Every man who has stopped knows the first half of this verse without ever having read it.
The thing went away. He saw to that, or the money did, or the police, or his family. And something stayed behind that had nothing to do with the thing. It was waiting for him in the evening, at the hour it always came.
The Gītā saw this long before anybody wrote about addiction, and said it in one line.
विषया विनिवर्तन्ते निराहारस्य देहिनः।
रसवर्जं रसोऽप्यस्य परं दृष्ट्वा निवर्तते॥
viṣayā vinivartante nirāhārasya dehinaḥ |
rasavarjaṁ raso'pyasya paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate ||
Bhagavad Gītā 2.59
Word by word
विषया विनिवर्तन्ते. The objects turn away. Whatever was taken in is no longer there.
निराहारस्य देहिनः. For the embodied one who does not take them in. The Gītā is speaking of a man who fasts. We read it for a man who has stopped taking anything at all, and that reading is ours.
रसवर्जं. Except the taste. रस: the savour, the juice, the delight a thing has for us. The thing has gone. Its rasa has not.
रसोऽप्यस्य परं दृष्ट्वा निवर्तते. Even his taste turns back, once he has seen the Supreme. परं: the highest, what is beyond. Not a better habit. Something larger than the whole business of having and not having.
Why stopping alone becomes a life sentence
Read the first half by itself and you have the shape of almost everything that is offered to a man in his position. Keep the thing away. Keep it away tomorrow. Keep it away for the rest of your life.
It is not wrong. The thing does go. But the verse says plainly what happens next: the taste stays. And a man left alone with a taste he is forbidden to satisfy has been handed a fight he must win again every morning, with no end to it.
That is not a failure of his will. The verse says it happens to anybody, to the man who fasts for God as much as to the man who has stopped opium.
What Sri Aurobindo read in it
Sri Aurobindo read this verse in Essays on the Gita. Here is the whole of what he says about it, as he wrote it.
It is not an external asceticism, the physical renunciation of the objects of sense that I am teaching, suggests Krishna immediately to avoid a misunderstanding which is likely at once to arise. Not the renunciation of the Sankhyas or the austerities of the rigid ascetic with his fasts, his maceration of the body, his attempt to abstain even from food; that is not the selfdiscipline or the abstinence which I mean, for I speak of an inner withdrawal, a renunciation of desire. The embodied soul, having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normal physical action; by abstention from food it simply removes from itself the physical contact with the object of sense, but does not get rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful. It retains the pleasure of the sense in the object, the rasa, the liking and disliking, — for rasa has two sides; the soul must, on the contrary, be capable of enduring the physical contact without suffering inwardly this sensuous reaction. Otherwise there is nivṛtti, cessation of the object, viṣayā vinivartante, but no subjective cessation, no nivṛtti of the mind; but the senses are of the mind, subjective, and subjective cessation of the rasa is the only real sign of mastery. But how is this desireless contact with objects, this unsensuous use of the senses possible? It is possible, paraṁ dṛṣṭvā, by the vision of the supreme, — param, the Soul, the Purusha, — and by living in the Yoga, in union or oneness of the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga of the intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisfied in its own delight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we see this supreme thing in us and fix the mind and will on that, the place of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions of the mind. This is the true way of liberation.
Two things in it matter for this page. The abstinence the Gītā means is not the physical one: a man who only removes the object keeps the rasa, and only the end of the rasa inside is mastery. And he says how that end comes: not by holding harder, but by a delight that takes its place.
He writes for anybody who would master himself. In the pages around this he speaks of desire as an enemy to be slain, as the Gītā itself does (3.43). This site keeps no enemy, and we say so here rather than hide the difference.
The taste is not killed. It is outgrown.
So the question was never how to hate the taste enough. A taste does not leave because it is hated. It leaves when a larger one arrives.
That is what the practice is for. Not escape, and not preparing to escape. Training: a body learning a delight it did not know, a breath that is enough, a feeling given somewhere to go instead of being shut away. Nothing here asks a man to want less. It asks him to want something large enough.
The same sentence, in another book
Sri Aurobindo comes back to it in The Life Divine, writing about hunger in every living thing, not about any drug. The paragraph is long, and we give it whole.
This movement of desire must and ought to continue until the individual has grown sufficiently so that he can now at last become master of himself and by increasing union with the Infinite possessor of his universe. Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe and the attempt to extinguish it in the interests of inertia is a denial of the divine Life-principle, a Will-not-to-be which is necessarily ignorance; for one cannot cease to be individually except by being infinitely. Desire too can only cease rightly by becoming the desire of the infinite and satisfying itself with a supernal fulfilment and an infinite satisfaction in the all-possessing bliss of the Infinite. Meanwhile it has to progress from the type of a mutually devouring hunger to the type of a mutual giving, of an increasingly joyous sacrifice of interchange; — the individual gives himself to other individuals and receives them back in exchange; the lower gives itself to the higher and the higher to the lower so that they may be fulfilled in each other; the human gives itself to the Divine and the Divine to the human; the All in the individual gives itself to the All in the universe and receives its realised universality as a divine recompense. Thus the law of Hunger must give place progressively to the law of Love, the law of Division to the law of Unity, the law of Death to the law of Immortality.
He does not say desire must be put out. He says the attempt to put it out for the sake of inertia is a denial of life itself, and that desire can only cease rightly by becoming the desire of the infinite. Meanwhile it moves, from a hunger that devours to a giving that receives back.
That last movement this site has met once already, on another page, in a closed hand that opens. A man who has come through does not lose his hunger. It becomes the hunger to give, and the sixth phase is built on it. That reading is ours.
One line that must not be misread
परं दृष्ट्वा, once he has seen the Supreme, is not a test he must pass before he is allowed to stop. Nobody is asked to see God on a bad morning.
The verse does not say a man is failing until the taste goes. It says when the taste goes. Until then, the thing staying away is the first half of the verse, already done.
The thing can go in a day. The taste goes when something larger has been tasted.
The verse is given in its usual printed text, transliterated by rule. The sense of its words is the common one; the reading here, of the man, the evening and the practice, is ours. Sri Aurobindo's words are from his Complete Works (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust), and both books can be read whole on the Ashram's site.