"<p>Think of life as the giant snake. If you keep it at a distance, you can admire its dancing curves and the rhythmic pattern of its skin, and you can care for it and feed it. If you keep it to yourself, it will coil upon you and you will no longer delight in it, and not you will feed it, but your flesh and blood.<br />Do not keep life from you by hiding from it, for it will creep after you unnoticed, or unexpectedly crush your hiding place. There is no escaping it, not even into death.<br />Keep life so at a distance from you that you may have dominion over it: as the serpent is dominated by the snake charmer with his whistle music.<br />The music that makes the serpent of life tame and obey, emanates from the naked, boundless soul, stripped of finite needs.<br />Neither in idleness of hermitage nor in activity you can't conquer life; only in yourself, if you arrange your feeble qualities to conform to the perfect measure.<br />If you achieve this: your idleness is as active as the sunshine; your activity is as idle as the change of the weather.</p>"