What happens when the senses become senseless? How much salt do you need in your food? Just a pinch of it, isn’t it? It makes the food edible and tasty. Now ask how much sugar do you need in your food and the answer is not the same! Sugar is needed to make some stuff sweet and salt is added for taste. So the two differ in content and quantity too.
Some people do not have the capacity to eat sugar since they are diabetic. They have to regulate the sugar in their bodies so they are under medication. They have an insulin jab and then have a little sweet stuff to regulate. But most of the people can have regular sugar in their diets. Even a bottle of your favorite soft drink has nearly 40 grams of sugar.
This is not a lesson on foods and additives. This is a lesson on tastes in life and how we accept them. This is how we take in stuff in the world through our mind.
The tongue is an organ which can distinguish a taste and tell you how much it is. Whether the food has excess salt or bitterness, sweet or spicy hot, bland or sour or just about tasteless.
Just as you can hear sounds with your ear which sound sweet like the koel or bitter like your in laws. In the same way the eyes distinguish things that are likable or not. All our senses are directed towards these likes and dislikes.
Again ask yourself, some find Chopin or Nicky Minaj interesting and others can’t handle it. Why this kind of differentiation? Just like sweet is likable to some and inedible to some. Who creates this differences? It’s the master of all senses called the mind.
The mind has extremes embedded in itself. It can make your body experience all flavors from sweet to bitter. It can make you like some songs and hate some music. It creates likes and dislikes. The sense organs helps the mind arrive at the decisions about certain things. The tongue tastes and the mind determines it as yuck. Or it says take some more, I like it. A bottle of beer sounds so enticing for the one who drinks and bitter for the one who doesn’t like the taste. One’s mind accepts it and the other’s doesn’t. Sometimes mind creates an aversion and sometimes addiction.
Now imagine yourself to be blind or deaf, then would you be able to differentiate colors or sounds? Since you cannot distinguish between the colors or sounds, your mind has no idea about it. It cannot decide on anything. The mind has no clue whether you are wearing a red or green T-shirt, since you are blind. On the other hand you may play death metal band or soft classical music and still you have no clue since you are deaf. If one exists and the other doesn’t then nothing works. Which means if you have eyes but no mind or you have a mind but are born blind, then it doesn’t work out.
This tells you that you will never get to know anything related if you don’t have one of the two.
A mad man has a mind but has no cognition hence he behaves in a peculiar way. A sage has controlled his mind so it doesn’t lead him astray. Even though he sees with his eyes or smells with his nose, still after having the mind, he doesn’t react since he had controlled his mind.
It’s a state of unmani or equanimity of mind. The mind doesn’t swing or sway at anything. Nothing disturbs his mind.
This is the utopian state we all should try to get to.
A state where nothing disturbs you and yet you continue to stay in this world going through all the gamuts of life. You experience the sweetness or sourness in life yet you are non reactive. Nothing moves you. No color distracts you, no human attracts you. You don’t hate politicians and you don’t love wars. You are lost in the divine alone.
Your tongue tastes everything and you know the tastes too, yet it has absolutely no value for you. Your father or mother dies and you do not grieve but feel tranquil. You are not haunted by past peccadilloes or present state of relation less existence.
The color blue doesn’t point you to some thing except Krsna and His Leelas. The cross roads of life has no meaning except the sign of cross on which Jesus was crucified. Your world doesn’t have film heroes but mythical ones. The only thing you want to see is the feet of your master or think about God. Your senses are now drawn inwards and so also is your mind. You are now free and in a state of unmani!
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