The Sixth Sense - Authors of the Impossible

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Potentials for the Sixth Sense

By: Bridget Dresser


 The “magnetism” described by Jeffrey J. Kripal is something I’ve been experiencing my whole life, but not in the sense that I see UFOs. Although I would like to add that my parents think I saw ghosts as a baby because I would smile and giggle at the ceiling like I would when I was looking at a real person. Also, semi-unrelated, but my dad thought he heard my uncle singing to my cousin on the baby monitor one time, and when he went to check, there was no one there, but she was still giggling and smiling, and he thinks it was our grandpa singing to her. 

 Regardless of whether the sixth sense is magnetism, awareness of supernatural entities, or any number of other possibilities, the fact remains that people still feel it, despite not having an explanation yet. I feel it and connect with it in the sense that I’ve felt a kind of seductive pull to nature, and the chemistry of the universe that I didn’t know my body was capable of. It’s beyond the feeling of gravity making me feel heavy, or even the exhilarating feeling of falling, and your stomach dropping. Something feels what I can only describe to be other when I’m by myself in the woods, or in a place that’s supposedly haunted, or when things go perfectly right in a really on-the-nose way. I feel a kind of sleepy but electrifying peace that freaks me out and then puts me at ease as immediately as I freaked out.  

Just because something hasn’t been explained by science yet, doesn’t mean that it’s inherently mystical, but it also doesn’t mean that it’s not real either. Science does have the potential to explain everything about the universe, but it is also our still imperfect way of understanding the world around us that we experience subjectively through imperfectly processed sensory data. As we discussed in class, there are things humans can’t experience in the way they “really” are; all of our sensory input is our brain making the most sense of an environment for our human survival functionality. The experience of the sixth sense could just be humans getting a glimpse of other senses outside of our known conception of reality that our brain has no way of processing. It could also be that humans are experiencing flickers of different times thanks to our linear perception of time, despite it being a multi-dimensional concept. We could also be experiencing ripples in our atoms or general anatomy because of our inherently interconnected chemistry with the universe. The reality is that we don’t know yet, and we seem to be at least several decades away from finding anything resembling an explanation for these phenomena. Indulging in the whimsical and sometimes scary realm of possibilities, all we can do to offer any type of explanation for what we experience but can’t measure, just like all our ancestors before us.  

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