Before you begin reading this book, reflect: do you truly wish to hear a truth perhaps not meant for you, a truth that might render the rest of your life unbearable? The truth that Nietzsche’s demon, “who crept up upon you in your loneliest night,” summarized thus:

“This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, and every pain and every joy, every thought and every glance, everything vast or tiny in your life, must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…” “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 341 (translation) [nietzsche.holtof.com]

If you are not willing to live your life as it is now, “once more and innumerable times” — in which “there will be nothing new” — perhaps it is better never to learn the arguments for belief in the Eternal Recurrence. And even less to attempt to refute them, for the very proximity of such insight might break you!

It is therefore not amiss to repeat the FOREWARNING from the cover: only one who can no longer believe either in the promises of religion concerning otherworldly immortality, nor endure the pitiless finality of this-worldly mortality as presumed by science — is called to read this book. For it is precisely here that a third possibility is considered — a “middle path” — the certainty of this-worldly immortality contained in the Doctrine of Eternal Return.

This book, therefore, is not for everyone. It is intended only for those who can endure the Doctrine of Eternal Return, and whose seemingly meaningless lives may discover within it a new gravity and joy. Its pages are not indexed by search engines; access to them is granted only by your own will, through this FOREWARNING.

Before you approach the pages of The Doctrine of Eternal Return, however, we advise you to read our second Forewarning: What is hardest to accept, and what first repels people from this thought.

Only after that — if you have finally decided that this book is meant for you, and that the insight it contains can be endured – may you proceed >>> here.

(In the online version of the book, only a few aphorisms are currently available, and the content will grow through their gradual publication in posts and their inscription into the book itself. Once completed, the book will be available both as a free digital edition and as a carefully edited printed version, offered at the cost of its preparation and binding — without any profit for its creator.)