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Why does the mind think about sex at all?

Why does the mind think about sex at all? Why? Why has it become a central issue in your life? When there are so many things calling, demanding your attention, you give complete attention to the thought of sex.. What happens, why are your minds so occupied with it? Because that is the way of ultimate escape, is it not? It is a way of complete self-forgetfulness. For the time being, at least for the moment, you can forget yourself—and there is no other way of forgetting yourself. Everything else you do in life gives emphasis to the “me”, to the self. Your business, your religion, your gods, your leaders, your political and economic actions, your escapes, your social activities, your joining one party and rejecting another—all that is emphasizing and giving strength to the “me”. That is, there is only this one act in which there is no emphasis on the “me”, so it becomes a problem, does it not?

J.Krishnamurti / The First and Last Freedom, pp 228-229

Thought functioning between pleasure and pain

The question is: Why does thought always avoid the one which is fear and hold on to pleasure? That is one question. Why does thought interfere when there is an experience? You understand? I have an experience of the sunset and at that moment there is nothing to think at all; I am just looking at the beauty of that light. Then thought comes along and says, “I want that repeated again tomorrow”, which is, knowledge as experience, which is pleasure, wants it to be repeated again. I have had pain, which is the remembrance of that pain, which is knowledge, and according to that knowledge or depending upon that knowledge, thought says, “I do not want it.” You follow? Thought is doing it all the time, functioning between pleasure and pain. And thought is responsible for both.

J. Krishnamurti/Talks in India 1970-71, pp 164-65

The struggle to repeat pleasure

From the old you derive pleasure, never from the new. There is no time in the new. So, if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in—at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight—if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and, therefore, tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday.

J. Krishnamurti/Freedom from the Known, p 37

The Work: box stuffer holiday pull through and coded survey

Thought revives the dead past

By thinking about the pleasure which I had yesterday, the pleasure which is dead, which is a memory, I am giving to that dead memory a new life. Please watch this in yourself. Thought is reviving the dead past, the dead pleasure, the dead memory, and from that very dead memory, thought has come into being. This is what is going on all our life. So thought not only breeds this contradiction in our lives—as pleasure and fear—but also thought has accumulated the memory of the innumerable pleasures we have had and from those memories thought is reborn.

J. Krishnamurti/Talks & Dialogues Saanen 1967, p 220

Thought and pleasure

Thought has a great deal to do with pleasure. I can look at that sunset and the next moment it is gone—thought comes in and begins to think about it, says how beautiful it was when, for a moment, “I” was absent, with all my problems, tortures, miseries; there was only that marvellous thing. And that remains as thought, is sustained by thought. The same thing with regard to sexual pleasure—thought chews it over, thinks about it endlessly, builds up images which sustain the sensation and the demand for fulfilment tomorrow. It is the same with regard to ambition, fame, success, and being important.

J.Krishnamurti/Talks & Dialogues Saanen 1967, p 50

Perceptual hijinks

Resaerch has prvoed taht no mttaer waht order the ltteers in a wrod are, you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is becuase we dnot raed ervey ltetr by itslef but the wrod as a wohle.

When the industry of entertainment takes over

When the industry of entertainment takes over, as it is gradually doing now, when the young people, the students, the children, are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality, the words restraint and austerity are pushed away, never even given a thought. The austerity of the monks, the sannyasis, who deny the world, who clothe their bodies with some kind of uniform or just a cloth—this denial of the material world is surely not austerity. You probably won’t even listen to this, to what the implications of austerity are. When you have been brought up from childhood to amuse yourself and escape from yourself through entertainment, religious or otherwise, and when most of the psychologists say that you must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental, leading to various forms of neuroticism, you naturally enter more and more into the world of sport, amusement, entertainment, all helping you to escape from yourself, from what you are. The understanding of the nature of what you are, without any distortions, without any bias, without any reactions to what you discover you are, is the beginning of austerity.

J.Krishnamurti/Krishnamurti to Himself, pp 47-48

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