Somatic-Visual Coupling: A Key to Understanding the Fundamentals of Human Consciousness
Updated: 6 hours ago
This article was originally posted as a contribution to the third Qualia Research Institute psychophysics retreat, which took place from May to June 2026 in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Please visit heart-qri.org for more consciousness posts.
All beings that see can feel, but not all beings that feel can see
Have you ever noticed that with a high degree of accuracy, you know what it would feel like to lick any surface you look at? And I mean just by looking, not actually touching. No? Well, give it a try, now. Look at the nearest table, wall, or whatever object to you and imagine licking it. You have an immediate sense of the felt texture of it, don't you?
This exercise is an easy way to start making the connection that everything you look at (at least can) corresponds with somatic sensations (a.k.a. bodily sensations). And it’s not just with your tongue that you can start becoming more aware of this connection between the visual and somatic. Try imagining feeling any object you look at with your index finger (again, without actually touching).
Now, elbow.
Now, forehead.
Big toe.
Notice how with this exercise you can start to lightly feel those objects when looking at them. Even if you think they are just ‘phantom sensations’, there is still, nonetheless, an experience of feeling. And though they may be just very faint feelings, they are impressing your experience and so are real feelings.
Once we’ve begun to make this connection, we actually open a door to an extremely crucial insight into the nature of the construction of our consciousness; because what if I told you that regardless of whether you are doing this exercise or specifically aware of it or not, somatic-visual coupling is always occurring so long as you are seeing? And in fact, somatic feeling may actually be an essential component of conscious seeing - if not all of (human) consciousness itself.
Basically, consciousness relies on sense modalities and more specifically seeing seems to rely on somatic feeling, but somatic feeling doesn’t rely on seeing in the same way. Although, often, when one goes to feel a particular part of the body a faint mental image of that body part may combine with that sensation, this definitely doesn’t always happen. There is an asymmetric relationship between the senses, in that somatic feeling can nowhere near as easily be removed from seeing itself, whereas visual binding can be removed from somatic feeling itself. This means somatic feeling is in some way a more fundamental aspect of (human) consciousness.
Consider: there are humans who cannot see and humans who cannot hear, smell or taste, but there are no (conscious) humans who cannot somatically feel, at all.*
*Even people with congenital analgesia (the inability to feel pain) still feel pressure.
Let’s explore this further.
The Fully Immersive Synesthetic Sensorium
You see (pun intended), we don’t just see the world "out there", removed from it, as an independent body with a single perspective point; we are fully immersed in a synesthetic sensorium. Our senses coalesce in a way that the felt bodymind is the environment - not apart from the environment, not in the environment, not before, next to, etc, etc… but is the environment.
While the sense of the body-schema (that sense of the outline and size of your body and what we attribute to sensing with proprioception) is only part of your full conscious experience, the somatic sensing aspects of experience are not contained only within the body-schema. There is somatic feeling throughout the 3D experience space, not just within the outlined sense of the body. This becomes clearer in the more defabricated, formless jhana states (e.g. 'the realm of boundless space' and 'the realm of boundless consciousness'), where the sense of the body-schema disappears and yet there is still a vast space of somatic sensations.
As the beginning exercise reveals, objects in the visual field correlate with sensations in the somatic field. However, even once this connection is recognised, initially it may still seem like sights happen “over there” (out in the environment) and sensations happen “over here” (within the body-schema); that although they are causally connected, they are still separated in experience space. But upon more examination, it becomes clearer that the apparent separation of the sense modalities is constructed slightly later in time, along the generative hierarchy of perception.
If we can consciously perceive faster (by increasing our noticings per second and sensory clarity) and/or not have such a reified body-schema, then the seeming spatial separation of a visual phenomenon from a somatic phenomenon is much less obvious. In fact, they seem to almost immediately co-arise together (in the same experiential location). On the other hand, the body-schema is a much more complex construction of consciousness, binding multiple inputs, over a period of time and designating them structured locations, which, when reified, leads to the sense of the separation of the two sense modalities. This obfuscates the initial somatic-visual coupling. But before any sense of a body-schema is formed, the sense of distance and separation between “sights over there” and “sensations over here” is not apparent.
The formless jhanas (states without a body-schema) can lend insight into this, but tend not to be very visual experiences. However, strong psychedelic experiences and those found during intensive fire kasina practice can shoot someone into very 'unbodied states' but still with strong visual components.
Psychedelic Wavefronts
From our analysis of basic visual phenomena, as composed of waves, sometimes interfering with one another to create boundaries - which might be the basic building blocks of phenomenally constructing objects of perception - the visual formations of edges seem to require subtle binding with the somatic field. That is, the impression of an edge of some kind in the visual screen might actually rely on a slight somatic tension occurring concurrently. So when you look at the side of a table, recognition of that edge may adhere to very subtle and dynamic vascular activation.
(These phenomenological insights make me all the more interested in the line of inquiry Mike Johnson is pursuing with his hypothesis of vasocomputation.)
A very salient example for me of catching real-time somatic-visual coupling was during the use of 5-MeO-DMT, at the QRI HEART Canada retreat in 2023. Not long after inhalation, I could visually perceive a bunch of white diamonds. Why diamonds though? Well, it became clear that the origin of the diamond came from the sense of feeling the angle of my right cheek, which was then being visually represented as a white curve. Now, 5-MeO can tend to mirror things in the horizontal and vertical planes (and fractalise). So, if you take a curved line, copy and mirror it twice, you get a diamond! A clear example of somatic sensations being intrinsic to visuals.
Check out Scry’s psychedelic animations. Notice how you can FEEL the valence of them!
QRI president, Andrés Gomez Emilsson, makes a rather high-rez comment on this:
"On high dose DMT you experience very non-linear waves in surfaces whose orientation, frequency, and intensity seem to be controlled/coupled/modulated by somatic sensations which themselves are coupled to the vascular system and the heart and sense of mind. These waves are kind of somatic displacements that get recorded and aggregated, with DMT jittering where your somatic sensations feel and on top of that adds a strong tracer effect. And when the crystals align the body aligns too! Heart and mind and body and visual coherence tends to happen with symmetry and flow-maximizing configurations. Whereas the waves on 5-MeO-DMT are apparently of a different class entirely. Essentially what Emil characterized, which doesn't have a clear analogous phenomena we encounter in daily life, but has crips characteristics. It doesn't build up into these insane crystals of body, but rather dissolves the body and visual coupling while adding intense low frequency base that tries to get all sensations aligned with each other, often with overwhelming force (where it doesn't feel like a negotiation, but rather a takeover)."
Fire Kasina & The Visual Screen
Another contributing area of experience to this idea of somatic-visual coupling is fire kasina practice.
During fire kasina (FK) retreats - which, for most, is a very visually focused meditation practice - practitioners typically go through a series of progressive stages in which they witness the formation of simple to more sophisticated visuals in their experience. There is much about doing the practice which can be similar to having a psychedelic experience endogenously.
Something in particular I noticed while doing FK was how attention wanted to naturally spend time on somatic sensations, despite best efforts to focus on the visual nimitta (the main concentration object of FK). At times, attention would be strongly pulled off of vision during the onboarding phase of the retreat (typically the first week or so). This is a process people may call ‘the murk’, because suddenly they find it very hard, to impossible, to perceive anything complex in the visual screen - hence the name, as things seem “murky”.
Without this recognition of where attention has gone (from focus on seeing to feeling), people often report an added frustration and confusion about not being able to clearly perceive anything at all. In my case at least, it was clear that experience needed to go dark and process some things in the body and then reconfigure its relationship with vision, after which I could more effortlessly pay attention to the visual nimitta; and this actually seemed very important for the practice, rather than a deviation. My friend, Teodora (who is a much more experienced FK practitioner than me), seems to agree.
I postulate that reconfiguring the relationship of the somatic and visual fields is an essential component for the formation of certain visuals in consciousness. If they are not synchronised in particular ways then it’s exceedingly hard to visually perceive anything (eyes closed). After a FK retreat it became obvious that somatic sensations are what provide the texture mapping and sense of depth to the visual screen. Whereas, when somatic sensations and visual percepts are more decoupled, the world looks flatter - and this is true eyes open as well.
In fact, for me, a sign of the classic ‘breakthrough’, out of the onboarding phase, into the more equanimous periods of FK (which led to a lot more rainbow-esque luminosity in the visual screen), is marked by my consciousness establishing a broad, equal weighting and assimilation among visual-somatic coupling. Before this period, the visual screen isn’t equally illuminated and clear, but contains dark, clumpy patches, where gross somatic contractions feel glued to it.
For example, there may be a tension in the left side of my neck and this is reflected in the visual screen by an associated area which I can’t see into, and distorts any visual phenomena that run into it. But then by going through a process of meditating for 10+ hours a day, for a week, there is a distinctive phase shift that occurs where the whole visual screen opens up, becomes much easier to perceive and the whole somatic field feels much more symmetrically distributed.
Also the relationship between seeing and feeling was really revealed during FK, as I learnt to generate objects on the visual screen. Instead of trying to just force them there through sheer will, it proved to be more effective to feel and trace lines and shapes on my body-map somewhere, and then subsequently they would show up on the visual screen (depending on where that region of the somatic field was respectively coupled to the visual screen).
Perceptual Phase Changes of Awakening
A few years ago, I drew a series of images that mark some prevalently reported descriptions of types of awakening, which result in drastic changes to sense of self, world and other. Approaching them with an understanding as a process of reconfiguring one's somatic-visual coupling dynamics can help illuminate why the main changes happen at each stage of awakening as they do.
Largely speaking, somatic sensations are afforded high verisimilitude (seeming realness) compared to other sense percepts, alone. If you can touch something it seems very real, compared to if you can only see it (e.g. a hologram). There does seem to be a ranking system between the senses among a number of other variables (like intensity and persistency) in how we judge things to be more real than other things - which is a very interesting conversation, I won't go into here.
I mention this though because our sense of self and most real seeming features of reality are highly correlated with our densest and/or most consistent, conscious sensations (for most it's a central knot in experience). As we investigate experience and realise more the emptiness of phenomena, we are deobjectifying, or deriefying, more of our sense of reality, which feels like loosening an overall grip (attachment) of somatic binding with things. And as people progressively release subtler and subtler somatic tensions in their awareness, this leads to radically different ways of perceiving reality (self, world and other).
In my initial drawings, the areas in blue represent what in experience one feels identified with. This correlates well with blue being the most strongly somatically felt aspects of our experience, which doesn't always mean the densest or tensest, as persistency plays a role too (e.g. identification with the awareness sensations of The Witness are less constricted then other areas of experience, but are very consistent across time and circumstances).
Let's go through the stages in turn:
1) Standard Perception is when there is such gross head and body somatic contractions that ourselves and the world seem very ossified. The somatic-visual coupling is very stodgy, leading not just to a very reified world and self, but to myopic perception and less broadened awareness.
2) The Witness is when a big area of somatic contraction (normally in the back section of one's head and body) is released, which reveals all this extra space of awareness. The respective somatic sensations are now decoupled from the rest of everything, hence people are tempted to talk about a difference between the world of form and the formless at this stage. Really, The Witness represents an area of somatic sensation which the person doesn't yet have the sensory clarity to realise are somatic sensations, just way less dense. In large part, this is because those somatic sensations are now decoupled from visual representation, so one struggles "to see" what they are.
3) Big Mind is when a more equal weighting across the experience space is achieved (having released more contractions, now in the front half of the face and body), which merges the previously separate formless awareness of The Witness with 'the world of form'. This re-introduces more somatic-visual coupling, but less rigidly as Standard Perception. So a new more harmonised configuration of somatic (awareness)-visual (world of form) coupling is integrated. And because the field is more integrated overall, the oneness quality of reality becomes more obvious. However, it still has this central knot.
4) Not Self is an even more refined version of the overall somatic field (having released more gross contractions than Big mind) and is with less distorted somatic-visual coupling; because it is a period of reorientation towards experience that is working on decoupling somatic binds, as it's primary focus is on 'nothingness', which is an extremely fine aspect of experience. Again, it still has a central knot. And remember when I wrote: "... somatic sensations are what provide the texture mapping and sense of depth to the visual screen. Whereas, when somatic sensations and visual percepts are more decoupled, the world looks flatter - and this is true eyes open as well."? Well, because the Not Self stage is a decoupling stage this is a period when the world can seem less real (hence the focus on 'the void' at this stage).
5) No Self and No Centre has dissolved that central knot (responsible for the duality of the subject-object split in experience). Now the distributed somatic-visual coupling is so much clearer, ubiquitous and dynamic; as attention doesn't need to travel through experience space, so connections across experience can be made so much more easily.
***** These pictures should be understood as incredibly simplistic illustrations and as more perfect than human reality. Don't get it wrong, field topology dynamics are high-dimensional and complicated, and even those with persistent, non-dual, centreless awareness still have lots of distortions and uneven densities in their field(s).
So, we see a process of progressively refining somatic-visual coupling through a sequence of: 1) coupled → 2) decoupling → 3) recoupling → 4) decoupling → 5) recoupling
Spelled out: Standard Perception starts with a lot of somatic-visual coupling, then The Witness stage is more about decoupling, and then Big Mind recoupling with more evenness, then Not-Self back to decoupling again, and then No Self and No Centre recoupling again for even greater harmony - and this can continue in subtler ways to achieve even less attachment/contraction/suffering.
↓ I highly recommend Cube Flipper's article as a companion piece to this. ↓
Emotions, vibes, valence and other ways of somatic-sensing
Lastly, another tell of the inherent connection between vision and somatic feeling is that anything you look at makes you emotionally feel something: be it initial judgements of liking, or disliking, or even indifference (which does have an emotional tone to it, though subtle). Everything we see has an unavoidable aesthetic (a vibe). For those yet to notice, emotions/vibes/moods are encoded in somatic sensations; and remember, those sensations don’t just have to be phenomenologically represented within the body-schema, but can be in the larger atmosphere of experience.
For instance, when you walk into a room, it has a vibe to it. The specifics of the feelings associated with any room will be more or less unique to each person, but that vibe is feeling/somatic based. Architectural and home decorating feng shui principles are about tuning into this feature of our experience and working with it to create more energetically harmonious spaces. #somaticvisualcoupling
Why do so many spiritual circles talk about the ‘subtle body’, the ‘astral body’, the ‘light body’, the ‘bodymind’, etc., etc.? Why is it always a ‘body’? Of course, if you want to know anyone’s reasoning for their word choices, best ask them; but to me these seem increasingly rather apt descriptions. As we explore our consciousness more and more, we can find how extensively and exceedingly somatic sensations are felt throughout experience. And of course, there isn’t just somatic-visual coupling, but also somatic-auditory coupling; while somatic-olfactory (smelling) and somatic-gustatory (tasting) coupling is so evident, even to non-phenomenologists, that pointing out the connection between these senses is nothing shocking.
Interestingly, in French the verb sentir is used both to mean ‘to smell’ and ‘to feel’ (or more generally ‘to sense/perceive’), which raises questions about how objective or subjective our categorical distinctions between the senses are. Consider: different languages draw different distinguishing boundaries between colours that actually seem to influence people's phenomenology. Could something analogous be true of the senses? Might the categories we call ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘touching’, ‘smelling’, and ‘tasting’ be, at least in part (not unbounded by biology), linguistic or conceptual divisions imposed upon a more continuous field of sensory experience? Many come down on it all being one sense field of consciousness anyway; but even then, consciousness also seems to elude a final quantification, including oneness. #nonduality
For the sake of awakening and becoming a freer being, making the somatic connections to thoughts, to feelings, to instincts etc. helps one locate and read their signals in a more tangible way, aiding in untangling the messy knots of our karma. What's more, all suffering has somatic contraction as a feature of it. Suffering isn't in the outer sights and sounds, or thoughts (inner sights and sounds) themselves, those only cause suffering in how they affect somatic contractions. This is why two people can see, hear, or think the same thing, but for only one of them does it significantly diminish their wellbeing, while the other's remains uncompromised. In that case, the respective stimuli are causing different somatic coupling activation in them.
So, because an essential component of suffering is somatic contraction, then noticing how our thoughts and feelings correspond with somatic contractions makes it so much more obvious where to focus our attention in order to process and release them. Otherwise, without this somatic coupling pointed out, it's much easier for people to flounder for long periods of time not knowing how to locate the source of their suffering; with common traps being: externalising it, desensitised and oblivious to it, or getting too caught up in its respective semantic content. Come back to feeling.
Conclusion
Summing-up, I’ve argued that somatic sensations are there to be found much further out than our typical body-schema lets on. They are in the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of our experience. Somatic sensations are the things of emotions. They are even in our thoughts and memories, sense of self and sense of awareness itself. Why do most (western) people report hearing their thoughts in their head? Because when thoughts arise, so do subtle patterns of somatic sensations in the head. What is the thing you are referring to as pure, formless awareness? I promise you, it’s some hard to locate, defuse somatic sensations uncoupled from the other senses.
And where the other senses occur, I suspect there is always some somatic coupling happening, so long as there is any definition, though the richness and fixity of that coupling can vary wildly.
Again, once you start really making this connection between somatic-visual coupling, and also somatic-auditory coupling etc., then it can begin to dawn on you just how entrenched somatic sensations are to conscious experience; that being conscious (at least as a human) is to feel.
So go explore your experience yourself, and find what you can’t feel!
Thank you for reading.
