Free Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale

creates meaning for the earth.
    I teach mankind a new will: to desire this path that men have followed blindly, and to call it good and no more to creep aside from it, like the sick and dying!
    It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dismal poisons they took from the body and the earth!
    They wanted to escape from their misery and the stars were too far for them. Then they sighed: ‘Oh if only there were heavenly paths by which to creep into another existence and into happiness!’ – then they contrived for themselves their secret ways and their draughts of blood!
    Now they thought themselves transported from their bodies and from this earth, these ingrates. Yet to what do they owe the convulsion and joy of their transport? To their bodies and to this earth.
    Zarathustra is gentle with the sick. Truly, he is not angry at their manner of consolation and ingratitude. May they become convalescents and overcomers and make for themselves a higher body!
    Neither is Zarathustra angry with the convalescent if he glances tenderly at his illusions and creeps at midnight around the grave of his God: but even his tears still speak to me of sickness and a sick body.
    There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God: they have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty.
    They are always looking back to dark ages: then, indeed, illusion and faith were a different question; raving of the reason was likeness to God, and doubt was sin.
    I know these Godlike people all too well: they want to be believed in, and doubt to be sin. I also know all too well what it is they themselves most firmly believe in.
    Truly not in afterworlds and redeeming drops of blood: they believe most firmly in the body, and their own body is for them their thing-in-itself.
    But it is a sickly thing to them: and they would dearly like to get out of their skins. That is why they hearken to preachers of death and themselves preach afterworlds.
    Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: this is a purer voice and a more honest one.
    Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth.
    Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of the Despisers of the Body
    I WISH to speak to the despisers of the body. Let them not learn differently nor teach differently, but only bid farewell to their own bodies – and so become dumb.
    ‘I am body and soul’ – so speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children?
    But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body.
    The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman.
    Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call ‘spirit’,is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence.
    You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this – although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.
    What the sense feels, what the spirit perceives, is never an end in itself. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: they are as vain as that.
    Sense and spirit are instruments and toys: behind them still lies the Self. The Self seeks with the eyes of the sense, it listens too with the ears of the spirit.
    The Self is always listening and seeking: it compares, subdues, conquers, destroys. It rules and is also the Ego’s ruler.
    Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body.
    There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who