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Here’s a bullet-point summary of “Can You Taste It?” by River Kenna, focusing on the central themes around rasa:
🔹 Taste & Smell: The Liminal Senses
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Taste and smell trigger deep memory and emotion, often transporting us to past moments or feelings.
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Unlike the "solid" senses (sight, sound, touch), they access subtle, time-bending layers of reality.
🔹 Rasa: Beyond Flavor
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Rasa in Sanskrit means flavor, but also essence or nectar — an emotional or existential flavor of an experience.
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Traditionally used in Indian aesthetics to describe core emotional tones in art (e.g., love, terror, peace).
🔹 Rasa as Perception
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Philosopher Abhinavagupta expanded rasa into a metaphysical framework, with shanta rasa (peace) as the spiritual base.
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Rasa isn't just in art — it's everywhere, in moments, people, and places.
🔹 Defamiliarization & Synesthetic Experience
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Describing familiar things in strange, vivid ways helps us experience them anew — this is defamiliarization.
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Examples: “Aluminum. Ash.” or “Manufactured sunlight” evoke specific rasa.
🔹 Rasa vs. Vibes
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Unlike vague terms like “vibe” or “energy,” rasa invites precise, poetic attention to the emotional and spiritual flavor of experience.
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It’s both created and discovered, objective and subjective at once.
🔹 Transjective & Valueception
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Concepts like valueception (Iain McGilchrist) or transjective reality point to how we perceive values and beauty as real, yet shaped by our perception.
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Beauty and rasa are universal yet personal, sensed with a kind of soul precision.
🔹 Practicing Rasa Awareness
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Keep a notebook to track rasas — the tastes and scents of everyday life.
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Aim to share experiences freshly, beyond cliché, through rich metaphor and sensory detail.
🔹 Taste as Intimacy
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Taste is deeply intimate — we literally take the world into our body.
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Describing experience through rasa allows us to let others “taste” our world — it’s a form of emotional seduction and sharing.
Would you like this distilled into an Instagram-style carousel or infographic next?
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