ABSTRACT

Are you sitting comfortably? No, really, are you sitting comfortably? At this moment are you at all aware of your body and the state of relaxation or tension within its various parts? Are you gripping this book more tightly than is really necessary to hold it up? Is your sitting position such that extra strain is being put on your neck and shoulders in order to hold your head upright? Are you frowning unnecessarily? How do you know any of this? The information about our bodies and the outside world comes through what we loosely call our senses.

It is difficult, however, to separate the working of our senses from our cognitive functioning and interpretations. Early references to the senses appear in the Katha Upanishad, written between 400 and 800 BC. It likens the senses to ‘horses’ that draw the ‘chariot’ of the body, with the mind as ‘reins’ and the ‘charioteer’ as the potentially controlling reason. It describes the purpose of the senses as, ‘this by which we perceive colours and sounds, perfumes and kisses of love; by which alone we attain knowledge; by which verily we can be conscious of anything’ (Mascaro, 1965: 62). This Upanishad identifies the five senses that Western society sees as the main senses, namely sight,

sound, smell, touch and taste. However, these are only the senses of which we are most aware. Barbara Stafford (in Elkins, 2008) sees our consciousness as, ‘borne aloft on an ocean of “automatic life regulators”’, which are estimated to be approximately 90% of our bodies’ sensory systems including balance, temperature regulation, heart rate, breathing, gland secretions, pain, kinaesthetic sense and many others. As well as the core physical senses, there are other senses such as telepathy and extra sensory perception that Sheldrake (2003) calls aspects of ‘the extended mind’, which appear in human experience but which, as yet, have little scientific evidence to support their existence. He has also proposed a hypothesis of ‘Morphic Resonance’ (Sheldrake, 2009), where past forms and behaviours of organisms can affect organisms in the present across time and space.