In Chapter 17, Poem 1 of Attar's Mokhtar Nameh, Attar contrasts direct spiritual experience with intellectual discourse. He asserts that the 'taste of sugar'—representing divine truth—is attained only through direct 'tasting' (experiential knowledge) rather than 'hearing' (indirect learning). The poem concludes that achieving even the slightest degree of union with the Beloved results in the 'severing of the tongue,' a metaphor for the profound incommunicability of mystical realities and the resulting eternal silence of the true mystic.