Fading, to the sea, home; then inward, and home again

1. Follow the taste as in Dhalnā: full, fading, the aftertaste, a trace, no taste. Touch for each.
2. Then widen through the waters: the cup, the pot, the well, the rain, the sea, no edge. Touch for each.
3. In the silence past the edge, hold, and stay.
4. Hold again. Come back, closer and closer, touching as each comes back, to a second taste, full on the tongue.
5. Now go inward: the tongue at rest, the mouth, the swallow, the warmth, the heart, the feeling. Touch for each.
6. In the feeling, silence. Hold, and stay.
7. When you are ready, hold. Come back out through the heart, the warmth, the swallow, the mouth, the tongue.
8. You are back. Sit a moment before you get up.

• The way back is always one hold away, or the button at the top: it never leaves you in the middle.
• Nothing you have been told not to eat: no sugar if you have diabetes, no salt if your blood pressure is high. A sip of water is always enough.
• This is not a fast and not a diet. Eat your meals.
• If the stomach is unsettled, take only water.
• Choose something from the kitchen of the life you are walking toward.

Sri Aurobindo, to someone afraid of the emptiness that came in concentration:

Consciousness is not dissolved; it is the limits of the consciousness that are dissolved.

Letters on Yoga III, CWSA 30, p. 276

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 paper →

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.