Sixth sense is how we understand people

“The working senses are superior to dull matter; mind is higher than the senses; intelligence is still higher than the mind; and he (the soul) is even higher than the intelligence.” – Shrimad Bhagavad Gita 3:42. The mind, although has no awareness or life of its own exhibits idiosyncrasies. It is elusive, tricky, deceptive and hard to tame, like a turbulent wind or a chariot pulled by five wild horses. That is its nature. The mind is where our developed talents, acquired knowledge, feelings and emotions are imprinted and stored, like a documentation of all our experiences in our diary or journal of life. They are always there, sometimes hidden and sometimes visible. “A mind is the friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.” - Shrimad Bhagavad Gita 6:5.

As we all now very well our mind has two modes - conscious and subconscious. Conscious mode are what we are aware at the moment, like, reading this comment, hearing a song, seeing our computer, writing articles and posts on social media. Subconscious are information that are “swimming” beneath the conscious mode - mind chatter, stream of consciousness, intuition, gut feeling, hunches, dreams, nightmares, hallucinations. These information are gathered to and from the senses via synapses, neuronal firings activated by the brain. The final destination is in the mind. The conscious mode uses the left side of the brain while the subconscious mode uses the right side.

These modes compete with each other for supremacy or they can work harmoniously. The Aha and the Eureka moments are from the subconscious mode suddenly surfacing into conscious mode. Many artists are aware of this because it is the more dominant mode for them. Who controls the mind? It is the spirit soul which is separate from the mind, from the brain and from the body. The spirit soul is the one watching our dreams and nightmares when our body is asleep; like a moviegoer is watching a movie from a distance.

It has been scientifically proved that our physical body and the brain are made of gross matter - different chemicals, atoms, molecules that makes up the trillions of cells and the billions of neurons collectively. The living human being may be likened to a desktop computer setup, the body and the brain are the physical parts that we can see and touch and manipulate, like the computer housing/tower made of metal or plastic– monitor, keyboard, mouse and all parts inside it - motherboard, hard drives, processors, video and sound cards, RAM, etc. The computer is designed to encode, print and transmit data, to capture and view photos and videos, watch our favorite movies, communicate with people worldwide via the internet and so on.

Apart from the hardware, the computer needs software that holds codes, information, program and operating system (mind and intelligence). Not only that, it also needs a person, someone to manipulate it – an operator or a programmer (consciousness). The full potential of this system is dependent on the capacity and capabilities of the four distinct components – hardware (physical body), software - codes/information (mind), operating system (intelligence) and the operator (consciousness). The computer on its own without the operator, will not work as intended, rendered useless and just an expensive piece of equipment.

After all the mind is a subtle material energy. It is the repository, a reservoir of all our experiences gathered from the five senses - hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching, including subliminal inputs and messages our mind picks up unconsciously. These experiences are transmitted to and from different regions of the brain via synapses (a communication between neurons through electrical impulses and neurotransmitters that passes via the complex network of nerves, much like a complex interchange).

Of course these experiences are collected and stored into their final destination – the mind. The mind is a distinct entity from the brain, contrary to what many neurologists and psychologists said that it is only a product of the brain. Their connection is subtle and invisible. These individual experiences are like fishes swimming freely in the boundless pond of the mind. Each one has its own idiosyncrasies and behavior like what each fish is supposed to be. They can swim on the surface, stay afloat or swim deeper and buried in the mud to hide or hibernate. Catching them is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. A lot of them are slippery, good in hiding and elusive, like when we try very hard to remember where we put our keys to no avail.

Let us have an illustration: we are reading a book while listening to music, eating potato chips, drinking orange juice. All these sensorial stimulation/experiences (conscious and unconscious) are stored in the mind – title, author, story and passages in a book, a sentence or two, snippets of music and lyrics, the color, texture, sweet/tangy taste of orange juice, the crispness and salty taste of potato chips, and everything that our subconscious mind picks up that we are not even aware and conscious of, like the scent of our room, the ambient sounds and atmosphere inside and outside, our feelings, and so on.

Remember that the senses are only limited to their given task, like eyes are only for seeing, nose for smelling, and so on. They only function when receiving the command from the mind, otherwise, they will only work subconsciously in the background. It’s like clicking a key in a computer keyboard for a specific command. In learning sports that requires finesse, complexity, fine-motor skills, it requires repetitions to be ingrained in the mind deeply and become second nature – spontaneous, intuitive and will not be forgotten easily; the same in memorization, developing habits and so on. The old adage says: “Not in sight, not in mind”, holds true. Endless practice is what sharpens the mind that trains the senses and the physical skills. Cheers!