Choose one small thing: a grain of sugar or jaggery, a slice of lime, a pinch of salt, a neem leaf, a sip of water. Before it touches your tongue, stop for a few seconds: the Mother's words for that moment are folded below.
The taste full on the tongue, then fading, the aftertaste, only a trace, then no taste at all. The silence of the tongue held. Then back, until a second taste of the same arrives whole.
any length →खthe taste widening through the watersDūr · wideningA sip of water: the drop on the tongue, the cup, the clay pot, the well, the rain, the sea. Then no edge. Then back, through the waters, to the drop on the tongue.
any length →गthe taste followed inwardBhītar · withinThe tongue at rest, the whole mouth, the swallow, the warmth going down, the heart. Then not a taste but a feeling, and in it, silence. Then back out.
any length →घfading, wide, home, within, homeYātrā · the whole journeyA taste followed until it is gone, then out through the waters to the sea until there is no edge, and silence. Back, closer and closer, to the taste full on the tongue. Then inward to the heart. Then back, to where you began.
a quiet hour →Where this comes from
This is the journey of Nādamaya with a taste instead of a sound, made at Jyotirgana from Arjun's own description. Its widening goes through the waters, because taste belongs to water. This form is ours.
It has not been tested. We claim no result from it.
The Mother, on psychic education, writing for the Ashram's Bulletin in February 1952:
Thus before you eat, concentrate a few seconds in the aspiration that the food you are about to eat may bring your body the substance it needs to serve as a solid basis for your effort towards the great discovery, and give it the energy for persistence and perseverance in the effort.On Education, CWM 12, p. 34
Sri Aurobindo, in The Life Divine, on the delight that is in all things:
For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa.The Life Divine, CWSA 21, p. 116
रसोऽहमप्सु कौन्तेय प्रभास्मि शशिसूर्ययोः ।
प्रणवः सर्ववेदेषु शब्दः खे पौरुषं नृषु ॥
I am the taste in the waters, Kaunteya, the light in the moon and the sun; the Oṁ in all the Vedas, the sound in space, the strength in men.
Krishna speaks, and the first thing He names is taste. The drop on the tongue is where He is.
jagdhipānakṛtollāsarasānandavijṛmbhaṇāt |
bhāvayed bharitāvasthāṃ mahānandas tato bhavet || 72 ||
From the delight of eating and drinking, the joy of the taste swelling: dwell on that fullness, and the great joy comes.
The taste is not refused. It is followed.
Bhagavad Gītā 7.8, in the text of sanskritdocuments.org; Vijñāna Bhairava 72, in the text of GRETIL (Göttingen), in Roman letters as it is given there. The translations are ours.