The Taste, or Rasa, of Food Can Be Enjoyed by the Yogic Practitioner If Desire Is Removed From the Experience

There is a factor of enjoyment of taste of various foods which is called rasa in Sanskrit. We experience this when we eat something that excites our taste buds and sends signals of pleasure to the brain. For many people, the sweet taste, and more particularly the taste of rich chocolate, seems to occupy such a position. Others however may find enjoyment in any of the other primary tastes identified by Ayurveda, salty, sour, sharp/spicy, astringent or bitter. Some of these tastes are considered to impact the doshas or predominant elements active in the being, vata, pitta and kapha. To the extent that they both satisfy the taste buds and positively impact the doshas, they lead to a positive response and acceptance in the being.

Many times, spiritual seekers who take up the practice of Yoga, in their attempt to bring the vital nature under control, will attempt to suppress enjoyment of any kind as being somehow ‘unspiritual’. They adopt a serious, oftentimes rigid demeanor, and refrain from anything that can bring enjoyment. This however, whether related to the enjoyment of taste, or other forms of enjoyment, is an extreme reaction that suppresses the natural state of enjoyment native to every human being.

Those who have come into contact with the XIV Dalai Lama often remark on his almost childlike enjoyment that spills out naturally when he experiences or sees something that sparks that type of reaction. We also see young children experiencing enjoyment from not only tasty foods, but from their games of play and their experience of animals, their experience of the scent of flowers, and through many other reactions that express the real ‘Ananda’ that underlies all life, and which expresses itself, albeit imperfectly and incompletely, in the mental-vital-physical realm as enjoyment..

The Taittiriya Upanishad emphasizes the role of Ananda: “Lo, this that is well and beautifully made, verily it is no other than the delight behind existence. When he hath gotten him this delight, then it is that this creature becometh a thing of bliss; for who could labour to draw in the breath or who could have strength to breathe it out, if there were not that Bliss in the heaven of his heart, the ether within his being?” (translated by Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, Brahmanandavalli Ch. 7) The Upanishad goes on to define the level and intensity of bliss, starting with that of a blessed and successful human individual and then magnified many times over as the comparison is made to higher manifestations of being. It concludes however, that “this is the bliss of the Vedawise, whose soul the blight of desire not toucheth.”

This leads us to conclude, then, that it is not the enjoyment of taste or other forms that Ananda may take in the human being, but the attachment and the grasping that comes with desire in the vital nature that needs to be eliminated.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “It is no part of this Yoga to suppress taste, rasa, altogether. What is to be got rid of is vital desire and attachment, the greed of food, being overjoyed at getting the food you like, sorry and discontented when you do not have it, giving an undue importance to it. Equality is here the test as in so many other matters.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pg. 66