To many of us, the existence of only 5 human senses seems quite archaic and obsolete. Edgar Mitchell, former astronomer and founder of the prestigious Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), once asked: “Isn’t it time we start calling intuition the first sense?”
This is why I prepared a brief list of some of the perceptions we all have in our bodies. Same as with any muscle or ability, these ones can be developed with practice.
- Proprioception: also known as the kinesthesic sense, this one keeps track of the relative position of one’s own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. Proprioceptors are located in muscles, tendons, and joints. Everyday tasks require this feature, some of them are not even fully conscious; this achieves and maintains an optimal body performance while our eyesight is needed for anything else, like cautiously walking through a crowd while holding cups of hot coffee. This sense has a strong connection to the concepts of tensegrity as well as the Living Matrix (a term created by Dr. James Oschman). Some professions that excel in this area are elite athletes, artists, and jugglers, among many others.
- Psychic Staring Effect (scopaesthesia): I have a lot of sensitivity on this one, but we all have it in a bigger or lower scale. Whenever I’m at the park, in the subway, or at a party, suddenly I get this feeling that makes me connect instantly to whoever is looking at me. It seems we have neuronal pathways that allow us to “feel” or detect whenever someone is staring at us, specifically at the temporal cortex level. The funny part is that at the same instant that eye contact is made, the other person immediately looks somewhere else (unless it’s a psycho or a potential lover, or my next psycho-lover). My eyes do not scan the area searching for the source, but kind of “magnetically” click. Nowadays I openly smile whenever this happens.
- Psychic phenomena: like telepathy, precognition, intuition, hunches, and gut feelings. There are so many of them, and the problem here is a cultural one, in which many societies still neglect, deny and maybe even fear the existence of these superpowers. I would refer the reader to check the amazing progress that the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is doing in this area.
- Biofield perception: this is how Reiki convinced me of its effectiveness, basically by being amazed at how my Reiki teachers do a scan on me and always nail it. I will never forget when one of them told me that I should take care of my right knee…and I was having issues there! I never mentioned her anything related to my knee before! Here I would include the capacity we energy healers have to detect human biomagnetism, which in turn allows us to feel blocked chakras and stagnate energies. In my opinion, we just need to train our senses and perception of the electromagnetic human field. If the IONS is the referent regarding psychic phenomena, then the Consciousness and Healing Initiative is the organization leading the science of biofield and energy healing.
CONCLUSION
With meditation and energy practice (you name it: kundalini, reiki, therapeutic touch, yoga, and qigong, among others), awareness grows, and the perception of our biofields grows as well. When saying that the awareness expands is the same as saying that the senses are growing and developing.
There are many other senses out of this list, as acceleration and balance, but I’m only including the ones that have bigger relationship to my posts.