The Whole Is Greater

In this class we have talked a lot about each of the five senses and how they have affected human history and especially human ritual, and the role they can play in symbolizing and communing with the divine. We've talked about how each of our senses work and how the data they give us allow us to perceive and interact with the world at large. How important each of our senses can be on establishing us within a community, whether we are touching our friends or eating with them. And how they can keep us alive, often in ways we don't even realize, such as bitter's function as a poison detector or the fact that a lack of touch can communicate to a baby's system that it lacks protection and that it should conserve its resources and stop growing.

Our senses can do some amazing things, and are at the root of sentience. Supposedly the brain originally developed to allow the processing of smell! But our perceptions are built of more than any one of our senses -- they are all of them. Although it is easy, especially in an academic setting, to separate our senses and the roles they play in our lives and cultures, we have to remember that in life there are few to no experiences that are truly only the domain of one sense. We developed five distinct methods of gaining information about the world and they often overlap, giving us different information about the same event or object. We see what appears to be a perfectly fine glass of milk, but once you get close enough to smell it, you'll be more sure. And if you taste it, you'll know even more! In the same way that height, length, and width are each distinct attributes that combine to create three dimensions in space, sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell work together to give us five distinct dimensions of input that together give us a more complete impression than any one alone would.

The quality of a banquet, for instance, isn't judged just by the taste of the food. It is an important factor, but so too are decorations, ambiance, and company (to name a few). Similarly, very few experiences are judged solely on the input of one sense or another, and that's exactly why we have more than one sense -- so that we can have as much information as possible to motivate reactions and judgements. Rituals, too, are rarely built on only one sense.
In class we have defined ritual as "a mode of paying attention."  However, in a literal sense, that's what our senses are, modes of input, the ways that our brain can pay attention. A ritual, then, is a way for us to pay more attention. Most of our lives we take the sensory input that our body provides for granted, as just another part of being alive. In a ritual, however, we imbue our actions and perceptions with additional meaning, and in doing so, we pay homage to those senses, making them more than passive information gatherers. I'd argue that whatever is being honored or acknowledged in ritual, any ritual, we are also honoring our senses for allowing the experience (and all experiences!).