Smells and Bells

I’m finding the 6 th  sense to be very difficult to write about as there isn't a strong definition of what it is. Also, many people view it differently or have different ideas of what it can mean or do.  But it’s such an interesting concept as its been defined by people as a sense of  intuitive power  or knowing what may happen in the future. But I find that definition to be confusing as it doesn’t give us anything real or tangible to connect too. The reading for this week by David Abrams, Jeffrey Kripal, Jon Kabat-Zinn tried to explain it, but I still found it rather difficult to comprehend. Other sense such as the classic five senses are very easy to understand, and we learn what they are at a young age. But there are other senses too such as balance, synesthesia, spatial awareness, temperature awareness and pain which are a bit more complex understanding the basics still isn’t too difficult.

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...