YOU ARE WATCHING the operation of your own brain, the operation of your own mind. You are discovering for yourself the way you think, the way you feel, your fears, of which you must also consider pleasure. Because they are the two sides of the same coin.
This whole movement of fear, desire, and time is you. That is what your consciousness is. You can’t escape from your consciousness, you are that. So remain with that. When you remain with it, give all your attention to it, like bringing a strong light upon something that is dark, it dispels the whole pattern of fear. And in considering fear we consider pleasure, because pleasure brings also pain and fear. Most of us have always sought pleasure—sexual pleasure, or that of the intellect; the pleasure of devotion, which is romanticism; or the pleasure of popularity, and all that business. We are always seeking pleasure, and ultimate pleasure is, of course, Brahmin, or another invented God. I do not know if you have realized that thought has created God. God hasn’t created you to live a miserable life, but we have created god. Thought has created it and we worship that which thought has created, which becomes rather silly.
So we have to examine pleasure. The pleasure of ambition, of possession, of being an ascetic, of sex. What is pleasure? Why has man pursued it? What is the movement of pleasure? You see a beautiful sunset, with its light and glory. A great light across the heavens, the beauty, the delight of something incredible. If you have ever looked at a sunset with all your heart and brain and mind, it is an extraordinary sight, as is the sight of an early morning. The other day we saw the sun rise. There was the waning moon and the morning star, clear light on the waters, and the snow-covered hills, and there was great beauty, which no painter, no poet, could describe. There was a delight in that. That delight is recorded in the brain. Then that pleasure is remembered and we want that pleasure to be repeated. The repetition is no longer pleasure; it becomes memory as pleasure. It is not the original perception of that waning moon, the clear sky with that low, single star and the beauty of that light on the water. That remembrance is pleasure; it was not at the moment of perception. At the moment of seeing there was no pleasure; there was that. But it has been recorded, then there is the remembrance of that, and that pleasure is the remembrance. And there is the demand for that pleasure to be repeated.
At the moment when you see the beauty of a mountain, with the snow, with the clear, blue sky, there is no pleasure, there is only that immensity, that grandeur, that majesty; later on pleasure begins when you want it to be repeated, which means the remembrance, thought, time; the same thing as fear. I have seen the whole movement of that thing that has happened yesterday morning and that I want it again. It is exactly the same movement as fear and pleasure. So our minds, our existences, are caught between these two, reward and punishment. That is our life. That is me, you, the self, that lives, has its root in this time, thought, pleasure, fear, reward, and punishment. Heaven is there if you do the right thing, if you don’t you go to hell! The same thing repeated over and over again.
So is what has been said an abstraction as an idea? Or do you see for yourself how your mind is working, how your brain is operating? Do you see the truth that thought, time, is the root of fear just as it is the root of pleasure? So they are both the same. You discover fear is pleasure. Have you seen the truth of this so that you are free of fear? Then there is freedom, then you have strength, vitality to fight all this ugliness in the world.