This book is not for everyone.

If you are a believer who believes in your God and in the otherworldly immortality promised to you — you have no business here.

If you are a scientist whom scientific methods have convinced that everything in the world is accidental and that death is the final end — you have no business here.

This is a secret doctrine. It addresses a minority: those who need it; those who believe neither in otherworldly immortality nor in this-worldly, final mortality; those whom the proof of its necessity — which will be presented in this book — will not break.

Therefore, before you approach this book, think carefully: do you truly wish to hear a truth that you may not be able to endure?

If you harbour any doubt about this question, first read carefully the special ADMONITIONS, which are provided here — not to discourage you, but to prepare you.

Can You Endure the Thought of Eternal Return — and Live with It?

Before you begin reading this book, consider this carefully: can you truly endure this thought and live with it? Do you really wish to hear a truth that may not be meant for you, and that could render the rest of your life unbearable? A truth which Nietzsche’s demon, who “crept up on him in the loneliest night,” condensed into the following words:

“This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every glance, and everything immeasurably small or great in your life, will return to you — all in the same order and sequence…

Would you not throw yourself down, gnash your teeth, and curse the demon who spoke these words?”

If you are not prepared to live your life as you live it now — “once more and innumerable times more” — and if you cannot endure the thought that “nothing new will ever happen in it,” perhaps it is better that you never learn the arguments and reasons for believing in the Eternal Return. For the thought of Eternal Return demands of you that, in something essential, you be satisfied with your life — and that its return be something you not only can endure, but that you also wish to return.

Therefore, let us repeat: only those individuals who — even if they most sincerely wished it — can no longer believe in the certainty of otherworldly immortality offered and used for consolation by existing religions, yet who are also unable to endure the certainty of this-worldly, final mortality so ruthlessly presupposed by science; those who are, moreover, to some degree satisfied with their lives and who would therefore wish to “repeat” them — are invited to read this book. For it considers a third possibility — a “middle way” — the certainty of this-worldly immortality contained in the Doctrine of Eternal Return, for which we shall endeavour to show that it stands on equal footing with the preceding ones.

What Is It That First Repels — and Most Terrifies — You in the Thought of Eternal Return?

(Based on Aphorism 3 of the Introduction to the Doctrine of Eternal Return)

What first repels you from this thought — as we wrote in the Preface — “does not lie in the rational incomprehensibility or in the unbearable nature of the eternal recurrence of one’s own suffering and pain, but in the unbearable witnessing of the suffering and pain of others — and in the sheer horror that arises from it.”

Who could endure that?

The certainty of an unpleasant companion of every existence in this world — suffering — once compelled even the Buddha to begin teaching the extinction of all sensation, in order to escape it. This objection to accepting the doctrine of Eternal Return is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to counter. It seems that for many, precisely for this reason, insight into this doctrine must remain inaccessible.

Apart from Nietzsche, this is the question we ourselves pursued the longest — a question that “touched us most deeply and pressed upon us most darkly in the most dreadful nights”; a question because of which there will always be those who reject this teaching from the very outset. Yet in that same Preface we already dared to offer an answer to it — “an answer that may require centuries to be understood, and then accepted” — and it is no harm to repeat it here once more, since it appears decisive; in any case, we shall problematize it throughout the entire book.

For what must be regarded as the highest value in our life, which returns, are not our judgments about ourselves, the world, and others — for these are our greatest illusions — but the moments of happiness, fulfillment, and serenity we have lived through, and which, as such, will eternally return.

Who are we? What is this world?
We cannot know that.

We can know only what we do, what we desire, and what we do not wish to do — and how we feel while doing so. And if you focus your thoughts on those moments in which you felt happy, fulfilled, and serene, then you may be able to endure the thought of Eternal Return. And we conclude this admonition with the same passage as the one to which we referred here from the Preface:

“Nietzsche wrote that the capacity to endure the thought of Eternal Return depends on whether you have experienced at least one such moment that you would wish to experience again. A person who has lived through even a single such moment is ready to endure the thought of Eternal Return.” (Doctrine of Eternal Return, Preface, Aph. 9)