Every object, well contemplated, opens a new organ of perception in us.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, eighteenth-century German polymath
What is capable of seeing, hearing, moving, acting has to be your original mind.
CHINUL, twelfth-century Korean Zen Master
Our senses and what they give rise to are, when well-contemplated, mind-boggling in every respect. We tend to take them sorely for granted and underappreciate their scope and depth, if we appreciate them at all. Our senses undergird our capacity to recruit and develop an astonishing array of intelligences for decoding experience and situating ourselves in the phenomenological world. Being in touch with our senses—considerably more than five, as modern neuroscience is showing—and the worlds they open us to inwardly and outwardly is the essence of mindfulness and meditative awareness. Attending to them provides myriad opportunities for realizing wakefulness, wisdom, and interconnectedness in our everyday lives.
Under special circumstances, our senses can become extraordinarily refined. It is said that aboriginal hunters in Australia, living in the outback, could see the larger moons of Jupiter with the naked eye, so keen was their hunting vision. When one sense is lost at birth or before the age of two, it seems the other senses may take on qualities of acuity far beyond what we usually think possible. This has been shown in various studies, even with sighted people deprived of sight for relatively short periods of time, from days to hours. They show, in Oliver Sachs’s words, “a striking enhancement of tactile-spatial sensitivity.”
By simply being in a room with people, Helen Keller could decipher using her sense of smell “the work they are engaged in. The odors of the wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the garments of those who work in them… When a person passes quickly from one place to another, I get a scent impression of where he has been—the kitchen, the garden, or the sickroom.”
The various isolated senses (we tend to think of them as separate and non-intersecting functions) all subtend different aspects of the world for us, and facilitate the construction and knowing of the world from raw sensory impressions and our relationship to them. Each sense has its own unique constellation of properties, out of which we build not only our “picture” of the world “out there” but out of which we build meaning and our moment-to-moment capacity to situate ourselves within it.
We can learn a great deal about ourselves and what we take entirely for granted from the reported experiences of those who do not have one or more of the sense capacities most of us share, whether it was that way from birth or as a result of later loss. And we can ponder what the experience of such profound loss (at least it feels that way to us) would be, and gain insight from those who have found ways to live fully within such constraints. Thus, we might come more to appreciate the gifts of those senses available to us in this moment, and of our virtually limitless potential to put them to use in the service of our own hopefully always-growing awareness of the inner and outer landscapes of our lives. For what we know we know only through the full spectrum of the senses, coupled with that capacity of mind that we might call knowing itself, its own kind of sensory and integrative function.
Helen Keller writes:
I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man… If I could live again I should do much more than I have for the deaf. I have found deafness to be a much greater handicap than blindness.
The poet David Wright describes the experience of his deafness as seldom being devoid of a sense of sound:
Suppose it is a calm day, absolutely still, not a twig or leaf stirring. To me it will seem quiet as a tomb though hedgerows are full of noisy but invisible birds. Then comes a breath of air, enough to unsettle a leaf; I will see and hear that movement like an exclamation. The illusory soundlessness has been interrupted. I see, as if I heard, a visionary noise of wind in a disturbance of foliage… I have sometimes to make a deliberate effort to remember I am not “hearing” anything, because there is nothing to hear. Such non-sounds include the flight and movement of birds, even fish swimming in clear water or the tank of an aquarium. I take it that the flight of most birds, at least at a distance, must be silent… Yet it appears audible, each species creating a different “eye-music” from the nonchalant melancholy of seagulls to the staccato of flitting tits…
John Hull, who lost his sight completely in his late forties, gradually experienced a loss of all visual imagery and memory and a descent into what he calls “deep blindness.” According to Sachs, writing about the senses in the New Yorker, being a “whole-body seer” (Hull’s term for characterizing his state of deep blindness) involved shifting his attention, his center of gravity, to the other senses, and, Sachs notes, Hull “writes again and again of how these have assumed a new richness and power. Thus he speaks of how the sound of the rain, never before accorded much attention, can now delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path is different from its sound as it drums on the lawn, or on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the road.”
“Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a colored blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience… presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once… gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world with another.”
Sachs’s phrase “never before accorded much attention” is telling here. Necessity fosters and furthers such an according of attention in those who are missing one or more of the senses. But we do not have to experience the loss of our sight or hearing, or any other sensorium, to accord attention to it. It is the invitation of mindfulness to meet our sense impressions at the point of contact (see Meditation Is Not What You Think, “The Origin of Shoes”), and to know and linger in the knowing of these worlds in their fullness, rather than in their diminution through our ignoring or habitually dulling of both the sense gates themselves and the mind that encounters them and accords them and ourselves meaning.
Just as we can learn and be astonished by the capabilities of those who have suffered the loss of one or more sense and made extraordinary accommodations and adjustments in both body and mind to fashion a full life, so we can learn from purposefully according some attention to the natural world, which beckons to us and offers itself to us through all our senses simultaneously, a world in which our very senses were fashioned and honed, and in which we have been seamlessly embedded from the beginning.
Although we tend not to notice it, we perceive across all our senses simultaneously in any and every moment. Even in Wright’s description and Hull’s there are cross-references to the lost sense. Wright has to remind himself that he is not hearing what he is seeing, for it “appears audible” to him, manifests as “eye-music.” And Hull, who has no visual experience, nevertheless speaks of “a colored blanket” thrown “over previously invisible things,” suggesting that they are indeed made “visible” through his careful hearing.
The senses overlap and blend together, and cross-pollinate. This experience is called synesthesia. We are not fragmented at the level of our being. We never were. Our senses, blending together, shape our knowing of the world, and our participation in it from moment to moment. That we do not recognize this is merely a measure of our alienation from our own feeling body and from the natural world.
David Abram, whose book The Spell of the Sensuous looks deeply into the crosscurrents of phenomenology and the natural world as it is sensed and known by all the creatures that inhabit it, including ourselves when we dwell in the wild, shares with us the rich dimensionality of the sensory matrix that gave birth to us and nurtured us for hundreds of thousands of years.
The raven’s loud, guttural cry, as it swerves overhead, is not circumscribed within a strictly audible field—it echoes through the visible, immediately animating the visible landscape with the reckless style or mood proper to that jet black shape. My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent way, and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other.
Hence, just as we have described perception as a dynamic participation between my body and things, so we now discern, within the act of perception, a participation between the various sensory systems of the body itself. Indeed, these events are not separable, for the intertwining of my body with the things it perceives is effected only through the interweaving of my senses, and vice versa. The relative divergence of my bodily senses (eyes in the front of the head, ears toward the back, etc.) and their curious bifurcation (not one but two eyes, one on each side, and similarly two ears, two nostrils, etc.) indicates that this body is a form destined to the world; it ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth.
Immersed and embedded in the natural world, we only know it through our senses, and we are known through the senses of other beings, including beings that are not human but who sense us all the same in their own ways, whether it be a mosquito looking for lunch or birds announcing our arrival in a forest glen. We are part of this landscape, grew up in it, and are still the possessors of all its gifts, although compared to our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors, ours may have atrophied somewhat from lack of use. But the spell of the sensuous, in Abram’s enticing and entrancing phrase, is no further than the sound of the rain taken in, or the feel of the air on the skin, or the warmth of the sun on our backs, or the look in your dog’s eye when you come near. Can we feel it? Can we know it? Can we be embraced by it? And when might that be? When? When? When? When? When?