Umwelt
Courtesy of "An Immense World" by Ed Yong
I write this with my back pressed against a plush, ergonomic cushion, my feet hugged by slippers, and my eyeballs twitching a little behind their glasses. Birds flit in my peripheral vision, landing in the hedge outside the window. Between my teeth, I can taste the sweet, grainy remnants of my daily hot chocolate. This is a partial description of my umwelt — my perceptual world. My sensory bubble.
In his incredible new book An Immense World, Ed Yong describes umwelt better: “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world” (5). Our umwelten are carefully honed, geared towards “success,” which, in the animal world, means survival. What else could “success” mean?
What goals does your umwelt help you accomplish?
Our umwelt can widen, but not indefinitely. We can’t possibly sense everything well, because our senses have a finely-honed system to filter out what doesn’t serve, and let in what we need. “We must choose to learn about the rest,” says Yong.
I’m not big on New Year’s. The holiday feels slightly obligatory, a numerical celebration that doesn’t always align with my emotional evolution. But if I were to pin down one “resolution,” one goal for 2024, it would be to expand my umwelt along psychic and spiritual lines.
This means more meditation outside, more tuning in to my breath and the natural world. It also means a more conscious “reaching out.” As a highly sensitive person (an intuitive / empath and introvert), I have a tendency to retreat when relating to the external world. I enjoy my own company, but being alone also helps me filter out sensory input. For me, it’s not just sights, sounds, smells, etc., it’s also energetic information about how people feel, what they want—whether or not they’re using words to tell me.
I’m not a hermit. I lead a fairly social life. But I need time to center in solitude. It’s ironic, but I think what I need is more perceptive information about what I’m picking up on from other people. I need to hone more meta-perception: instead of getting taken over by someone’s feelings, I need a psychic bouncer, a protective voice that can run interference and say, don’t bring this inside of you, Sasha. I’ll better conserve my energy this way, and be able to use it more consciously. It’ll allow me to be more generous and patient.
Hopefully, this will ripple outwards in bigger ways. When it comes to world events, I have two modes: filter the news out completely or let it take me over. I don’t know what it’ll look like to find a balance, but I have a feeling that it starts with considering my umwelt. What do I let in and what do I filter out? How can I respond differently to the input I receive?
I’ve always been drawn to the non-human world…trees, plants, animals, the fae. Admitting to that feels threatening and scary. What will you think of me if you know that I believe in faeries? That I’ve actually met some? As I delve further into the mysterious unknown, I’m bolstered by hard science like that in Ed Yong’s book. I agree that the umwelt concept is wonderfully expansive:
“It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity” (14-15).
My spiritual umwelt expands bit by bit every year. I can’t wait to see what I discover next.