Expanding Upon Your Senses to Enhance Your Reality

Do you believe in supernatural abilities? Extrasensory perception? What if it were possible to hone your senses and change the reality that you see before you? Imagine being able to see more colors than other people. To hear sounds that no one can hear. The ability to literally experience a more vibrant reality, without mind-altering substances, may seem a little absurd unless you’re living in a virtual world; but it’s not as crazy as you might assume, and it’s possible through the power of perception.  

Do you believe that a person could train their eyes, or their ears to be more efficient? Obviously, we have physical limitations, but we also have much room for growth. I believe it is possible, and It’s all about learning to pay closer attention to detail and learning to expand the depth in which you see and experience the world; in essence, expanding upon the senses, and increasing our awareness of the world around us. If we look at a landscape, we see the landscape just as anyone else would, right? Let’s say you’re looking at a sunset over a tropic isle. What colors do you see? When an artist, someone who is trained in the art of aesthetics, looks at this same landscape, do they not see more detail than we, with our untrained eye? There are shadows, contours, shades, colors, and other subtleties that the common person may not pick up on. The common person knows basic colors; like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, for example. But an artist has an intimate understanding of color theory, shadow placement, and has learned many shades and version of these colors. When they see this same scene, they see an ‘enhanced’ version of reality, so to speak. They can perceive a more complex, detailed reality than we are capable of perceiving. This same concept can apply to music, as in the way a trained musician would perceive a song compared to how a casual music listener would perceive the same song.  
 
I am in tune with nature in that way. I started to pay close attention to my surroundings, I expanded my reality, and it changed the way I see the natural world. When most people go into the wilderness, they do not hear the wilderness – they chatter and tromp about and scare most of the wildlife away before they ever have a chance to see it. People who are more patient may hear birds, frogs, locusts, and squirrels, and may see a few things, but beyond that, most are not trained to perceive the complexity of the sound or the environment, therefore they literally can’t comprehend it. It’s just a chorus of sound. A forest is merely a forest. They see a tree and it is a tree. A flower is a flower. I have the deeper meaning. I don’t just hear ‘birds’, I hear individual voices… a male Eastern Bluebird singing for a female, the subtle peck of the Downy Woodpecker, lightly tapping at a tree behind me, the agitated call of a Carolina Wren – intended to alert other birds that there is prey nearby. I hear spring peepers and a bird-voiced tree frog with their enchanting choruses blending together as one. I have a window into the natural world. I don’t just see trees. I see the buckeye tree, the silver oak, black cherry, and the weeping willow. I see a black-eyed susan, milkweed, buttonbush, and morning glory. I can see the delicate intricacies, the colors of the forest, more vividly than most, but it is not because I am special, but because I have spent a lot of time honing those ‘senses’.