Be yourself

A traveler who has seen many countries, nations, and parts of the world, and who is asked what characteristic he finds common in people everywhere, might reply that they have a tendency to be lazy. Some would feel that he would have been more correct and true if he had said that they were all cowardly. They hide behind custom and public opinion. Basically, everyone knows in his heart that he, as a unique thing, will only exist once in the world, and that there will be no second coincidence, that so many elements of so much complexity can be put together into a single entity as he is now. He knew it, but he hid it like a guilty conscience -- why? Because he is afraid of his neighbor, he must preserve the custom and wrap himself in it. But what compels a man to fear his neighbour, to think and act as others do, rather than to be happy with himself? In a few people may be ashamed. In most people it is the desire for ease, inertia, in a word, the traveller's tendency to be lazy.

The traveler had a point: people are more lazy than cowardly, and they fear the burden that absolute sincerity and frankness might impose on them. Only the artist, who abhors such hasty conformity, who can reveal the secret and the guilty conscience of every man, and reveal that every man is a one-off miracle, dares to point out to us that every man is himself and only himself, down to the movement of every muscle, and that, so rigorously applying his uniqueness, He was beautiful and impressive, as new and incredible as any work of nature, and never boring. When a great thinker disdains human beings, he disdains them for their laziness: they are, for their own sake, factory products, identical, unfit for intercourse and instruction. Don't want to become a crowd of people just do one thing, is to stop being lazy to themselves; He should heed the call of his conscience: "Be yourself! Everything you are doing, thinking, pursuing, is not you."

Every young heart hears this call day and night, and shudders at it; For when it thinks of its own true liberation, it is vaguely aware of its eternal rule of happiness. As long as it is in the chains of public opinion and cowardice, nothing can help it achieve this happiness. And how hopeless and boring life would be without such liberation! There is no more vacuous and savage creature in nature than the man who flees from his gifts, and prays greedily in every direction. As a result, we can no longer even attack such a man, for he is nothing more than an empty shell without a core, a bulging, coloured mess, a rimmed phantom, which arouses no fear and certainly no sympathy. If we have the right to say that idleness kills time, then for an age which bases its happiness on public opinion, that is, individual idleness, we must seriously worry that such a period of time is really being killed, I mean, written out of the history of the true liberation of life. With what great disgust must posterity deal with the legacy of an age when human beings, but human opinions, governed; Our age, therefore, may seem to some distant descendant to be the least human, and therefore the most obscure and unfamiliar, period in history. I walk the new streets of many of our cities and look at all the hideous houses that a generation that believes in public opinion has built for itself, and I wonder how in a hundred years they will be gone, and how the opinions of those who built them will collapse with them. On the contrary, how hopeful must all those who feel that they are not citizens of this age, for if they were, they would commit themselves together to the age that kills them, and perish with it -- yet they would rather awaken it, in order that they might live in this life.

But let the future offer us no hope -- it is in this present moment that our strange existence most strongly inspires us to live according to our own standards and laws. What motivates us is the incredible fact that we are living precisely today, and that it took an infinite amount of time to be born, that we have nothing but the fleeting moment of today, and that we must show in this very moment why we were born precisely today. For our life, we must be responsible to ourselves, therefore, we must act as the real steersman of this life, do not let our existence equal to a blind accident. We should treat it with courage and risk, not least because, come worst or best, we will lose it anyway. Why cling to this piece of land, this occupation? Why do you defer to your neighbour? It is too small-town to cling to the idea that people from a few hundred miles away will no longer matter. East and West are but chalk lines drawn before our eyes by others to fool our cowardice. Thus says the young mind: I will experiment in order to be free; Then all sorts of obstacles arise: two peoples occasionally hate each other and fight each other, or two regions are separated by an ocean, or a religion is practiced around them that did not exist thousands of years ago. It says to itself: All this is not you. No one can build you a bridge over which you must cross the river of life. No one can do that but yourself. In spite of countless horses and Bridges and demigods willing to carry you across the river, it must be at your own cost. You will mortgage and forfeit yourself. There is only one way in the world, no one can go except you. Where does it lead? Don't ask. Just go. "A man has climbed higher than ever before when he does not know where his road will lead him." Who was the man who spoke this truth?

But how do we find ourselves? How can a man know himself? He is a shadowy and shaded thing. If a rabbit has seven skins, then a man could take off seventy times seven skins and still not say: "This is the real you, this is no longer a shell." Moreover, it was torturing and dangerous to dig himself so, to force himself in the most direct way down into the mine of his essence. He injured himself so easily that no medical treatment was available. And what would be left if all evidence of our essence, our friendships and enmity, our glances and handshakes, our memories and forgetfulness, our books and handwriting, were discarded? There is, however, one way to hold the most important interrogation. Young mind may look back on life and ask: What have you really loved so far? What has stirred your soul? What has occupied it and blessed it? You would give yourself a list of cherished objects, and by their character and order they might show you a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects and see how they complement each other, extend, transcend, deify, form a ladder which you have so far climbed towards yourself. For your true essence is not hidden within you, but is immeasurably higher than you, at least that which you have always regarded as your self. Your true educator and shaper reveals to you what is the true original meaning and principal material of your essence, something that cannot be taught, that cannot be shaped, but which is certainly difficult to reach, to bind, to paralyze: your educator can do nothing but be your liberator. This is the secret of all shaping: it does not lend artificial limbs, waxed noses, bespectacled eyes - rather, only educated imitators offer such gifts. Education, on the other hand, is liberation, the removal of all weeds, wastes, and pests that attempt to harm the buds of crops, the release of light and heat, the loving arrival of rain at night, the imitation and worship of nature, which is understood here as maternal and merciful; It is also the completion of nature, because it prevents her cruelty from breaking out, and turns her harm into good, and because it puts a veil over her stepmother attitude and pathetic irrationality.