The notion of rasa comes from Ayurveda, the ancient system of Indian medicine. Ayurvedic medicine recognizes six basic rasas, or tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, pungent, and astringent—each of which has an important effect on the body. According to Ayurveda, a healthful diet should include all six tastes.
Gupta took this insight about rasa and applied it to the emotional resonances in music, dance, and drama—and, by extension, to life. He identified nine emotional rasas, or moods.
- Erotic the flavor of love
- Comic the flavor of laughter
- Pathetic the flavor of sorrow
- Furious the flavor of anger
- Heroic the flavor of courageous ardor
- Terrible the flavor of being scared
- Odious the flavor of being repulsed
- Marvelous the flavor of amazement
- Peaceful the flavor of serenity
Just as a sophisticated cook balances different flavors, an artist of life learns how to balance different emotional rasas. You may have noticed that you do this unconsciously when you choose entertainment. You go to see a Julia Roberts movie like Pretty Woman because you're in the mood for the erotic (romantic) with a flavor of the comic. You'd choose a film like Lethal Weapon for a taste of the heroic and furious, or perhaps a gross-out comedy like Wayne's World to revel in the odious. Not everyone likes every rasa, of course. But a truly universal work of art has many rasas. Shakespeare's tragedies, for example, always have a bit of the comic, the terrible, the heroic, the odious, the pathetic, and in many cases, a flavor of the erotic.
If you look at your own inner life, you may notice that your emotional energy tends to flow between four or five of these different rasas and only occasionally touches others. I generally find myself hanging out in the peaceful, the pathetic, and the erotic rasas, with periodic shifts into the comic. At times I get deeply stuck in one or the other, and my way of looking for excitement is to rouse myself through the terrible or the furious. I have my own methods for arousing fury or fear in myself, and if you think about it, so do you. Some people do it by reading reports on what's happening to the oceans or watching TV news. Others go to horror movies or ride rollercoasters or tell gross jokes.
Of course, it's common to engage these rasas unconsciously, and any rasa can become problematic if you overemphasize it. Even yogic peace can get, well, dull, if it's the only flavor on the plate. However, when you engage rasas consciously, moving in and out of different ones can create more aliveness and more balance, not only in life but also in practice. Put simply, your consciousness needs a wide palette of emotional experience, and constantly moves to create it—internally as well as externally.
Let Your Feelings Flow I got a radical realization about this need while I was taking care of my father during his last illness. One afternoon, as I was helping him to the bathroom, the two of us slipped and sprawled on the carpet. As I was hauling him to his feet, his pajamas fell down. I burst out laughing. It was involuntary: The laughter just bubbled up out of me, and of course I was appalled at myself. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't laughing at you," I said. "Oh, I understand," my father said. "It's gallows humor." And he laughed too.
Much later, I realized the laughter was a natural movement of energy, a way of balancing the rasas in a situation that was both terrible and pathetic. Had I suppressed the laughter, the painful energy would not have been able to move, and we would have stayed stuck in the pathos of it. There's an innate wisdom in the way emotional energy moves when it's allowed to follow its natural course. Comedy lurks inside even terrible situations, just as pathos is the other face of comedy.
If you are willing to accept the way emotions flow, you can appreciate the miraculous fluidity with which your inner world keeps rebalancing itself. Then, when a poignant romantic moment morphs into an argument, instead of mourning the loss of the erotic rasa and wondering what went wrong, you can recognize and honor the sudden emergence of the furious. All these emotional flavors are part of the tapestry of human life. You can't keep any of them out.
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