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The master answered: Not to commit oneself

to the vicious circle of birth and death

or pleasure and pain

is great nirvana.

What then is the vicious circle

of birth and death and pleasure and pain?

The master said:

To desire nirvana!

Now be silent and feel what is meant by to desire nirvana,

and remember that I am not saying think about it

because to think is to miss it.

Feel it.

Feel it.

Feel it.

354. Love.

In this world everything is upside down

and anyone who is meditating

will have to put everything right side up!

One should not try to know life but to know death,

and then the mysteries of life are revealed to him.

One should not ask for any security

and then there is no insecurity at all.

Bunan says in a poem:

While living be a dead man,

be thoroughly dead,

and then behave as you like

because then all is well.

355. Love.

Materialistic societies produce hollow men,

men with dead emptiness within,

and because of this dead emptiness

one dies before one is really born.

Remember that man cannot live by shops alone,

and today the holy of holies is the shop.

The outer is meaningless without the inner richness,

and the outer richness

only makes the inner poverty prominent.

Man is hollow because there is no inner growth

and the inner grows only when one lives in the inner.

Inward is the way of growth, grace and God.

356. Love.

Never suppress any thought,

or fight with it,

otherwise you will never be without it.

Fight it, and you invite it more.

Suppress it, and it will be back with double the force.

I have heard

that someone advertised something for women

but with the heading, Only For Men.

It is reported that

out of ninety thousand women who came across it

eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-four

read the advertisement.

The other six were blind.

357. Love.

It is impossible to conceive of the divine intellectually,

and that is why the intellect denies it

or creates fictitious systems about it,

which is even more dangerous than plain denial.

The mind works only in the circle of the known;

it cannot transcend the world of the known.

For the mind the unknown is not.

Says Attar: You know nothing of your real self

here and in this state.

You are like the wax in the honeycomb –

what does it know of fire or guttering?

But when it gets to the stage of the waxen candle

and when light is emitted

then it knows.

358. Love.

Life is not a detective story,

and you do not have to deduce a thing.

Life is before your eyes as clear as the sun

and as open as the sky.

Just be out of your thinking disease

and open your eyes,

and nothing is hidden at all.

Even the hidden one is not hidden then.

I have heard a dialogue between

Sherlock Holmes and Watson:

Holmes: Ah, Watson, I see you have put on

your winter underwear.

Watson: Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous!

How did you ever deduce that?

Holmes: Well, you have forgotten

to put on your trousers.

359. Love.

Life goes on flowing.

It does not wait.

But mind thinks and therefore takes time.

To exist, no time is needed,

but to think – time is necessary

Really there is no time in existence.

There appears to be only

because of the mind and its thinking.

Existence exists not in time but in eternity.

It exists in the eternal now.

There is neither past nor future

but only the present –

or not even that –

because without the past and future

it is meaningless to call it present.

Do not live out of the mind,

otherwise you will always lag behind,

because life never waits for you and your so-called mind.

That is why the mind always feels

as if something is missing –

because it is missing life itself – and always!

Once a master said to his disciples:

If you utter a word – thirty blows of my stick for you.

But if you utter no words

just the same, thirty blows of my stick.

Now – speak, speak!

One disciple came forward

and when he was about to bow

before the master he was struck.

The disciple protested: I have not uttered a single word

nor did you allow me not to utter.

Why the striking?

The master laughed and said

If I wait for you and your speech or your silence,

it is too late, and life cannot wait!

360. Love.

Goethe is said to have cried when dying:

Light, light, more light!

And Miguel Unamuno has responded with his:

No – warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we die of cold

and not of darkness!

But I say to you that we die neither because of cold

nor because of darkness

but because of our lust for living

or because of our fear of death –

which is to say the same thing in different ways.

Do not look at death as opposite to life, because it is not.

And live death moment to moment.

Do not postpone it for the end

because that creates fear.

Die each moment to the past,

and then each moment you will be fresh,

young and reborn.

And then there is always light

because the very darkness becomes light;

and warmth also,

because only the dead past is cold.

The present is always warm.

361. Love.

Man is not the end

but only the means.

Man is not really a being

but only a tension

between two planes of being.

Man is only a bridge,