We all learn the 5 senses in elementary school, and then we hear of a few additions as we grow up—things like proprioception, interoception, clinical polysyllables that point to distinct medically useful experiences.
The 5-sense model is very useful for supporting a particular vision of reality (explored at length by Philip Shepherd, if you’re interested), but its surprising how little relation it bears to our lived experience of the world, once we stop clinging to it.
The most useful model I’ve found for the lived experience of our senses is that of Streams on the one hand, and the Sea on the other.
Touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight are all examples of sense-streams. They are particular modes of sensing, a few of the currents flowing within us that let us experience the world in particular ways. But there are many more streams.
Which of the 5 senses do you use to sense your sadness? Anger? The passing of an hour? The frisson of a good mystery story’s twists and turns? Social dynamics at a high school reunion?
These and ten thousand other things are things that we sense, that we know, that shape our understanding of what we encounter every moment of every day. And these don’t even get into the subtle sense-streams that we find in deeper, less relatable experiences—deep meditation, imaginal exploration, the throes of psychedelia and the like.
You push your hand against a boulder that's been facing the sun; it's warm and rough and heavy. Are those 3 senses, or 1? Is all of this just "touch," or do you find yourself noticing 3 sense streams here, one for the temperature, one for the texture, and one for the weight?
You bite into a spicy mango habanero wild wing—you taste the sweetness just before the burning kicks in. Is this one sense, or two? Are the taste and the burning part of the same sense-stream, or separate?
In our moment-to-moment experience, we don’t tend to find ourselves taking in several different streams of experience—it’s all one. It’s a sea of experience, surrounding us, flowing within us, making up the entirety of our interaction with the world around us.
Both of these perspectives are useful, the streams and the sea. In somatic practice, it’s best to swim back and forth between them—noticing new currents in the sea of experience, zooming in on them to notice their particular qualities and capabilities as a stream, and folding this more vivid awareness back into the ocean.
Here are some starter examples to begin the exploration: Example senses to inquire into.