Monday, April 19, 2010

Learning to think with your senses

©NamdevKLD 2010

Human beings have five direct tangible senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell. But, of course, you knew this. Right now as you ‘read’ this your brain is processing each symbol and translating it to an understandable form, then stringing the connected symbols together until you have a perception of the meaning behind the word, the sentence, the paragraph. In the end, though, you are not thinking with your eyes. They are merely the receptive tool used by the brain to collect information about the outside world. The eyes themselves get little or no thought during the entire process of reading this. Of course my eyes aren’t being thought about as I read, you are thinking, that would just be crazy complicated for my brain (albeit super-brain) to keep track of so much at the same time. And you would be correct in your assumption. I don’t need to think about focusing or moving my eyes. These actions are controlled by other parts of my brain on a subconscious level. But these motions are flesh, neuron based actions. I’m not taking about the flesh and blood action of the brain. The motor of the brain. No. I'm referring to the mind. The complete, active mind. The full identity of the mind. The whole self.

I’m also not making some grand metaphysical leap that a million years of quiet meditation would just barely reveal. The senses don’t think*. They are senses, conduits for the mind into the tangible universe. What I’m talking about is taking steps into your awareness. To become a participant into your perceptions.

We tend to only care about the data being input. If my eyes see something move quickly I react. If my stove is hot and I touch it I pull away. If something is loud, I cover my ears. So many of my actions are in fact subconscious reactions when it comes to my senses.

As I’m listening to someone speak, my ears are not actively part of the conversation, because my mind is busy translating the verbal symbols and worse…the mind is already busy creating replies to what is heard. The enlightenment crowd would call this ‘normal’ living as unconscious living. That you are unaware of your true self or more importantly, your true self is not living in the moment.

There in lies the principle: learning to think with your senses so that when you are touching, listening, seeing, they are in a sense a direct connected extension of your mind at that moment. As a martial artist you should immediately see the potential for such open direct connection to your underlying consciousness.

I will give you an example. When working with an Uke you might find that you need to visually assess the position of his hands during a joint manipulation. You might then have to check your angle and your distance, and process the necessary time it will take you to move from point A to point B. These actions are all based off of one sense: Your sight. The other four are laying there asleep. What must be remembered is that the universe deals in absolutes. Energy not used to work as Kinetic energy is lying in wait as potential energy (assuming the absence of Entropy). For example, your sense of touch isn’t simply the act of feeling something surface and knowing if it is hard or soft, warm or cold. It is far more complicated than that. It tells you the relationship of the object in question, its orientation in space, its distance from you, and a multitude of other things your visual cortex can work out, but at a slower pace. And this is the crux: Each sense takes time to do a task that is not native to its purpose.

We have all done it. Held something in our hands that was unfamiliar to us and we were forced to take our eyes to the object and literally ‘feel’ it with our eyes. The mind is capable of processing the ‘feel’ of the object through the other sense, but it is not a native action and this takes a bit more reflective time.

As a martial artist, it behooves the individual to start to use the other senses for their native purposes. The process of doing so is really very simple and it only requires that you be aware of the learning process going on under the surface as you let the other senses do their thing. The first thing to do is slow way down. Babies are magical at this, as they learn to co-ordinate their actions, by learning to walk. A slow moving baby teetering on his feet is better balanced than a baby trying to run across the carpet when first discovering the ability to stand. We’ve all heard it before: Walk before you run.

Next and in conjunction to slowing down, use the sense from a correct distance. Touch is a clever occupier of space. Let it manage the distance for you. Imagine going to a car race and standing at the edge of the track and only being able to see the cars zip past your little section at two hundred miles an hour. You wouldn’t be able to even tell who was winning. Or, as we’ve all seen, having your ear right to the speaker at a concert. Whatever he’s hearing isn’t music. Nor would it be music if he was two miles away. Find, by slowing down and paying close attention to what the sense is telling you, the right distance. And lastly, when you have to trust another sense to objectify the findings of a more native sense, tell yourself your findings. This means, that you do not simply accept the findings. You mind is a clever animal, it will dismiss the native sense for the more tangible findings of the other sense, thus diminishing the importance of the native sense. For example, you pick up a rubber ball and normally you'd feel the texture of the rubber ball, and look at it, saying, 'oh that's how it looks'. Thus diminishing the value of the texture to a visual response so that the next time you see that texture it's connected to your eyes not your fingers. So if you feel that you need to look, say at a hand position relative to your own, tell yourself what you were feeling while you were connected to the hand: "I feel his fingers and they feel like they are pointed down toward the ground". Let the sense of feel be responsible for the entire action and the eyes were simply a witness to the act, not the primary sense for the whole outcome.

Lastly, we are visually based. It’s sad, but it’s pretty much our underlying reality. It takes a lot of training to undo this 80-20 rule (Eight percent of our input comes from our eyes). This is mostly because touch, smell, taste, aren’t really used, expect to tell is about pleasure and pain. You need to break yourself of that one and return those three senses back to a state of being part of your every day participation in this life. Start thinking with your hands as they type. Notice the texture of the keys, the distance to each keystroke, the pressure of your knuckles as you push down. Participate in the action not just the consequence.


*The senses don’t think. Interestingly enough, there is a theory that applies the idea that the whole body is part of the mind complex. Not simply the gray matter, but the entire nervous system, right down to the pain receptors in your toes, are part of the cognitive, interactive, mind.