatever I do flows out of my state of rest.
I do not swim, I just float.
No one can ever do anything for another
but if something happens to others out of what I am,
that is something else,
and there too I am not the doer.
As for the future –
for me, the present is everything.
And the past too is also a present – that has passed away.
And the future too – that is a present that is yet to come.
Life is always here and now
so I do not bother about past and future.
And it is amazing that ever since I stopped worrying about them
they have begun to worry about me!
My regards to all there.
76. Love.
There is a music which has no sound;
the soul is restless for such silent music.
There is a love in which the body is not;
the soul longs for such unembodied love.