Activating the Senses

‍‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.’

Our core senses are those of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Using sight and touch we can define the space in which we appear to live. Using taste, smell and touch we can develop senses for knowing what to eat and what not to eat to help the body, in which we imagine we live and grow. How we use our senses triggers emotional responses. For instance, we see what we think is a runaway train, feel fear, and we get out of its way, or we feel the heat from a fire, see friendly faces, smell cooking, and then gather around the coals.

These senses, however, do not actually exist except as our groupings of fermions and bosons create the illusion for us. We are able to create and sense a world only because we choose to. We are both the creator and experiencer of it. We see the world as we are. A fly sees the world as a fly is. A tree sees the world as a tree is.

The video clip below is dated but demonstrates the illusion well.

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So, it is all made up but so what? Who cares? What matters is that we are having fun and positive experiences. I don’t care that it is all a self-made illusion. I love playing with the illusion.

But I want to control the rules of the game and we begin to take control by awakening our senses.

By that I mean we see things for what they really are and not as they appear to be to our simple human senses. In doing that we begin to eradicate that sense of separateness that haunts most humans. We move toward being one suchness.

Sensory information streams in through our eyes and is immediately processed through our limbic system. By the time a message reaches our cerebral cortex for higher thinking, we have already placed a “feeling” upon how we view the stimulation… is this pain or pleasure? Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.

As information processing machines, our ability to process data about the external world begins at the level of sensory perception. Although most of us are rarely aware of it, our sensory receptors are designed to detect information at the energy level. We are literally swimming in a turbulent sea of electromagnetic fields. We are part of it. We are enveloped within it, and through our sensory apparatus we experience it.

Each of our sensory systems is made up of a complex cascade of neurons that process the incoming neural code from the level of receptor to specific areas within the brain. Each group of cells along the cascade alters or enhances the code, and passes it along to the next set of cells in the system, which further defines and refines the message. By the time the code reaches the outermost portion of our brain, the higher levels of the cerebral cortex, we become conscious of the stimulation.

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with fermions and bosons that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of these particles. Different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain’s ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see.

All in the blink of an eye.

The innate differences we each experience in terms of how sensitive we are to different types of stimulation contribute greatly to how we perceive the world. Now add to that what we learned previously about how the RAS already filters out 99.9% of the data that bombards us. Surely, given how little of the world we perceive, it cannot be terribly difficult to stretch our senses and have expanded awareness to ‘see’ more. Even a fraction of a percentage increase would blow our perception of the world to smithereens.

Let’s play with this a bit by considering how trees in a forest communicate.

Trees in a forest communicate with one another through underground networks. That is a human analysis of a tree’s communication system. We understand entities like trees based on how we perceive them with our basic five senses. Scientifically we say trees cannot hear or see, but they communicate chemically. By now, however, you have learned that humans can’t see or hear either. We interpret quantum physics magic as a sight or a sound.

Scientifically we can say that trees are connected below the ground by mycorrhizal fungi, which live symbiotically with the roots of the trees. Both the trees and the fungi need each other to survive. But that’s not all. Because the fungi essentially connect the roots of one tree to another, the trees can use the fungi to pass nutrients and chemical messages to one another. So, for example, in winter when aspens are weaker, nearby conifers were found to pass additional nutrients to the aspens to keep them healthy. Similarly, older, more-established trees pass nutrients through the fungi to young seedlings which need to grow larger toward the sun’s light in order to survive. The largest, oldest trees in the forest serve as the hub because they possess and produce large amounts of resources, and their massive roots spread out in all directions.

When one tree is attacked by insects, it distributes pheramonal chemicals through the fungi beneath the soil to warn nearby trees of a possible attack so the other trees can prepare by changing the chemical makeup of their leaves. The fungal networks also strengthen the immune systems of the trees. So not only do different species of trees help each other out in the forest, but fungi and even other types of plants join the underground network and communicate together to support the health of the entire ecosystem. There is documented proof that when a tree is dying, it releases its resources into the root networks so that its neighbors can benefit from the nourishment that it will no longer need—it is making the ultimate sacrifice.

Isn’t that a beautiful thing. It is, however, also the type of connectivity you can expect when you awaken your senses. Yes, you can learn to talk to trees too and when you do you’ll be blown away by how different it is to what you are used to.

Why am I talking about trees? For this exercise I want you to think differently. Think as a tree thinks. See as a tree sees. Try to become the tree.Take your imagination inside the tree and view the world differently.

As you look at the tree in the picture know that the tree is looking back at you… not with eyes because those are human things. Just because you have eyes and a tree has no human-type eyes doesn’t mean a tree can’t see. It just doesn’t see like you do… because you are not a tree and it is not a human.

The single tree in this picture is a special tree to me. We are on first-name terms.I have a deep love for this tree. The tree tolerates me. The tree thinks I am dumb because I can’t perceive the world the way it does. Sometimes it loses patience with me. I feel like a remedial student when I am in the presence of this tree.

Some humans would say it was blown down in a storm, but there were no witnesses to that as humans have only lived near this tree since 2008. Prior to that it was in a forest. From the tree’s perspective storms don’t exist. Wind and rain exist and sometimes a tree might succumb to those things out of ecstasy but what is a storm to a human is a party to a tree. Just as some humans overdo things at a party so some trees get a bit carried away in ‘storms,’ especially if the humans removed all their protective friends from the room/forest.

Reluctantly, and over time the tree told me a different story.

Lying on its side, its branches still grow toward the sky. It looks like a small copse on its own, but is in fact all one tree, and it has a purpose beyond just being what humans might perceive as a fallen tree.

But for now let’s just consider the sense of sight. As I look at the tree,  combinations of photons traveling at the speed of light enter my eye where they cause an electric charge to pulse along a nerve to my brain. My brain then interprets the charge into an image which it projects in a three-dimensional format. The tree literally appears magically before me, instantaneously and at a distance.

My brain is wired to see a tree out of that combination of photons. If my wife looks up at the same time she sees the same appearance of a tree, but neither of us will have exactly the same image because we probably received slightly different combinations of photons traveling across the field into our eyes. She might see bolder colors for instance.

If I were a fly, however, the tree would look completely different, because the mechanism I have for interpreting photons is different to that of a human. Human eyes seem very simplistic to me as a fly. No wonder they never catch me.

Flies, such as the common housefly (Musca domestica), look at the world in quite a different way than humans do. The structure and function of a fly’s eye are completely different from ours, and so they see shapes, motion and color differently. Flies are also able to see light in a way humans cannot. A human’s eye is attached to muscles that allow it to move, expanding the field of vision and making it possible for the eye to gather more information about its surroundings. Instead of moving their eyes, flies receive information from several different points simultaneously.

A fly’s eyes are immobile, but because of their spherical shape and protrusion from the fly’s head they give the fly an almost 360-degree view of the world. In a human eye, the pupil controls how much light comes into it, which is focused by the lens onto the retina. The retina then relays information to the brain via the optic nerve. Because fly eyes have no pupils they cannot control how much light enters the eye. With no control over how much light passes through the lens, the fly cannot focus the image it sees. Flies are also short-sighted — a visible range of a few yards is considered good for an insect. The fly never sees the tree as I do.

The tree only looks like a tree as I know trees because of the way as a human I process photon-created electrical charges. If my fly-friend showed me her drawings of a tree I’d laugh. If I showed her my drawings she’d fly away convinced I was insane.

So, please study the picture of my friend the tree. Assume the posture of a wizard which means take an observational stance. Watch, assess, intuitively stretch your senses. What do you make of the tree when you take this different perspective? Did it fall in a storm? Did it choose to fall? What is its connection with the earth. What is its purpose if indeed it has one.

Answer is in the downloadable pdf but try to figure it out first. Try not to analyze in a human way. Try being the tree. Ask yourself what you are doing right now Mrs Tree?

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