The Eclipse of the Senses
The senses are the channels through which we construct our version of reality. Remove them, close our eyes, seal our ears, restrict our sense of touch, and what is left is the mind alone with itself, in an inner space that is normally too crowded with incoming information to be experienced directly.
Sensory Deprivation deliberately creates this space. The blindfold or hood that removes sight, the headphones that remove sound, the constraints that prevent the exploration of space through touch: together these create an environment in which the mind cannot orient itself through its usual channels.
The result is not vacuity: it is an intensification of the inner experience, and, paradoxically, an enhancement of any external stimulation that manages to penetrate deprivation.
Touch, under sensory deprivation, is experienced with a specificity and intensity that ordinary circumstances do not produce. A single finger passed slowly over private skin is experienced as something much greater, the brain, hungry for its usual input, amplifies the signal it receives. Temperature, pressure, texture: everything arrives with unusual clarity, almost surprising the nervous system with its presence.
Sound, similarly: a single word uttered in deprivation comes as if from a different quality of silence than ordinary sound.
The internal state produced by extended sensory deprivation is described as meditative, expansive and, for those who stay with it rather than struggle with it, surprisingly peaceful. The usual narrative of the self, the internal commentary that accompanies the waking experience, becomes quiet, for lack of material to comment on. What becomes available in this stillness is a quality of pure presence that ordinary life, crowded with stimuli, rarely allows.
