Communication, Comfort, Coordination: Making Sense of the Twelve Senses

​“When a multi-sensory personality looks inside itself, it finds a multitude of different currents. It learns to distinguish between these currents and to identify the emotional, psychological, and physical effects of each. It learns which currents produce love, healing thoughts, and constructive actions.”
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Studying Steiner during Waldorf teacher training was very much a process that, up to this day, even after training was complete, and after teaching in a classroom, remains pretty mysterious. I rather like that about Waldorf. If Steiner's teachings were stated and static, then it would be awfully stale! The nature of his work is dynamic and delightfully alive, meaning, Steiner wants us to receive his work the way artists and authors receive the perceived world - self expression through inspiration. A caveat to this is that, through the process of using our imagination, inspiration, and intuition, leading to innovation - each individual, even though expressing the SELF, discovers that we are pulling from a shared truth.

This idea of a shared truth could perhaps be evidenced by the human being's experience of the world through the availability of the TWELVE SENSES.  According to Steiner in Study of Man, we are aware of only a few senses in "ordinary science" because those senses like hearing, seeing, smelling are obvious, but the others that complete the twelve are "less conspicuous".  I created the mandala of the twelve senses above to help me organize them. Steiner categorizes them in thinking, feeling, and willing. As sensory mechanisms, I grouped them as COMMUNICATION (thinking), COMFORT (feeling), and COORDINATION (willing). It makes sense to me.

To the organizing into the three bodies, Steiner says: "Neither pure thinking-cognition, nor pure feeling, nor pure willing is ever present alone: the three always work together, weave together into a unity. And this is true of the whole human being even in the physical body."

Chapter 8 of Study of Man offers a good description of the twelve senses that is digestible. I will briefly say that "other's ego" is like an awareness of another person (I am considering the using empathy) and "homeostasis" is what I call Steiner's "sense of life". Your own research may give you a different picture, so I won't expand on the twelve senses here - you are your own artist and author. 

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