Sense and the Senses

By Linda Mihalic

  Sense is “the faculty of perception, feeling, meaning.”–The Oxford English Dictionary
  The ancient philosophers spoke of the senses as “windows of the soul.” As faculties of soul, they are “powers” or “virtues” in the sense of strength—the soul’s powers of perception, by which the soul is able to sense something it needs. The five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—strictly defined, relate to the physical body. However, as “senses” they are our “faculties of perception,” which instantly places certain aspects (facets) of their roles and functions in the metaphysical or non-physical realm of consciousness. In other words the senses are faculties of mind, which is soul: Yes, mind and soul are one and the same: Without a body the soul is a spirit, a consciously functioning individualized aspect of that mind “which was also in Christ Jesus,” i.e., the universal Mind of God.
  The soul requires physical equipment to interface with the material universe, so it builds a body with the electrochemical systems and organs needed to support its metaphysicality. A fish builds gills to breathe in water; a bird builds wings to fly; a soul builds a body to house a brain to facilitate its mental function. Thus, Mind, individualized into the souls it desires to make, translates the essential creative patterns of intangible Ideas from pure being and knowing—across the “abyss to becoming”—as patterns of grossly physical Forms that soul, as individual mind, can reproduce in the tangible material world. All these patterns and translations are mathematical, i.e. number-based.
  This sums the fundamental Ideas in Plato’s Myth of Er (Republic 10.614–621), especially the function of the Spindle of Necessity and of physical rebirth through the many lives, the interludes of “becoming,” which are necessary for the soul to shape its form from a diamond in the rough into a round, many-faceted brilliant-cut gem to adorn its Maker’s Crown of Creation, the Diadem of I AM.

Definitions

  Sense is “a faculty of the soul, whereby it perceives external objects by means of impressions made on the organs of the body. Moral sense is said to be an apprehension of that beauty or deformity which arises in the mind by a kind of natural instinct, previously to any reasoning upon the remoter consequences of actions. …We approve or disapprove certain actions without deliberation. This approbation or disapprobation is uniform and universal.”–A Theological Dictionary
  Sense [Latin sensus, from sentio, to feel or perceive] is “1. The faculty of the soul by which it perceives external objects by means of impressions made on certain organs of the body. Sense is a branch of perception. The five senses of animals are sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. 2. Sensation; perception by the senses. 3. Perception by the intellect; apprehension; discernment. 4. Sensibility; quickness or acuteness of perception. …11. Common sense is that power of the mind which, by a kind of instinct, or a short process of reasoning, perceives truth, the relation of things, cause and effect, etc. and hence enables the possessor to discern what is right, useful, expedient, or proper, and adopt the best means to accomplish his purpose. This power seems to be the gift of nature, improved by experience and observation. 12. Moral sense is a determination of the mind to be pleased with the contemplation of those effects, actions or characters of rational agents, which are called good or virtuous.”–Webster’s American Dictionary
  “Dr. J. B. Rhine coined the term ‘extrasensory perception’ (ESP) to describe the apparent ability of some people to acquire information without the use of the known (five) senses). He also adopted the term ‘parapsychology’ to distinguish his interests from mainstream psychology.”–Who was J B Rhine?

Edna Lister on the Senses

  Spirit uses the faculty of apperception. the embodied soul relies on emotion and the pictures of imagination. The body uses the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touch. Seeing is viewing pictures in the mind's eye, which may be perfect or imperfect. Hearing perceives and describes the perfect and the imperfect as being either harmonious and musical or as harsh and discordant. The sense of smell also reports the perfect or imperfect. As one wag said, “Things do smell when your nose is in the other fellow’s business.” People describe spiritual experiences as having a fragrance or scent, but describe experiences of earth as having an odor, smell or stench. Of the sense of taste, people may say, “It’s sweet as honey in your mouth. It has a taste of the farm.” When you eat (read or study) the words of God, they are sweet to the mouth because you taste the kingdom of heaven. Most people speak of the sense of touch as “feeling,” but generally use it only to describe the emotional thrills or physical pains of earth; few of them ever mention feeling the ecstasy of heaven.
  You must eventually synthesize all lower physical senses into the one great soul faculty of apperception. Yet, before you can do this, you reach a drab place in consciousness and perception, which we call the “burning sands of the desert.” Most people look grim while they traverse the desert, but you can and eventually must choose to smile. –Edna Lister, Apperception and the Five Senses, January 11, 1935

You interact with your world in three basic ways, each having five categories. The first category is animal-like and utterly personal: it affects only you through your five physical senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling, or touch. Your senses constantly gather and report information that could affect your safety, health and well-being,—and your first reaction to that input is instinctive. The second category includes your personal ways of interacting with the world around you—spirit, soul, mind, body, and affairs. You formed these habits of interaction as mimicry in infancy and childhood; they are mainly emotional in nature and may or may not serve you well. The third category is universal—it applies to all thinking beings in a primarily mental or intellectual way as factual knowledge that can potentially become and be used as wisdom. These are the categories of expression in life—psychology, metaphysics, science, philosophy, and mysticism.
  Life on earth is really a school that provides the embodied soul with a constant, non-stop education from kindergarten to the highest post-graduate levels, and even beyond—it’s never-ending! “Matriculate” is a seventy-five-cent word that means to enroll in a school, to be admitted to a college. You matriculated in the School of Life on Earth when you were first born into a physical body. You will graduate only when you have successfully completed all the course requirements laid out in Genesis 17:1 when “the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.”
  Certain cautionary advice is needed here: If you are unable to smoothly coordinate your physical senses, your body’s “language” of movement will be awkward or clumsy; impulses and physical appetites may be your undoing; illness may plague you throughout life. Should your choices in your personal expression of spirit, mind, soul, body, and affairs be overly emotional, you will lack rhythm and timing, and will likely live a life of chaos, delays, losses and failures. If you lack comprehension of how life’s main categories of expression (psychology, metaphysics, et al.) coordinate with one another, you will be unable to understand or express yourself effectively in those areas. The result will be confusion, not mental clarity. You will misunderstand others and confuse them; they will question your knowledge and competence.
  To summarize, every detail of life—instinctive, personal, and universal—must dovetail, must coincide to create comfort, harmony, and peace. Achieving this is counted as doing the “greater works” that Jesus prophesied we would be able do. How can I do this? you ask. “Submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7), and permit no compromise with self. You can offer no substitute for total surrender of self, nor experience any happiness, contentment, joy or peace of mind without it. You must coordinate every facet of your being perfectly, whether it is the body, mind or soul—material, mental, or of the psyche. You must walk earth unified as one, a perfectly coordinated working whole in every department; otherwise, you experience only chaos, not order, only tragedy, not bliss.–Edna Lister, March 8, 1935

The Father and Mother soul virtues of wisdom and love are always at work in man as will and desire, and at a higher level as illumination and intuition. These soul virtues are faculties, powers of perception that report different types of information to your physical senses. For instance, illumination tells you whether a thing is true, honest or just. Intuition informs you whether that thing is pure, lovely or of a good report. God has given you these virtues as precious jewels to have and to use to learn by receiving information from what you hear and see in a spiritual way as well as physically. The greatest of your jewels of the soul is faith, which you cannot perceive with physical senses but as an overwhelming sense of knowing what is true and real. The intuitive jewel is yours to “see” with, to perceive the reality beyond the appearance. It is simple and easy to use if you just look to see with the eyes of your soul.–Edna Lister, July 9, 1944

When you synthesize your five physical senses into spiritual apperception, Light explodes within your consciousness, and you turn your senses upward from inducting darkness and confusion to perceiving and releasing Light. The creature inducts from the outer through the subconscious aspect of mind. The creator inducts from above, through the super-conscious aspect of mind.–Edna Lister, June 27, 1948

You can use your physical optic nerves to integrate the five senses at the X-shaped optic chiasm, a cross-over point in the brain. To do so, you must cease looking for, noticing or “seeing” the not-good in favor of seeing only the Light of God’s Good issuing from it. This practice will greatly accelerate the sublimation of your five physical senses into soul sense of apperception.–Edna Lister, September 25, 1950

You either induct the world’s darkness and weakness through the five senses into your mind and heart, or you look up to God, accept the truth of your soul’s immortality from the Light, and let its goodness flood the world to push it away, consuming it as it goes. It’s a matter of choice. What you see, hear, feel, smell and taste can be white or black, but all of it is still merely a lesser aspect or degree of God’s good Mind, Substance and Power. If you continue to induct from the world according to the world’s point of view, your intention of serving the good recedes, it seems to disappear until you choose only the black. Move up in consciousness! Let the Light do the work, and cease repudiating the Light the instant it moves in. When you fear the cold or a stiff breeze and say, “But my head hurts. The wind blows on me and I ache. I never step on the street but I get a pain”—you are planning ahead for pain when you could plan just as hard for release and perfection!–Edna Lister, June 25, 1951

{Souls come in all stages of development as does the mind, substance, and power of which they are comprised when in form. Bear in mind that Edna Lister’s comments following describe the interaction of body with soul, the physical being directed and controlled metaphysically.}
  The creature constantly inducts sensory information from the world through its five senses and reacts through instincts such as the fight-or-flight response. Your physical body is animal in nature and has been referred to as the creature body of man as an animal.
  When you physically induct the world’s magnetic vibration through your toes, you must remember to lift the world’s chaotic mental mess (the world mind) as if it were your own because it is your responsibility to lift it. Otherwise, you will take it into yourself and it will make you feel confused {brain-fog} or even ill! When you synthesize your five senses into the soul faculty of apperception, you can access the mind of Christ spoken of in Philippians 2: 5: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. At this point of development you can read a person’s entire character as you shake hands. Until you reach that stage, your physical body energy slowly oozes out through your fingertips and toes all day. As you deplete your body’s physical energy store, by not consciously breathing deeply enough, the magnetic currents of earth, which strengthen the self-will, shoot up through your toes, through your desire body’s vital centers to repair the body with a very degraded degree of energy that strengthens your I-me-my sense, which is selfish.
  In the parable of the ten virgins, five had wisely trimmed and filled their lamps with the oil of spirit. The other five hadn’t bothered to apply what they’d been taught so they still inducted from the outer world. The soul, through its faculty of apperception, trains the optic chiasm of the physical thalamus to act as an invisible “eye” to read information from the physical senses, which it then redirects to be read and translated by the soul into the proper action to take.–Edna Lister, July 19, 1951

Personality is what the world sees of the soul. The closer you get to God, the more radiant your personality becomes—until it’s a vivid glow. To have the Light moving through you, you must first draw in your personal reaction the sounds and interruptions of the world. You draw your attention inward and upward to create an impersonal life—you eliminate all personal reactions to other’s expressions of praise, blame, or condemnation. This is the only creative way to be impersonal, i.e. you may not legally be rude, offensive or be overly sensitive when others interrupt you.
  Your five senses operate like radar waves, rays of sensory detection that can form a shield of perception from your waist to above your head and to the center of earth below. Then you can enter the silence—enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father–Matthew 6:6—this is where you draw in the five ordinary senses, which induct from the outer world, while your radar shield of Light remains as your protection.
  As you move higher into the Light from above, the outer light, colors and tones, your joy, faith and all perceptions are intensified. In the golden silence you synthesize your sensory impressions into the soul faculty of apperception. Now you are a beam balance scale holding intuition and illumination in your scale pans. As you raise your hands in prayer, you automatically open the 1,000-petaled crown lotus. When apperception pours in through the top of the head, the soul who is high in consciousness pours out compassion, which is born of the Christ consciousness. The world vibration or subconscious composite world mind whirls up from your feet. When those souls of an earthy consciousness hear of those who are having trouble they pour out sympathy and so further open themselves to the chaotic world mind.
  The minute you draw the physical senses in and draw upon the pure Christ mind, your five-rayed soul radar moves into action. The subconscious mind is then so interested in the heavenly view above that it pays no more attention to the world. You can only use imagination in one way at a time. If you want to read or study—prepare your mind first. Move up in consciousness and imagine yourself in a cloud garden. This is the first step into the silence—go to your garden, then sit still until you feel yourself in this garden. You will be here as pure mind and can use your faculties with no interference from the subconscious mind. You can read or study anything you like—and it will not be just physical words because you will be reading it from above.–Edna Lister, June 18, 1954

You must awaken 44 soul faculties to “see” and to “hear” spiritually. The 44 faculties encompass 18 lesser faculties, including the five physical senses, which the of the impulsive appetitive soul develops to a higher level than mere instinctive intelligence. The next five faculties are imagination, intuition, desire, will and love. When you add imagination to the five senses, you take your first breath of aspiration, and look up in consciousness. Intuition leads your hungry soul to greater truth. When you awaken desire, the seed of your soul’s love of God, you add it as the eighth faculty for a still higher degree of development. Then you add your personal will, subordinating it to God’s will for you.
  Desire and will, harnessed together, are the teammates that pull your chariot of soul ever higher. If you unharness desire, it falls to mingle with the five senses of instinctive intelligence; your higher faculties totter, closing the door to imagination, intuition and will. If you succumb to temptation when desire wishes to please the self, your emotions submerge your will and imagination runs riot. Love is the tenth faculty, but you cannot have true love without a spiritualized identity as being a son or daughter of God. This is part of what it means to be a member of the Elect!
  Unless self-discipline is instilled in the embodied soul from childhood, just about everyone has trouble with idle words and speaking without thinking. With self-discipline firmly reining in impulsive appetitive soul, you find that the words of God organize themselves perfectly in your mind because you interfering with their mission by indulging the physical impulses and appetites. “I empty myself of all I have. Father, please fill me anew with Thy Light.”–Edna Lister, September 17, 1957

Hatha yoga deals with controlling the five senses, but only soul conquering of self brings spiritual illumination. This is how yoga can take you part of the way but still misses the point.–Edna Lister, January 12, 1961

You must synthesize your physical senses with logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion. Then you can lift these mental faculties together and synthesize them into the one great soul faculty of apperception.
  The Elect must add the mental faculties of reasoning, comparison, and induction to the five senses, then add deduction and synthesis to instinctive intelligence to ascend from the creature stage completely. Through countless incarnations we have all fallen into silly habit patterns. Save yourself! Declare, I am following my Lord Jesus Christ until I am as perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect! Then you can successfully stop inducting from the body senses and start directing them up into the Light. Ascended deductive reasoning enables you to recognize your soul’s debt patterns in the universal record and to rid your impulsive appetitive soul of all old habit patterns. Until then Transfiguration remains merely a vague comparison of your attempts to conquer self with the Master’s complete soul conquering.–Edna Lister, September 29, 1961

The “house of bondage” is the physical body enslaved to the five outer senses and the illusions they create and maintain.–Edna Lister, April 21, 1964

All religions use glyphs or symbols, but to read them you must turn your senses upward to open soul vision and receive a true spiritual translation to properly read and place the symbols for comprehension. Taste savors the beauty of the new vibration and its illumination. It heightens your sensitivity, but you cannot savor everything—take ecstasy as an example—mystics often describe an experience of the sacred as being a feeling because touch, the sense of feeling, is the foundation of the Holy Spirit itself spiritualizing your vitality, energy, and emotions.–Edna Lister, August 4, 1966

{The following passages are from Edna Miriam’s prayer to open a Bible study session.}
  God is greater than our imagination and vision can grasp! Our imaginations at their greatest are futile and just play with God’s Ideas, but our hearts’ devotion, our consecration and worship of You, Father, are as great as You are! We have dedicated ourselves. We have consecrated ourselves. We have renewed vows so many times on each new level. This is fitting and according to Law. It means assuming greater personal responsibility. We ask in this hour that we may grasp the full consciousness of the responsibility of oneness with the One, You! If this One would consume all else, every healing and prayer would be fulfilled now!
  The Orders of the descended creators are to be made one again as they were in the beginning. Wherever they are, they shall establish purity of heart, mind and purpose. This Light, released here in this Temple so perfected, could go forth to shatter, to scatter or to consume all perversion, especially pornography and its makers. They shall be divinely impaled by their own evil minds! Their minds will be incapable of thinking new thoughts. This, oh Father, had to be! We, the people on Earth have been too incompetent to stop it. It is too deeply rooted in the minds of the sons of Belial and of Ishmael. It is just and right that they be rendered impotent, and incapacitated in mind, body and affairs. Let them be made static in all time! Thank You for giving us this Glory, for this need covered will penetrate the whole of Earth. It covers dope and all things, even the children taking it. It frees the Peace Movement. This is the source and root of Belial’s evil. …
  When the souls of the Genesis were given the gift of freedom to choose their own path home to God the One, they were given physical bodies with an array of such senses that it was inevitable that this freedom of experience would be a snare to their desires and will. Thus, the purpose of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden was to uncover the appetitive soul’s desire for what would excite the senses into seeking all the soul-deadening experiences to pleasure the bodily senses. This forbidden seeking started the process that in the end uncovered the evil of Belial, the father of lies!–Edna Lister, August 21, 1966

You must sublimate the five senses to begin burning away the silver cord, but the rate of sublimation waxes and wanes according to the soul’s consciousness. The sense of smell operates near earth and is the first sense to fully awaken. You can perceive through odors or fragrances, and remember past experiences, too. All warnings originate in the twin senses of taste and smell, and we associate them with some present experience through the soul’s power of recollection, so the meaning they ascribe to various scents varies widely. Foul odors and stenches arise from taints of ancient perversions, and as a warning for illness such as cholera or plague. Some associate the scent of incense as a warning of illness. The five basic tastes are bitter, salty, sour, sweet and savory. Many people taste bitterness when the vibration is negative. Another woman smells the scent of roses when the Master is near, but another smells lilies of the valley. In the presence of anger, one may smell the scent of ozone when there is no lightning, another may smell hot iron. You can also “feel” the touch, the “pull” of a friend in need, who is on your line of Light; you may “see” that person’s face as an image in your mind, or be conscious of a special fragrance that warns you to pray for him.–Edna Lister, May 15, 1967

You must gather your scattered pictures of imagination and memories of sounds, tastes and smells and lift them once and for all or you delay or prevent a prayed-for miracle. When you pray, but see a dark image, your sense of sight sees the lie and stops the miracle.–Edna Lister, May 21, 1967

To understand the parable of the ten virgins, wise and foolish, keep in mind that the body is like a great soul empire containing many lesser nations, the organs and body systems. Although the five physical senses rule at the body’s solar plexus, the senses themselves are rooted in the sacrum plexus at the base of the spine. At the soul’s first touch, the sperm and ovum, the parent cells, join and unfold as strands of Light from within what will become the heart (from the SA node and AV bundle). Seven strands expand up and seven down the spinal cord, to become the soul’s silver cord, which carries memories and knowledge of soul debts. This is the soul’s first interaction with its body-to-be.–Edna Lister, November 25, 1968

Other Philosopher-Mystics on the Senses

  The soul hath its senses, like the body, that may be cultivated, enlarged, refined, as itself grows in stature and proportion… To live on the level of the commonplace…[produces]…inferiority of the soul’s senses, which is the inferiority and imperfect development of the soul itself.
  Steer far away from all those vain philosophies, which endeavor to account for all that is without admitting that there is a God, which erect Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone, which annihilate Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses.
  Even the ideas that are above and beyond the senses, as all ideas of God are, require the aid of the senses for their expression and communication.
  God’s Ideas are insufficiently and inadequately expressed by language, whose words are images of those things alone that can be grasped by and are within the empire of the senses.
  Do not expect easily to convince men of the truth, or to lead them to think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even the clearest vision.–Albert Pike

  If you could control a man’s senses then you would be able to determine how much of the universe gets into him and how much of him gets into the universe.…Since this is true it follows that the man who would make his mind the home of goodness, truth, and beauty, will be the one who sees to it that his senses are trained to do their work effectively, and that he permits nothing to travel back and forth over their bridges except that which is good, or true, or beautiful.–H.L. Haywood

New Testament on the Senses

  For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins: Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity. And by reason hereof he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins. And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron. So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec. Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him; called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec. Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.–Hebrews 5

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