It is not surprising that various Eastern mystics have referred to Nietzsche as one of them. The chapter “On the Three Metamorphoses” of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None” (in the German original: Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) accurately describes the path to consciousness ( spiritual). .
Nietzsche describes the life of a person as three successive metamorphoses of the spirit. He calls the stages of this development the camel, the lion, and the child.
If this sounds too esoteric, we could also replace “spirit” with “consciousness”. And awareness is what we need to be successful in life in general and in business in particular. We can safely assume that successful entrepreneurs do, of course, scan the environment and rationalize, but that they largely decide by intuitive knowledge of the current situation. Malcolm Gladwell calls this “the power of thinking without thinking.”
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” was published by sections by Friedrich Nietzsche between 1883 and 1892. More than 100 years later, the relevance of the three metamorphoses has even been highlighted in a world overflowing with information.
These are the underlying assumptions of what Nietzsche is saying: humans are born incomplete, we simply come into this world as a process with potential for development. Evolution, however, is intrinsic to our nature. And the growth of a person is through the stages of the camel, the lion and the child.
The camel has to do with the assimilation of the past: the assimilation of the knowledge given by society. This stage is mainly about memory and reliance on the prevailing opinion about the world we inhabit. The camel is about being a good citizen in the sense that the greater the assimilation, the better a person will be in society’s esteem.
The lion is a rebellion against the camel scenario. The assimilation of shared knowledge has reached such a point that the person’s inner self rebels against the environment and discovers itself as a guide of authenticity and independence. Nota bene, most people remain camels all their lives. The lion is, for example, the entrepreneur who people laugh at for doing something that “will never work.” The lion goes from heteronomy to an internal locus of control. The ego becomes itself. Camels perceive lions as dangerous and sometimes the lion can feel the camel inside “Can I earn money from home on the Internet? Or should I pursue a respectable career?” – In fact, it is a challenge to get rid of the camel completely. The camel has to do with memory, and the lion has to do with knowledge.
The last stage of the child is not merely a rebellion but a true revolution and may well describe enlightenment in Eastern philosophy. So, according to Nietzsche, the second childhood is the true one, and to Westerners, this might even sound like a “biblical bell”. In the child stage, the person is completely freed from the past and the future. Creativity and interdependence, personal happiness and financial success genuinely coincide. A human mind has reached the stage of wisdom.
