Sixth Sense – In Gita Verse 3.42 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.
Krishna tells Arjuna to move from From the Five Senses to the Sixth, the soul, non-duality. It’s a journey from body to soul.
Sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are the five traditionally recognized senses. The traditional five senses are enumerated as the “five material faculties” gives us the experience of the body. Unless we experience the body through all these five senses we cannot use the senses to move towards the self. In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 3.41, blog I wrote that unless we use all senses in both directions, we cannot transcend or conquer desire, lust.
Once we experience our body through all the senses, then only we can grow in consciousness, our intangible energy. If through self-consciousness we experience our body then we can experience our senses from our subjectivity, soul, – we will start to experience our senses from inside. It starts growing in consciousness. Once it will start growing in consciousness you will have many mysterious experiences, like your body will be touched from inside, your third eyes will have a certain sensation from inside.
If we take our body as chariot and consciousness as charioteer so it will be very simple for us to understand.
Man’s body is like a chariot and man’s consciousness should be the charioteer. But it is fast asleep and the chariot goes on moving according to the horses. The five senses are five horses. They have their own different ideas and they are running in all directions; hence the misery, the chaos. It is a miracle that somehow we keep on going.
The charioteer has to be awakened, he has to take the reins in his hands. That’s what self-consciousness is: the beginning of an inner mastery, the beginning of a sense of direction, the beginning of a center in your being, a rootedness, a groundedness. Each movement has to be made consciously, only then can life become something significant, otherwise it remains accidental.
In Buddhist philosophy, ayatana or ‘sense-base’ includes the mind as a sense organ, in addition to the traditional five. This addition to the commonly acknowledged senses may arise from the psychological orientation involved in Buddhist thought and practice. The mind considered by itself is seen as the principal gateway to a different spectrum of phenomena that differ from the physical sense data. This way of viewing the human sense system indicates the importance of internal sources of sensation and perception that complements our experience of the external world.
The six senses have to be noted down. Ordinarily we talk only of five senses; the sixth is dormant. The moment you turn in, the sixth sense starts working. Hence when the Buddhists talk about six senses it amazes people – where is the sixth sense? It is not visible, it is when you close your eyes: suddenly you see a new sense penetrating in your interiority which you have never known before. It has always been there, but you have never turned inwards.
Krishna is directing us to turn inside, first experience senses through the body then experience all the senses from inside, so that you can grow in consciousness, you will experience your intangible energy, which is soul, your subjectivity, once you experiences your senses from inside, your intangible energy will touch your third eye. So from the mind experience your body – outer senses, from your intelligence – self-consciousness – experience your intangible energy – your inner energy, from that the third step is experience of self, self-realization which is higher then your mind and intelligence.
Tags: Sixth Sense
