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.