बूँद · The drop
Numbness at its full depth. Nothing is asked of it but to hear one note all the way to its end.
Śānta has no colour. There is nothing to put on: if something is tight, a belt or a watch, loosen it. Or begin as you are.
First the body, later the voice, later still only inside. Any of them, any time; nothing is locked.
The note ended, and the silence was still there.
Śānta is the centre: every road from the other lamps ends here.
Why this
Bharata names eight rasas, and śānta is not among them in Ghosh's text (VI.17; one manuscript adds a passage on it that Ghosh calls spurious, note to VI.82). So it has from him no colour and no note. The note here is the site's own Sa, and what is worn is something loosened. Both are ours.
The Mother was asked by a student how one can enter into the feelings of a piece of music played by someone else. Among the ways she named was listening with an intense and concentrated attention, “to the point of stopping all other noise in the head and obtaining a complete silence into which fall, drop by drop, the notes of the music whose sound alone remains” (Some Answers from the Mother, 20 October 1959; CWM 16, p. 230). This practice borrows only the listening.
The silences grow on their own. There is no right moment to tap: a note ends when you hear it end. Nothing you do here is kept or sent.