The Unbearable Sweetness of Living

The Unbearable Sweetness of Living

In the Unbearable  lightness of being Kundera quotes and essential dillema to our humanity "The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ..."
I'll take the dichotomy a lil further and I wiill say is about discipline,  responsibility versus enjoyable freedom and pleasure. What will you choose and especially what make sense to you today?
I was having chocolate today and the sweetness of it, was smoothing the bitter taste of my cofee.
And then it hit me..sweetness is a real joy of my morning ritual.I hear Bono in my head “Life should be fragrant,Rooftop to the basement"
I'm surrounded by so many people,  who are impressively disciplined , with their bodies,  what they eat , what they drink, how they sleep, morning routine etc. They fast ,avoid sugar, have a lot of protein intake, avoid gluten , lactose, blus screens after 9 pm ..I love discipline up to a point..to that level where deplete life of fragrance , sweetness and creativity.
There is a Sanskrit word I have been thinking about lately: madhura.
Sweet..but not only.. Madhura can carry sweetness, charm, something delightful to the senses. It belongs to the same beautiful landscape of words as madhu—honey, sweetness—and mādhurya, sweetness with a twist of graceful charm.

Same connotation that we find in one of
Krishna's many names : Mādhava. The name  is a poetic synonym for “the sweet one”—yet it lives close to this ancient Sanskrit universe of madhu, honey and sweetness.

Madhuram, madhuram, madhuram.
Everything about the beloved one becomes sweet: the eyes, lips , face ,etc..
There is something almost excessive about it, and I love that. No embarrassment about tye delightful nature of Madhava. No need to make God abstract, depleted of Rasa, juice, or distant or terribly solemn. The divine can be beautiful,enchantingly sveet.The divine can seduce with his greatfull charm. The divine can dance barefoot and steal butter.
Krishna plays the flute and he dances.He is an absolute lover and beloved.
And then, as though this were completely normal, this same Krishna stands between two armies and delivers one of the great philosophical teachings of humanity as a great Yoghesvara.
I find this duality extraordinary.Unbearable sweetness of the life...We want to tame it , discipline it and control  it.

At some extent the sweet and the bitter, the heavy and the light become impossible to sustain. Both are necessary for a walk trough life ,the are inseparable, lila—divine play and wisdom.
Our fear of carbs and the protein intake ;)
A little sweetness!
Ayurveda has its own relationship with madhura.
Madhura rasa is the sweet taste, one of the six tastes described in Ayurveda. It is considered nourishing and building, associated with satisfaction, softness and sustenance. Sweetness feeds. It grounds. It gives substance.
And sweetness in Ayurveda is much larger than the sugar bowl. Grains, milk, certain fruits, roots and other nourishing foods can belong to madhura rasa. Sweetness is a quality of nourishment before it becomes a dessert.
But Ayurveda, as usual, is suspicious of excess.
Too much sweetness becomes heaviness. What nourishes can begin to burden. What comforts can become attachment. What gives pleasure can become inertia.
The answer is not therefore a life drowning in sweetness.
It is a little sweetness,enough to nourishand make life delicious.
Swetness, and it is also a word for affection, tenderness. I find that linguistic proximity almost impossibly beautiful "my sweetheart". What love does to a life is perhaps something like what oil does to something dry.
It softens it.
Maybe human beings need sneha in precisely this way.
Because we can become dry.
We can become efficient, accomplished, disciplined, correct—and completely dry.
We can even become spiritually dry and dull.
Life should be fragrant...Rooftop to the basement.
I wonder sometimes when we decided that a good life had to be such a serious affair.Or why do we take eachother s seriously?
We speak endlessly about purpose, optimization of ourselves and products of a society driven by performance. We turn ourselves into projects and then spend decades managing the project like we are eternal.

And of course there is work to do. There are responsibilities we cannot dance away from. Krishna certainly does not tell Arjuna to put down his bow and go smell the flowers or have a chocolate break.
He tells him to enter the battle.
His lightness does not come from having escaped the gravity of life, the unbearable lightness of being.
He knows the battlefield.
And still there is a flute singing and dancer.
Maybe līlā is not the denial of suffering but another way of holding existence. Life remains serious, painful sometimes, unpredictable or  brutal and somewhere inside it, inexplicably, something continues to play, to dance to be fragrant and sweet. My sweet lover of life, don't forget to enjoy the beautiful creation, let it be unbearably sweet.


Rasa
This brings us to another Sanskrit word: rasa.
Taste. Juice. Essence. Flavour.
And eventually, in Indian aesthetic thought, something more mysterious: the flavour of an experience as it is savoured.
I love that such a sophisticated philosophy of art begins with something so bodily.
Taste.
Not an idea about the mango but the mango itself.

Not an explanation of love.
Love.
There are things we understand by thinking, and there are things that remain incomprehensible until they have entered the body.
You can describe honey perfectly to someone who has never tasted it. You can analyse its chemical composition, explain where it comes from, discuss its colour and texture.
And still this is not it.
At some point it has to touch the tongue, interact with our senses and create and eco and a vibration in ourselves.
We can understand an enormous amount about ourselves and still barely taste our own existence, the juice of it.
And life, before it is understood, perfected or transcended, should occasionally be allowed to be fragrant and unbearably tasty and sweet.
And don't forget : joy, hapinnes and pleasure are divine. Why would we deprive ourselves of Madhura,  the honey we receive by the grace of life?