The Underman (Decluttering the Superman)

It occurred to me the other night whilst reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider that the Ubermensch (Overman or Superman) of Nietzsche is actually my 'Hu-man'. In fact, it's a little topsy-turvy, as the human I am talking about (the man who has not neglected the soil for oil, and raped the mother that feeds him) is actually an under-man and not one which is, as Nietzsche implied, 'over'. The human's transcendence of man is actually an immanance, and a reaching inside, a reaching before man came upon the scene. Personally, I think Nietzsche made a big mistake with his choice of word. It is clear that he was against the idea of creating an idol or anyone that appeared superior to the ordinary human being. And there's the rub. Nietzsche's overman was not superior, and was not an idol. Like the human I espouse, he was just a human being who had rid himself of the dementia and the sickness that had infected all other men. He was a man who, in returning to the source of his self, had reunited (had re-ligioned) with what it mean to be human, and not what men had become in their brain-addled states, as pallid acquiescent zombies.

Nietzsche greatest proclamation was the death of God. What he didn't realize, or perhaps he did (!), for his forays into Taoism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, was that the death of God was in truth the death of the human. [The search for God is none other than the search for the divine in every one of us. Each of us has Buddha nature, and perhaps, unlike a tree, a dog, or a plant which also has Buddha nature, we are capable of realising it].

I am inclined to think that Nietzsche however like most people misunderstood the essence of religion, battered as they were with the bells and whistles that had come to conceal its true nature (the young Friedrich's father was a Lutheran pastor, and although he died when Friedrich was just five he had already influenced him a great deal). The bible too, is a minefield for anyone unable to decipher it. Jesus said as much about his own sayings in The Gospel of Thomas.

Whether Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, Hitchens or Dawkins, what they're riling against is not religion per se but the dogma of religion, what religion appears to have caused. But religion by itself, as it is, has not caused anything. How could it? It is the schisms and perversions, the aberations and mutations, that have been imposed upon it by man. Religion - Christianity, Islam, Judaism etc. - deconstructed (and removed of its constructs) is wonderful; it is the purest poetry of the soul. But much of it is in parable form, in koan form, and requires a before-thinking mind to unlock its secrets. It is not even good enough to inquire as a young Nietzsche wrote to his sister ('if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire') but to build upon that inquiry with enactive participation. The truth requires that one becomes religion in order to understand it. This! is the key. One cannot explain it away and then 'get it'. Religion eschews explanation and a flattening out of its royalty. Christ more or less repeated what the Buddha had said five hundred years previously when, in The Gospel of Thomas he says:

'Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death'.

There is no use trying to avoid religion, trying to dismiss it out of hand as the great instigator of wars and atrocities. It is not religion that is at fault, but man's failure to recognize it as the great binding force that unites all things, sentient or other. Religion is love whether you like it or not, whether you believe it not, for the truth can never be a matter of belief, but only the truth. If you do not accept it - if you are not it - then it is your self that is at fault, it is your self that is failing to see itself for what it actually is. The essence is still there, it cannot not be there; it's just that your present manufactured self has too much interference to tap into it, and to see it clearly. The self too has to be deconstructed.

To be sure, within today's noise-infested world it is nigh on impossible to attain a state of 'zero distortion' but that is why all the great body-minds have proclaimed the need to fast from the world, to go into the hills, to develop an intimate relationship with solitude and stillness. These are your best friends though you do not yet know it. John Locke used to say that what one needed to do was clear away all the clutter and nonsense, strip away the paint and wallpaper. And today, like no other, we have clutter in abundance: clutter of stuff, clutter of mind, clutter of body. Business is based upon clutter; news is clutter in disguise, sensationalist stuff that we do not need to see or hear, but which is there because it arouses us, and it makes money. We are constantly being preyed upon by those versed in the ways of the brain: neuro-linguistic programming, neuro-marketing, all manner of devious and unethical behaviours surround us, especially by those we least expect it from: our politicians, our priests, our teachers, our own parents. Indoctrination (of clutter) is par for the course it would seem. Our very economy depends upon clutter. And yet, as the eco part implies, in accepting this clutter, and not clearing it away on a daily basis (is this not the purpose of prayer?), we are effectively 'shitting in our own nest'.

There are actually professionals out there who call themselves 'decluttering consultants', but what one has to become is one's own consultant, one's own 'world editor' so that one might hear, see, and feel the essence of one's true and indefinite self. Left to the devices of the city or the world, one becomes deaf and blind, mute and dumb, by the age of twenty; life in the city, in man-infested world (without great space and great silence), is an apprenticeship in alienation and dehumanization.

So, in answer to anyone who might throw the word 'superior' my way. It is not I, the human, who is superior, for I am just an ordinary human being, an ordinary creature being human in the fullest sense possible, in the reality that the human is not just present in the diminished subtext of his own kind, but in the enlarged and indefinite context of the universe. Invariably then, it is he who uses the word 'superior', he who casts it at you, as if somehow you are responsible for this disease, who is confused and demented and diseased, and consequently who intuits his own disconnect from this sense of the human. In other words, it is you who is 'superior', and in your superiority, you have deluded your self, and poisoned it with your dementia.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra began as a reaction against the German philosopher's own dementia. Like Hesse after him, he preached the removal of man from the source of his self, his 'outsourcery' and sickness, and the need for him to acknowledge this if he was indeed to remedy it.

Verily a polluted stream is man. One must be an ocean to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. I teach you the Superman. He is the ocean; in him can your contempt be overwhelmed.

A few decades later, the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran would announce in The Prophet:

Like the ocean is your god-self;
It remains for ever undefiled [...]
Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,
But a shapeless pygmy that walks asleep in the mist
searching for his own awakening.

Wake up to your oceanic ordinariness, to your pacific un-superness; only then will you realize the paradox of your self.