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"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 |
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"For most of us, pleasure and its expression are very important...If you examine the outward values
and judgments of society, but also look within yourself, you will see that pleasure and its
evaluation is the main pursuit of our lives. We may resist, we may sacrifice, we may achieve or
deny, but at the end of it there is always this sense of gaining pleasure, satisfaction, contentment,
of being pleased or gratified...
Bear in mind that we are not saying we must not have pleasure, that pleasure is wrong, as the various religious groups throughout the world maintain. We are not saying you must suppress, deny, control, translate to a higher level, and all that kind of thing. We are just examining. And if we can examine quite objectively, deeply, then out of that comes a different state of mind which is bliss, but not pleasure; bliss is something entirley different." On Love and Loneliness, p.104-105 |
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"Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight
in it without seeking pleasure from it."
Freedom from the Known, p.37 |
