Meet Your 5, 10, 15 Senses

By Matthew Joyce

This article is a follow up to a previous article about state specific memory, which refers to memories created and stored in specific states of consciousness, including those, such as dreams, which are not readily accessible by the waking mind.

Most people think they have five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But you actually have more.

In your daily life you are well-attuned to perceiving the world around you through the input you receive from your five physical senses. Your eyes see certain wave lengths of light. Your ears hear certain frequencies of sound. Your nose detects certain molecules in the air, etc.

Your physical body is a highly sophisticated system that transfers sensory input from the outside world to your inner sense of awareness, enabling you to survive and thrive in the physical world. But your physical body isn’t the only way that images, sounds, and other perceptions reach your inner awareness.

When you dream, you see, hear, and feel things that seem real to you—at least during the period of the dream. The same can be said for experiences that occur during meditation, remote viewing, out of body travel, and more.

So how is it that some people can vividly perceive things without using the sensory tools of their physical bodies?

Your Eyes Are Not Your Sight

The answer is that your senses are something quite distinct from the bodily organs that you typically use to perceive with. Your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are bodily organs that convert sensory input into something that you perceive with an inner sense of sight, hearing, smell, and taste. But they are not the same thing.

If you think they are one and the same, then you are firmly habituated into thinking so based on the fact that you so often perceive things through those sensory organs. And this makes sense given that you use your physical senses virtually every minute that you are awake.

Read that sentence again: You use your physical senses virtually every minute you are awake.

Outer vs Inner Senses

Once you recognize that your physical senses are your means of gathering information when you are awake, you can also begin to recognize that you have other means of gathering information when you are not in a normal state of waking consciousness.

When you are in normal waking consciousness your predominant brainwave patterns are in the beta range (14-27 Hz). It’s from this level of awareness that you process the huge volume of information that comes to you each day.

But when you visualize, daydream, meditate, remote view, or actually dream, your consciousness isn’t in its normal waking state. In those states of consciousness your brainwave patterns slow down into the alpha (8-10 Hertz) or theta (4-7 Hertz) range. Most often while in those states you close your eyes and shift your attention away from the physical world and into an inner world.

Depending upon your ability to access it, this inner world can be as rich and as vivid as the outer world. Whether this is easy for you or not depends upon your ability to access your inner senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch without depending upon physical body parts to do so.

How to Break the Sensory Habit

If you have a challenging time perceiving things beyond physical reality, then chances are you are habituated to perceiving things from a state of normal waking beta consciousness. To change that requires two things:

• an ability to access and sustain other states of consciousness
• time to practice perceiving things while in those other states of consciousness

Accessing other states of consciousness is something that you do naturally throughout the day and night. But sustaining those states of consciousness long enough to practice perceiving things with your nonphysical senses can be a bit more challenging.

If you have a well developed meditation practice, if you are probably already good at visualization, or if you are simply good at daydreaming, then you can likely access and sustain those states on your own. If you aren’t so skilled, then tools such as Hemi-Sync that use audio frequencies to shift and sustain different states of consciousness can be helpful.

How to Turn Up Your Inner Senses

If  you want to turn up your inner senses, the first step is to reduce your perceptions of the physical world by going to a quiet place, finding a comfortable position, closing your eyes, and relaxing. When the stimuli of the outer world are reduced, you’ll have an easier time opening yourself up to your inner senses.

The next step is to still your mind because your thoughts can be just as intrusive and distracting as the outer world. (There are lots of methods for doing this, but covering it here is beyond the scope of this article.)

Working these first two steps goes a long way toward helping you with shifting your consciousness. With stimuli from outer world reduced, your body relaxed, and your mind still, you’re ready to listen to the Hemi-Sync or shift your awareness on your own so you can open to your inner senses.

Remember that perceiving with your inner senses isn’t very different than perceiving with your outer senses.

Inside or Out, Your Senses Work the Same Way

When you use your outer senses you can focus your awareness on something in particular, such as a single conversation in a crowded coffee shop. Or you can open up your field of perception and take in all the information at once, such as watching and listening to an orchestra while also being aware of the person who is coughing in the row behind you.

Perceiving with your inner senses works the same way, but instead of using your physical body to provide the input you observe with your inner eyes and ears, allowing yourself to notice whatever happens to arise. It may be a fully immersive and action-packed experience. Or it may be as simple as an image in your mind’s eye, or an idea that forms in your mind, or an answer to a question you’ve been wondering about.

If you’re new to this you may sit in the inner dark for a while before something emerges, but with patience and practice things will begin to arise. You can encourage the process by priming the pump with a little imagination. (For a more extended primer on how to awaken your inner senses see our article How to Explore Inner Worlds with Active and Passive Arising.)

No matter what arises—even the faintest hint of something—it demonstrates that you are perceiving something with your nonphysical senses. And when you do that you’ve opened yourself to ever increasing levels of perception.

Meet Your Next Five Senses

On one level your physical senses provide input to your waking mind while in beta consciousness. On another level, your nonphysical senses provide input to your mind while it is in alpha consciousness. And you use a slightly different level of perception to perceive things in theta consciousness.

Once you get the hang of it, you will discover that your five physical senses are just the starting point. You’ve got that many more senses for each level of consciousness you visit. So don’t think of them all as “the sixth sense.” More senses and perceptions are out there, just waiting for you to begin using them.

Next Step

Read more articles, and if you haven’t done so already:

(That’s a hint!)