Addressing Food-Desire Effectively Without Over-Emphasizing the Focus on It

When an individual takes up the spiritual path, he seeks guidance, perhaps from books or through online blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, perhaps from people who are treading the path, perhaps from a teacher or Guru who has come into his life. Generally he comes away with some guidelines to follow. In many instances, the guidelines set forth ultimate desired results but do not provide detailed instruction taking into account the individual’s starting point, situation and circumstances. This can lead to substantial anxiety in the seeker as he tries to measure his thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions against a standard that he is not able to meet at that moment. Substantial time, energy and focus is then dedicated to what may be, in the big picture, relatively small things.

It is part of the process of maturing along the path for the seeker to begin to refine the time and attention so that these matters can be seen in a more balanced light, and thus, not allowed to occupy the mind that should be ideally focused on the spiritual pursuits. While most people are more easily able to spot faults outside, in others, the spiritual seeker tends to take a more ‘close up’ view of his own reactions and thus, magnifies the faults he sees when he tries to compare them to the ideal as set forth in the teachings he may be attempting to implement.

Sri Aurobindo’s approach is to cultivate detachment and equality, thereby reducing or eliminating vital desires that arise, over the course of time. This standpoint helps the seeker to find that right balance where the focus remains on the spiritual effort, the aspiration, the consecration and the receptivity to the higher force and the rejection of unwanted vital reactions plays out through the action of the higher force responding to the call and the openness that the seeker eventually develops.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Neither neglect this turn of the nature (food-desire) nor make too much of it; it has to be dealt with, purified and mastered but without giving it too much importance. There are two ways of conquering it — one of detachment, learning to regard food as only a physical necessity and the vital satisfaction of the stomach and the palate as a thing of no importance; the other is to be able to take without insistence or seeking any food given and to find in it (whether pronounced good or bad by others) the equal rasa, not of the food for its own sake, but of the universal Ananda.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pg. 67

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