Honing our sixth sense

Hindsight is always 20/20. It is easy to analyse the past and come up with perfect solutions to problems. But the fact is that we actually live in the present. Our decisions and actions of today become subjects of analysis tomorrow. We wonder why we could not see things for what they were. Indic scholars and philosophers dwelled on this question for thousands of years and came up with some amazing answers.

Intellect is a rule-driven organ. It is either black or white, true or false, right or wrong. But where do the rules for the intellect come from? It could come from our own stored prior experiences. But this will be a limited data set. To overcome these limitations, nature endowed us with a sixth sensory organ. In Sanskrit, this is called sakshi. This organ (not a physical organ) feeds rules to the intellect directly. When this contradicts common sense, we tend to ignore it, only to regret it later.

Another important asset is being aware of our surroundings. Is there a way to increase this awareness, called prajna in Sanskrit? We have means of tapping into the universe. It is called ajna chakra, an energy centre located in the forehead. It is like an antenna that can pick up intelligence in the external universe. However, to make use of this, we need to fine-tune our wavelength. That would give us access to knowledge outside our sensing capacity.