Why You Need To Drop Your Sixth Sense.

What is your Sixth Sense?  Well, it depends who you ask.  What they may not tell you is that your happiness and well-being could depend on your ability to drop your Sixth Sense.

Film buffs will tell you the Sixth Sense is extrasensory perception.  Scientists will say we have many more senses than the famous five of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.  For example, there's your sense of balance (equilibrioception) and your sense of direction (magnetoception).

But the Sixth Sense I am referring to is one we don't even perceive as a sense.  Yet we have over-developed it to such an extent that it has taken over our lives.  It has become the  source of our knowing, the narrator of our lives, the judging voice, the inner critic, the doubter.  It has given birth to the capricious beast of the monkey mind - that unsettled, distracted, worrisome creature that is often in the driving seat of our lives. 

According to Buddhist tradition the Sixth Sense is thinking.  But what was supposed to be a great servant has become a lousy master.  While our five senses receive information about the world around us, we have given the thinking mind an elevated status which has become the dominant source of our awareness.  It has also taken on the role of managing our ego-identity - a kind of deluded awareness of who we think we are.

'Reliance on conceptual knowing can create a tremendous amount of suffering because it looks only to itself for answers.  This perpetual loop of self-referential thinking is its own prison.' - Loch Kelly, psychotherapist.

 So how do we escape this prison? Do we simply Zen out?  Discard our rational engagement with the world?  Avoid conceptual thinking, and medicate or meditate ourselves into oblivion?  Of course not!

It's not about stopping thought but about putting it in its place, in the background, where we can draw on it for functional discernment as and when we need it.

The solution is to think from a different space.  To access a part of the mind that draws on creative solutions to our perceived problems.  To engage with a way of seeing and understanding beyond our capabilities to ‘work things out’ by thinking.  In essence, to know from the unknown.

Instead of thinking of the Sixth Sense as extrasensory perception, we can engage it as a kind of intra-sensory perception that connects you to an infinite source of intuitive intelligence.  In our busy lives we think we need more space and time to think.  But it is accessing the S P A C E within you that frees your mind.

Getting 'out of your mind' is the first step in allowing your intuitive intelligence to flourish, which is the sense we want to develop to expand our knowledge, our experience and to flourish as creative individuals.

We talk about letting go of thoughts and feelings, and even assumptions and beliefs, but what if you could drop the whole darn thing - the over-thinking mind?   

Who would you be without that thought?  Yes, that one! What remains when there are no problems to solve? Releasing yourself from the controlling aspects of your over-thinking mind is one of the most liberating and creative things you can do.

My own personal experiences of re-centring the mind is that there are different techniques that suit different people.  When we find our own way to unhook the mind, it can release us from our attachment to stress and anxiety, and even deeply felt emotions.

Letting go of what is not true, creates the S P A C E  to surrender to what is true.

This becomes our new baseline for living.  We can live from a place that is emotionally sensitive and aware, instead of being wounded or reactive.  When we are in this state of creative flow, we can go beyond thinking and use thinking as needed.

 Discover how to liberate your mind at The Freedom Retreat, 20-22 Sept 2019.

By Sara Mallett — Freedom Coach | Retreat Leader

(Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash)