Do You Believe in the Sixth Sense?

The sixth sense, or as some call it, psychic ability, is our ability to perceive the subtle-dimension or the unseen world of angels, ghosts, Heaven, fairies, astral projection, etc. It

also includes our ability to understand the subtle cause and effect relationship behind many events, which is beyond the regular comprehension of the “normal” human brain. This idea is brought up by Jeffrey Kripal in, “Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred”. In a society today that taps into our fears of our sixth sense and the paranormal, from horror movies, to haunted houses, paranormal investigator TV shows, the whole thing seems more like a marketing gimmick than a real thing. As a person heavily driven by neuroscience and psychology, sometimes I catch myself trying to biologically reason away experiences of the paranormal, but in the end I come back to my gut feeling that they cannot be rationally explained. As a very spiritual person I tend to lean away from science in these situations. Being raised in the infamous, “Bridgewater Triangle” stories of the paranormal have been fed to me, even in school, growing up.(Google it if you want a good scare) So, the sixth sense has always been a factor in my life. I was told by my parents I had my first experience when I was less than two years old. As we saw in our sixth sense presentation, it is believed children are more in tune with their sixth sense. Anyways, my mother came in to check on me after my nap and found me standing up in my crib smiling and staring off into the distance. When she asked me what I was doing I proceeded to tell her that my grandmother was with me and she was touching a mole on my hand and talking to me. Now this would seem not that unusual, but my grandmother had been dead for about twenty years, from a death of melanoma. She had a mole that was not removed in time and skin cancer quickly overtook her. At this age I was too young to know any of this, my parents never even told me I had a grandparent who had passed and it was a topic in my home that was rarely discussed. Therefore the power of suggestion could not have played a part here, I also was too young to know anything about the workings of skin cancer. So growing up hearing this story be told to me by my freaked out parents always left me thinking about a sixth sense being real. I have been to tarot card readers, mediums, and explored haunted places and have had encounters that I cannot explain. Although one of my favorite professors, Rolf Nelson, came into class and logically explained away the idea of the paranormal with neuroscience, I am still inclined to disagree. Throughout history prophets and the sixth sense have played a part of not just religion, but most cultures. Whether or not a person chooses to believe is up to them, but I have the feeling we all have that sixth sense within us, some are more in tuned with it than others. So the next time something out of the ordinary happens, instead of just writing it off, tap into your sixth sense and see what happens.