Your Senses Are a Mind•Body•Spirit Bridge

Integrating our mind, body, and senses reacquaints us with direct experience and brings us amazing perceptual acuity. We can heighten our sensory awareness to levels most of us aren’t aware is possible. Certain tribes in Africa and South America can identify the position of Venus in daytime. A few hundred years ago, many sailors used Venus to navigate by whenever it was above the horizon, even during the day. Most people today would need some kind of shading or viewing tool to block the sunshine in order to find Venus in daylight, if they were even willing to attempt such a task.

Hyperacuity is our innate ability to feel heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli. Researcher Eugene Marais showed that people under hypnosis can recognize differences between apparently identical pieces of blank paper, using minute differences such as small marks, creases, irregularities, and the position of the watermark, which would otherwise go unnoticed. Marais showed in a 1922 study how a hypnotized subject could easily distinguish between twenty apparently identical snail shells, or determine who had handled certain objects by a sense of smell alone. He devised similar experiments to show that humans have an amazing sense of direction, and this finding suggests that the homing instinct and sense of direction of animals is a natural facility that humans often suppress.

While humans may have developed intellect at the expense of sensory ability, we can recover sensory acuity. Some researchers document extraordinary cases of transposition of the senses, such as the cases Cesare Lombroso cited (1836-1909) of seeing through the skin of the ear and nose, and smelling through the chin and heel.

Many doctors are aware that High Sense Perception exists, since they use it! Some healers who feel comfortable using HSP in their diagnoses include: Barbara Brennan, W. Brugh Joy, Dr. Dolores Krieger, Dr. Shafica Karagulla, and Caroline Myss. Karagulla interviewed many medical professionals with HSP, including famous surgeons, professors of medicine, and heads of departments in large hospitals.

Perhaps part of the reason we don’t realize how sensory awareness can be heightened is that our senses are so often bombarded that we rarely notice we’ve lost some sensual acuity. We seldom take time to savor any particular sensory experience … to relish the way grass feels tickling under our bare feet, the way the surface of water feels in our bathtub when we stroke it from above with our palm, or the way our food and drink tastes as we swallow it slowly and savor its subtle consistency, texture, temperature and flavor. It rarely occurs to us to delight in the way cold air pours out of the refrigerator onto our ankles and toes when we open the door, or the way we sigh quietly when we sit or lie down. We don’t need to lose our senses of smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing as we grow older … we can refine and develop our senses. Recovering sensitivity is a great way to feel fully alive. We can improve our sensitivity at any time in life by appreciating how keen our senses are, and intending that they improve.

An amazing example of someone who did the seemingly impossible by curing his blindness is Meir Schneider, who was born with a number of eye problems including: cataracts, glaucoma, small cornea, strabismus, astigmatism and nystagmus. After five unsuccessful surgeries, he was declared legally blind. At the age of sixteen, Meir began the Bates method vision exercises and gradually gained functional vision. He now has a current unrestricted California driver’s license, sees quite well, and teaches people to heal their bodies and improve their vision to the point that wearing glasses is unnecessary. The British writer Aldous Huxley also used Dr. Bates’s exercises to recover from a condition of near-blindness.

One of the biggest obstacles to overcome before we come to our senses is our belief that our eyes can never improve, or that presbyopia (or ‘middle-age farsightedness’) is an unavoidable result of aging. Neither of these beliefs need be true, and an insistence on believing in such limitations can certainly interfere with improving our sensitivity. Actually, one of the keys to improving your ability to see is simply to believe you can see, and relax. Many people notice their vision improves immediately. This has been dramatically proven to work with visual perception, and it may also work with other senses such as hearing, smell, taste, and touch.