"It is the same with sexual desire or any other form of desire. There is nothing wrong with desire. To react is per­fectly normal. If you stick a pin in me I shall react unless I am paralyzed. But then thought steps in and chews over the delight and turns into pleasure. Thought wants to repeat the experience, and the more you repeat the more mechanical it becomes; the more you think about it, the more strength thought gives to pleasure.

So thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity, and therefore the natural reaction of desire to any beautiful thing is perverted by thought. Thought turns it into a memory and memory is then nourished by thinking about it over and over again.

Of course, memory has a place at a certain level. In everyday life we could not function at all without it. In its own field it must be efficient but there is a state of mind where it has very little place. A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom."

Freedom From the Known, p.36


"There is continuity so long as thought and feelings are not ended completely. You complete a thought when you pursue the thought to its end and thereby bring an end to every thought, to every feeling...

So long as experience is not completely understood, there is residue, which is old, which is of yesterday, the thing that is past; the past is always absorbing the new and therefore destroying the new. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy."

The First and Last Freedom, p.248