BENGALURU: There are three things concerned with pleasure: joy, enjoyment and pleasure. This is so - look at it. You are going to find out what is the relationship between the three of them. Joy - real enjoyment of a lovely day, the enjoyment of seeing the mountains, hearing the great thunder rolling among the hills - and the mind that is pursuing the pleasure as that which has happened yesterday, with that lightning.
So what is pleasure? Is there a moment of pleasure - I am asking - when you can say, ‘This is pleasure’? Or you only know it after. You recognise it as pleasure when it is over, which is the movement of thought as time. I wonder if you see this thing! So is there a moment when you say, ‘My god, this is great pleasure!’ But only when thought, when that incident which has been called ‘pleasure’, in quotes, has been registered in the brain and then the awakening of thought and recognising that as delight, pleasure and pursuing it - sexually - in so many ways. So what is the relationship of thought to pleasure? Pleasure being emotions, great feeling, sentimentality, feeling tremendously sentimental, gooey, romantic, ideological.
What relationship has pleasure to thought, or is pleasure the movement of thought only? I take... There has been a pleasure - what we call pleasure - a flattery, someone flatters you: ‘Marvellous, how beautiful, what a lovely writing that is, what a marvellous speech you have made!’ That is pleasure. And you listen to that and you like the flattery of another, which means you are not really concerned with the truth of perception but the flattery of someone who says, ‘What a marvellous fellow you are’.
Then thought picks that up, pursues it and you who have flattered are my everlasting friend and I seek more and more flattery. That is the pursuit of pleasure which also acts in the other opposite way, which is: you hurt me and I pursue that hurt, thought pursues that hurt, and you are my enemy or I don’t like you, avoid you. It’s the same principle. So is thought the pursuer, not pleasure? I wonder if you see that. I’ve found something! We are not pursuing pleasure but thought is pursuing pleasure. And when you pursue... when thought pursues something, it must be in the field of time.
Therefore yesterday the sexual pleasure, the remembrance of it and the pursuit of it. Seeing the pleasure, all ‘pleasure’, in quotes, the mountains and the sunset, and the thunder rolling among the hills and thought pursuing that sound, pursuing that marvellous light of an evening on the snow. So it is the movement of thought as a remembrance in time that is the pursuit of pleasure. I wonder if you get all this. I pursue a guru - not I (laughter) - I have an abomination of gurus, because they are the new priests; before you accepted the Catholic domination. You were told exactly what to do and you did that - now you are bored with that and you take on new gurus and you will get bored with that and then you will go on to the gurus from China or Japan, or Russia - it is the same pattern.