The Divine Power Of The Senses
“I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it,” says Shug in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. God wants to “share a good thing.” It is clear that we have been given a great capacity to share in God’s good thing, for example,
scientists who study human vision say that our eyes are capable of distinguishing about ten million different colors. If that is true, then our eyes can perceive hundreds of thousands of different hues just of purple, so we can walk through fields and see subtly different colors of purple every day for a lifetime. To me, this is a great miracle and mystery – that we can perceive the beauty of the world through our senses.
Flower Feild
In Sanskrit, a word for the senses is Indriya, and it means, “agreeable to Indra, King of the gods; companion to Indra; bodily power, power of the senses.” The word implies that the senses are intrinsically divine, the companions of God. Each sense is a way of giving praise to the Creator. Each sense is a door onto the universe around us – and within us.
In the practice of Yoga, we use the senses to perceive the world within the skin. When we take a breath, the air touches the skin around the nostrils and inside the nose – we feel the touch of the air. As the air travels up the nose, it flows over sensory cells that tell us what is in the air – the sense of smell. Our lungs expand and a “lung inflation” sense lets us perceive the delights of inhalation. Sensory nerves in our blood vessels keep us informed of our blood oxygen content, and we develop a deep “air hunger” if the balance of oxygen
and carbon dioxide is not just right. When we breathe out, the air is often about ten degrees warmer, because it has been inside our bodies. We can sense this temperature difference. Our ears can hear the sounds the air makes as it flows through our anatomy, and this spontaneous sound is sometimes called soham, a usually unconscious mantra and prayer. Just in a breath, there is touch, smell, lung expansion, oxygen sensing, temperature sensing and hearing.
When we engage in asana, several additional sensory pathways are activated: joint position, muscle stretch and balance. The joint position sense (proprioception) lets us know, even with our eyes closed, the position of our limbs. The muscle stretch sense tells us about the condition and extension of our deep tissues. Balance informs us of our relationship to gravity. This “gravitational sense” tells us continually of our relationship to the center of gravity, in other words, the center of the Earth.
Each of the senses is a miracle of transmutation, continually transforming one rhythm of energy into another. When we are seeing color, electromagnetic waves that fluctuate hundreds of trillions of times a second are touching the back of our eyes. Our vision sense transforms the energy of light into electrochemical nerve impulses and sends them to the visual cortex, the vision area of the brain. When we hear sounds, our ears are receiving waves, which vibrate bones in our ears, and our bodies turn this information into the sounds we hear. When we smell, our sensory system detects the shape and electrical charge of the molecules as they pass through our nose, and generates impulses that it sends to through the olfactory nerve to the olfactory areas of the brain. The sense of balance is a whole miracle unto itself. No matter what posture you are in, whether you are moving or still, your sense of balance is always informing you of your relationship with the Earth’s field of gravity. Your inner ear has semi-circular canals filled with a special fluid of calcium crystals, and your senses detect the motion of this fluid and turn it into the sense of balance.
The nine senses I mention above are just some of the ones known to sensory physiology. I find that we also have the ability to sense the energy fields of life. In teaching classes over the last forty years, it appears that most yogis, even complete beginners, can directly sense prana, the life-force. Prana appears as an ever-changing flow of something magnetic, an energy that is not quite physical but nourishes and inspires our physical cells. Prana can feel like tingling on the skin or inside the body, and it also varies in quality between being energizing, soothing, nourishing and purifying.
No matter what activity we are involved in, the more senses we engage, the more engaged we will be. When we are practicing Yoga, one specific sense, for example muscle stretch, may come to the foreground and we focus on it specifically for awhile. At other times, all the senses combine into an overall symphony of perception: we are immersed in a world of sensation coming from every part of the body simultaneously. It’s like when you are listening to a band or orchestra – you can pick out one specific instrument, or hear the composite sound, and you can go back and forth.
Each Yoga teacher has their own mix of senses that they alerts us to as we follow along in a class. We each have to find what works for us, for our unique inner nature – what sensory style gives us access to rejuvenation? What types of practice give you indriyashakti, the power of the senses to perceive both your inner world and the outer world and keep them in balance?
One way of looking at Yoga is as a set of techniques for cleansing the doors of perception (to paraphrase William Blake), so that we are more capable of seeing the world as it is: divine. I like this phrase, because when I practice Yoga, I often feel that I am on my hands and knees with a brush and a bucket of water, scrubbing the doors of perception. This gives me the gift of clear and intense perceiving and the serenity to handle it.
Dr. Lorin Roche has been teaching meditation for more than forty years and is the author of The Radiance Sutras. He and his wife, Camille Maurine, are the authors of Meditation Secrets for Women. They are teaching a weekend retreat, Wild Serenity, at Esalen, March 14 -16.lorinroche.com
By Dr. Lorin Roche
Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.