K Quote

Thought and Pleasure   K

Thought is never new, for thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge. Thought, because it is old, makes this thing which you have looked at with delight and felt tremendously for the moment, old. From the old you derive pleasure, never from the new. There is no time in the new.

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in -- at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight -- if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and therefore tremendous joy.

It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.

You cannot think about joy. Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

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Pleasure is encouraged by thought, isn't it? Thought can give it a continuity, the appearance of duration which we call happiness; as thought can also give a duration to sorrow. Thought says: 'This I like and that I don't like. I would like to keep this and throw away that.' But thought has made up both, and happiness now has become the way of thought. When you say: 'I want to remain in that state of happiness' - you are the thought, you are the memory of the previous experience which you call pleasure and happiness.

So the past, or yesterday, or many yesterdays ago, which is thought, is saying: 'I would like to live in that state of happiness which I have had.' You are making the dead past into an actuality in the present and you are afraid of losing it tomorrow. Thus you have built a chain of continuity. This continuity has its roots in the ashes of yesterday, and therefore it is not a living thing at all. Nothing can blossom in ashes - and thought is ashes. So you have made happiness a thing of thought, and it is for you a thing of thought.

But is there something other than pleasure, pain, happiness and sorrow? Is there a bliss, an ecstasy, that is not touched by thought? For thought is very trivial, and there is nothing original about it. In asking this question, thought must abandon itself. When thought abandons itself there is the discipline of the abandonment, which becomes the grace of austerity. Then austerity is not harsh and brutal. Harsh austerity is the product of thought as a revulsion against pleasure and indulgence.

From this deep self-abandonment - which is thought abandoning itself, for it sees clearly its own danger - the whole structure of the mind becomes quiet. It is really a state of pure attention and out of this comes a bliss, an ecstasy, that cannot be put into words. When it is put into words it is not the real.