Turning to Ashes in the Mouth

Many who experience grief know what's meant by the saying, 'food turns to ashes in your mouth'. Certain trauma affect the way the brain processes data. The sensation of Taste is one of the first to know the power of that effect. I recall only too vividly what happened three years ago, watching my reputation smashed to smithereens overnight. I could not get the taste of terror out of my mouth; the sensation of having some tin leaking its taste onto the back of my tongue was so imminent and immense I slept and woke to it for months. Fear tastes like that, you know.

This is the secret of life and death.

You and I, when we bite into an apple we hear the crunch like an explosion of sound, the cells in the fruit burst open and and the juice floods out over our tongue and palate, the fragrance of the sweet, fresh living apple jolts the olfactory bulb under the brain like the movement of tectonic plates...

But if the life were gone from the apple, you'd bite into it and it would be hoplessly rotten, brown mush. So, we say the taste of appleness is really the taste of the Lifeforce in the living apple, or, as I was taught, to bite into an apple is to taste God, pure and simple. 

The bitter truth though is this. If you burn the apple and reduce it to its constituent elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, nickel, iron, phosphorus, calcium, sodium, etc., a tiny lump of minerals on the tip of a spoon, it tastes like ashes. But the lifeforce is just as present in the ashes as in the apple, it's a tragedy, but we can't taste it, because we have acquired a taste for death. There are no physical forces at work in the DNA of a living cell or breathing human that are not already at work in the nucleus of a single 'dead' atom. 

In Hebrew the word for taste is <i>Ta'am</i>. But the identical word <i>Ta'am</i> also means 'Reason', and it also means 'Melody'.

In Kabbalah we are often granted secrets in the form of 'Reason' but they are worthless unless we taste them and hear the  melody in them. D'you know what one of the main differences between talking and singing is? If I'm talking I can't hear you talk, but if I'm singing I can hear you sing, we can both sing together and it becomes an even more powerful song. But if it's words we're talking then two voices are already too much.

There are three big kabbalistic secrets hidden here. 1.) Life and death are both illusions. 2.) If you've never tasted idolatry you can taste the Lifeforce in the dead thing as strongly as in the living. 3.) There exists a part within each of us that is still connected to the <i>Chokhma</i> - Wisdom of Oneness and which has never worshipped idols and untruths.

http://community.livejournal.com/kabbalah_101/23603.html#cutid4