Your Master speaks:
I will tell you a parable of ancient understanding.
Imagine a deer in a garden of flowers, his attention caught by a female in the garden. Therefore, his senses are swooning in the fragrant maze of grazing grass, humming aloud with honey bees, where she moves. Thus distracted, he does not taste the scent of wolves, that wait ahead of him, hungry for blood. Nor does he hear the arrow at his back, that kills him at the heart.
Need I say it? The deer is Man in the ordinary way. He is the soul, involved with mind and senses. Flimsy passion wanders in the company of thighs. But lovers are like flowers. Their blossom is sudden, and suddenly it is gone. Attention wanders in the garden of the senses. Therefore, Life Itself is spent, in payment for exaggerations of taste and touch. But all our superficial pleasures and all our moving desires are themselves nothing more than the mechanical achievements of vagrant attention. A lifetime is nothing more than self-illusion, a temporary and troubled distraction from the Bliss of Eternal Transcendence.
While the soul sleeps in an unmindful state, attention wanders into realms of possibility. Now we are absorbed in sexual love, clinging to the household sounds of lovers and children. Like the deer in the garden, our ears are occupied with creaturely conversation, and our senses are fixed upon the taste and odor of the petty object we are born to Idolize.
Thus exiled in our dreamy houses, the years of days and nights pass unnoticed in
their suddenness. But we are always fed upon by search and satisfaction, as by
wolves in secret, unconscious, unobserved in our deadly meditation. Suddenly, the
garden is undressed. Suddenly, the eloquent weapon of our devourer, who always
followed us, is felt within the heart, heard within the mind, and all this Life
is stolen in a moment.
Consider this well in the lesson of your own desiring. Bring the motive of the senses to rest in the mind itself. Convert the Current of Life from its worldly course, and surrender bodily, toe to crown. When the mind is thus made Full of Life, surrender it also, in the Heart.
Abandon the married disposition, Awaken to the Disposition of a devotee. Exceed the company of ordinary desirers, who only talk of food and sex and casual amusement. Yield attention to the Life and Self of all. Be Absorbed in the Living God, and thus transcend every kind of experience.
(Book 4, chapter 29, verses 52-55)