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Sixth Sense: What it is all about?
I still remember the night of August 8, 2002. It was my cousin’s seventh birthday party and all the family members were gathered at my aunt’s place to celebrate the child’s big day. After the party, when the guests went back to their homes and only close relatives stayed there, my cousins turned the music on and started dancing. I have always hated dances since my childhood, yet my cousins insisted that I join them. My aunt’s daughter took my hand into hers and we started dancing on one of the hit numbers. A few minutes later, I whispered into her ear, “Uzma, I’m feeling uncomfortable; I think something is going to happen, something unexpected”. Saying this I freed my hand from hers and ran upstairs to the bedroom. My heart was beating badly and I felt very restless. The next day, our Grandpa died.
At another time, I went to my university deliberately leaving my cellphone at home telling my brother that I feel I’ll get some bad news through my cellphone that day. On my return home, my brother told me that he received a call on my cell from my uncle informing about the death of our beloved aunt.
Are these just coincidences or can I really predict the future? Everybody at sometime in his life must have experienced having a hunch, an instinct or an intuition. We all are aware of our five basic senses — touch, sound, sight, taste and smell. But there exists a sixth sense too, which makes us feel that something is going to happen, which makes us sense a change before seeing it. No one can give a logical reason to why it happens or from where does the intuition come from. But the fact is that it exists and is experienced by people in their daily lives.
How does it function?
There are several possible explanations for why such "intuitive hunches" sometimes play out. One explanation says that we always remain thinking and sorting out conclusions about certain things in our subconscious, but that these register only as hunches to our conscious mind.
A second possibility is that for each unusual coincidence we remember, we forget all the times we had a hunch and it didn't pan out. One other possibility is that we modify our memories for our own convenience, creating a connection where it may not have existed. And so on. Such explanations probably account for many intuitive hunches. But they don't explain them all.
Studies suggest that we have ways of gaining information that bypass the ordinary senses. The sixth sense and similar terms like “second sight” and “extra-sensory perception (ESP)” refer to perceptual experiences that surpass the usual boundaries of space and time. In physiological terms, the centre of intuition is located on the right side of the brain. Sixth sense is a sense of otherworldliness, a connection between the physical and the spiritual world. We get intuitions while doing our routine work as well as in dreams.
Some time back, I dreamt someone screaming in the dark, “Ahmed, Ahmed, save yourself”. I felt in my dream that Ahmed was the younger brother of one of my new friends who never told me about her family and siblings. Later on, I asked my friend if she had a brother named Ahmed. And I was at my wit's end when she said that her younger brother’s name was Ahmed. This means that we connect to the spiritual world while sleeping too through our dreams and that sometimes we get a hunch about even those things about which we never had an idea before.
Sixth sense in special people
As compared to normal human beings, special or gifted people possess a higher level of sixth sense. It is just like some people possess a better or weaker vision or sense of hearing than others. There lives a dumb young man in our locality who usually remains calm and quiet but people have seen him yelling and shouting before the earthquake of October 8, 2005, in which several of his maternal family members died. Regardless of the level of sixth sense one possesses, its presence is found in almost every human being. It’s a part of human psyche and is not only reserved for special or gifted people.
Sixth sense in animals
Some researchers and psychologists believe that animals too possess the sixth sense or “mind sight” as they call it, others relate it to biology and some others take it just as superstitions. There is a common belief among people in our part of the world that when a cat cries badly, a death happens nearby or that the arrival of some guests is expected if a crow crows on your home’s wall. We usually take them as superstitions but this phenomenon might have its root in sixth sense.
It has been reported that animals start behaving strangely before natural disasters in different parts of the world. One of the area devastated by the Tsunami of December 2004 (that struck large areas of Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka) was an animal reserve at Yala in Sri Lanka with monkeys, leopards, buffalo, elephants and 130 species of birds. But after the Tsunami and the unfortunate death of many tourists, virtually no animal carcasses were found. How did the animals escape through the tidal wave? Before Tsunami struck, animals started behaving unexpectedly. Some observations were that elephants screamed and ran to higher ground. A dog refused to go for its beachside walk. And zoo animals remained in their shelters. In September 2003, a doctor in Japan claimed that he could predict earthquakes when the behaviour of dogs became erratic and anxious.
These incidents seem quite unbelievable, but are real.
After years of being put down by those preoccupied with facts and science, sixth sense is now thought of as an older, wiser and vital part of our intelligence. Even though all of us don't use this "wisdom that comes from within," each of us has some ability to unconsciously perceive information that is not obvious to the physical senses. This gut feeling can warn us when something is not right or when something is very right. Where all the five senses end up working, sixth sense works. It is beyond imagination and it is God gifted and cannot be acquired through some special efforts.
Dear readers, if you too possess a sixth sense, don’t feel that it’s something abnormal or extra-ordinary or that it will do something destructive to you and don’t be afraid of it. It’s an inborn ability of communicating with the spiritual world from where all of us came and where we all have to go, giving up our physical identities. So, next time when you have a hunch, know that your sixth sense is indicating something to you!
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