Pleasure is encouraged by thought, isn't it? Thought can give it a continuity, the appearance of duration which we call happiness; as thought can also give a duration to sorrow. Thought says: `This I like and that I don't like. I would like to keep this and throw away that.' But thought has made up both, and happiness now has become the way of thought. When you say: `I want to remain in that state of happiness'--you are the thought, you are the memory of the previous experience which you call pleasure and happiness. So the past, or yesterday, or many yesterdays ago, which is thought, is saying: `I would like to live in that state of happiness which I have had.' You are making the dead past into an actuality in the present and you are afraid of losing it tomorrow. Thus you have built a chain of continuity. This continuity has its roots in the ashes of yesterday, and therefore it is not a living thing at all. Nothing can blossom in ashes--and thought is ashes. So you have made happiness a thing of thought, and it is for you a thing of thought. But is there something other than pleasure, pain, happiness and sorrow? Is there a bliss, an ecstasy, that is not touched by thought? For thought is very trivial, and there is nothing original about it. In asking this question, thought must abandon itself. When thought abandons itself there is the discipline of the abandonment, which becomes the grace of austerity. Then austerity is not harsh and brutal. Harsh austerity is the product of thought as a revulsion against pleasure and indulgence.From this deep self-abandonment--which is thought abandoning itself, for it sees clearly its own danger--the whole structure of the mind becomes quiet. It is really a state of pure attention and out of this comes a bliss, an ecstasy, that cannot be put into words. When it is put into words it is not the real.