The spiritual realm has its own set of senses that function there. When God originally created Adam in the garden, He breathed into them His own life; He made them a living soul. He breathed into them zoe; a part of Himself. Before they were lowered, the man (image of God), and then, after they were divided, Adam and Eve, had the spiritual senses required to have perfect communion (communication to the degree that all their needs were met just by being with Him) with the Living God.
Because we humans have a tendency to believe everything revolves around ourselves, we have transferred our ideas of our senses as we experience them today onto the senses Adam and Eve must have experienced with God in the garden. They walked with Him, spoke with Him, saw, felt, heard and probably even smelled His presence, and were heard, etc., by Him in return. Who knows what it was truly like? But we do know that after they sinned, and God’s Spirit was withdrawn from them, they no longer had the senses necessary to commune with Him on the level that truly satisfied their deepest needs.
What loneliness and desolation they must have felt! On their own for the first time in their lives (we have no idea how long they were in the garden before they sinned), they suddenly had to rely on their soulical and natural senses to try to meet their needs on all levels. God must have seemed a million miles away; even if He appeared to them, all they had left were their natural and soulical senses, poor substitutes for the spiritual senses indeed!
But they muddled through, learning to use what they had, though obviously mis-interpreting their surroundings and God’s dealings with them at every turn. And so it is today — because the senses we are often relying on are still the wrong ones.
Through Christ we became spiritual beings, and the true spiritual senses are now again available. But in order to experience them, the other senses, both soulical and natural, have to be seen as the substitutes (sometimes idols) that they are. Spirit speaks to spirit, and God did not pay that great price to commune with us over the telephone, or even Face to face, but Spirit to spirit.