“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge –a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.” –Nietzsche
The Übermensch, or Overman, is the primordial prodigy, the interdependent-self, the chameleon of the human condition, the epistemological elite longing to emerge. The Overman is the “genius” that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.” In a world where the majority of people have not brought forth the genius within themselves, it is no wonder things are being destroyed. It is therefore the duty, indeed the quest, of overmen the world over to bring forth the genius within themselves, to stand as beacons of hope, to go forth as walking examples of genius incarnate, so that others may learn how to do the same. Here are six signs you may be on the sacred path of the Ubermensch.
1.) You Have Perfected the Art of Self-Overcoming:
“The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learned, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.” –Jose Ortega y Gasset