What is Synesthesia? Where Are Senses Located?

She comes in colors everywhere

She combs her hair

She’s like a rainbow.

The Rolling Stones (1972)

To [properly] look at an object is to inhabit it. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

My first conscious experience of synesthesia — experiencing qualities of one sense, typically colors and light, through a seemingly unrelated sensory perception such as smell or touch — came flooding in through profound moments of union.

In the beginning, I thought little of it. It was simply a natural sensory symphony sharing greater resonance to expanded states of consciousness than to what was then qualified as normal life, set on fire by visceral conscious awareness and corresponding emotional expression.

Then my meditation practice began to expand, along with it sensory perception. Over time, its integration deepened into daily life, and became more elegant. As mental awareness grew increasingly sensitive and articulate, so did my cellular nervous system. How I sensed and integrated impressions began to change, evolve, as an artist evolves to become more self-realized, more fulfilling. In time, I began to ask myself, Is there more to our human senses, and where are senses located? Where before I had assumed from culturally conditioned, top-down thinking that senses were physiologically governed (i.e., a neurophysiological process), this assumption simply fell away in non-dual states of consciousness.

The modern scientific community obviously is at a loss to explain in consensus this experience, as most still hold onto limiting assumptions. And like so many times before in all different circumstances, because synesthesia differs from typical (mean) conscious experience with normal conditioned expectations of a nervous system burdened by modern stimuli, it is considered a disorder and thus deserves intervention, or inspection for illness.

From where I perceive, the synesthetic experience is not a disorder nor a condition to separate one from another.

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We know that the human nervous system is constantly receiving vastly, perhaps even infinitely, more information about its environments than what enters our normal waking conscious awareness. And if we entertain an alternative hypothesis of a mental reality, the physiological mainframe of soma itself becomes a manifestation of mind, thus calling to question whether sensory perception is reductive at all, or rather, creative. It is my personal, humble intuition that in expanded states of conscious awareness, our sensory perception becomes thus expanded, heightened. Even more wondrous than this, what we call expanded states are the experiences whereby our personal conscious mind directly experiences the personal and even collective unconscious, toward Jung’s (2018) transcendent experience of unus mundus. Through this integration, perception becomes heightened to new magnitudes. Would it not make simple sense that in a suspended moment of such awareness, should we manage to operate through it consciously, sensory perception too would integrate and flow into one another in new creative ways? Over time and integration, would this not become one’s new normal?

Just like seemingly spontaneous bursts of unitive ecstasy and/or veridical ESP while in meditative states, synesthesia arrests the entire psyche in extraordinary orders of love. It is purely experiential, beyond or below thought. It thus requires none. Its nature is experiential, not analytical. If emotion is categorically an egoic experience, as some theorize (Clements, 2016), I am most assured that what we experience as pure love is catalyzed at the crossing point between dual (egoic) and non-dual (cosmic) consciousness experience.

To experience synesthesia in such states is to experience love in everything, everywhere, all at once, and to participate in its creation.

What I have found is that the synesthetic integration of sensory perception becomes heightened, even catalyzed, through moments of non-dual states of consciousness fueled by the heart, as if the heart comes into coherence and union with the center of the multidimensional cosmos, or Source, within. To experience synesthesia in such states is to experience love in everything, everywhere, all at once, and to participate in its creation. If one entertains, however congenially and briefly, validity to this perspective — which is admittedly deeply personal and subjective — while indeed transpersonal, synesthesia is categorically incapable of being a neurologically-causal experience, much to chagrin of contemporary researchers’ theoretical modus operandi (Wendler, 2017). One may look at all the fMRI's one wishes and thus never get an inch closer to discovering an experience's intrinsic qualities, mechanisms, or meaning, just as one may analyze surface ripples upon the ocean in attempt to fathom its depths.

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I took a long early morning walk through ancient redwood groves at five a.m. As I walked ever so lightly through the heart and lungs of the Earth, so early that only the black bears and I shared the divinity of the foggy morning, I opened my senses and invited all the vibrancy of the forest into my body. As all the information moving through wild creation came into me, mind and body integrating into the reality of the deep forest, my heart moving my entire body, all my senses began to weave into one another. The sights, smells, sounds, textures, even tastes of the cool air and cup of tea began to unite beyond conscious association.

Could it be that to directly experience a wild moment of the Earth is to absolve all discerning reduction and finally embrace the non-dual infinity of life? Is this not exactly what love is once awareness of Source permeates into the dual realm toward emotion and its feeling?

Perhaps, when we love deeply, and open our hearts and our very being to the Earth and her forces of wild Spirit, smells may become colors and textures may be tasted. Perhaps this is part of the playfulness of divine union with the sacred in the play of consciousness. And perhaps, as we evolve greater orders of sensory perception beyond (or below) material conventions, their felt alchemy will become patterned and known as the new human senses. Grown by expanding unconscious-conscious integration toward new experiential realities in the evolving human consciousness field, newfound faculties will emerge, further merging psyche with physis, and catalyzing through us what we will come to know as expanding orders of intelligence and love.

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References

Bouratinos, E. (2014). Primordial wholeness: Hints of its non-local and non-temporal role in the co-evolution of matter, consciousness, and civiliazation. In Z. Jones, B. Dunne, E. Hoeger, & R. Jahn (Eds.), Filters and reflections: Perspectives on reality. ICRL Press.

Clements, C.J. (2016). Toward a transpersonal model of psychological illness, health, and transformation. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. 48(1). 57-87.

Jung, C.G. (2018). Jung on astrology (S. Rossi & K.L. Grice, Eds.). Routledge.

The Rolling Stones. She's a rainbow [Song]. On More hot rocks (Big hits and fazed cookies). ABKCO.

Wendler, E. (2017). Leakings, drafts and magical thinking: Synaesthesia, creativity and obsessive-compulsive disorder – is there a link? The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. 49(2). 136-148.