Around 350 BC Aristotle suggested the existence of five human senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. 2000 years later and with multitude of scientific discoveries having painted a more complex sensory picture, the commonly known senses are still the same five. And even these we do not really observe.

What of it? you may ask. I believe that the awareness of the senses and how they work makes our experience more consciously multi-sensory and allows us to see more beauty in our embodied existence. We do not only have sensory experiences on various substances, our whole life is one big sensory experience, which we could all learn to notice, describe and appreciate more.

What are you sensing? If you have done any meditative practices, you might have been asked this question before and might have found it rather hard, or even frustrating. How do you know if you are sensing it or thinking about it? Let's run an experiment.

Take 2 minutes to complete this task. Fix your gaze on any object in front of you.
What do you see? Write down your observations.

If you look at the words you wrote down, you might find that a few of them describe a non-visual sensory experience. For example, I looked at the fireplace in front of me and described it as smooth and hot. But how would I know this? I know the fireplace is hot because I sense the temperature (thermoception),I do not see it. But I also assumed that the surface is smooth because I have prior experience with the surfaces that look like this. As kids we use touch to confirm that what we see is real. So I am thinking about the tactile experience, not having it.

Let's do another one. Stand up and close your eyes. Without looking at your stopwatch, spend two minutes observing everything that you sense from the skin inwards.

Maybe you started sensing gravity (vestibular sense) and how your body is reconfiguring itself to keep standing (proprioception). Did you stand for the right amount of time? Even if you were off by a minute, it's not a gross difference. So you are able to be fairly accurate with the help of your sense of time (chronoception).

I have one last task. Map the soundscape of the spaces around you. Close your eyes and tune into the sounds you can hear. How far are they? What is producing them? Are you making sounds yourself? If you are in an apartment, repeat the task in different rooms.

Maybe you hear some of the same sounds from the outside, but they change based on your location in relation to them. Do different soundscapes make you feel different? Probably. Now think about the fact that you are constantly sensing them and they are affecting your physiological and mental state, you are just not paying enough attention to understand how.

I didn't ask you to write down your observations from the second and third tasks. If you did, you might have found it rather challenging to find accurate words to describe them. Yet, I think as much as language can be a reduction of the sensory experience to a verbal label, it can guide us to a more granular and rich perception of reality.

It's visible in our language but also in the way we live today, that socially we are acknowledging the non-visual senses less than sight. Seeing is used as a synonym to understanding and perceiving. Yet, we do not only "see" the world, we are constantly having a multi-sensory experience created not by 5, but according to some recent scientific classifications 33 senses. How much of it do we really appreciate in its fullness?

"However beautiful a song may be, it is just a tune to those who do not understand its meaning."

Tibetan yogi and poet Milarepa