According to Osho, yes, taste is a sacred doorway: all experiences are God's instruments, taste too. He teaches not tastelessness but the supreme savor: eat with remembrance, offer the first bite, and feel the Beloved tasting through you. When every sense is woven with surrender, life becomes twenty-four-hour worship; food turns into prayer, and the Divine rasa is savored everywhere, including through sharing.
Yes: if you enjoy food while remembering and offering it to the Divine—feeling God tastes through you—eating becomes a simple prayer.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, with reference to “Raso Vai Sah,” can taste too be made a means to the experience of the Divine?
Brahman means “the expanding one”—that which keeps spreading, which is ever extending. That which does not stand still anywhere, which never makes any boundary into a boundary, which always flows beyond. If you would know the Divine, then—even on a small scale—do not make boundaries. Expand, keep expanding! If you have fragrance, share it with the winds! If you have light, give it to the paths! If you have awareness, give it to others! Whatever you have! And who is there who has nothing? There is no such human being. The Divine is within everyone; therefore something or other will surely be there. Search. You cannot be without purpose. Through you he wishes to sing some song. Through you he wishes to dance some dance. Through you he wishes to bloom some flower. You cannot be in vain. You have a destiny. There is a secret hidden within you. Open…
Osho, another fear arises: if we remove the mind’s interference, might our whole life end in a single sight, a single word, a single fragrance!
Let it happen. There is no harm in it. Because what you call life will end anyway. There is no way to save it. Whoever tries to save it only gets into trouble. It cannot be saved; it is already passing. And if the mind’s interference drops and your life dissolves into the One, that is the very search. If you are utterly immersed in fragrance, then fragrance is your God. Then through fragrance itself you will have known the divine. Then within the sense of smell all your other senses will be absorbed. You will become a doorway of fragrance. Then you will smell with every pore of your being. Then, on every side, the divine will become fragrance for you. For this reason, in different religions different senses became important. Islam gives great value to fragrance. Surely Muhammad knew the divine as fragrance. The mind’s interference fell away…
We are living in an extraordinary world. All around, the Vast is present in uncountable forms. Supreme beauty is happening here; supreme music is playing; there is no end to the Nada. Yet like the deaf and blind we pass through all this. Nothing touches us. We are dead corpses. We have turned our senses into tombs, and we are sealed within them like coffins. We pass by—nothing touches, nothing is experienced. And we ask, Where is bliss? We ask, Where is Paramatma? And He is all around. Inside and out there is none other than Him. And there is no moment that is not a moment of bliss. Only an experiencer is needed. And that experiencer we kill in stimulation. My definition of renunciation: renunciation is the science of supreme enjoyment. Only the one who knows how to leave can truly experience.
One whose taste is alive will derive such unique flavor from ordinary fruits and vegetables that he cannot conceive why you are destroying the taste of vegetables by adding chili! It is the destruction of taste. Spices are a means of destruction, not enhancement. Taste does not increase with spices. But you will feel difficulty. If today you suddenly leave spices, everything will seem tasteless—because you will have to practice taste anew. It is the same as with a friend of mine who is a traveling agent. Twenty or twenty-four days of the month he is away; he returns home for five or seven days. He came to me and said, “It is a great problem. In the train I get sleep; at home I don’t.” Having been a traveling agent for so long, he sleeps in the train—uproar, noise, sounds, the coming and going of stations, crowds—and he sleeps.
Osho, Charandasji says—as perhaps all the wise say—that the Divine is of one taste. There is neither dusk nor dawn there; neither death nor birth; neither pleasure nor pain. Then what is there? What is this one-taste?
Life is dual. Everywhere in life there is duality. If there is love, there is hate. If there is sin, there is virtue. If there is day, there is night. If there is birth, there is death. Everywhere in life there is duality. Life runs on duality; life is dialectical. Here, life cannot be without death; how could there be evening—without morning? How could there be morning—without evening? How would there be success if there were no failure? And if there were no sorrow, how would there be happiness? Here everything is tied to its opposite. Therefore, however happy one tries to be here, one never quite is, because sorrow follows right behind; it comes along with it. Sorrow and happiness are twin brothers. And not merely twins—they are conjoined. They share the same body. Perhaps there are two faces, but the body is one. Here, if you gain fame,…