PHS Cognition/Sense: Taste — The Dominant Sense Through Which This Design Takes in Life
The Nature of Taste as a Cognition
In the Personality Hierarchical Structure, the Cognition is the primary faculty through which the formless mind of the Personality samples and digests the totality of lived experience. When the Cognition is Taste, the design does not simply observe life, analyze it, or listen to it — it palates it. Every encounter with another person, every meal, every environment, and every idea must pass through the discerning filter of taste. The mind is constantly putting the world to the tongue of awareness, testing its flavor, gauging its nourishment, and determining whether it is worth swallowing.
This is not metaphor alone. For those with Taste as their dominant Cognition, there is a literal and reliable sensitivity to the flavors, textures, and qualities of life. They are designed to know, almost immediately and somatically, whether something is for them or not for them. The Cognition operates as a kind of inner connoisseur — an exquisite instrument of preference and discrimination that exists before thought and beyond logic.
The Mechanics of Taking in Life
A design with Taste as its Cognition takes in life by sampling. The formless mind cannot ingest the totality of what is offered; it must taste, test, and then either accept or reject. This sampling process is continuous, and it is the basis upon which the Personality builds its experience of reality.
What is essential to understand is that this is not a conscious choosing. The Taste Cognition is not a decision-making tool — it is an appetitive faculty. The design finds itself drawn toward certain flavors of life and repelled by others, often without knowing why. The body responds before the mind names the response. What tastes good is taken in; what does not is left on the plate.
In practical terms, this means the person with Taste as their Cognition is designed to move through life with a highly refined (or highly specific) set of preferences. These preferences are not superficial or arbitrary — they are the very mechanism through which the design recognizes what belongs in its life and what does not.
Connection to Identity and the Solar Plexus
Taste, as a Cognition, is intimately linked to the motor of awareness and the experience of identity. When the formless mind is tasting life, it is also tasting itself in life — measuring its own aliveness against the flavor of each experience. A life well-tasted is a life that is being received; a life that has gone flat is a life that is being rejected.
This is why those with this Cognition can experience such profound states of dissatisfaction when out of alignment. If they are regularly taking in experiences that do not taste good — relationships, environments, vocations, diets — the formless mind begins to starve, and starvation of this kind is not subtle. It expresses as a deep, unnamed longing, a sense that life itself has lost its flavor.
The Not-Self Theme
When the Personality mind overrides the innate wisdom of the Taste Cognition, the not-self theme emerges as a chronic and unsatisfiable hunger. The mind, in its attempt to control and decide, begins to chase flavor rather than allowing it to arise naturally. The result is a person who is perpetually searching for the next taste, the next hit of nourishment, never quite satisfied, always reaching for the next thing.
This manifests practically as: difficulty committing to a direction because no single option tastes fully satisfying; over-consumption, particularly of sensory experience; a tendency to dismiss what is nourishing because the mind wants a more intense flavor; or, conversely, a withdrawal from experience altogether when too much has been sampled and rejected.
Living with Taste as Your Cognition
The practical guidance for a design with Taste as its Cognition is to honor the palate. This means:
- Trusting immediate, pre-verbal responses to people, food, environments, and opportunities.
- Stopping the consumption of what does not taste good — even when the mind insists one should stay, should try harder, should give it more time.
- Recognizing that the absence of appetite is information. A life that no longer tastes good is a life that is no longer being received.
- Cultivating an intimate relationship with what genuinely nourishes — specific foods, specific people, specific places, specific forms of work — and returning to them again and again.
The formless mind is designed to know, through taste, what is for it. The work is not to develop this faculty, but to stop overruling it.
The Gift of Refined Discernment
At its highest expression, the Taste Cognition is a profound gift of discernment. Those who live in alignment with it become masterful curators of their own experience. They know, with a quiet and reliable authority, what belongs in their life and what does not. They are not unkind in their discrimination — they simply possess a clarity about nourishment that allows them to build a life that is deeply satisfying and unmistakably their own.
To live with Taste as the dominant Cognition is to be a connoisseur of one's own existence — and to trust, always, the wisdom of the palate.