| Pleasure is the product of thought; joy is not. Pleasure is sustained, built up by thought. The mind has an experience, and that experience is thought about. If that experience has a certain form of pleasure, delight, amusement; thought begins to think about it and therefore sustains that pleasure by thinking about it. That is what most people do when they have sex – sexual demands, sexual pleasures – the mind, thought, thinks about it over and over and over again, and then that pleasure must be fulfilled. That is a constant image in the mind. One hears, ‘Die to everything you know,’ and one asks, ‘What have I left?’ But if one has really gone into it deeply, what one has left is joy, real joy of living – seeing a beautiful tree, a beautiful face, the movement of water, the bird – living. Not living in conflict, in misery – all that is not living. Death is not something prolonged; it comes immediately, and it is over. To die to the past immediately requires a great deal of attention, a great deal of inquiry, a great deal of inward apprehension. Not apprehension in the sense fear, but inward awareness. Then out of that, there is a different kind of life altogether. Therefore there is no fear of death because you are dying every day to everything you have gathered. So your mind becomes extraordinarily alert, fresh, young and – if I may use that word which is so laden – innocent. It is only the innocent mind that can live, not this jaded mind. From a conversation with Donald Ingram Smith, New Delhi, 24 December 1966 Read more | 