You have 12 Senses ~ escape the tiny cultural box of only five animal senses

A Best Practices in Energy Healing article from Healing Toolbox

Everyone reading this has more natural, built-in senses we can make more and better use of.

Why don’t we have full use of all our senses? Cultural blinders put on us as children, learned thru osmosis, thru cultural conditioning, told us what to feel and how much to feel, what to see and how much to see, what to listen to and how much to listen. To the degree our cultural blinders reduce the openness of sensory channels babies come into the world with, “cultural blinders” are also “tunnel vision” imposed on our senses.

This is not bad or evil. My guess all 3D planets with people living on them have some version of shutting down a baby’s senses; Earth has its own versions of this. We all agree to work within all these “myths” with particular cultural blinders, when we agree to be born here.

Q: Can you help me see these cultural blinders on my senses?

A: Easy, one key is to recognize your senses have been placed in a tiny "cultural box," a "sensory dogma" that endlessly repeats, "Human senses begin and end with touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing and nothing more." This "cultural box" was useful in the 1700s when thinking itself was getting organized. You do not have to live in this 18th century "box."

Jeff Green cites a 2005 New Scientist article upping the number of "accepted senses" to ten with another 11 waiting "in the wings;" yet, this expanded wisdom has not penetrated the mainstream. Jeff's article is here: www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/sensejeffgreen.pdf

Q: How can I remove my cultural blinders?

A: Psychedelic drugs and mushrooms that violently force open your etheric centers are one way. I don’t recommend this as psychoactive drugs almost always permanently distort your etheric centers. This kind of damage requires very skilled practitioners to repair because the damage is all invisible. MSIA.org aura balances are the very best way to repair such damage appropriately since the work is overseen by angels dedicated to this and related tasks, as I experience it.

Other than drugs, what options do we have? Good sex, loving sex, feeling safe to open up more unconditionally at deeper and deeper levels, is a good way to expand your sensory channels.

The more common approach is removing blocks you have to self-sensitivity. You can't go after more or better senses directly, to paraphrase Rumi; you go after removing chaos and incoherence in the sensory channels you already have available. The senses you had when you took your first physical breath here in 3D are just fine. You reclaim them by chipping away at the blocks and obstacles to those senses.

Removing obstacles and blocks to your senses is a path of patience, gradualness and perseverance. Along the way, your inner child gets freed up becomes more free to express. It’s a good path, a happy path. Beyond that comes recognizing your have internal "governors" on your senses in your Inner Court and clearing those.

Q: Which sense do I work on first? How?

A: Once you can self-test, you can explore measuring your five senses, called VAKOG in NLP, on a scale of 1-10, ten being most open.

Can't self-test yet? For those walking a path of self-mastery, you will want to learn Client-controlled Testing (CCT), kinesiology testing, dowsing, inner testing, of some kind. PTS.org has wonderful, safe Masters and Doctorate programs I highly recommend. In the do-it-your-self vein, I recommend the book, SelfHealing 101! Best Practices in Healing, Talk with Your Immune System.

Once you have numbers for your senses, VAKOG, consider strengthening your weakest sense. Sensory awakening as a topic blossomed in the early 1970s. See Bernard Gunther’s page at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Gunther/e/B001HCZ4ZG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_p... These are the main exercise books on waking up the five senses. Waking up the rest of the 12 senses likely requires self-testing of some kind to navigate in unfamilar invisible territory.

More on the origin of the "five senses" box

The short version is: Early materialists limited humans to only the five senses of the animals: hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. This was as all the senses early materialists could agree on in the human psyche. Early Western scientists were strong iNtuitive Thinkers (NTs). "Feeling" did not interest them much. Since 1970 the pendulum of science has been moving towards a more 50-50 balance between T and F.

An ally for a science more attuned to feeling is Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). He made a career out of breaking open the overly-rigid mental stereotypes cascading out of materialistic science during the Industrial Revolution in the West. He especially enjoyed busting cultural myths fast becoming rigid and unhelpful dogma. Except in the area of personality typology, every Steinerism I can think of betters scientific materialism still taught in virtually every public school and college. Steiner’s reformulations of basic concepts improve and expand on now overly-narrow intellectual concepts. It's not our intellects that will save us in 2012; it's our hearts. Steiner demonstrated observing with heart.

Rudolf Steiner suggests we have 12 senses

You can break one of your own dogmas today: you have 12 or more natural senses.

Steiner made short work of this error. That human shave only the five animal senses, only touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing aligns with the purely materialistic paradigm of human beings as merely and only Naked Apes.

If you wish to know why humans differ from the animals, you cannot stop at only five senses. If you start from the Spirit, RS said, and work back to the human being here in 3D materiality, it's obvious and common-sensical what makes humans different from animals are many senses humans have that animals do not.

Below is his list of Steiner’s list of 12 senses, slightly simplified and updated to reveal his most significant insight, an expansion of the kinesthetic sense beyond even how NLP conceives of “kinesthetic.” See how many senses you recognize in your own awareness.

1. Sense of another soul ~ capacity to sense another person, most dramatically exercised by incidences of sensing the presence or absence of another person in complete darkness. This sense is commonly expressed in our love of socializing, parties and any peaceful groups.

2. Sense of Thought ~ the brain as a sense organ for ideas. The capacity to perceive, “I think; therefore, I am,” is an idea. Contrast this with your sense that crying and laughing are not ideas in that same sense. We perceive crying and laughing are not ideas. E = MC2, that’s another idea.

3. Sense of Speech ~ capacity to make sense of speech. Even if someone is talking to you in a foreign language, you can tell if meaning is intended. Our sense of speech is heightened in viewing pantomime; we perceive meaning can be conveyed even without words.

4. Hearing audible sounds ~ this is our first sense to wake up and our last sense to leave at death.

5. Seeing colors ~ capacity to register impressions with the eye.

6. Tasting

7. Smelling
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Our seven kinesthetic senses, regrouped by BD

8. Kinesthetic sense of Warmth ~ Am I warm enuf; am I too hot? Am I too cool?

9a. Kinesthetic sense of Touch

9b. Kinesthetic sense of Texture

9c. Kinesthetic sense of Weight ~ capacity to sense if something has any weight at all, capacity to sense if it has much or little physical mass, independent of size.

10. Kinesthetic sense of Balance ~ perceptions of things in or out of balance, physically, emotionally, and also morally: fairness and unfairness. Related to our vestibular sense. Highly related to intuitive hunches as in, “Something feels off here,” “That sounds “funny” to me;” and, “That feels really right on target!”

11. Kinesthetic sense of Movement ~ capacity to perceive direction of movement: above to below, left to right, front to back, etc. Also our sense of relative motion, one thing in motion relative to another thing.

12. Kinesthetic sense of life ~ "Sense of well-being" may be more clear here, our capacity to sense if we feel well or poorly, our sense of feeling not-well.

“I feel good today,” “I don’t feel well today;” and, I feel better today compared with yesterday,” “I have a bad feeling about this,” and, “I have a good feeling about going this direction.”

Our Sense of well-being is very likely our strongest of all kinesthetic senses.

Our poor accuracy rate in predicting future outcomes does not prove we have no such sense. Tracking when we accurately predict good and bad outcomes is the natural starting place for further observations here.

"Mood of death" and "mood of birth" as kinesthetic senses

Our kinesthetic sense of life, or sense of well-being, connects with another Steinerism, his idea of the contrasting moods of death and birth. I cannot recall where I learned this from RS, his colleagues or students and nothing online either. It may have been in my Waldorf Teacher Training thru Noah Williams Sr.

As I recall it and re-create it now, RS was pointing to our capacity to sense whether this or that phenomena is living or dead.

Few of us have much experience exercising this sense. One common experience would be casket viewings where the deceased is made to look lifelike; we may temporarily imagine they merely sleep, but after a few minutes our internal senses tell us the loved on in the casket is no longer expressing life.

This evidences our capacity for a sense of life.

On a more positive note, many of us respond to a weeks-old baby kitten with, "Hello kitty!" evidencing some capacity we have to sense life.

In his discussion of the contrasting moods of birth and death, Steiner was not concerned with whether we could tell if corpses were dead or kittens alive. Rather he was concerned with education: is this lesson, for these children, at this time in their stage-development, leading them into more life or leading them into death?

Steiner was concerned with teacher delivering lessons that strengthened the life forces in children. He was very aware school lessons can strengthen either the life forces (blood-muscles) or the death forces (nerves-intellect-bones). He was very aware factory-style intellectual education only strengthens the death forces in humans and leads to graduates who can conceive of and think useful bigger guns, bombs and atomic bombs.

In Healing Toolbox articles I continually strive to compose them so they speak to and strengthen readers' life forces.

If you get stuck, give me a call.

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