Floracopeia, Inc
The Complete Course of Ayurveda
Jai Dev Singh Module 5
This is a presentation from Floracopeia Aromatic Treasures and MedicineCrow.com, the grassroots
healthcare network.
We are officially now past the halfway point and this is the part of the course where we really move from
or at least begin to move from the philosophical to the application of philosophy.
For the first four modules we really spent most of the time building our foundation, building the
understanding, building the context of the philosophy and to me that’s really essential and perhaps most
important because it is that expansive context that brought into the philosophical understanding that gives
the energy to actually to do the things that are important to do and when that’s understood well it has real
meaning then that actually can feed into giving an energy and will power in order to do the things that are
going to make the real difference in the life. For me personally if I don’t have a good enough and a deep
enough rational, something is not connecting to me in my soul then I’m probably not going to do
whatever that is long term, I may do it for a little while because it’s supposedly good for me and I might
hear that this food does this and this and I might take it for a little while and then for some reason or
another I stop doing it along the way. But when something has actually impacted me at a deep level and I
experience it as the soul, those are the things that I found I do long term and they never go away. That’s
what I hope that we have begun to do with the first half of this course and that we’ll continue to do here.
At the same time now we’re going to actually take the substance of what we’ve built so far and look at
how to use it in order to actually make a positive impact on our lives. For instance, the last module we
discussed the dhatus, the tissue layers of the body, and that is really the way we built the substratum for
the mind and for the psyche. How to create a physical body that is well supportive for a healthy mind so
that the sense of self, the unconscious and the subconscious sense of self, the Ahamkar has a well
supported healthy positioning in order to move from. If there is not a sense of self that has an identity that
is conducive for higher awareness, that’s conducive for having a confidence, for having the energy, for
having the stature, for having a real sense of real fulfillment in life, then there is little chance that we’re
going to experience a real long lasting happiness.
That’s really the deeper beauty of Ayurveda is that when we talk about food, and we talk about eating,
we’re really talking about transforming what’s not you into what is you and when we digest anything,
whether it be physical or whether it be psychological, we’re actually taking what is in our external
environment and turning it into ourselves and the key principle is that it will continue to be the key
principle for the rest of this course and that is digestion. It’s not just digestion in the typical sense of your
physical body, of your digestive system, but it’s you being able to digest, ingest whatever it is your
ingesting, extract out what is good in that and eliminate out what is not good in that because in every
situation, with every substance, with every food, with every herb, with every person, with every
relationship, and on and on, there are things that are nutritive, that are positive, that are useful and then
there are things are negative, that are toxic, that are not useful and that’s across the board. Certain foods
have far more nutrients than they have that need to be eliminated whereas other foods have far more
toxicity and far less nutrients. If you take white sugar for instance, you’re refined, standardized middle
American white sugars, I believe it’s the only actual food that has calories with actually no nutrients.
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And so sugar has a bad rap but sugar itself is not a bad thing as we’ll see today, sugar can be very
medicinal which I’m sure many of you are happy to hear. However, we need to put that in context and
that’s what today’s class is about.
When you look back at the seven dhatus and the Agni and ojas in that chart we used last week, that’s
something you can meditate on and it’s something that between that chart and “The Journey of
Consciousness into Form”, the first handout, just on those two handouts you have incredible amount of
information and it’s not just intellectual information as if you’re reading a book, these are deep concepts
that sometimes take a long time to digest, no pun intended. But you can go into these charts and you can
meditate on them and you can re-listen to these classes over and over and the way you will understand
them a year from now is going to be profoundly different than how you’re understanding them now.
That’s the nature of these teachings that’s why it’s of Veda, meaning it’s of infinite truth, that’s what the
Veda is, its infinite truth, it has no time and space to it. That’s why Ayurveda is as relevant today as it was
5,000 years ago. It’s not a trend; it’s not a fad because it’s the laws of nature, and its how the creator
thinks. Einstein said that “I want to know how God thinks everything else is just the details.”
So the Veda, the teachings of Ayurveda and the teachings of Yoga, to me it’s how God thinks. That may
be a bold statement to make for some of you but for me it’s not a bold statement at all. It just makes
complete sense.
In its purest form, there are many people who take the teachings of Ayurveda and Yoga and dilute them
and we couldn’t make that statement, but in their purest form, that what these teachings are, the same
teachings of the Kabala, it’s the same teachings of the mystical sects of Christianity, it’s the same
teaching of mystical Islam, the same teachings of all the indigenous cultures around the world, it’s the
same stuff and in this case Ayurveda has been preserved and influenced by the culture of India so it
comes out of that particular context and it’s a very profound and wonderful and glorious context, one that
I resonate with very much. I think maybe the gift of India to the entire world is Yoga and Ayurveda
because although these sciences in one form or another have been in really every culture, in every
spirituality around the planet, they were very well preserved in India. Even through all of India’s fazes as
the British took over and before that as the tyrannical Muslim Empires took over India, these sciences
were still preserved in the mountains from the Gurus to their disciples and from the Guru Teachers to
student and teacher to student and teacher to student. Really what you’re learning here is a tradition and
it’s a lineage that is really unbroken for thousands of years.
That’s an important thing and a powerful thing to acknowledge and that’s one reason why I particularity
like this form of teaching. As wonderful as it would be to be in everyone’s presence, at least being able to
speak through an audio medium is a powerful way to transmit the teachings because it goes beyond just
the written word and that’s why all of the sacred traditions of the world have traditionally been oral
traditions. Not because they couldn’t write things down, but because there is an energy that passes
through the sound current that can’t pass through the written word. Written word is important as well and
very useful and we like the combination of everything, but being able to do it through voice, the teacher
can then project something that then can digest in ways that’s just simply not possible otherwise, and
that’s the power of sound, and that’s one of the secrets that the Yogis know with mantra and one of the
reasons why we chant mantra is because we’re developing our own inner sound currents so we have the
capacity to use our sound current through the medium of our words in ways that communicate bigger
ideas and so that people can digest them and people can understand them.
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As Yogis, once we’re engaged in these sciences of Ayurveda and Yoga and using mantras and using
pranayama and using the asanas. What we’re really doing is building this body vehicle as kind of a
pranic matrix, that’s why you’re referred to as the pranee, the human being is referred to as the pranee,
the carrier of the prana and the pranayama is the manipulation of the prana so the pranayama is not just
the breathing exercises, the pranayama is chanting, this could be pranayama right now as I’m talking to
you, I’m manipulating my prana. So pranayama is the movement or the conscious manipulation of the
prana, the Life Force intelligence. As we’re going into these practices, and as we’re engaging them and
growing with them and learning them we’re really developing the body vehicle as this container for the
prana and creating a matrix of energy so that you can actually be more effective in your life.
It may sound esoteric when I talk with words like matrix of prana and so forth but what it really means is
that you can communicate with your wife or your husband better. Or you can raise your child more
effectively, you can transmit ideas to them, concepts to them because you have the power over your
sound current, you have the power of your prana. I could raise my voice to teach my son something and
if I’m doing that out of anger he’s not going to learn anything except how to be angry when he gets older.
But I could raise my voice and say the same words, and if I’m doing it consciously and not being driven
by my emotions, but I’m doing it with a purpose, with an intention then it makes sense then there is a
totally different effect.
Back to really teaching numero uno that I emphasized in the Life Force Formula is that the context of
what you do is always more important than the content of what you’re doing. There’s a lot of Ayurvedic
stuff out there that I really have little interest in because I’m not interested in the context of what they’re
teaching, of the context that their teaching from or even the context of who they are as people. I want to
make sure that whatever it is I’m learning, whether it’s Ayurveda or whether it’s business that I’m
learning from a person or people who have the energy that are going to be able to teach from context and
context is always the most powerful when that person is living whatever it is that they’re teaching and so
there’s no way to transmit bigger ideas such as that is necessary when you’re teaching something like
Ayurveda and Yoga unless you have some level of experience of those ideas and experience is the
catalyst that turns your intellectual knowledge into real wisdom. Wisdom is based on experience;
knowledge is based on the intellect, solely the intellect. I could read a book about Ayurveda and know
something and that’s a good start but then if I put it into practice and begin to experience it then I can tell
somebody about that and that energy will come through, same thing with Yoga or anything else. But even
my experiences and many other people who have taken this course experiences, even through the
listening to the sound and listening to these audio classes and meditating on it and just learning and
engaging it with your consciousness then you already begin to get experiential knowledge of the
teachings just through your work so to speak of actually taking the course, of listening to it and of
opening your mind and going into it and allowing it to affect you, it gets into your consciousness and its
even going to digest more over time and so that is the opening spiel before we move into our new topics
which flows very beautifully right from the last topic because when we talk about dhatus again, the tissue
layers of the body, rasa, rakta, mamsa, medas, asthi, majja, and shukra or the plasma and the lymph and
the blood, muscle, fat, bones, nerves and then the reproductive fluids and then all culminating into the
alchemical product of the ojas, the vitality, the container for your prana.
So ojas can be thought of as kind of your context for your prana because you can generate a whole lot of
prana in the body, it’s not very hard to do so, but if you don’t have a strong nervous system and if you
don’t have a good amount of ojas to contain that prana it’s going to do very little for you in the long run
because it’s like running a bunch of Water through a hole, through a bucket with a whole bunch of holes
in the bottom, it’s just going to come out the other side which again is why Yogi Bhajan said, “If you
have nine holes, you’re holy.” People always called him a holy man, your holiness.
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He said, “I believe if you have nine holes, you’re holy.” You have two eyes, you have two nostrils, you
have a mouth, your have two ear holes, you have the rectum, sex organs and so forth and so you have nine
holes. But what really makes you “holy” is when you have consciousness and control over what’s going
in and out of those nine holes. That’s what the science of Ayurveda is all about and I reiterate I like to
think of Ayurveda as the system of pranic management.
The prana is the energy of your life, that is what you have, that is really you’re only asset, and that is your
prana. You came into the world, you came out of your Mother’s womb and you took a breath in and then
when it’s time for you to go you’re going to exhale. The question is, “What are you going to do in
between?” In your movement from womb to tomb as they say and so in between that first inhale and that
last exhale you have so many breaths. The question is, what do you do with it and that’s your prana and
that’s what I mean by saying that’s truly your only asset. You gain money via your prana, you gain
relationships via your prana, you gain health via your prana and so that is really all you have and so it
makes a lot of sense to me to put attention on how do I cultivate that prana, how do I use it wisely, how
do I strengthen it and how do I have as much control over it as possible. The difference between a healthy
individual and a sick individual is the healthy individual has a control over their Life Force, has more
control over their Life Force. A truly healthy individual, if you were to take it as the healthiest individual
from the primordial cause of disease is the one who’s remembered their true nature. We’re talking about a
Buddha or Christ or Krishna or a Nanak, that’s the real state of real health when the unconscious part of
the individual has now become conscious. And that is why Yogis, extremely advanced Yogis can do
things like stop their heart because they’ve cleared out their subconscious to the degree that they have
complete control now even over their autonomic unconscious processes. That’s not a typical thing that
you see and that’s not exactly what we’re striving for here but it’s an important thing to know because
really what this process is about is making as much of the unconscious conscious and that happens
through emptying the subconscious and emptying the subconscious happens through meditation and yoga
and chanting and even using herbs, using the diet and using the herbs in the diet with consciousness,
which is what today is about. What this class is about is about what we refer to in Ayurveda as dravya
guna. Dravya guna is often translated as Ayurvedic Pharmacology. What it really means is the word
dravya could be translated as a substance but if we were to break it down literally it means that which
holds together. That which holds together and what it’s referring to is any substance that is holding
together the Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space elements. So dravya is anything that holds together the
five tattvas, the five great elements, the Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether and as we know everything in
nature is a combination of these five elements. Every food, every herb is a combination of the five
elements in different proportions just like every human being is a combination of these five tattvas in
different proportions. So dravya is the substance that holds together. It’s a beautiful translation and then
guna means the tributes or the qualities of something. So dravya guna is the quality of the substance, so
pharmacology but an important thing to bring out of the gunas is the qualities of the substance is that as
I’ve stated before, Ayurveda is not a bio-chemical science, it’s a bio-qualitative science and that means
it’s much easier to understand, you don’t have a PhD or even an High School Diploma in order to
understand it nor do you have to go to school at all because anyone can understand Earth, Water, Fire,
Air, and Space, my son can understand it.
He’s five and for example, I recently had a cold and I was going to make some food for him and for us
one evening and I had caught a cold and he wanted something with a bunch of cheese like macaroni and
cheese or something and I said well I can’t make that for me because I’ve already got a bunch of mucus
and I don’t think that would be a good idea. So actually the next day he said, “Papa you should take
something for your mucies. He calls it mucies. I said yes, you’re probably right, I probably should and he
said what can you take? He said spicy things? I said yes, you’re right. Spicy things, but you can also take
bitter things.
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I said there are two types of things you can take when you have mucies, you can take spicy things or you
can take bitter things and both of those do a good job getting rid of mucies. He said which one’s better?
I just said it depends and that’s the answer to every question in Ayurveda is it depends, it depends on the
person, it depends on the Prakriti, it depends on the vikriti, it depends on the time of the year, it depends
on all of these different things, that’s the art of it. He said, which one’s better, I said it depends, he said
which one’s better for you?
I said well in this case there is some green and yellow in my mucus and so really bitter things are better
because I explained to him when there is greenish or yellowish mucus that means there is some infection
or in Ayurvedic language it’s Pitta. There is heat involved so if you’re using spicy things you are going to
be successful in getting rid of some of the mucus but you’re also going to be increasing the heat in the
body, which is going to exacerbate some of the problems. Bitter things should be more accentuated when
there is a lot of mucus with Pitta involved. That’s a very simple thing to understand. I could totally see
that he’s totally got it. Not difficult to understand.
That’s why I’m so passionate about this stuff because this should have been taught to me in school. I
should have learned this in school instead I learned Algebra, I wouldn’t use Algebra. To Algebra’s
defense, I’m sure that Algebra is in some part of my brain, however, I didn’t learn how to manage money
in school and I didn’t learn Ayurveda in school and I think those are two things among probably several
others that should be in just every child’s curriculum. Perhaps somebody listening will be able to help
make that happen.
So that is a little story that illustrates a point about this and that in this case a Pitta person like myself with
a cold, with excessive mucus, which is Kapha, which is yellow and green meaning there is heat involved
and so there is Pitta involved, I should instead of having a bunch of cayenne pepper to try to get rid of my
cold I’m going to use more things like golden seal or echinacea and then in combination with that I can
also use pungent spices such as the ginger or the clove, however, I want to make sure I’m using enough
things that are cooling so that I decrease the Pitta enough while I’m getting rid of the mucus and you’re
going to learn all about this here momentarily but that’s a nice little way to start.
With dravya guna, the full name actually for Ayurvedic Pharmacology, the traditional name would be
dravya guna rasa karma, dravya guna rasa karma. That’s not something you need to remember unless
you want to. That’s rasa like the rasa dhatu but the word rasa means many things. The word rasa means
taste, the word rasa means melody, the word rasa means emotion, and the word rasa means
comprehension, the word rasa means juice and I think as I’ve mentioned in the previous modules that in
Sanskrit the more meanings the word has, the more important that word is. Just like with the herbs, the
more Sanskrit names an herb has, the more important that herb is or the more uses that it has because
every Sanskrit name is illustrating or articulating one of it’s different ways it can be used or it has
different properties. That’s one way when working with Ayurvedic herbs to understand how important is
this herb is how many Sanskrit names does it have if you can find that information. The word rasa has
many meanings, in this case it is meaning the taste but it’s also meaning melody in the sense that every
taste has an action on the body, every taste has an action on the mind, like a melody and then it means
comprehension, every taste has an action on the intellect. In other words, every food, every herb, every
medicine has an action on the body, has an action on the mind and has an action on the intellect.
Every substance goes deep into the nervous system, releases certain neuropeptides, maintains your psycho
neurological response and has some action on your body, your mind, and the intellect. It has some action
on your endocrine system and then the word karma means action literally and so that’s dravya guna,
dravya is the substance that’s holding these five elements.
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You can think of every food, every plant, every mineral substance, every person is really a vessel that is
containing the tattvas and the tattvas are what? It’s the expression of prana on the physical plane. The
word karma means action and it’s referring to the action of each individual substance because depending
on the quality or the proportions of that substance, the proportions of the elements within that substance is
going to dictate what type of action has and we’ll start with the rasa here.
When we look at food and when we look at medicine and herbs, there are four different opportunities that
a food or an herb has to make impact on your body, on your mind, on your consciousness.
The first opportunity is the taste.
The second opportunity is called the virya or the energy, does it heat up the body and does it cool down
the body, does it dilate the channels, does it constrict the channels.
The third opportunity is the vipaka meaning what is the long term effect of that system. It has an initial
effect that’s the rasa, the taste. Then it has the long term effect after it is digested initially and is now
entered into the dhatu system.
What is the impact of that substance as it moves through and is digested in through the seven layers of the
dhatus? Does it have an anabolic strengthening effect or does it have a catabolic detoxifying effect?
We’re going to talk about this a lot here in just a little while.
The last opportunity that any substance has to affect your organism is what’s known as the prabhava and
that’s the special action of that particular substance. That is the pranic intelligence of that substance.
So the tattvas, that proportion of the tattvas, tells us what is the virya, what is it’s energy, what is the
vipaka, is it building or is it decreasing? What it doesn’t tell us is what the prabhava is and that’s the
special action. Does this particular herb have an affinity for the liver or for the pancreas or for the
elimination system? Does this particular herb work on the channels of the mind or the subconscious?
Does this particular food strengthen the sexual organs and so forth. So the prabhava is actually what most
western herbalists and nutritionist focus on solely, without using that word, is this your digestive herb or
is this your nervous system herb, or is this your sleep herb? It’s all based on what is the special activity
but in Ayurveda that’s just one aspect and we also need to know what is the taste, what is the rasa, what
is the virya, what is it’s energy and what is it’s vipaka, what is it’s long term affect? Without
understanding all aspects of that you have an incomplete system.
That’s the beauty of this and that’s why when you know this and you understand this system, it doesn’t
matter if it’s an Indian Ayurvedic herb or the dandelion grown in your back yard, you can access
whatever that plant is, whatever that food is and be able to understand how it’s going to affect your
organism, just by tasting it. Don’t go out and taste stuff you don’t know but just by tasting it and that
leads us into the six tastes and the six tastes you want to pull out your handout on the six tastes, the six
tastes chart, and you can keep this handy for the duration of this class. It does a nice job of kind of
breaking down the different parts of what we’re going to be talking about. Each taste is an expression of
the prana through the form of the specific elements. For instance, the sweet taste is a combination of
Earth and Water. The sour taste is Earth and Fire, Salty is Fire and Water, Pungent is Fire and Air, Bitter
is Air and Ether and Astringent is Earth and Air. We’ll go through each one of these in detail but to begin
with immediately with the knowledge that you already have from the first half of this course you can look
at each taste and you can understand that the Sweet taste is Earth and Water. What else do you know that
is Earth and Water? We call it Kapha, Kapha dosha.
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We also know that the idea of maintaining good pranic health, good digestive health, good pranic flow in
the body and the mind is to antidote whatever elements are excessive or decrease what’s excessive and I
know if I’m a Pitta type person, I naturally already have a lot of Fire energy so I’m most likely to be
excessive in Fire because I already have a lot of it, therefore that is where the rational comes from in
Ayurveda, that if you’re a Pitta person you should eat a Pitta decreasing diet.
Now I agree with that only to a certain extent but you’ll have to wait until module six to get my take on
that completely but the point I’m making, you can look already at this chart from the six tastes and
understand where we’re going with this and where the real art of using food and herbs from the eyes of
Ayurveda comes in and that is it’s simple in concept but yet it takes time and skill and artistry. It’s even
more artistry than it is intelligence because the artistry comes in when preparing food or it comes in when
you are combining herbs together that are going to be uniquely appropriate for you and your situation.
The six tastes are going to be the foundation for the rest of this class and all of our food class as well. And
as important to the extent that in a Tantric Tradition, it’s said that there are three coverings. The three
coverings are said to keep the human being from understanding or realizing their true nature, who they
are? Those three coverings are the five elements, Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether from the context of
the physical body, the three gunas from the context of the mind and then the six tastes from the context of
the chemistry between the body and the mind. So again the three coverings that keep the human being
from the awareness of the ultimate reality are the five elements from the context of the body, three gunas
Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, and really what we’re talking about is Rajas and Tamas because they are the
disease causing factors of the mind. Rajas is the energy of activity, Tamas is the energy of inertia or from
as neutral context, Rajas is what initiates change, Tamas is what stabilizes previous activity. So they’re
not disease causing factors in and of themselves, but when either one of them like the doshas becomes
excessive then they are the disease causing factors. The elements are not disease causing factors; the
doshas are not disease causing factors unless they’ve become excessive or deficient. So if you have
excessive Rajas in the mind, excessive activity in the mind you’re prone to more anxiety or anger and
that’s going to, whatever emotions become predominant, will be dictated by your Prakriti or vikriti. So
the five elements, context of the body, three gunas, context of the mind, then, from the context of the
chemistry between the body and the mind is the six tastes. That’s how important these six tastes are.
When a person consumes the proper amount of each taste for their particular constitution and or
imbalance, the body responds with the production of healthy tissue and normal physiology.
If there is too much or too little of any specific taste the body’s going to respond with imbalances or
disease.
Every taste has both a positive and a negative function in both the body and the mind starting with the
body.
Let’s start with the sweet taste and it is Earth and Water. Examples of the sweet taste of course are
honey, licorice, maple syrup, but also rice, bread, most grains and most of your proteins are sweet in their
tastes so we’re not talking about just sugar, but many of the foods have a predominance of the sweet taste.
Many of the herbs which we’ll go into in the module seven, such as marshmallow, and slippery elm,
shatavari, and comfrey have a sweet taste.
Sweet is the most nourishing of all the tastes however it’s the most difficult to digest. The sweet taste as
I’ve mentioned is a combination of Earth and Water and it is cooling in its virya, its energy and its
Vipaka is sweet. I’ll talk about the vipaka in a little while.
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The thing to know about the sweet taste, positively speaking, is it tonifies the tissues. It’s anabolic in
nature, it promotes growth. It’s important for people suffering from any kind of weakness or debility, any
atrophy of any tissues, it nourishes the body and the mind, it relieves hunger and thirst, it provides
hydration, stability and it builds ojas and however as I’ve mentioned it is the most difficult of the tastes to
digest because it’s heavy, it’s cold and it’s unctuous so it’s moist. Those are the opposite qualities of the
Agni. Just like Kapha, it’s heavy, cold and wet. Whenever you get confused, just come back to qualities,
qualities, qualities. Heavy, cold and wet and therefore increases the Kapha dosha, it decreases the Pitta
dosha and decreases the Vata dosha.
The negative qualities of the sweet taste is obvious, it will cause obesity, it could cause high blood sugar,
diabetes, parasites, Parasites feed off sweetness, sugar, lethargy. All of the excessive Kapha type things
are the negative aspect of the sweet taste.
You need to know the positive and you need to know the negative so you can have a rational and neutral
understanding. If you have a rational, intelligent and neutral understanding of sweetness maybe you’ll be
less addictive to it. The other way you’ll be less addictive to it is start using all the rest of the tastes.
We’re going to go throw this part fairly quickly because you can always reference your chart here and
then I’ll try to articulate further on how to make this stuff practical for you.
Next is the sour taste and it is Earth and Fire. The sour taste is warm, heavy and also moist. The positive
functions of the sour taste are it enkindles digestion. Just as you take a lemon or lime, even by saying the
word lime you’re digestive juices will start flowing. The sour taste also encourages the elimination of
waste such as with amalaki and it invigorates the mind. The sour taste is less common in nature than the
sweet taste but lemons, limes, most citrus fruits, hawthorn berries, rosehips, and fermented foods.
Anything that’s fermented has the sour taste to it, sauerkraut, pickles. Most of your digestive enzymes in
the body are sour. The sour tastes are very important.
The negative qualities of the sour taste are the excessive use of the sour tastes will cause burning
indigestion. It will cause premature aging, it could cause hyperacidity.
Next is the salty taste and it is Fire and Water. It is another addictive taste. You have a bag of salty
potato chips next to you in the care and your hand will just keep going there, you can’t control it. Salty is
the heating. Sour is heating, salty is heating and sweet is cooling. These are the types of things you need
engraved in your brain. Sweet is cooling, salty is heating, and sour is heating. Salty is heating just like
you put the salt on the roads to melt the ice. It’s mostly found of course in salts and mineral substances,
not herbs or so much food except seaweed. So sea vegetables and salts and there is all kinds of salts.
There is black salt and sea salt and there is actually in Ayurveda they define many different types of salts,
all are important. Another name for salt is sarva rasa which means all tastes because one of the qualities
of salt is it enhances all of the tastes. That’s why if you make kitcheree, your mung beans and rice and
forget to add the salt it doesn’t taste very good does it? You add a little pinch of salt and everything
comes to life and that’s the psychological qualities of salt too is that it gives zest for life. It enhances the
flavor of all of the tastes and it increases one’s appetite, that’s the beauty of salt. The thing about salt is
only very little is needed. In small amounts it provides hydration, moisture, and gives life.
The negative qualities of salt is that in large amounts it’s the enemy of longevity, it decreases your
tissues, it dries you up, creates high blood pressure, Water retention and as we know with our middle
American high salt diet it creates all kinds of problems.
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It dries, it weakens, it degenerates and as we know in real strong amounts, its emedic, it makes you vomit.
In small amounts though it increases your digestion, it moisturizes and it brings out all of the other tastes.
Without salt you’ll go crazy and too much it will destroy you. So find the in between. How much do you
need? It depends on who you are, Vata people need more, Kapha people need much less, Pitta people
only need a little. Salt decreases Vata because it’s moist and it’s warm and it’s heavy and Vata is cold and
light and dry. Very simple, this could be a second grade subject in our schools. Then we have the Pitta
dosha, it’s hot already and it’s oily already and salt increases the Pitta dosha and it increases Kapha,
heavy, moist and cold. Does it mean that Kapha shouldn’t use salt? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. We’re
just talking about tattvas, we’re just talking about elements or understanding the science of how to
manipulate them. Everybody needs all of these yet in different proportions and they are going to need
different things at different times of the year.
Next is the pungent taste and it is Fire and Air. It is heating. It’s actually the most heating of all the
tastes. Examples of pungent is hot peppers, black pepper, chili pepper, jalapeno peppers, cayenne pepper,
ginger, cloves, cinnamon has a pungency. That’s the pungent tastes. When we talk about the Spicy things
we are talking about the pungent tastes and that’s one of the qualities, one of the beneficial uses of the
pungent tastes is it’s an expectorant, it removes phlegm from the body, it increases digestion, and it
increases the appetite. Its diaphoretic meaning it causes sweating. Its vermicidal meaning that it kills
parasites.
Pungent taste obviously decreases the Kapha dosha because it’s Fire and Air. The best taste for the
Kapha dosha because it is hot, light, and dry and Kapha is cold, heavy, and moist, so pungent taste is the
best for Kapha. For Vata it’s okay but only in moderation because even though Vata benefits from it’s
heat because Vata is cold, pungent is very drying so if Vata uses too much pungency they will dry
themselves up so they are helping themselves on one hand but they are exacerbating their dryness which
is a negative so this is just the way to think about it. So does this mean not to take pungent, no it doesn’t
mean anything like this at all. Don’t think in extremes. That’s the key here, just don’t think in extremes.
You combine your hot pepper in your coconut sweet potato soup, the unctuousness of your coconut and
sweet potato, heaviness, but then you’ve got a little cayenne in there and black pepper and cinnamon and
yum.
The negative qualities of the pungent taste are the overuse of it will dry you up. It is the most drying of
all of the tastes. It can cause ulcerations, inflammation, and hyperacidity, all of these things kept within
context. That’s the problem with our health food world and our herbs and it is this. If you look at the back
of the product and it will tell you it will remove phlegm or increase your digestion, if it’s a good herbal
formula it’s be safe to use. With that being said, if we’re just looking at things based on their benefits we
need to also know what the negative sides are because everything has a positive and a negative. The art of
using fruits and herbs is to actually combine them together so you’re increasing the positive aspects and
you’re decreasing any negative or potential negatives of it. Overuse of it will cause all of those things, the
burning indigestion or drying of sexual secretions and decreasing ojas.
A major point to take out of these six tastes is that you’re either trying to build, strengthen, give yourself
nutrition or you’re trying to increase digestion. That’s the only two things and some of the tastes such as
the sweet taste is to build, the other tastes are to increase digestive capacity so you can build and that’s the
new stuff, the benefit of the pungent taste, the salty taste and the bitter taste and the astringent taste is that
we cannot live on sweetness alone otherwise we would.
That’s why nature created all of the tastes because the human being needs all of them in order to have a
healthy organism, even if we’re talking about removing phlegm from the body or if your killing parasites,
we’re still talking about increasing the body’s digestive capacity.
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As we know, the real taskmaster of digestion is Ahamkar. That’s why this is Ahamkar Medicine because
Ahamkar is your ego, your ego sense of “This is me and then your not me”. Then when I’m digesting
something I’m turning something that is not me into me. The Ahamkar is also the master also of your
immune system because the immune systems job is to seek out and destroy anything that’s not you but
has infiltrated your system.
That’s why you want to have a healthy sense of self. On one hand you want to decrease the egotism, on
the other hand you need to have a strong personality. This is one of the conundrums of human life.
You can’t destroy your ego because you’re simultaneously destroying your sense of self and therefore
your immunity and therefore your digestion, so we’re not going to do that. But we’re decreasing certain
egotism when the Ahamkar is now running the show verses your pranic energy animating who you are
verses the intelligence of the Mahat and Prakriti. The healthy individual is being animated by that
intelligence so then the soul Purusha is then the expression of who you are, that’s what’s coming out
through the eyes.
When the ego is running the show then you get this kind of glaze over the eyes and just these is just an
unconsciousness and this could be an individual who is speaking spiritual talk and doing “spiritual things”
but the difference is that the prana isn’t there. When we’re talking about using the taste, using the food,
and using medicine we could define food as that which gives nutrition and prana to the body. We could
talk about medicine as that which increases the body’s ability to digest. That’s what this whole science is
about, is you’re trying to create an environment within your organism that is very good at digesting
things.
That means being able to assimilate nutrients and eliminate waste because you are what you eat. Whether
it’s psychically or physically, but more so, you are what you assimilate and you also are what you don’t
eliminate which is aama.
Next is the bitter taste and it is Air and Ether. Dr. Watt’s says “bitter is better” because bitter is the
antagonist of the sweet taste. Sweet is Earth and Water and bitter is Air and Ether. So bitter is the coldest
of the tastes. It is Vata so it increases the Vata, it’s best for Pitta, it decreases Pitta and it’s also good for
the Kapha. It’s very cooling. So bitter would be like your dark leafy greens and salad greens are bitter and
then your herbs that are very bitter are ginseng, chaparral, goldenseal, echinacea, and chutneys which is a
bitter Ayurvedic herb. The main thing about bitter herbs or bitter foods or bitter anything is they are
detoxifying. They detoxify, they clean the blood and they tone the organism by restoring all of the tastes
and that’s the beauty of the bitter tastes. That’s the one taste that is very much lacking in the American
diet is bitter tastes. There is practically no bitter tastes except like the garnish on the side of your plate
sometimes. Unless you live in the deep South where I grew up and you have some dark leafy greens and
unfortunately they are cooked in fat back with bacon so that can ruin that for us. Bitters are better and it’s
a must that there should be some bitter in the diet. Almost everyone, no matter the person, there has
always got to be some bitter depending on who you are will dictate how much and what kind. That’s one
thing I always like to say, I drink a cup of Brahmi tea every day, that’s one way I get my bitters and that’s
a very nice way of getting bitters without increasing Vata too much. It decreases Pitta, it decreases Kapha
and it’s pretty neutral to Vata and its energy but it actually decreases Vata in it’s affect on the nervous
system because it strengthens the nervous system and calms down the mind. That’s one way to do but
this time of year, currently its spring, and bitters are extremely important so a little bit of dandelion tea
every afternoon cleanse out the liver, clean out the blood, stimulate the lymphatic system. It’s very
important to at least having bitter greens with your meals.
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The negative qualities of bitters are the overuse of bitters would be to increase in all types of Vata
disorders, emaciation, headaches, tremors or stiffness or decreased sexual energy would be the overuse of
bitters but I’m going to talk a lot more about bitter especially once we get into the psychology of the six
tastes.
Last we have the astringent taste. Astringent is Air and Earth. Astringent has that taste that makes your
mouth pucker. There are not a lot of foods that have a lot of predominance of astringency but some are
pomegranate and if you took an unripe persimmon in your mouth that’s the astringent taste, cilantro is an
astringent taste, cranberries have an astringent taste. Herbs that have an astringent taste are hatitaki is the
first one that comes to mind and triphala. If you’ve ever had a little bit of hatitaki on your tongue you’ll
never forget it, its astringent and it’s not very pleasant but it’s extremely powerful medicine to the extent
that it’s the hatitaki that the medicine Buddha is holding in the hand in the depictions of the Medicine
Buddha. Hatitaki means the destroyer of disease. Hatitaki, we’ll talk more about it in module seven. Uva
Ursa, mullein, witch hazel and turmeric are astringent. Astringency is best known for tonifying tissues,
tonification of tissue. That puckering of your mouth, think about that sensation happening through all
seven tissue layers. That kind of like squeezing of the tissue and it creates a tonification affect. Only small
doses are needed but the most famous use of astringent is actually externally because astringent tastes is
wound healing. It dries secretions, it can stop diarrhea, that’s why if you take a little touch of hatitaki
when you have diarrhea it will stop, but if you take a lot of hatitaki it will give you diarrhea. So it’s
homeostatic, meaning it stops bleeding, and heals wounds. That is the astringent taste, its Air and Earth,
so Air and Earth; it’s cooling, light, and dry. It has Earth but it’s still on the light side because of the Air
element. It increases the Vata dosha and decreases Pitta and Kapha doshas.
The negative qualities of the astringent taste are the overuse of astringency would create dryness, it would
create constipation, and emaciation is increased out of sight. Again a lot of the Vata type things.
Astringent is going to be the least used of all tastes, but a little bit is important.
Now we already talked about the best tastes for each dosha but what I want to mention briefly is that the
sequence in which you take your food is very important and it should happen in the sequence that you see
these tastes written. This sequence is not random, sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent. This
is the order in which the body digests its food. That’s why in Ayurveda we take the sweet foods first. That
does not translate to taking your dessert first, that’s a famous thing that we like to say in the Ayurvedic
world is that Ayurveda says you should have your dessert first. It’s not really true, it means you take your
sweet foods first, that would be like your rice, you dahl, maybe your bread and I guess if you want to take
your dessert first it’s better than having it last.
There is really not a concept of dessert; however we have desserts, so sometimes we take them first.
When we get into foods in the next module I’ll discuss that in more detail. What you want to take out of
this is eat your harder to digest foods first when your digestive secretion is strongest when you’re hungry,
that would be your higher protein, your fat foods and your grains and things like that and eat your salad
and your greens last because they are going to help move the other substances through the digestive
system. If you look at traditional Indian cookery it originates in Ayurveda. If you go to an Indian
restaurant its not really necessarily Ayurvedic but if you look at the traditional sequence of food as served
in the Indian cuisine its based on this, you start with your rice and dahl which are your sweet tastes and
then you’ll have like your pickles, that is your sour taste, and then you’ll have your subji which is your
salty taste, the vegetables with the spices and salt, and then you’ll have your bitter foods that are your
greens, salad at the end and then that’s why traditionally they would finish their meals with the cilantro.
Lassi because your finishing with the astringent taste because that’s how the body will digest the food and
I’ll talk more about that in module six, when we talk about the different stages of digestion because that’s
what’s happening in the body is the food while its being digested it first becomes sweet and then as it
moves into the small intestines it becomes sour and so forth.
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It’s the natural intelligence of nature. We can look at this from the western scientific perspective and see
the same thing. The Yogi knew this stuff for hundreds and hundreds of years and we didn’t need our
modern day technology to understand it. They knew it from direct perception.
Just a recap of these six tastes from the context of the three doshas:
For the Vata dosha, the best taste is the salty because it’s warm, moist, and heavy, which are the opposite
qualities of Vata, then next is sour and then also sweet. Anti Vata food would be the salty, sour, and
sweet tastes as predominate.
For the Pitta dosha, the best tastes are bitter, sweet and then astringent because their qualities antidote the
hot and oily qualities of Pitta.
For the Kapha dosha, the best taste is the pungent because it’s the opposite qualities of Kapha. Warm,
light and dry and then next is bitter and then astringent. Anti Kapha food would be pungent, bitter, and
astringent.
That’s the rasa, the six tastes and as I mentioned, the taste does not disappear from your food or your
herbs once they are ingested. Everything you ingest has a few opportunities to affect your organism. First
is the taste as it touches your tongue and the six tastes, this rasa is communicating to your body the
moment it touches the tongue what type of digestive enzymes to secrete, what type of juices to secrete
that are going to be most appropriate to digesting your food, the specific food that you take. That’s why
you also want to smell the fragrance of the food before you take it in and you want to breathe and you
want to prepare your body, but the rasa is very important. That’s why also when taking herbs, there is a
limitation on taking capsules because you’re not actually getting that rasa on the tongue therefore you’re
decreasing the effects your going to get, you’re still going to get some effects, you’re just decreasing to a
degree.
The next taste you have is the Virya and that is the energetic of the tastes or the food or the substance.
Does it heat the body up or does it cool it down? For our purposes that’s how we’re defining the virya.
Does it heat or does it cool? Hot tastes increase digestion, cool tastes decrease digestion. Hot tastes when
they increase digestion they are freeing energy up for other metabolic tasks in the body. Cool tastes
decrease digestion so it has to pull energy from other parts of the body. So when you eat sweet heavy
foods predominately and in excessive amounts it will decrease your energy because your digestion has to
work so hard it has to pull energy from the rest of the body. That’s why you want to eat it in appropriate
amounts with the other tastes so that you’re not taxing the rest of your energy system in order to just
digest your food.
Important to understand is that anything that heats the body is dilating the channels of the body.
Remember we could talk about the physical body as simply Earth, Water, Fire, and Air moving through
channels of Space. So the body is really just an intricately woven system of channels. The primary
channel is your digestive system it starts at the mouth and ends at the rectum. That’s why it’s called the
mahavaha sroto, the great channel.
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Then you have the channels of your bloodstream, you have the channels of the urinary system, you have
the women’s lactation channels and so forth. So the whole body is just an intricate matrix of channels.
When you’re increasing the heat in the body through this dravya guna, these substances you’re ingesting,
you’re dilating the channels and increasing the flow. But when you’re taking in cold substances, such as
the sweet substances, you’re constricting the channels. So you’re either dilating or your constricting and
that’s what the virya is about, increasing your digestion or decreasing your digestive capacity. In some
cases you need to decrease your digestive capacity because if you were to take all hot things you’re going
to end up burning through your channels because these tattvas are interwoven, they work together. The
Kapha dosha has to be there or otherwise the acid or the Fire of the Pitta dosha would burn right into the
body because the digestive system is still the outside of your body.
When a substance enters your digestive system, it’s as if it’s on probation whether it going to be able to
enter into the real internal part of you or not, whether it’s going to become a part of your tissue system or
not. It will either get eliminated out or ingested and assimilated in. If the Kapha wasn’t there, the mucus
membranes of the digestive channels for instance, then the hot Fire of Pitta would burn right into the
insides of the body. The Vata is there to move things through, it’s the motion, and it’s the peristalsis of
the large intestines.
Next you have the vipaka. Virya is the energy whether it heats you up or cools you down and the vipaka is
the long term post digestive effect of the substance. The sweet tastes, substances with the sweet tastes
typically have a sweet vipaka that means it has a long term anabolic activity on your tissues. Anabolic
means its strengthening, its growing, its building, its giving you nutrient nourishment.
A pungent vipaka means that it’s having a catabolic effect on your tissues. It means its detoxifying, and
it’s decreasing.
There are three vipakas actually.
The first is sweet.
The second is sour, sour means it’s actually has a heating vipaka, it increases digestive capacity but it’s
neither building nor catabolic, it’s more neutral. Most sour things have a sour vipaka. It is the least
common of our vipakas.
What I want you to take away for our purposes in this course is the vipaka is this: either the food or the
herb is either going to have a long term building effect or its going to have a long term detoxifying effect.
That means after the initial digestion is it going to have a strengthening effect or is it going to have a
detoxifying effect?
Things with a sweet rasa typically have a sweet vipaka meaning a strengthening nutrient building affect.
Things with a pungent rasa will have a pungent vipaka, a detoxifying catabolic affect on the tissues.
The salty taste also has a sweet vipaka but as I said if you use too much of it, it ends up degenerating the
tissues.
The bitter tastes have a pungent vipaka.
The astringent tastes has pungent vipaka
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In general, sweet, salty tastes have a sweet vipaka. Pungent, bitter and astringent tastes have pungent
vipaka.
Sweet, sour, and salty typically build, and strengthen. Pungent, astringent and bitter typically detoxify.
Now there are exceptions but this is the general rule, but actually the most powerful and important and
most effective medicines are the ones with the most unusual properties. For instance, if you have a sour
herb, such as amalaki, typically the sour taste has a heating virya and a sour vipaka, but in the case of
amalaki, amal literally means sour, that’s the word for sour, amalaki is an herb, is a sour rasa primarily,
then it has all other tastes except salty as secondary tastes, but it’s primarily sour but then it has a cooling
virya, which is unusual because it’s sour. Sour typically has a heating virya. And then it has a sweet
vipaka, it’s a tonic, it’s a rasayana, it builds and that’s why it’s an extremely revered medicine because
although it’s sour it’s one of the reasons why it’s extremely revered. The other reason why is it has a
multitude of special actions prabhava. One of the reasons is because of its unusual pattern of
characteristics, it’s sour and sour is usually heating but in amalaki’s case it’s cooling. Then when it’s an
orange or a lemon it’s sour and it’s heating with the sour vipaka and so its increases the digestive
capability of the digestive system and then through the tissue layers as well. Amalaki is going to build, it’s
going to have a sour effect as rasa that means it still increases digestive capacity but then it also builds
and strengthens which is very unusual. It’s these unusual patterns that you see in some of the most
revered herbs. Like take Ashwaghanda. Ashwaghanda has a sweet bitter rasa so it’s a sweet rasa but it’s
a heating virya where sweet is usually cooling and then it has a sweet vipaka, so in Ashwaghanda’s case,
as we said, sweet is usually the hardest taste to digest, because it’s heavy and in Ashwaghanda’s case it’s
got a nice warming virya so it’s much easier to digest than some of the other tonic sweet herbs like
shatavari, and then its still building. In this case Ashwaghanda has a nice warm vipaka but its building
and that’s one of the reasons why we like it especially for Vata people because it’s sweet and it’s
warming. It’s heavy, warm, and unctuous and that’s why it’s a supreme medicine for Vata and its
prabhava is its activity in the nervous system is profound. And in Vata people, the nervous system is a
system because of its mobility and so this is how we think of things. It’s not difficult; it just takes time to
digest it.
The last part of this module is looking at these tastes and their affects on the mind and the emotions which
actually the six tastes are considered more important for the mind than they are the body. As I said at the
beginning of the class, the six tastes governed the chemistry between the body and the mind and that’s
very true but because rasa means both tastes and emotion, it indicates that taste is to the body what
emotion is to the mind. That’s an important line to remember. Taste is to the body what emotion is to the
mind. And emotion in the mind tends to produce the corresponding taste in the body. Likewise the taste
in the body tends to produce the corresponding emotion in the mind. You may not notice it.
So the taste or the corresponding emotion is either going to dilate or constrict the channel of sensory
impression, a sensory perception in the mind. So hot emotions dilate the channels of the mind, so when
you’re dilating the channels you’re increasing your digestion and may want to consume more or when
you have cold emotions than you’re constricting channels so you want to consume less. That dictates how
your organs of action are going to be used to project yourself; your Ahamkar is going to project itself out
into your life, into your world, into your environment. So the mind is going out to perceive through your
five senses, your pathways of consciousness, and your five senses. Then you perceive, the mind perceives
through the channels of the five senses and then goes back out and projects via the organs of action going
back to your ”Journey of Consciousness into Form.” You can see the mouth, the hands, the feet, the sex
organs and the rectum and so and that’s happening via the ears, the skin, the eyes, the tongue, the nose,
the sound, the touch, the vision, the taste and the smell from the Ether, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. It’s a
very beautiful glorious science.
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Now, the question to ask oneself is, “How do I want my hands, my sex organs, my mouth and all of my
organs of action animated?” Via pranic intelligence, Prakriti, Mahat, or via the subconscious patterning
and unconscious egotism. That’s why the six tastes are powerful because taste and emotion are the
primary influencers of how the mind perceives and then projects, taste and emotion. There are a lot of
ways to organize your taste and your emotion. Not just from food obviously, and not just from herbs. The
mind, the five senses, the channels of consciousness is how Ahamkar experiences and then the organs of
action are the channels through which the mind and Ahamkar expresses itself and projects its personality
to your outside world. Your sensory channels are like any other channels in the body, they dilate or they
constrict and they are going to either have an excessive flow, a deficient flow, or a harmonic balanced
flow. Just in your digestive system, you’re either going to have a balanced flow, which is ideal; you’re
digesting at the appropriate rate, not to quick like diarrhea, not too slow like sluggish digestion. But
probably the single most important factor in determining the dilation or constriction and of your sensory
channels is of course number one, your emotions and also the tastes. What’s so important to understand is
that if I’m having an explosion of anger that I’m creating the corresponding emotion in my body at the
tissue layers of my body, particularly in my blood to start with but then the blood of course is going to go
into the what? the muscle and the muscle is going to go into fat, and the fat is going to go into the bone,
the bone is going into the nerves, the nerve is going into the reproductive fluids. When I’m exploding
with anger essentially lighting off a bomb within my energetic field but that’s also filtering down and
creating the corresponding taste within my body structure at the layers of the tissues, which the
corresponding taste to anger is pungent. So I’m creating excessive pungency at the tissue layer so I’m
creating a catabolic degenerative environment within my tissue layers. Now is that motivational perhaps
for managing anger or how about this, channeling anger more intelligently because emotion is not a bad
thing obviously nor is anger a bad thing. Anger is a very natural thing it just should be used in a useful
way. That’s all this is about. When we get into food, that’s all that is about, it’s not about what’s better or
what’s worse, whether it’s vegetarian or its meat. It’s about what is the most useful and intelligent for
you. So emotion is this energy in motion and your emotion is either going to become commotion or
devotion. There is only really two ways it can go and what we’re trying to do is create the internal pranic
environment so that your energy in motion, your emotion is naturally and organically going in the
direction of more and more devotion. That’s what Ayurveda and Yoga is all about.
Let’s go through all of these six tastes and their corresponding emotions:
Sweet = Water and Earth
The sweet generates satisfaction. That’s why we’re all drawn to it. That’s why a little baby is drawn to the
sweet taste. It’s the first taste, the mother’s milk is sweet. But even if you first start with a little honey on
your finger or sugar on your finger to a little baby and then a little bitter on the other finger it will go for
the sweet because the sweet is what we’re drawn too.
It cools the anger of Pitta, it comforts the insecurity of Vata, but it increases the complacency of Kapha.
The positive aspect of the sweet taste is that it generates satisfaction. Just like when you take the
sweetness on the tongue it’s satisfying. That’s very superficial satisfaction as we saw with the rasa dhatu
compared to the deep contentment of ojas. With rasa you get the deep satisfaction but it pales in
comparison with the deep blissful contentment of soma with your well generated ojas. The sweet taste =
satisfaction.
The negative aspect of the sweet taste is complacency. So each taste as you can see has a positive and a
negative and by knowing both you can make intelligent decisions.
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Sour = Fire and Earth
The sour taste is discernment. It enhances the minds appetite for evaluating things and determining their
use in your life and what is that? Its digestion, determining this things use in your life and what is that?
It’s digestion. Determining this things use in my life and that what sour tastes does in the body. It
increases digestive capacity and helps to eliminate waste.
The negative aspect of it is when your discernment becomes excessive and you become an envious and
jealous type person which is a Pitta type hot emotion. The hot emotions are anger, jealousy, and envy.
The sour taste in particular increases the emotion of jealousy and envy or another way and perhaps a
better way of thinking about it is jealousy and envy is creating a sour taste in your body and in your mind.
Sour people, bitter people. The negative aspect of the sour taste is jealousy and envy.
It heats up and it focuses the mind of the Vata though. Increases the jealousy of the Pitta and causes the
Kapha to clutch more firmly to it’s already firmly grasped attachments.
Salty = Fire and Water
Salty tastes increase the appetite for life, zest for life. Again it’s a hot taste so it’s increasing and dilating
your channels and increasing digestion, in other words you want to go out and experience more life. You
want to digest more things. It’s the same thing as the sour taste, your discerning, should I take this in?
Sweet tastes are satisfying so it’s constricting the channel, it says I don’t need anymore, I’m already
satisfied, satisfaction, and decreasing digestion. Salty tastes increases the appetite for life but too much
zest for life will cause like a hedonistic excessive pursuit of pleasure, to where now the Ahamkar, and
remember we’re not necessarily talking as much about your conscious mind, as we’re talking about the
subtle aspects of your sense of self, the Ahamkar. Now that Ahamkar has convinced itself that the way to
get real contentment and satisfaction in life, because again, we’re always going for the sweet taste, but the
human being can’t live on the sweet taste alone so we have to have sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and
astringent. The Ahamkar in this case with an excessive amount of pursuit of pleasure in life becomes
convinced that by seeking life’s pleasures is the way to deep contentment, satisfaction, and happiness.
The negative aspect of the salty taste is its overindulgence and sensory pleasure. What could be an
appetite for life, an appetite to experience life’s pleasures become hedonistic?
Pungent = Fire and Air
Pungent tastes create excitement. The positive aspect of the pungent taste is that it creates excitement.
Expression, activity, it creates extraversion, external activities so again dilating the channels of perception
Digesting more.
The negative aspect is it creates overexcitement, overstimulation, leads to anger, impatience, can lead to
anxiety with Vata people, decreases Kapha because it digests the mental aama of complacency. The
mental aama is that subconscious muck in the mud that we then have created over many many years in
most cases, sometimes lifetimes even, therefore that pure impulse of the Purusha of the soul of who you
are is now having to move through these mental channels of what we call the mental aama, muck in the
mud and then that pure impulse of the soul, that high vibratory frequency now gets coated with the mental
aama so then by the time it’s projecting out from your mind and your awareness or your words or through
your activity, via your organs of action, it is now not just the pure impulse of the radiant soul but its what
that pure impulse was is now covered with aama, in this case mental aama.
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The pungent taste increases activity and excitement but an excessive amount of it will create anger or
impatience. So again an excessive amount of anger in the mind creates an excessive amount of pungency
in the body. Because our physical bodies, because most of us identify so much with our physical nature,
I think it’s helpful to understand emotions from that perspective because we can get angry all day and
think that it’s no big deal but when you understand the real effect it’s having, not only physically but also
energetically, that same anger can be used as good energy, that’s the way to look at emotions is that your
depression is good energy that is just being channeled in an un-useful way. You’re in the wrong context.
Somehow you’ve got to get into a positive context so that this sadness can then be used to give me energy
in a positive direction. This anger can be turned in at whatever needs to be looked at in myself and be
used as purification energy. Detoxification just like the pungent taste is used in the body.
Depression can become devotion pretty quickly if you have the right environment and the right people
working with you sometimes and the right understanding sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s a little shift in
perspective, sometimes it takes more.
That’s why I like really teaching this stuff with the yogic practices because we can make real potent shifts
immediately right there on the spot.
Bitter = Air and Ether
Bitter is better because the bitter is the antagonist of the sweet. Sweet is satisfaction and bitter must be
dissatisfaction. What is the positive aspect of dissatisfaction? It creates a desire for change. That’s why
everybody needs a little bit of bitter in their life because the key to human health is the evolutionary
process must keep going. Just like a plant, a plant is either growing or it’s dying. A human being is the
same way.
The negative aspect is when the Tamasic guna must become excessive in the mind, the human being is
really dying, even though you have some Tamasic people that will live to like a hundred years old.
Everyone knows of that Uncle that ate hamburgers and drank whisky everyday of their life and lived to be
ninety-eight. That’s not health, that’s just Tamas because Tamas stabilizes previous activities so they
become inert in their way of being even physically and so their processes keep going but they’re still
living within that same muck and cloudy darkness that they’ve always lived in. That’s more like
punishment then it is longevity. Its longevity but it’s not the right kind of longevity.
That’s why we need the bitter taste in our diet. The only bitter tastes we have in the American diet is
coffee. I think that’s one reason that coffee is so popular is because the bitter taste is lacking in the
American diet. If we had more bitters in our food, we would have more energy, period, because we’d be
digesting better. Even through the bitter is a cold taste it actually, in small amounts, increases digestion.
It’s the best of the cold tastes because it neutralizes all of the other tastes and in small amounts bitter will
increase digestion when digestion is needed or decrease digestion when that’s needed so it constricts
channels when used in the appropriate amounts, it constricts the channels that need to be constricted and
dilates the channels that need to be dilated. Small amounts of bitters is the key. It creates that desire for
change because it forces you to face your own reality, but excessive amounts of dissatisfaction is going to
make you a what, a bitter person. You’re going to be a disappointed person, insecure. It’s called the best
of the six tastes because it’s that mild dissatisfaction that compels you to change and grow. It dilates the
channels that are too constricted, and reduces Kapha’s complacency, constricts the channels that are too
dilated reducing Pitta’s anger. Too much bitter will cause too much dissatisfaction and increase the Vata’s
insecurity and their fear.
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Astringent = Earth and Air
Astringent causes introspection. The positive aspect of the astringent is it causes introspection which is a
little different than introversion. Introversion is introspection but its kind of chronic introspection.
Astringent tastes would be good for people who are like a celibate path because it directs the prana
inward. For instance Baba Hari Daas over at the Mount Madonna Center, a famous saint who is still alive,
he doesn’t speak he only communicates via chalkboard for years and years, I don’t know how long but
probably a good sixty or seventy years. I was told that he takes a little tablet of hatitaki every day, an
astringency. He’s a celibate monk and doesn’t speak, so that’s important for him.
The astringent taste or let’s also think about this again in terms of astringent emotion as well as this
introversion, introspection, will create that kind of tonification and also at the level of the mind. It
tonifies the mind by looking inward just as the astringent taste tonifies the body and just kind of
squeezing activity but an excessive amount of introspection again similar to bitter causing insecurity.
You’re looking at your self too much, anxiety and a fear of your excessive introversion because you’re
contracting your sensory channels again with the cold taste so it constricts the sensory channels. Whereas
your pungent taste dilates the sensory channels, the sour and salty tastes dilate the sensory channels or
think of it as the sour, salty and pungent emotions dilate your channels of perception and the sweet,
astringent, bitter emotions constrict the channels of perception.
Again, important is the body but far more important is the mind. So when we’re talking about the tastes
and we’re talking about food, don’t lose that perspective that your mental disposition is more important
than the actual what it is your doing or what you’re eating and whatever herbs you’re taking because your
mental disposition becomes your context. What your food is is your content. Context is always more
important than your content. This is Ahamkar Medicine. Ego Medicine.
The knowledge of the six tastes gives you the ability to make intelligent decisions so you can guide and
support the Ahamkar into a healthy disposition, your sense of self, because again you have very little
control. You have very little will power as far as your conscious mind is concerned.
Your will powers are, “What color shoes am I going to wear today?” or am I going to wear these jeans or
these jeans? Your will power can get you to your yoga mat to do some sadhana, that’s good use of
willpower. You can use your will power or your conscious mind for making food choices, which is why
this information is powerful, but what’s really making the most impact is the more subtle things that you
don’t have so much control over. So you’re using the conscious mind to do the things that are going to
cause the appropriate environment for that subtle Ahamkar to be well supported. Does that make sense?
As opposed to trying to think that this little conscious mind is taking away a thousand thoughts per wink
of an eye, it’s what’s going to keep you healthy, that is not what’s going to keep you healthy.
You’re heart is beating from the unconscious autonomic system, from pranic intelligence, the food is
being digested by your autonomic process, you’re autonomic system. Normal people don’t have control
over that so what we do is we use our conscious mind to, via this Ayurvedic lifestyle, to make conscious
choices that are going to influence our prana. So that’s how we get to it and make a healthy disposition.
Because the Kapha people, they are more complacent by nature and what the tendency is is that they will
eat sweeter, sour and salty things because that’s where they are comfortable. When in reality they do best
with the pungent, bitter and astringent things. Doesn’t mean they don’t have some sweet, we’ll get into
this in the next module, but what they are doing is solidifying their already set ways because we don’t
have consciousness about this stuff. If we don’t have the consciousness and the guidelines these aren’t
rules to become slaves too, they are guidelines to guide your own intuitive wisdom so you’re not
committing pragnyaparad over and over everyday.
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With the Pitta people they are more impatient and aggressive by nature, that’s how we are, Pitta people,
impatient and aggressive and we do best with sweet, bitter, and astringent things but we’re habituated to
pungent, sour, and salty things making us more aggressive, more impatient because that’s the comfort
zone. The Tamas is stabilizing that. The Vata people who are more anxious and fearful by nature do best
of course with sweet, sour, and salty and will naturally crave them to antidote their anxious nerves but
will often eat too much of it because they’re compulsive and then end up obstructing the prana,
increasing Kapha and they’re also increasing Pitta.
So just having the consciousness around it gives you more power, gives you more intelligence and having
the awareness of the affects of the six tastes on the mind and the emotions allows you to consciously use
them to serve you in a positive way so you access the positive aspects of it and decrease the negative
aspects of it.
The human being again cannot live on the sweet tastes alone because we’re all drawn towards the sweet
tastes because it creates satisfaction. That’s why God created the other five tastes so you can digest and
assimilate sweetness at a pace that is negotiable and tolerable by your organism. That’s the idea and so
the alchemy of this dravya guna, Ayurvedic food, science, and Ayurvedic herbology is to turn the six
tastes into one taste, sweet vipaka. To turn all six tastes into the real sweetness which is that deep nutritive
sweetness that builds the ojas. But you need all of the others in order to be able to digest sweet at a pace
that’s tolerable. If you consume sweet alone your Agni would become stifled and die and all you would
create is aama, toxicity and fat.
Well, digested food with a sweet vipaka satisfies longer than poorly digested food with the sweet rasa
because long after the initial rush of that sweet taste is gone the well assimilated substance is gratifying
the real Ahamkar at a much deeper level and then you’re not creating these rebellious activities and
having food cravings because you’re satisfied. Food cravings is dissatisfied Ahamkar. And we’ll get into
that in the next class how to not have food cravings. But that deep sweet vipaka is nourishing thousands
of your body cells and all the seven tissue layers is supporting a strong immune system plus balancing
your personality, that’s what we mean by making the six tastes into one taste.
The taste with the pungent vipaka is so you can digest. There are only two things, you’re either building
nutrients as food, that’s what gives prana and strength to the body or your medicines what’s helping you
digest and so I’ll meet you in module six.
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