The Sixth, Divine, Sense

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     I found a quote by Abram I liked, and I realized that it was something I could use to sum up a lot of my thoughts about this class:

 

The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world. The body’s actions and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting. If the body were truly a set of closed or predetermined mechanisms, it could never come into genuine contact with anything outside of itself, could never perceive anything really new, could never be genuinely startled or surprised.  

 

The sixth sense is so hard to understand, as a whole, because it encompasses experiences that aren’t able to be explained. It’s the experiences and perceptions of the world where we have no idea how to perceive it, just something happened that may or may not be within the realm of the possible. And I feel like part of this is because the body isn’t determinate, the body doesn’t know everything or is able to understand everything. The sixth sense is not surprise, as a whole, but without the ability to be surprised we wouldn’t be able to experience the sixth sense, in my opinion.

 

    But I also feel like… religion wouldn’t be as important without the sixth sense. While I feel humans will always want a feeling of understanding and place in the universe, the fact remains we will never have all the answers and a lot will fill in the blank. We consider many sixth sense experiences as divine ones, using the divine to understand and conceptualize things we can’t in other situations. The sixth sense is, in some ways, a direct link to a divine sense, one that may not always be active but will tell us things or let us experience things that are outside the world of normal.

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