Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The Sixth Sense

Everyone is aware of his or her five basic senses, seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing and tasting. What everyone is not so well aware of is their sixth sense, that sense of otherworldliness, a connection to something more and greater than their physical senses are able to perceive. This is the entrance to the world of the unseen encounter, the unheard communication, the unfelt touch of someone from the spiritual world trying to make a connection with someone in the physical body.
Everybody's heard of the sixth sense and stories surrounding it. So many movies have been made with the theme like the boy who saw dead people as in M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Sixth Sense, or the man who saw the tomorrow as in Iyyer, The Great, an old Malayalam movie. But have you ever had a hunch, an instinct or an intuition? Some experts claim that such hunches might actually foretell the future. Others aren't so sure. Here's a story I found on the net.

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Alex was cleaning his double-action, six-shot revolver in preparation for a bunting trip later in the month. In this pistol, when the trigger is pulled the hammer is cocked, the cylinder revolves, and the hammer falls on the next chamber, all in one smooth motion. For safety's sake, Alex normally kept five bullets in the revolver, with the hammer resting on the sixth, empty chamber.

Before cleaning the gun, he later said, he removed the five bullets and set them aside. When finished cleaning, he began to put the bullets back in the cylinder. When he arrived at the fifth and final bullet, he suddenly got a distinct sense of dread. It had something to do with that bullet.

Alex was bothered about the odd feeling because nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He decided to trust his gut, so he put the bullet aside and positioned the pistol's hammer as usual over the sixth chamber. The chamber next to it, which normally held the fifth bullet, was now also empty.

Two weeks later, Alex was at a hunting lodge with his fiancee and her parents. That evening, unexpectedly, a violent argument broke out between the parents. Alex tried to calm them down, but the father, in an insane rage, grabbed Alex's gun, which had been in a drawer, and pointed it at his wife.

Alex tried to intervene by jumping between the gun and the woman, but he was too late -- the trigger was already being pulled. For a horrifying split second, Alex know that he was about to get shot at point-blank range. But instead of a sudden, gruesome death, the pistol went "click." The cylinder had revolved to an empty chamber -- the very chamber that would have contained the fifth bullet if Alex had not set it aside two weeks earlier.
Had Alex actually predicted the future, or was this just an extraordinary coincidence? Does a sixth sense really exist? It’s been a hot topic with researchers for a long time.

Am not sure about it either, but I did have these strange hunches and intuitions in the past, and not just once, but quite a number of times that I remember at least. Let me share a few here.

Long back, when I was a kid, I remember telling my sister one day that she's gonna fall down and hurt herself that day. She didn't take it seriously, but it turned out that she did actually fall and hurt herself that same day. I don't know what impact that really had on my sister back then but she thought that I did "predict" the future. But that wasn't any sixth sense. It was just a coincidence. But later, years later, in October 1993 if I remember right, something happened which really shook me.

Back then I was in senior secondary school, and it was a crucial year for me. But more than the textbooks and classes, I was interested in music, movies and the stars. With my pocket money, I used to buy many magazines and books that otherwise my parents wouldn't let me have 'coz they were worried about me losing my grip on the studies. These magazines I used to keep them in my room, inside a shelf, hidden amongst the many books and papers. Then one day we all went on a 4-day trip from the school. We had all the fun and were back to our hometown by about dinnertime on the 4th day. As I said bye to my friends and walked home, I suddenly had this weird feeling inside. It was a kind of intuition, that my mother has taken my absence as a right time to clean up my room and shelf and that she had found out my little secret, the magazines hidden under the books. I was really scared that moment. It wasn't a big deal actually. It wasn't like they were some "forbidden" books. But I was still scared. I reached home and my parents were having dinner. I spoke to them for a few minutes and went to my room to freshen up. The first thing I noticed was, my room was indeed cleaned. I rushed to shelf and checked inside. Yup, my moms actually cleaned it up, and guess what; all those magazines and books that I had kept from them were missing!

Of course I had to answer a lot of questions to my mom after that but what really shook me was the fact that I actually "saw" it coming. I should have dismissed it as just a coincidence, but I couldn't. I mean, I was coming back from 4 days of fun with friends and there was no reason why I should have suddenly been worrying about my mom finding out my secret which, to begin with, wasn't as serious as having killed somebody and buried the body in my backyard.

I couldn't dismiss it that easily. I sat and let my mind wander, as usual. I tried to remember if something similar had happened any time earlier in my life. The only incident I could remember, other than my sister hurting herself, was something that took place a few years earlier when celebrating a festival with all my cousins. That day we were all having a great time bursting crackers and enjoying fireworks. In between, one of my cousins was trying to light a flowerpot - that conical stuff which shoots up fire like a fountain. It wouldn't light up even after repeated tries. So she left it. After sometime I saw her going to give it another try. I suddenly sensed danger there and told her not to do it. I told her it's gonna explode instead of just shooting the fire up. She just gave me a blunt look, which ideally would have translated to "Such a coward". I let her go. She went ahead with her intentions, sat down and tried to get it work. And then - the flowerpot exploded. It wasn't a big one, and so it sounded just like a small cracker. My cousin sat there, stunned. Everybody ran to her and asked her if she was hurt. She said no, she was just fine. Minutes later, she was missing and I found her sitting in her room, with tears in her eyes. She had indeed burnt her hand.

Could that have been a hunch that told the future, or just another coincidence? I had dismissed it back then as a case of me being more sensible than my cousin but now it seemed like it was kind of a sixth sense that was telling me what's gonna happen. I discussed these incidents with a friend of mine and he too had some stories to tell me. So I started believing that the sixth sense or whatever that is, is a part of everyone whether or not they like it. It is a normal part of the human psyche and not abnormal or reserved for special or gifted persons.

…to be continued…