Sixth sense

“ It is said that we are possibly in want of a sixth sense belonging to our nature, by means of which our knowledge would be greatly augmented. This sense is most likely in some other world, where one of our five is wanting. ”

“ The world would lose tremendously should all the truth gathered through aids to the senses be removed.
Man himself, through what may be called, for want of a better name, the sixth sense, may become a great aid to his own direct senses. ”

“ This newly recognised sense, “the sixth sense,” not only answers the purpose of sight and hearing, but transcends all senses in vividness and power. Materialists, no longer able to ignore the phenomena of somnambulism and trance, and compelled to admit man’s avenues of knowledge in this life were not confined to the recognised five senses, are good enough to give him a “sixth sense,” even while they deny him a soul. In the same way, no longer able to deny the existence of mesmerism, they now admit it to consideration—re-baptised [17] as hypnotism. ”

“ In the light of past discoveries it seems highly improbable that so important a physiological gift as a sixth sense could come to us suddenly and mysteriously. This is not the manner in which Nature works. ”

“ But although our reason may reach into the mysteries of life, there is still a higher stage, actual first-hand knowledge. As a matter of fact the foregoing propositions are capable of verification by each one, for we all have a sixth sense latent in our being, which will sometime enable us to view the spiritual world179 with the same distinctness as that with which we see the temporal. This sixth sense will be developed by all in the course of evolution, and there are certain means whereby it may be developed now by all who care to take the necessary time and trouble to do so. ”

“ For it is impossible to imagine that the relation of senses and sense-objects should be a different one in different creations, so {215} that, for instance, in some new creation a sixth sense and a corresponding sixth sense-object should manifest themselves. ”

“ They seek to discover whether they cannot explain the facts better or as well, or approximately as well, by the traditional views. And that, too, is justified. But at times some extremely artless animadversions are heard that almost nonplus us. "If a sixth sense existed it could not fail to have been discovered thousands of years ago." ”

“ It is at once a super-sense giving us a bird’s-eye view of the universe which is not permitted at close quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before our attention the contents hidden beneath the surface of things. There are not two worlds, objective and subjective respectively, but two aspects of one world—things as they are in their absolute and ultimate being, and things as they are relatively or as apprehended by our cognitive powers. ”

“ And had mankind been made but with four senses, the qualities then which are the objects of the fifth sense had been as far from our notice, imagination, and conception, as now any belonging to a sixth, seventh, or eighth sense can possibly be;—which, whether yet some other creatures, in some other parts of this vast and stupendous universe, may not have, will be a great presumption to deny. ”

“ The Mystic Sense can and does operate when the rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, and by its operation prepares new material for pure reason to consider.
There is no specifically intellectual organ. It is the whole man which apprehends knowledge just as it is the whole man and not an exclusively religious part of him, which apprehends and is apprehended by eternities and infinities. It is popularly supposed that science and mathematics [53] call for the exercise of one set of faculties, and philosophy and religion another. ”

“ The sixth factor is the mind, which rules and guides the senses, and draws deductions from their impressions when collected and arranged. The seventh factor is the atma, which is the observer of the generalization which the mind makes from the impressions of the senses. It is the self, the sense of "I," in us, behind which it is impossible to go, either in logic or in observation. ”

“ So important a thing is it, not only that we should be able to create hypotheses, but also that our hypotheses should be sound, that we must furnish our Mystic Sense with the same safeguards and stimulus that we afford our physical senses. ”

“ The mind includes the Mystic Sense in somewhat a similar way to the manner in which the body includes the physical senses. But the Mystic Sense can be, indeed must be, considered as a distinct faculty having a peculiar function in the formation of that product of the mind called thought, which is “the effort to win over facts to ideas, or to adjust ideas to facts.” ”

“ A deliberate and persistent use of the Mystic Sense without respect for the objective would be subversive [27] of all progress and a reversion to chaos. “The progress of thought consists in gradually separating the series of objective and universally valid, from that of subjective experiences. In the measure that their confusion prevails, man is, to all intents and purposes, mad; and it is this note of insanity that characterizes medicine and religion in their early stages. ”

“ The bodily senses alone can get at the full content, the deep inside of nothing, no matter how pronounced its objectivity, “The truly real is a thing that has an inside.” [3] The more pronounced or attractive the external [24] substance and form of a material object and the closer we are to it, the greater the difficulty for the average character to gain cognition of its spiritual essence. ”

“ The organic differences in the bodily senses, then, find a close unity in functional similarity, all the sensory nerves grouping themselves under the head of touch. The Mystic Sense, likewise, first comes to our attention as a simple faculty of perception by which we gain cognition of that department of reality that transcends bodily touch and its sub-divisions, but study reveals that its unity is ordered complexity, [16] as in the case of all developed endowments. Broadly speaking it is the sense which relates man to the spiritual or psychic aspect of reality. ”

“ This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,—the sense of the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contingent ”

“ And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and extension which we call ourselves, there are corresponding modifications under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of God, each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite—nevertheless, we neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of sensible experience. ”

“ Can we now see how the vague gross feelings of the animal sort might turn into the well-defined particular ideas of the human sort, by the aid of a multitude of delicate associations?
It seems to be a general law of mind that any mental element which occurs with a number of different mental elements, appears that is in a number of different combinations, tends to thereby acquire an independent life of its own. We show children six lines, six dots, six peas, six pieces of paper, etc., and thus create the definite feeling of sixness. ”

“ THE SENSES AND LANGUAGE
Why is it that mankind have settled down on the fact that man has five senses, no more, no less? The wise say the spiritual man has two more, making seven. Now, what is a sense? ”

“ The first truth, then, that psychology arrives at, is the internal discord within our fourfold and divided consciousness. Having commenced with a slight characteristic sketch of this fact, I have attempted to give a further and deeper grounding, and to invest it with a higher and profounder significance. To this first perception we appended, as the second member in the series of our philosophical investigation, the idea of a triplicity of consciousness as restored to its perfect and living action. According to this view, the simple division of the mind is into spirit, soul, and sense. ”

“ It is said that in cases where tendencies of a man's mind are entirely material, and all spiritual aspirations and thoughts were altogether absent from his mind, the seventh principle leaves him either before or at the time of death, and the sixth principle disappears with it. Here, the very proposition that the tendencies of the particular individual's mind are entirely material, involves the assertion that there is no spiritual intelligence or spiritual Ego in him. ”

“ It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; ”

“ The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. ”

“ A representative judgment of perception, like that of sensation, has five elements. Instead of the consciousness of the sense impression we have the consciousness of a concept brought about by an act of choice arising from association or exercise of the will. ”

“ Now, to render in any degree complete that characteristic of the human mind which it has been our object or endeavor in the previous Lectures to sketch in detail, we were obliged to take in also those higher elements which by many are called in question, and by some positively denied to exist. And herein lay the natural ground and the occasion for our introducing the mention of them, at least as facts of consciousness generally acknowledged by the common-sense of mankind. ”

“ Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis, by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and elaboration of these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by the examples of great spiritual attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to [115] the soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. ”

“ The fourth, to bear reproaches with joy. The fifth, to converse willingly with men of inferior condition, and be so far from thinking ourselves better than they, as rather to think ourselves the most miserable of all men, and the chief of sinners. The sixth is, to submit readily and cheerfully, not only to our superiors, but even to the least and meanest. ”

“ The conception may be made clear by remembering that the seventh principle is the source of energy, while the sixth principle is merely the energy radiated by the seventh. The states of existence of man may be divided into three which can be again divided into seven. ”

“ All which you have explained where it says:
"When will the bright spark of the visual ray
Darting, spring through each veiling obstacle."
But let us return. The sixth, represented in the following, is caused only by the imbecility and unreality of the body, which is in continual motion, mutation, and change, the operations of which must follow the condition of its faculty, the which is a result of the condition of its nature and being. ”

“ Chapter VIII. Having thus summarily recounted whatever has been said upon the Vital Principle, let us repeat that it is, in some sense, all things which are; for things are the subjects either of sentient perception or of thought, and knowledge is, in some sense, things known, as sensation is things sensually perceived. But let us inquire how this is to be understood—Knowledge, then, like sensation is divided, when in potentiality, into things in potentiality, when in reality, into things in reality ”

“ In converse with nature, man transforms or interprets symbols of sense impressions into concepts of sensation, perception, apprehension, reflection, and ideation. In contact with these natural symbols he devises a new world of symbols with which he interprets concepts of others. Still they are judgments founded upon the five factors or constituents of bodies, and nothing more enters into them. So we still find mind dealing with number, space, motion, time, and judgment, or their reciprocals kind, form, force, causation, and concept. ”

“ The fifth is the mental world, because from its matter is built the mind of man. The sixth is called the emotional or astral world, because the emotions of man cause undulations in its matter. (The name astral was given to it by mediæval alchemists, because its matter is starry or shining as compared to that of the denser world.) The seventh world, composed of the type of matter which we see all around us, is called the physical. ”

“ The external senses in their different degrees, especially sight and touch, give us the knowledge of objects that are extended and figured. The body I grasp with [Pg 83] the hand or survey with the eye has limits, outlines, angles, surfaces—that is, it has more or less EXTENSION. The inner sense gives us the knowledge of the changes and successions of our mental life. ”