Unwrapping the Present
Life Dimensions #5: Sensory Gifts
Presence is a dive into the senses and for me that's often aural in origin, though others may have other entry points. Of course sight is all pervasive, but tuning into the impacts on the ears helps me wake. Maybe that's linked to the rhythmical pulse that keeps us moving through life, or to the fact that everything comes from sound, or at least from vibration which comes with pitch. I'm writing this listening to the chatter of a bird in a tree above me; hearing the shout of kids on a sports pitch and a piano being enthusiastically battered. The ears take us unavoidably out into the world around us, become our guide to where and when we are now. Then there's busy movement all around, as I start paying more attention to the visuals around me. To the narrow spectrum of colours I see; to the forms of light flickering through the leaves on the trees.
Sight is a sense we can play with, though. Thousands of eye movements in every moment, combining to craft the moving images we get, until we blink or even close our eyes tight. Of course, that redness of the back of the eyelids is a sign that sight hasn't been switched off so easily; does bringing down the shutters make us less present? Most meditation techniques insist on closed eyes, so clearly that can't be the case. What eyes closed does mean is a deeper drop, less stimuli so that we can at least become more conscious of those internal things that distract us from 'presence.' Thoughts, for the most part. How do we calm them down, so we can have greater awareness of what's going on beyond the false-historical ego drama that they play out? And without doing the other thing that closing eyes can lead to, taking us off into imaginative dream states or the pleasant zoning out of deep sleep.
Dreams are of course a whole other version of presence. Lucid dreams might just be the most present anyone gets; but dreaming generally is a reminder of the elasticity of time and the present moment. Clearly, someone in REM dreaming state is usually not 'aware' of themselves on the bed asleep, though it is a feature of those in raised senses of presence, states of consciousness: able to get deep rest while also knowing consciously that that's what's going on. Questions of presence are deep questions of the nature of reality; what is more real, more happening right now? That journey up the dream state mountain, or the comfy blanket and hot water bottle that my skin continues to sense for me?
Touch is one of those sensations that draws us in, to a 'deeper' presence if we let it, if we focus on it, if we breathe into it. How much can you feel? Because the act of touch is that of feeling, we do it 'physically' with the enormous contoured and differentiated territory that is the skin, and of course it has the potential to wake us into greater presence, with all the delicate, sensuous and sensual exposed areas of our bodies. That's a little perplexing given that the hidden heart is also regarded as the centre of feeling. There's a mystery worth investigating in this linkage between the sense of touch, via the skin, feeling the world, and the emotional "feelings" we conjure up inside us. We have greater 'sensitivity' the more presence is brought to the touched area, by us or of course by the sensitivity of the one giving us the touch experience. The magical crucible of mutual touch, of limbs or lips or other externalized parts of us finding contact, takes us into entirely other states of the present. Touch is clearly one big area for the senses and for feeling stuff, and we know it's got to be more than the surface sensations which we often zone out from. If we were constantly alert to everything our skin knew intimately, we'd probably go mad; though the things we really pay attention to in our touch - as experiencer or as deliverer of touch sensations - wake us up a lot more to the moment, to an expansive quality that is often hidden from us; potentially to the infinity of the moment, to the deep magic of right now, which might be a world we'd never expected.
On the other hand, as Pink Floyd sang and a zillion of us can affirm, there's a possibility, especially in this time we're living in, of becoming comfortably numb. The nervous system alerts us to pain and discomfort, and plenty of us somehow avoid these kinds of feeling - even more internal but just as much part of the presence we should become aware of if we want to drop deeper into the moment. Screens and other fabulous drugs have been extracted, devised, wished into being by our addictive and distractive personalities, to keep us away from our pain for ourselves and the world. Sadly, in that place of distraction, we’re cut off from being able to really feel touch. Our root chakra connection to the planet, to our creative sexual energy, is driven to blandness in our quest to avoid our pain - our grief.
Plants too have a sense of pain - scientists have recorded their distress signals being released when they're suffering damage, and they can’t easily avoid feeling that, unlike us overthinking movers. And in a way this reminds us that our own human sensations of the present moment are just picking up on one range of stimuli, of information about right now. Plants are undoubtedly aware of a different range of things going on, using organs we don't know about because they don't look like organs to us. (Mainstream scientists tend to call the way organisms like plants process information 'mechanisms', rather than organs, which of course is a giveaway for a machine-based worldview! I would say organs are collaborative systems of body parts, alive, with some kind of intelligent organisation behind them. From this perspective the 'organic' creation, by organs, of the present moment, is a little more obvious).
What we have in common with many other animals, though, is the awareness of our own movements, that sense of proprioception that plants don't have, because they're not mobile in the same way. (Though perhaps they do sense it in their deep sense of growth, a special aspect of movement that they manage just as well as we do; long-term movement, at the pace of giants). So if we tune in and drop out of those monkey-mind thoughts, we get in the zone, be it running or dancing or climbing or simply lifting a yoga posture for a little longer than we'd managed before. And then there's other times we're not present at all, unaware of our scrunched back or our careless feet stomping over rarefied turf. At times it seems animals have perfect skill with this sense as well as the related sense of balance; they are not bothered by anxious thoughts taking them out of that awareness of what their limbs are up to. Are they, then, truly present in ways we aren't?
Yes and no. Yes, plants have unexpected senses we haven't yet figured out - their communication methods, and their surprising reaction to information like changes in the climate (which we don't have in the same way without complex scientific equipment) give this away. But so do animals. Birds have an extra awareness of magnetic fields it seems that aids them in flight; a mysterious opening to an aspect of what's happening right now that we are cut off from. Even in the senses we share with animals, we're cut off from high pitches that dogs hear, from colours that bees can see, and it takes people with special olfactory skill to pick up on half the aromas sending most animals wild; smelling our pheromone perfumes might make us more animal, but does it make us more present to the present? Or more susceptible to being deluded! Animals don't mix speculative emotions and thoughts into their experience of these things. If that thing smells good, they're going to eat it, though we might conjure up feelings becoming thought-texts of guilt or love if we smell the same thing; and probably not even realize that a smell set us off. Some of us are far more sensitive to bad smells than others though, or even more discerning around the range of smells on offer in a moment. The picture of now can be made fuller with a nose that maps scents, but of course we humans don’t have a word for this: maps and pictures are visual. But the sense world that gives rise to our present experience is certainly very varied, and affects the way the moment opens up to us in different ways. Many of our ‘gifts’ are sense-related. We can come together to create a fuller ‘picture’ of the present moment, or we can stay within our obviously limited individual perceptions. Paradoxically (the present is always a paradox), the more we develop our inner reflective appreciation for what’s happening, the more we can reach out to discover/uncover what we’re missing that another being might help us know about.
The tongue and the taste buds are the mouth version of a sense that takes us inwards but also reaches out. Visuals, smells, music pulsing and taste: welcome to the machinery of fast food, or indeed any restaurant aiming to attract custom. In fast food the senses are flattened and simplified. Think of the way a baby’s toys, these days, are patterned according to gaudy plastic primary colouring. The subtle gradations, the organic, are almost filtered out, compared to the pastels of a home-knitted doll; so it is with fast food. Presumably marketing has found this elicits rapid responses rather than reflection; it also undoubtedly is a marker of over-stimulation. When I go to the ice rink or the bowling alley, it’s with this sensual pounding as a background; with a ‘milkshake’ that pounds my tongue with more sugar than my ancestors would have had in a lifetime. There was a time when European aristocrats were proud of their black teeth, showing they were elites who could afford to rot their teeth with the stuff. We have dulled many of our senses through excess; retreating from this is a sure way to get more present again. When I’ve fasted, the tastes of foods when I return to them are vivid; even carrots can taste too sweet. (Our version of carrots are a pretty modern sensual experience, hybridised to make an orange variety by Dutch patriots when their empire was gathering the world’s plants and playing with them). Imagine a time when purple was not the colour of Barney but the colour of sea shells, that could only be dyed for emperors, a time when bright things were rare; when good taste had a gentler quality. Perhaps ‘good taste’ still does: more natural, earthy tones. Mauve, that slightly sickly cross between purple and pink, was the original chemical dye that ushered in this modern sensually bold age. And yet: taste is intimately linked to consumption, to swallowing more than we should. Often we’re asleep to what we’re eating, and it becomes a moment of gluttony; we eat because we need to eat. This sleepiness in the taste sense is what has led to our taste addictions, to being conned into gobbling up stuff that we start to crave in spite of ourselves, overriding the pain sense, overriding the actual needs of the stomach. It’s good to stop, to blindfold, to feed a lover little tastes of things, to give them sensory experiences that reawaken observational skills and induce simple delight. This is all a part of becoming more present to what the moment brings, and not simply scoffing each other and the world.
In Rudolf Steiner's elegant postulating of twelve senses, building awareness in the four internal body senses (touch, pain/life processes, movement/proprioception, balance) helps us develop those more 'spiritual' senses that enable us to relate in the moment with others. The sense of balance is related to the sense of hearing, this we all know. That baby who finally stands, and then moves, is supporting her ability to differentiate the sounds around her. Greater awareness of movement, however, also calls forth a critical sense, for Steiner, of being able to appreciate that things are being spoken: that there is a discourse being given out into the world, as opposed to ‘mere’ music. Poetry in motion; motion into poetry. The present moment is in fact full of resources as we become more observant. Perhaps those speaking are not simply our fellow humans: there are many beings issuing their stories into the world, in languages we need to strive to understand. The stories of the great consciousness that is the forest, for example, are expressed in wonderful ways we might hope to get aware of if we keep our senses open. And those stories can be danced. A twist of the foot or a bend of the back; a sudden impulse upwards. All are found in narrative and in movement; and if we’re too wrapped up in our own stories, our pasts and our futures, we can’t hear these stories, can’t sense into what is being expressed by another. Rather critically, Steiner also claimed that the sense of pain and discomfort is vital for connecting to a sense of thinking and conceptualization. Breaking that down, what he’s talking about is an awareness not just of the fact that somebody else is telling a story, is speaking words and phrases, but that they are sharing real meanings that we can grasp at. Understanding the perspective of another, what their beliefs are, their world views; this becomes less and less possible if we numb ourselves to our own pain in our bodies, our own pain for the world. Interior awareness naturally develops exterior empathy.
The most grounded sense Steiner notes is the sense of touch; and the most externally focused sense, ultimately, is a true sense of the other person, of the other consciousness, which is only really accessible if we quieten down our own narcissism and listen, see, smell, taste, feel deeply who is this person I’m meeting? Their relationship is intertwined of course. Touch is primal, and so many traditions have been wary of it, abstracted away from healthy tribal practice. Men have written books and scriptures to prevent too much touch happening; even if the instinct we have is to know that tactile experiences are vivid. They are literally visceral, and they become more real, more revealed, more present if we let them. But also, too much touch happens between people without one actually sensing the other; it happens selfishly, without that quietening that allows the other to flower, allows us to be truly present to this other person. If we can be, we can meet them by experiencing them through all our available senses. And cute as Steiner’s elegant schemata is, there are actually far more than twelve senses. The more we become present to his twelve, I suspect, the more we will realize what other channels of perception we have; what else we can be awake to in the world.
The ‘gorilla suit’ experiment is the best known example of people being focused on another task and therefore not acknowledging other, surprising information coming into the senses. (In this case, someone crossing a basketball court in a gorilla suit apparently completely unnoticed, when the participants in the experiment were focused on the ball). Often, of course, we need to filter such information. Perhaps the question about how to get more present is more a concern about how to focus on what’s really important. Big picture or key point of focus, but also how to expand in a way such that what we focus on is aligned with what our soul truly calls for from this moment. May our actions be for the highest good of all, as many a prayer would have it. Selecting the kind of momentary information that is most useful for this kind of result is undoubtedly helped by a few methodologies. Ascetic practices, like withdrawing from certain senses and actions, closing the eyes, stopping food, deliberately facing cold and other discomforts, are actions taken often to awaken the senses more to the call of spirit. To clear the clutter so that we can see/hear/smell/taste/touch/vibrate with the universe’s call in this very moment. But then so are ecstatic practices and actions! Dancing takes me far more towards the knowledge of what movement to make next; there are foods, drinks, forms of sensual touch that make a more vivid life available that feels fully true and beautiful. A sensual touch that awakens me to the presence, right here, of my lover that is the universe.
For ultimately it is love again that tells us we’re present. It’s painful to recognise when we’ve not been, so we might foolishly stand our ground and try and justify the past; but when things align, it’s easy to ‘see’ and love the beings we’re with, with a depth that is about now, not about where we might both be in the years to come. This is where those feelings come from – those feelings of bliss that are a deep sign that we’re in the moment and in love with life around us and it’s good. That becomes much easier to access, in principle, if we haven’t left trails of unprocessed junk around from the past that has looped into our minds and round and round as undigested stories that prevent us seeing who and what is actually happening before us. Ghosts of all kinds get in the way of hearing the song of now. Anxieties about the future too cause fluff in the mirror, as I picked up on in my last piece on this temporal trajectory. The work we do with the past and the future, getting it moving, frees up this now-space to show us its truly fluffy feathers. Most of the conflict our world is currently stuck with is about deep grooves of resentment that have to do with something long gone, or dreams of future happiness that prevent a joyful gratitude for now.
So, pause once more. Take it in, as much of it as you can. Take us in. Take yourself in. We are magnificent. We’re worth it; we are this moment. What an extraordinary present to unwrap.