I have a hypothesis that our spiritual sense is as much a part of the human experience as the six regular senses.

“Six senses?”, you might wonder. “Is this guy counting ESP as one of the senses?” No, what I am counting is kinesthesia, which most scientists now recognize as the sixth sense.

Kinesthesia is our sense of self-movement and body perception. There is an easy way for you to see for yourself how this sense works. Stretch your arms out in front of you, then close your eyes. Now, with your eyes still closed, touch your nose. For most people, this is trivially easy to do. Why? Because, seemingly independent of your sense of sight or touch, you just somehow know where your body parts are and how to move them into a new position relative to the rest of your body.

Good dancers tend to have a finely honed sense of kinesthesia. And even though kinesthesia is not something most people ever learn about in school or otherwise think about, it is essential to our everyday functioning in the world. For example, as I type this, my hands are moving across a keyboard without me having to look at the keys. Through many years of practice, I have internalized a sense of where the different keyboard keys are positioned relative to each other, and I can type without having to look at where my fingers are moving. Without consciously thinking about it, I can sense where my fingers are and where they need to be to write the words in my head.

So what does this have to do with spirituality? Personal experience leads me to believe that we have an equally real spiritual sense. If I am right, then just like our other senses, our spiritual sense would be something innate that develops and grows as we do. And it could be trained and honed, just as dancers hone their sense of kinesthesia, musicians develop their sense of hearing, and pilots and painters train their sense of sight. And just as some people are naturally better dancers than others, and just as some people are near-sighted, while others have 20/20 vision, some people would naturally have a spiritual sense that perceives more and in finer detail than others. Similarly, in the same way that some people are born blind to sight, or become temporarily or permanently blind during life through illness or accident, some people would probably be born spiritually blind, or become spiritually blind.

And just as ignoring what you perceive through the senses can be the cause of accidents and unnecessary suffering, ignoring your spiritual sense could cause your life to unnecessarily lack meaning and connection to the divine. And in the same way that losing any one of the six regular senses can be difficult and even disastrous, so too would losing the spiritual sense. In his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes the case of a woman who lost her sense of kinesthesia because of an infection in her spinal cord. Following her loss, she had trouble performing even basic actions such as walking or even modulating her voice properly. She recovered the abilities she had lost by learning how to use her other senses to compensate, such as by watching her feet to walk or using her hearing to judge her voice modulation. Even so, her compensations using the other senses were not perfect—her movements were slower and stiffer than before her infection, and her speech sounded mostly normal, but not quite.

I suspect that those who are spiritually blind (whether from birth or through life experience) suffer similarly debilitating effects. If the spiritual sense helps guide us to moral action, to living with meaning, and to drawing closer to God, then there may be nothing more important to living the good life than learning to hone and strengthen our spiritual sense. Just as the woman who lost her sense of kinesthesia could only imperfectly compensate for her loss, and just as finding a missing object without eyesight and by touch alone (whether because of blindness or just because the lights are out) is usually more difficult, I suspect that failing to appropriately rely on our spiritual sense will make it more difficult to find meaning and the right way through life. Perhaps it would not make this impossible, but very likely it would make it much more difficult and unlikely. (And this raises questions to which I do not know the answer: Are there different kinds of spiritual blindness? Which kinds of spiritual blindness can be cured? Are there those who are so past spiritual feeling that there is no hope of recovery?)

My latest endeavor is to explore my hypothesis about the spiritual sense by examining ways to develop this sense, and also how to practice the ability to recognize and use it. I had already taken preliminary steps in this when working on my book The Triple Path by examining religious practices that appear to be universal across cultures. The idea is that if the same religious practice appears over and over again in completely separate cultures, then it likely spread (or was independently created in multiple places) and then thrived because it was good and valuable. Some of the most important examples of those universals appear to be prayer, meditation, ritual, communal worship, and a focus on loving and positive family relationships. In creating the Rites and Feasts in The Triple Path, I consciously tried to incorporate these universal practices (through a Western lens), by examining and collecting the religious practices and traditions common across the West. The Triple Path thus includes these universal practices. I have found them very useful for developing and strengthening my spiritual sense.

What I am currently doing in my quest is to focus more specifically on spirituality and mysticism and not just on religious practices in general. I am looking for spiritual and mystic practices and writings that have widespread recognition as being valuable and important for developing spirituality. Right now, I am focusing on the writings of Christian mystics. Currently, I am studying and adapting for the Triple Path The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. After I have completed this work of adapting and re-writing Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, I will use it as the general framework to which I will add more from other sources. The next sources I plan to examine are the works of other Christian mystics. As those works yield valuable spiritual insights, practices, and exercises, I will add them to the Spiritual Exercises framework until I have created a new book tentatively titled Spiritual Exercises for the Follower of the Triple Path.

You can track the progress of this new project and read the latest Spiritual Exercises book drafts (still short and very rough) at TriplePath.org/SpiritualExercises.