No Mind, No Bad Taste

There’s this delicious dish served at a vegetarian Korean cuisine restaurant over on 32nd Street in Manhattan that I love. One evening, I decided to treat myself to a delectable meal of wrapped mushrooms and vegetables, which comes with an absolutely to-die-for brown sauce. The plate comes garnished with some fancy, curly-cut raw vegetables—usually a carrot and beet or radish. Whatever fancy vegetable came that day, I didn’t like it. Once I became aware that I was complaining to myself about the taste and was about to decide not to finish it, a thought suddenly popped into my mind. I wondered if the vegetable would taste differently if I weren’t having a negative, internal reaction to it.

Whenever I find myself needing to do something I’d rather not do, I practice a technique (when I remember to do it) to clear my mind, at least of any negative thought I have about what I’m doing. Sometimes I use a mantra to replace the negative thought with a sound, syllable or a sentence. And sometimes I use a focusing technique in which I empty my mind of any thoughts and simply observe very intently what I am physically doing. The idea is to not let your internal reaction push you off your mental or emotional center.

So, as I sat in the restaurant, I emptied my mind and simply observed myself without reaction. I then put another of the curly vegetables in my mouth and chewed. To my surprise, it had no taste at all. It was really an extraordinary experience to see this play out on a physical response level. As I write this, it actually reminds me of a practice, which I think is called the Inca Sundance, in which participants hang themselves on hooks but claim to feel no pain. There are a lot of such practices in different traditions—walking across hot coals, lying on beds of nails, etc. And it always appears on the outside to be some supernatural act that defies the laws of science. Maybe those are just acts of No Mind, which prevents everything, including the physical body, from going into a reactive process.

Usually when I do the exercise, it’s an emotional reaction that I’m working with. It’s relatively easy to wrap your mind around the idea that your emotions color your perception of reality. But since we are so attached to our physical bodies and for the most part take the input from our physical senses as gospel on what’s real and what’s not, it’s probably a lot more difficult grasp the idea that much, most –and I dare say all—of what you perceive with the physical senses is made up in your mind. To some that might sound scary. To others, that might be the most liberating thing you’ve ever heard.

When it came time to eat the mushroom and vegetable wrap though, I quickly abandoned the No Mind exercise. The divine taste of that meal—imagined or not—was an experience I did not want to miss.