Bliss is not pleasure; ecstasy is not brought about by thought; it is an entirely different thing. You can come upon bliss or ecstasy only when you understand the nature of thought – which breeds both pleasure and fear.
So the question arises: can one stop thought? If thought breeds fear and pleasure – for where there is pleasure there must be pain, which is fairly obvious – then one asks oneself: can thought come to an end? – which does not mean the ending of the perception of beauty, the enjoyment of beauty. It is like seeing the beauty of a cloud or a tree and enjoying it totally, completely, fully; but when thought seeks to have that same experience tomorrow, that same delight that it had yesterday seeing that cloud, that tree, that flower, the face of that beautiful person, then it invites disappointment, pain, fear and pleasure.
So can thought come to an end? Or is that a wrong question altogether? It is a wrong question because we want to experience an ecstasy, a bliss, which is not pleasure. By ending thought we hope we shall come upon something which is immense, which is not the product of pleasure and fear. What place has thought in life? – not, how is thought to be ended? What is the relationship of thought to action and to inaction?
What is the relationship of thought to action where action is necessary? Why, when there is complete enjoyment of beauty, does thought come into existence at all? – for if it did not then it would not be carried over to tomorrow. I want to find out – when there is complete enjoyment of the beauty of a mountain, of a beautiful face, a sheet of water – why thought should come there and give a twist to it and say, ‘I must have that pleasure again tomorrow.’ I have to find out what the relationship of thought is in action; and to find out if thought need interfere when there is no need of thought at all. I see a beautiful tree, without a single leaf, against the sky, it is extraordinarily beautiful and that is enough – finished. Why should thought come in and say, ‘I must have that same delight tomorrow’? And I also see that thought must operate in action. Skill in action is also skill in thought.
So, what is the actual relationship between thought and action? As it is, our action is based on concepts, on ideas. I have an idea or concept of what should be done and what is done is approximation to that concept, idea, to that ideal. So there is a division between action and the concept, the ideal, the ‘should be; in this division there is conflict. Any division, psychological division, must breed conflict. I am asking myself, ‘What is the relationship of thought in action?” If there is division between the action and the idea then action is incomplete. Is there an action in which thought sees something instantly and acts immediately so that there is not an idea, an ideology to be acted on separately? Is there an action in which the very seeing is the action – in which the very thinking is the action? I see that thought breeds fear and pleasure; I see that where there is pleasure there is pain and therefore resistance to pain. I see that very clearly; the seeing of it is the immediate action; in the seeing of it is involved thought, logic and thinking very clearly; yet the seeing of it is instantaneous and the action is instantaneous – therefore there is freedom from it.
Are we communicating with each other? Go slowly, it is quite difficult. Please do not say yes so easily. If you say ‘yes,’ then when you leave the hall, you must be free of fear. Your saying ‘yes’ is merely an assertion that you have understood verbally, intellectually – which is nothing at all. You and I are here this morning investigating the question of fear and when you leave the hall there must be complete freedom from it. That means you are a free human being, a different human being, totally transformed – not tomorrow, but now; you see very clearly that thought breeds fear and pleasure; you see that all our values are based on fear and pleasure – moral, ethical, social, religious, spiritual. If you perceive the truth of it – and to see the truth of it you have to be extraordinarily aware, logically, healthily, sanely observing every movement of thought – then that very perception is total action and therefore when you leave you are completely out of it – otherwise you will say, ‘How am I to be free of fear, tomorrow?,
Thought must operate in action. When you have to go to your house you must think; or to catch a bus, train, go to the office, thought then operates efficiently, objectively, non-personally, nonemotionally; that thought is vital. But when thought carries on that experience that you have had, carries it on through memory into the future, then such action is incomplete, therefore there is a form of resistance and so on.
Then we can go on to the next question. Let us put it this way: what is the origin of thought, and who is the thinker? One can see that thought is the response of knowledge, experience, as accumulated memory, the background from which there is a response of thought to any challenge; if you are asked where you live there is instant response. Memory, experience, knowledge is the background, is that from which thought comes. So thought is never new; thought is always old; thought can never be free, because it is tied to the past and therefore it can never see anything new. When I understand that, very clearly, the mind becomes quiet. Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.
Seeing all this, seeing that freedom is necessary to examine – and to examine very clearly there must be the discipline of learning and not of suppression and imitation – seeing how the mind is conditioned by society, by the past, seeing that all thought springing from the brain is old and therefore incapable of understanding anything new, then the mind becomes completely quiet – not controlled, not shaped to be quiet. There is no system or method – it does not matter whether it is Zen from Japan, or a system from India – to make the mind quiet; that is the most stupid thing for the mind to do: to discipline itself to be quiet. Now seeing all that – actually seeing it, not as something theoretical – then there is an action from that perception; that very perception is the action of liberation from fear. So, on the occasion of any fear arising, there is immediate perception and the ending of it.
What is love? For most of us it is pleasure and hence fear; that is what we call love. When there is the understanding of fear and pleasure, then what is love? And ‘who’ is going to answer this question? – the speaker, the priest, the book? Is some outside agency going to tell us we are doing marvellously well, carry on? Or, is it that having examined, observed, seen non-analytically, the whole structure and nature of pleasure, fear, pain, we find that the ‘observer,’ the ‘thinker’ is part of thought. if there is no thinking there is no ‘thinker,’ the two are inseparable; the thinker is the thought. There is a beauty and subtlety in seeing that. And where then is the mind that started to inquire into this question of fear? What is the state of the mind now that it has gone through all this? Is it the same as it was before it came to this state. It has seen this thing very intimately, it has seen the nature of this thing called thought, fear and pleasure, it has seen all that; what is its actual state now? Obviously nobody can answer that except yourself; if you have actually gone into it, you will see that it has become completely transformed.