Coming to our systemic senses

(Or what Metasysteme-Coaching’s training program on Systemic Coaching Fundamentals is really all about)

This article delves deeper into how the very practical, methodical sharpening of our six primary senses opens access to incredible extensions in our capacity to connect with our systemic environment. I

First, in their extended capacities, each of our six primary senses is revealed to exist in continual, intimate and intricate interaction with the five others.?Through the deep connections between our extended primary senses, we can thus discover these are not only deeply connected, but they together form a totally coherent, entwined network of subtly available extended perceptual skills.?

In order to consider our six primary senses, these can be perceived to come in pairs.?Smell and taste?obviously support each other, as may seeing and hearing.? Which leaves us the last pair that concern touch and bodily sensations, both more physically grounded in the flesh of our bodies than the first four.?

Taste and smell

Although our first two senses, taste and smell, seem to have quite complementary functions, the sense of smell may well overshadow the deeper function of taste.?Interestingly our noses are vertically positioned just above our tasting mouths. The sense of smell is fundamentally receptive and is extraordinarily distinguishing.?Our noses have more than 400 different sensors and the capacity to capture the presence of a single molecule hovering in the environment.?In that realm, should we decide to value and develop our sense of smell, humans can become just as capable to pick scents as most animals.?Now beyond our everyday awareness of scents and perfumes (from the Latin per or through, and fumes for smoke), this sense can be considered to reach out much further than we may first be aware.

• Take for instance common business sense or entrepreneurial flair for opportunities, intimately connected to our animal sense of scents.

Notice how it is so naturally deployed by carnivorous trackers and hunters, and more symbolically by entrepreneurs. This primary sense particularly drives those among us who relentlessly strategize and deploy energy to achieve targeted preys or other such powerfully desired material results.?Often, more than actually possessing results, the fundamental motivation of many hunters and entrepreneurs is fueled by the hunt.?A well-developed sense of smell is thus one most likely to serve our urge to achieve materially measurable results.??

Consequently this extended vital animal sense is not to be ignored by managers, recruiters, business-developers and coaches.

Know that without our sense of smell, most of what we consider tasty would actually seem quite bland.?Many perceived tastes are actually sensed by our nose and smell receptors, sometimes up from the backs of our throats.?Real taste void of any accompanying odor, fume and perfume is mostly limited to perceiving varying degrees of sweet, sour, salty and bitter.?In fact, the apparently limited range of perceptions actually measured by taste could well be limited to distinguishing between the basic characteristics of liquids if not just water.?

Indeed, out of our six senses, taste seems to be entirely dedicated to evaluating the characteristics or quality of the liquids we may allow into our bodies.?The function of taste could therefore be reduced to distinguishing how healthy may be the water or liquids we are tempted to ingest.?Considering our ancient history, the issue is not to be underestimated.

Through the suckling instinct, a newborn’s first real contact with the outside world, our equally predominantly liquid blue planet if not with the universe, is through the mouth. Remember that along with mother earth and as living beings, we also are composed of sixty to ninety percent water. To have a primary sense almost totally dedicated to evaluating the quality of ingested liquids may historically have been quite valid.

Real tasting starts when we quench our thirst. Then, tasting actually occurs when our more or less liquid food is mixed with, tamed or liquified by our own water in the form of saliva.?This is when we decide if the food can be ingested into our bodies. We actually mix our own body fluid with that of a foreign body, test its waters, so to speak, before accepting to let nutrition in, merging with it, or become one with it.?Alternately of course, we may decide to quickly spit it out!???The tasting process could thus be broken into several steps, first the liquid tasting of our food, then the mastication process, aligning with it by mixing personal and incoming fluids, and finally, the ingesting phase to start making screened nutients an intimate part of us.?If indeed we are what we eat, this may be especially true of what liquids we ingest, starting with pure, clear and healthier alkaline water. The latter wields a taste that sits at the far opposite end of acidity.?

• This perspective of the tasting process can raise questions as to the fundamental alignment process between mother and child that takes place during breastfeeding, when children learn to ingest external liquids and through their mouths, initiate direct connection to their larger external world.?
• One can wonder how this aligning process may be similar to that of two lovers who mix liquids through kissing and sex, or to animal testing potential relationships, then connecting, then deeply partnering through mutual licking rituals.?

What type of reciprocal liquid exchange and ingestion occurs when we animals partner, and what are the longer-term effects of such a liquid-based alignment process between beings?? When we become deeply connected and aligned with another, our sense of taste may well extend far beyond the limited realm we generally consider.

• Savor also the power of energetic resonances that connect individuals of the same taste, when these align and channel to the point of merging their deeper beings. From that point forward, their intimate connection or soul communion will prove to instantly reach beyond distance.?

Oftentimes, between such blessed connected beings, twins of sorts, the extended sense of taste borders on telepathy, merging across large distances and apparently distinct individual presences.

Audition and vision

Together, the next two senses, audition and vision, could justify the Pythagoras quote that ??physical matter is music solidified??.? What we see is thus energy waves made solid.

Careful observation of complex geometry, fractals, spirals, and other complex shapes and forms in nature invariably evoke both mathematical models and musical harmony.? Architecturally-oriented eyes and musical ears, both working as a pair, have a similar capacity to perceive spatial order and cacophonous chaos, symmetry and disequilibrium, proximity and distance. Indeed, both our eyes and our ears are interestingly positioned on the same horizontal plane, in the same way we install stereophonic speakers and artistic mobile artwork.?

Our vision almost immediately captures light waves to perceive matter in space, complemented by our audition of slower sound waves, as when thunder significantly rolls seconds after lightning strikes.?In medicine also, auscultation (of the same Latin root as the French word écoute for listen), through a stethoscope, is indeed the audition equivalent of direct visual diagnosis, as done through microscopes.

Vision and audition provides humans with an incredible capacity to distinguish, subtleties, one between an array of Pantone colors, the other within an equivalent range of musical notes.?Filling most of the worlds museums and concert halls, the two account for a large part of humanity’s musical and artistic heritage. Consequently, audition and vision are obviously complementary in their equally detailed capacity to receive sound and light waves.?

In their specific functions, audition and vision are also intimately associated with extended skills that subtly add depth to behavioral our perceptive capacities and extend our reach far beyond our normally accessible immediate space. Both give us access to a much wider capacity to sense. In these extended capacities, however, it is interesting to note that both have a very complementary wider reach than may first be perceived.

• Hear how well-developed audition, a sense so central in coaching relationships, comes laden with a very fine capacity to distinguish or discriminate right from wrong, truth from illusion.?

Our ears can indeed perceive whatever most appropriately fits in a played symphony as much as whatever specific instrument may incoherently disturb systemic harmony. Audition skills help us precisely discern whatever single item may be discrepant or out of line with a coherent whole, and allow us to individually adjust in order to harmoniously fit in, or tune into, almost any given environment.?

• To coaches and others, it should be no surprise the sense of audition extends outwards into our capacity to pertinently develop systemic harmony in our lives and relationships with others.

With the advent of electricity and extensive night lighting, modern civilization could have had us become over-dependent on vision, under-developed in our listening skills.?A clue may reside in the way blind people adjust their listening capacities to the point of hearing echoes of sound waves that remain imperceptible to those who see all too well, to the point of forgetting to really listen. So thanks to electricity, our modern capacity to equally see night and day may explain a modern-age distortion between the importance we give to sight compared to sound. This modern preference has recently evolved, much in the same way that we experience between smell and bottle-water taste.??It is consequently no wonder many managers and coaches prefer face to face relationships over telephone and online distributed meetings.

However, both audition and vision are central when it comes to man’s developmental capacities in general, and to man's specific skills when it comes to their future development in professional realms.?They both play their vital roles. Vision, however offers lightly different potentials from the animal instinct attributed to hunters and entrepreneurs.?In fact, vision offers a management-oriented, very complementary slant when it comes to the extended potential it seems to offer.??

• Visualize how visionaries and seers seek to build future predictability, much beyond their immediate visual horizon. This immediate vision and longer-term visioning sense is motivated by the need for order displayed by many expertise-driven managers. It is accompanied by an array of organizational, structuring, modeling qualities, all intentionally deployed to materialize a precise visually-anticipated form.

Our sense of vision thus extends into?our capacity to take control of our present and model our future.

Touching and bodily sensations

The remaining two primary senses are often associated and sometimes confused by the use of one common verb: to feel.?To top it off, we also use the verb to feel when we mention emotions which, as personal interpretations based on individual history, have nothing to do with our six primary senses. We do distinguish however, between:

• Feeling outwards through touch, or through our external skin envelope to touch others, and feel our environment,
• Feeling inwards, when we focus on internal bodily sensations such as when we become aware of a stiff neck, stomach and muscle cramps.?

Interestingly, although touching often occurs through the preferred use of our hands, both touch and sensations concern a distributed network of nerve endings disseminated throughout our flesh, muscles, nerves, bones and organs.

A characteristic shared by external touch and inner body sensations is they both do not have their specifically specialized organs such as a nose, tongue, eye or ear, preferably positioned in our heads.?Both external touch and inner sensations can involve our whole nervous system using our whole bodies as a single organ, as a much wider-reaching, comprehensive antenna.??

And although we may well hear sound vibrations and capture light waves in a totally distributed way, also through every cell of our bodies, we are more specifically being touched by vibration, heat waves and bodily sensations, than by sound. This can offer us another common example?of sensory confusion.

Furthermore, full body contact such as may experience unborn twins, mothers and their children, lovers and cuddling beings will immediately reveal that the capacity to really touch others often comes with more than just mixing fluids through taste, as presented above. Bodily sensation also involves being open and vulnerable enough to be touched in return.?Unlike the other senses, touching seems to be a two-way street. Touch makes us fundamentally ready to fully embody a low position as a coach, a modest and humble posture as a leader, parent or other model to others. And as with the five other primary senses, touching also has a far-reaching scope that can extend far beyond apparent space and time.

• Get a deeper grip on the generous motivation to give, share or transmit displayed by great teachers, artists, writers, actors who do more than just entertain.

Their urge to give is deployed by hands that can touch hearts and souls to the point of healing, and of reaching others much farther out beyond space and time, sometimes around the world.??With high quality and overwhelming generosity, this sense is central to all who know how to deeply touch others through music, sculpture, writing and other manual extensions, regardless of distance. Interestingly, however, so you give, so you will receive.?Consequently, those who know how to deeply touch others are also those who can be equally moved to tears by another person’s distant reach.?

• Thus our immediate sense of touch is intimately linked to our capacity to transmit a profoundly developed, valuable, personal legacy.

The last sense among the six primary is the internally-focused one that covers our capacity to be aware of numerous bodily indicators of well-being, in harmonious physical equilibrium with oneself.?

• This sense will often affect all the others such as when precise taste buds are alerted to signal a vital need for specific minerals or vitamins. This in order to ensure the sustainable availability of a specific bodily function. ?
• Our joints can also get inflamed to signal excessive carbon consumption, the ecological plague of modern civilization,
• Our muscle pains can signal over-exertion, poor blood supply, a lack of magnesium, etc.?
• More dramatically, a sharp headache, cardiac pain or belly ache will occasionally signal a possible emergency in one of our three main brains or clusters of existence, our minds, our hearts and our guts.?

Thus through our physical sensations, each of our bodies tell us how to ensure our own survival, growth, and beyond, our pertinent contribution.?

The farther-reaching extended dimension of such inner bodily sensations is less known, maybe less obvious.?This may be due to the fact that all our sensory skills as a whole, sensations entwined with the other five primary and extended senses, also exist as one complete, totally, coherently integrated ensemble.?

This systemic whole or holistic sensory system is also much more than the sum of its parts, mainly because it continuously acts as one receptive entity.?When healthy, this integration of well-perceived bodily sensations then opens up to give us access to farther-reaching bits of information, far beyond space and time.?Call this extended sense intuition, sometime premonition.

• Catch what more occasional internal or bodily indicators attempt to signal, when sudden gut feelings and other sensations?in our flesh, nerves, muscles, bones and organs suddenly cry to attract our undivided attention.

Much like antennas connected to wider environmental resonances, our bodies also know how to sense into the universe and alert us of unusual, pending upsurges and existential threats. Such non-locally provoked physical sensations convey vividly real premonitions to alert us that something will emerge out of our environment, possibly to vitally affect our very existance.

• Our physical sensations are thus often linked to their subtle extension, our intuitions.

When this last intuitive capacity is physically felt, it is most probably networked into all our other primary and extended senses, ideally all well-developed and operating together as a whole coherent system.??Consequently, by exacerbating a deeper awareness of clear sensory information, as is when directly received by each of our primary networked senses, we dramatically increase our capacity to recognize and relate within complex interactive systems. In fact, we become systemic.

Through our body serving as would an energy-oriented antenna and so with intuition, we start perceiving intricate subterranean forms that intimately connect and echo our apparently individual existences with our much larger universal environment.?The information we then access tells us much more than all of our personal and culturally shared interpretative thoughts, emotions, and desire to act.??With such systemic awareness:

• perceptions of local events that emerge into our individual lives,
• more distant and apparently haphazard occurrences disseminated here and there on the surface of the globe
• and the nature of much larger planetary disruptions suddenly merge into coherent, totally correlated?patterns.

As if one single comprehensive planetary if not universal hologram could be broken into hundred parts, each into another hundred… and so on… to result in trillions of microscopic embedded fractals all subtly reflecting the same universal, constantly emerging meta-shape, or master stencil.?Access to this integrated web of global awareness occurs when individual systemic perceptions all become truly inclusive, unitary, if not comprehensively singular.

To be sure, our daily lives are usefully engrossed in our totally local, individual thoughts, emotions and actions.?These give each of us clear information originating from a?personal and cultural web of history-based interpretations. All these originate from various individual and collective heritages and shape our day-to-day lives. But in no way do they give us access to the deep here-and-now presence that can help us initiate different futures.

• In parallel however, our much more inclusive, systemic network of primary senses exist to connect us with our larger universal environment.?

These provide us with access to a form of augmented reality, a much larger, strategic, synthetic whole picture, inclusive of our constantly emerging universe, locally growing within all its parts.??That is how systemic here-and-now presence can allow us to initiate much better informed, both intimate and powerfully constructive interactions with others and our surrounding environment.

On an evolutionary level, we may be coming to the end of a long historical human-development process marked by humanity's excessively mental reasoning, emotional dependency and obsession with behavioral reaction, all driven by biased personal and collective interpretations.

The hopeful next systemic step for human development may be to rest all the criteria that define human identity on whatever reality emerges from our deeper connection to our six senses and their farther-reaching extended sensory network.

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