We all know the standard religious take on the senses. Left to our own devices, we are imprisoned by all those yummy feels, addicted to sensual delights, repulsed by rotting stinks and screeches, and too distracted by the whole delirious swirl to tune into spirit, or God, or the good. The classic response to this perceived problem is asceticism: the withdrawal of the senses (what the Yoga Sutras call pratyahara); the adoption of strict dietary and sexual codes; even the mortification of the flesh.
But not all religious traditions reject or delimit sensory experience. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, a key Mahayana Buddhist text, the dharma is taught through the perfume of trees and flowers. Many mystical traditions, though they feature ascetic aspects, nonetheless embrace and celebrate the immanence of the divine. This celebration of overbrimming presence, right here and now, often finds expression in and as extraordinary sensory experience. (This is the wine that Sufis guzzle.) In a more quotidian mode, Zen finds the Tao within the ordinary life of chopping wood and carrying water, and tells stories about monks waking up to reality when they hear a broken tile strike bamboo. Even religions that seemingly denigrate the flesh still build visionary cathedrals and fill them with brightly colored art glass and the intoxicating strains of rich polyphonic music.
Then there’s tantra, and especially nondual Shaivite tantra, which is surely the only religious tradition to include among its leading lights a sage — Abhinavagupta — who was also a supreme authority on aesthetic theory and drama. Not only does tantra include some famously spicy practices, but it directly yokes supreme awareness — which lies at the root of our own experience — to the diversity, joy, and drop-dead amazement of sensory encounter. The phenomenal world is seen not only as a divine play, but as a play that we are encouraged to actively enjoy, bringing curiosity, wonder, and exuberance to the whole phenomenal field — ultimately to the horrible (and stinky) as much as the beautiful and sublime. As tantric teacher and translator Christopher Wallis puts it, tantra invites us “to learn to see a wider and wider range of our experiences as an expression of divine beauty, and to lovingly feed that beauty to the sense-goddesses, that they may bestow their blessing of an ever-increasing capacity to experience the beautiful.”
Despite the wild-ass ritual and arcane esoterica that characterize classic tantra, there is something very modern about this sensibility. After all, one core feature of the Enlightenment is the outright rejection of monkish morality, and a corresponding affirmation — both philosophical and hedonistic — of ordinary physical life and its pleasures and even pains. Alongside this refreshing turn towards the empirical, Western culture also elevated art and aesthetics into practices and forms of experience that took over many of the functions of traditional religion. While “aesthetics” often means the study and theory of art, in a more essential sense it is simply the domain of how the world feels, as both affect and sensation. Here is where the cultured bon vivant is born, the bohemian poet, the decadent flaneur of the scents, the hipster mystic “digging” the material world.
For those of us navigating the yawning cracks in the Enlightenment’s rational materialism, but unwilling to give up the empiricist spirit of independence and experiment, the senses present a secret key: five golden tickets hiding in plain sight. For practitioners, the senses are always ready and willing. Not only do they mediate and construct our everyday world, but they are very amenable to novel exploration, aesthetic curiosity, and technical honing. We have a hedonic drive to experience more, to refine and expand our tastes. With the reins in hand (and sometimes artfully abandoned), we can ride the horse of enjoyment towards subtler, more awakened, and more amazed states. A “spiritual hedonism” becomes possible, not in the crude sense of reducing spiritual experience to entertainment — looking at you, Burner — but in the sense of fueling the journey with a commitment to this-worldly enjoyment and sensory encounter.
The senses are also deeply tied to emotions, which is why we call them both “feelings.” This proximity allows the sense gates to open into the depths and stories of the self; by tracking and tasting our own reactions to sensation, we gain intimacy and insight into attitudes and memories that can otherwise be difficult to discover. Even our basic dualistic triggers of attraction or resistence — what the Buddhists describe as the second skandha, or vedana — becomes open to investigation and reframing. Awakened sensation can also become an avenue to thusness — not just this sound or this taste, just as they are, but hearing and tasting as modes of the absolute, of reality presenting itself to itself through you, the feely interface.
This October, I will be starting an occasional series of Sense Gates workshops. These informal and hopefully playful events will combine lecture, discussion, and practice. On Sunday October 13th, we will enter the sense gate of Sound by focusing on the contemplative and aesthetic opportunities of listening – to sounds, to music, to the environment, to the Void. I’ll touch on the vast topic of sacred sound in world mystical traditions, including the sonic dharma tucked into the Surangama Sutra, and link these teachings to more contemporary experiments in “deep listening.” Musician and recordist Samuel Plattner we will join me as we explore various practices keyed to soundscapes, drones, and musical tracks drawn from the spiritual avant-garde. At 7 pm that same Sunday, Sam will present “Hidden Vistas,” an urban sound collage of subsurface field recordings made with geophones, which reveal the delightful and strange resonances and rhythms that hide within our infrastructure. (The concert is free for attendees of the workshop.)
But the point here is not whether or not you attend a workshop or a concert. Sensory awareness and aesthetic cultivation are deeply rewarding awareness practices that are very ready to hand, and far too few people include them into the work and play of exploring and expanding awareness. I also believe it is high time for such practices, given that our felt embeddedness in the rich multi-sensory world is being overwritten by an overwhelming, often toxic, and certainly addictive invasion of data flows, virtual images, memes, social media loops, and limbic manipulations whose combined effect seems to be driving everyone slightly (or more than slightly) insane. In discombobulating times like these, sensory awareness not only presents a path of aesthetic affirmation, or a way to encounter the full range of things and beings on this planet. It may also put the sense back into sense-making.
“3RD Ear presents: Sound Practice” with Erik Davis and Samuel Plattner will take place on Sunday, October 13 from 1 to 5 pm. For more information, and for tickets, please see our Eventbrite page. At 7 pm that same day, Sam will present “Hidden Vistas”, a concert of urban field recordings. The concert is included in the Sound Practice ticket but is also available separately here.
Transmutations is a publication from the Berkeley Alembic, a center for consciousness culture that offers classes, workshops, retreats, and warm cups of tea. We grow by word of mouth, so feel free to share this if you are so moved.
damn man. you’re living the life i want to come back and live when i’m done with this one…