The Wisdom of the Senses“You can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and think… This is an incomparable gift,” writes Zen teacher Norman Fischer in his exploration of the four great reflections, urging us to contemplate the rare gift of human life. While an incomparable gift, indeed, our sense perceptions can also serve as a distraction. It might come during meditation as a sharp pain in your knee, the fantasy of the taste of a meal to come, or an unpleasant noise outside your window, but we don’t have to lose our minds to them. As Francesa Fremantle writes below, spiritual practice is sometimes viewed as being unrelated, or even opposed to, sensory experience. We might find ourselves trying to escape the senses of our physical bodies in pursuit of exploring our minds, but our senses can actually offer their own paths to awakening. Through our sensory perceptions, we can ground ourselves into the present moment, noticing the sounds, flavors, textures, scents, and sensations around us. We might be surprised just how much wisdom we find there. The three teachings below explore how we can use the senses as an ally to Buddhist practice and as a helpful bridge between body and mind. May they lead you through the gateway of the senses this weekend. —Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar |
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When we cleanse our perceptions of grasping and attachment, we experience a universe that is infinite, awakened, and full of delight. Francesca Fremantle on sight, sound, touch, and other miracles.
We all experience moments of heightened perception, when it seems the universe has a message for us, one that is filled with profound but inexpressible meaning. suddenness, the sense of being taken by surprise, before ego has a chance to put up its barriers, is often important here. Any of the five bodily senses can open this door for us. The sense of smell, in particular, is well-known for arousing deep-buried memories, which, if we let go and do not grasp at them, can open up the dimension of timelessness. such experiences are often intensely emotional, and we should not forget that in Buddhism the mind too is a sense-organ, whose objects are thoughts, feelings, memories, and so forth. These too can act as symbols. Through the gateway of our senses, we can enter a realm infinitely wider and deeper, where the limitations of time and space dissolve and the whole universe is present in one moment, in one single point.  |
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Everything and everyone are always teaching us the dharma, says Christian McEwen. We just have to know how to listen.
Legend has it there was once an Irish monk named Phoenix. One day, he was reading his breviary, alone in the monastery garden, when suddenly a bird began to sing. Phoenix became utterly absorbed. When at last the song was finished, he picked up his book and went back to the monastery — only to discover he knew no one there. Centuries had passed while he sat listening in the garden. His original community was long gone, and the new monks had no idea who he was. But when they searched their annals, they discovered that many years before, a Brother Phoenix had mysteriously disappeared. The Maidu writer Marie Mason Potts, who grew up in a cedar-bark house in northern California, remembered the sounds of her girlhood with affectionate precision: “How wonderful it was lying awake at night…to hear the coyotes bark and the hoot owls uttering their calls among the trees. Sometimes there would be the running clatter of squirrels on the bark slabs above us; and in spring and summer, just as it grew light…there came the enchantment of the bird chorus, the orchestra of the Great Spirit all around us.” |
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A smell could take Marianna Pogosyan back in time, or she could stay present to this precious, fleeting moment.
The magic of odor-induced time travel comes down to evolution. According to recent research, as our sensory apparatus rerouted to accommodate our growing brains, olfaction appears to have escaped the great rearrangement. As a result, our sense of smell — unlike the rest of our senses — maintained a direct access to the hippocampus, the memory seat of the brain. Neurobiologically, smell and memory are a well-traveled road. Which means that in some post-pandemic future, thanks to our olfactory-hippocampal superhighways, a whiff of alcohol sanitizers could send us back here. Again. Which moments, from a year of loss, would you wish to revisit? |
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