THE SENSES IN THE WISDOM TRADITIONS
The word for taste in Sanskrit is rasa. It also means essence, experience, juice, delight, and the vital sap that nourishes all life. One word, holding all of that — as if the ancient speakers of this language already knew what we keep rediscovering: that to truly taste something is to touch its essence. And that to touch its essence is to be changed by it.
This recognition — that the senses are not obstacles to spiritual life but doorways into it — is not the discovery of any single tradition. It has sprung up independently, across centuries and continents, wherever human beings have slowed down enough to notice what their senses are actually receiving. The traditions give it different names and frame it in different ways. But the core insight is remarkably consistent: when we meet sensory experience with presence rather than habit, something more than information is revealed.
What follows is not a comprehensive survey. It's an appreciation — a gathering of some of the threads that have most illuminated this understanding for me, and that may illuminate it for you.
The Vedic Tradition: Consciousness Knowing Itself Through the Senses
Of all the traditions that have explored the senses as instruments of knowing, the Vedic tradition may have gone the deepest.
The ancient Vedic philosophers identified what they called tanmatras — a word meaning "subtle essence" or simply "that alone." These are the five irreducible essences that underlie each sense: sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell. In this understanding, consciousness does not passively receive sensory input from an external world. Rather, consciousness first manifests as these subtle sense-essences, and from them the elements and the physical world arise. The senses are the means by which consciousness knows itself through its own creation.
This is a profound reversal of how we usually think of perception. We tend to assume that the world is "out there" and our senses report on it. The Vedic view says something closer to: the world arises through the senses, and when we perceive with enough presence, we are consciousness recognising its own expression.
The word rasa captures this beautifully. In Ayurveda, taste is far more than flavour — it is the way we take in and become what we encounter. The Taittiriya Upanishad declares: raso vai sah — "He is indeed rasa." The ultimate reality is essence itself, and one who truly tastes this essence becomes blissful. The roots of the Sanskrit word tell us something lovely too: ra means "to give" or "to bestow," and sa means "wisdom" or "knowledge." Together they form rasa: the giving of knowledge — the bestowing of wisdom — through the act of tasting.
When I speak of tasting essence qualities — the spaciousness of a blue sky, the aliveness in birdsong — I am, without always knowing it, standing in a stream that is thousands of years old.
The Sufi Tradition: Beauty as the Beloved's Face
In the Sufi tradition, the senses are instruments of divine love. The world's beauty is not separate from God's beauty — it is God's beauty, showing itself through form. To perceive beauty with real presence is an act of remembrance: recognising, in what the eyes see and the skin feels and the ears hear, the face of the Beloved.
Rumi understood that the senses are linked at their root, and that when one sense awakens spiritually, the others follow. He wrote of how seeing enhances speech, and how communication increases vision, and how sight stimulates and awakens every sense to spiritual perception. He described how when one sense manages to break free — catching a glimpse of what is usually invisible — it makes the invisible apparent to all the others. Like a flock of sheep following when one jumps over a creek.
This is remarkably close to what I experience in essence recognition. When spaciousness is first perceived through the eyes — in the quality of blue sky, say — it begins to be perceived through all the senses. The senses, once one awakens, seem to draw the others along.
Rumi also offered one of the most beautiful invitations to step beyond the conceptual mind and into direct knowing: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." This is essentially what the sensory doorway asks of us — to trade our ideas about experience for the experience itself, and to be astonished by what we find there.
The Buddhist Tradition: Direct Experience, Unadorned
The Buddha's instructions on mindfulness — the Satipatthana Sutta — are among the most precise and practical teachings on working with sensory experience ever given. The practice is elegantly simple: attend to what is actually here — in the body, in feelings, in the mind, in the qualities of experience — with presence, without adding to it or turning away from it.
What makes this teaching so relevant to the sensory doorway is its emphasis on direct experience. The instruction is not to think about what you're sensing, but to know it — to be with the breath as it moves, with the body as it sits, with feeling as it arises and passes. When met without conceptual overlay, sensory experience begins to reveal something about the nature of things as they are.
The Buddhist approach shares with the Essence Way a recognition that the quality of our attention determines what we perceive. When attention is clouded by craving or aversion, we see one thing. When attention is clear and equanimous, something else is revealed — not because the world has changed, but because the perceiver has.
The Christian Contemplative Tradition: Creation as Sacrament
Within Christianity there has always been a stream that finds God not by turning away from the material world but by turning toward it with new eyes.
The early Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus (4th century) described a stage of spiritual development he called physike — natural contemplation — in which the created world is perceived not for its own sake alone, but for what it reveals of the divine. In this contemplative seeing, the world becomes sacramental: material things are vehicles of the sacred. Evagrius even spoke of "spiritual senses" — inner capacities of perception that apprehend realities not apparent to the physical senses alone. He observed that just as the physical senses are changed by receiving different qualities, the contemplative mind is changed by what it gazes upon. This is strikingly close to the experience of essence recognition: that the quality of what we perceive begins to transform the perceiver.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, centuries later, wrote of a world "charged with the grandeur of God" — glory that "will flame out, like shining from shook foil." His poetry is essentially a record of someone perceiving essence qualities through the senses: the particular inscape (his word) of a bluebell, a windhover, a ploughed field. He saw that every created thing expressed its own inner radiance, and that this self-expression was itself sacred. In one of his most luminous lines, he wrote of how Christ "plays in ten thousand places" — essence expressing through every particular form.
This sacramental understanding — that the ordinary material world, met with presence, is already expressing something sacred — runs like a quiet river through Christian contemplative tradition. It is perhaps the closest parallel in Western spirituality to what the Essence Way describes: not transcending the senses, but going through them.
Te Ao Māori: Sensing the Knowing
The te reo Māori word rongo captures something that most Western languages have no single word for. It means to sense, smell, hear, feel, taste, perceive and ultimately, to have a sense of awareness — essentially, whole-body knowing. That all of these can be communicated in one word is no accident — it places the emphasis on the experience of sensation itself, on the interconnectedness and activation of multiple senses as part of a single knowing. Recent Māori researchers have developed the concept of rongomātau — "sensing the knowing" — which describes the capacity to absorb and interpret felt knowledge through all sensory and intuitive channels. This is not abstract; it is grounded in the lived relationship between person and place, person and people, person and the more-than-human world.
Living in a valley in New Zealand, I am aware that the land I walk on each day has a deep history with Māori people — that their relationship with this land, over centuries, is woven into it. I don't speak from within that tradition. But what strikes me is this: while worldviews shape how we interpret what our senses give us access to, the capacity to know through the body — through this expanded, whole-being sensing — is not a worldview. It is built into the instrument itself. Into having a body, having senses, being on land. Every tradition in this page recognised it in its own way. And on this particular land, that way of knowing has been practised for a very long time.
When I slow down in my valley and meet what is here through my senses, I am not borrowing a tradition. I am accessing a capacity that is as old as having a body on this earth — on land that has already been deeply, sensuously, reverently known.
The Thread That Runs Through
What is remarkable is not that these traditions agree — they don't, in many important respects. They emerge from different cosmologies, pursue different ends, and use very different methods. The Buddhist practitioner is attending to the nature of experience. The Sufi is yearning toward the Beloved. The Vedic philosopher is mapping the structure of consciousness itself. The contemplative Christian is perceiving God's grandeur in creation.
And yet, in every case, the doorway is the same: slow down. Be present. Meet what the senses are actually receiving. And when you do, you will discover that ordinary sensory experience — properly attended to — reveals something extraordinary about the nature of what is here.
This is not because these traditions influenced one another. It is because the capacity they each recognised is not a cultural invention. It is built into the instrument itself — into having a body, having senses, being present on this earth. The traditions give it different names. But the thread is the same.
"There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change." — William Stafford
The Essence Way stands in this stream. It doesn't draw on any single tradition, and it doesn't ask you to adopt a particular cosmology or belief. It simply invites you to do what human beings have been doing, across cultures and centuries, whenever wisdom has found them: come to your senses. And notice what they've been trying to show you all along.
Explore The Sensory Doorway — the senses as a direct path to essence recognition
Explore Essential Beauty — on beauty as a primary doorway to essence
Return to About The Essence-Way?
