The Four Senses

Our senses provide us with information about our relationship to our environment. They are the mediators between reality and consciousness.

I propose that our human-senses match the pattern of the four-elements... We have four basic senses, but the more Yin senses come in multiple forms. (Yang is One, Yin is Many).

We also have both internal, and external senses. The internal ones aren't usually linked like this, but they correspond nicely. Yin is inside, Yang is outside. They might seem a little odd at first, but you'll hopefully see what I mean.

Element		Meaning	Medium	External Sense (+)	Internal Sense (-)
	Fire	Will	Electromagnetic	Sight	Desire
	Air	Design	Gas	Hearing	Judgement
	Water	Action	Liquid	Smell / Taste	Emotion
	Earth	Object	Solid	Touch / Pain / Temp etc.	Memory / Recognition

External Senses - Yang

Sight
is the sense mediated by light / electromagnetism / aether.
People are still arguing about whether the aether exists, and what light really is. Of course mainstream-science claims to understand it all, but there are compelling arguments against the 'photon' hypothesis.

Sight is linked with desire / will. "What the eye sees the heart desires", as they say. Sometimes what the eye sees the heart desires to get the heck away from...

But isn't Fire the center of desire? Why do we attribute desire to the Heart?

Because the UP is a fractal, every element has it's own internal set of four-elements. So the heart has it's own desires, and as we well know, the genitals have their own too. They all do. But the desires they have are different.

The Will of the Fire element (Fire/Fire) is the controlling will. And it will often make people do things which all the other parts of them are against. For example, a young soldier going to almost certain death in a war, because a higher form of will overrides all the others...

Hearing
is mediated by Air / gas.
Air defines the Law / Path / Plan.
For example, the sound of a growling lion when you're out gathering berries, a demand from a customer, a speech from a political leader, and so on. The Air-element is the archetype of polarity / difference / choice and morality.

Smell
is mediated by Water.
Taste is an alternate form of smell, this more-Yin sense has two forms, but note that if you block your nose, you can't taste things. So taste is Yin to smell, it depends on it.

Touch
(a large family of senses) is mediated by Earth / objects. It works by physical contact.

Memory is your body of knowledge. The foundation for all the elements above...

Fooling The Senses

The external senses are Yang, real. The internal ones are Yin, and thus illusion (relatively speaking).

Yang-senses can't be 'tricked', they just relay the data they receive faithfully. They don't interpret the data. They're direct.

The Yin-senses are the ones that can get things wrong. They are the ones which interpret the data, and make choices. Yang offers, Yin chooses. So the Yang senses offer their reality-feed to the internal-senses, which then choose what to pay attention to, and how to interpret it.

Optical-illusions occur because of the way we process the data received, not because of a fault in the data.

Internal Senses - Yin

The Yin-senses are the ones that can be lead astray, fail to process things properly, and so on.
They are like children, because Yin is immature, and must be nurtured, and constantly corrected...

The internal-senses are Yin to the external ones, because they receive from them, and being Yin, they can receive from Many sources. Memory can be triggered by any of the physical senses.

Desire - Do I Want It?
The internal sense of desire/intent, which correlates with Sight.
When we desire something, we hold an image of it in mind, by force of will.
So desire is an internal vision, like sight.

Judgement - Is It Good or Bad?
This is the sense of Law, or Right-and-Wrong.
It tells us, for example, that the predator we just recognised is Bad.

Emotion - How Do I Feel About It?
The emotional-sense is the POWER.
Corresponding to Water, the element of Action.
Fear, of a predator for example, is strong-motivation to run very fast.

Memory / Recognition - What is it?
Memories are the foundation stones of knowledge. If we couldn't remember anything, we wouldn't know anything.

Why don't the senses map to the Seven? They are fully-materialised 3-D things, aren't they?

This is a good question...

It suggests to me that our senses are the things which actually create the 3-D world. They transform information from the 1-D and 2-D levels of reality into the 3-D world we perceive. Our senses are our sole source of evidence that there even is a 3-D world.

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