BENGALURU: For most of us pleasure, and its expression, is very 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.
And saints are really quite neurotic people, and I don’t know why they have become saints, probably it’s a part of the vested interest of the church, and that is so throughout the world. So 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 it quite objectively, deeply, then out of that comes a different state of mind which has a bliss but not pleasure. Bliss is something entirely different.
Pleasure is the looking at a beautiful mountain, a lovely tree, the light in a cloud that is chased by the wind across the sky, the beauty of a river, with its clear running water. There is a great deal of pleasure in watching all of this; and in seeing the beautiful face of a woman, a man or a child; the pleasure that comes through touch, taste, seeing, listening - which we all know. And when that intense pleasure is sustained by thought, and when that pleasure is thwarted, then there is a counter-action which is aggression, reprisal, anger, hate, aggression born out of the feeling of not getting that pleasure which you are after, and therefore fear, which is again fairly obvious if you observe it. And the more this expression, self-expression from which pleasure is derived, the more thought seeks to express that pleasure in different ways.