BENGALURU : For most of us, pleasure and its expression is important. Most of our moral values are based on it, an ultimate or immediate pleasure, and our whole psychological training, as well as physical, neurological, hereditary, is based on the pursuit of pleasure. If you examine not only the outward values and judgements of society, but also examine, look within ourselves, you will see that pleasure and its evaluation and judgement 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, being pleased, gratified. (You will have to sit down because you can’t be disturbed when you are talking about this because - take your time and settle down, will you?) And, self-expression, or fulfilment is a form of pleasure, and when that pleasure is thwarted, blocked, then there is not only fear, but out of that fear there is aggression.
You are not just listening to a lot of words, they have no meaning, or ideas, then you can read a book or psychological explanation that’ll have no value, but if we are investigating together, step by step, then you will see for yourself what an extraordinary thing comes out of it; bearing in mind that we are not saying you must not have pleasure, that pleasure is wrong as the various religious groups throughout the world maintain, especially the saints.
Most of us seek pleasure through self-expression. We want to express ourselves in little things or in great things. The artist wants to express himself on the canvas, the writer, the musician and so on, using the instrument. This self-expression from which one derives an enormous amount of pleasure, when that self is expressed is it beauty? You are following this? When an artist expresses himself – a sense of expression – and derives beauty, derives pleasure, intense satisfaction; or, that discontent which is also another form of pleasure, because he can’t completely convey on that canvas or in words what he feels, and in that also is a form of pleasure.
There is bliss only, which is beyond pleasure, and beauty which is not the expression of a cunning mind, but the beauty which is known when the mind is completely quiet, silent. You know, it is raining and you can hear the patter of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear that out of deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, the beauty of it cannot be put into words or on a canvas. So beauty is something beyond self-expression. And love obviously is bliss, which is not pleasure.