6th Sense - Supernatural or Sensory?

The human 6th sense is often described as intuition, instinct, gut feeling or an inexplicable knowing. Whatever language you choose, it points towards something fascinating, your ability to perceive more than you can consciously explain.

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Your conscious mind is only one part of your complete sensory experience. Your mind is constantly filtering information, deleting what it considers irrelevant, generalising experience and constructing meaning from what remains, so what you consciously notice is only a tiny fraction of what is available to your senses. In a world that can quickly overload the senses, it’s all too common for you to become disconnected from your 6th sense.

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Imagine standing beside a still lake early in the morning. The surface appears almost perfectly smooth. Look more closely into the mirror and you may notice tiny ripples travelling across the water as a breeze moves across the surface, disrupting the tension there. A fish has disturbed the depths and it all happens before you consciously register what it is. Your 6th sense can operate in much the same way.

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Some view the 6th sense as a supernatural phenomenon and quite often it does appear magical when it’s in action. This mystical sense can be understood as your ability to recognise patterns, subtle sensory information, emotional shifts, physiological responses and unconscious signals before your conscious mind has constructed a logical explanation. At times, it may feel almost magical because the conclusion arrives before the reasoning. You walk into a room and immediately sense that something is different. Someone tells you they are fine, yet something inside you says they are not. You meet someone for the first time and experience an inexplicable sense of trust, caution or familiarity. You are about to make a decision and experience a powerful internal sense of yes or no, even though you cannot yet articulate why. You might call this intuition. Your unconscious mind may simply be processing information at remarkable speed.

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The modern world has not exactly encouraged you to listen. You live surrounded by notifications, screens, advertising, algorithms, constant communication and an extraordinary volume of information. Your attention is repeatedly pulled outwards and silence can feel uncomfortable, stillness can feel unproductive. You are encouraged to analyse, compare, research, verify and seek evidence. Whilst there is enormous value in rational thinking, your 6th sense is another source of information. The problem arises when you allow conscious analysis to become the only authority you trust.

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Your unconscious mind is continually gathering information through your sensory systems. When you engage with someone you take in information which is outside your conscious awareness like facial expressions, tone of voice, breathing patterns, posture, movement, timing and changes in energy. You here words that do not quite match the physiology, signalling incongruence and tiny inconsistencies between what somebody says and how they say it. You may not consciously notice each individual signal and your unconscious mind can combine them into an impression.

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This is one reason experienced practitioners of NLP often seem to ‘know’ something is happening before they can explain precisely what they have noticed. Years of experience create an enormous library of patterns and with practice, your unconscious mind becomes a sophisticated pattern-recognition system. This is where NLP becomes particularly interesting.

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NLP invites you to become fascinated by the structure of subjective experience. Instead of simply accepting what you experience, you learn to notice how you experience it. You become more attentive to internal representations, submodalities, physiology, language, states, beliefs and unconscious responses. In doing so, you begin to turn up the volume on signals that may previously have been drowned out by conscious noise.

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Consider your internal representations. You do not experience the world directly, you experience your representation of the world. You see images, hear internal sounds, experience sensations and attach meaning to what happens around you. Your 6th sense can emerge from becoming more sensitive to these subtle internal responses. Perhaps you think about a particular opportunity and notice that your breathing changes, your shoulders relax, you experience warmth in your chest and a particular image appears spontaneously in your mind.

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Then you think about another option and experience tension in your stomach, shallow breathing and an internal voice warning you to be cautious. Neither response should automatically be treated as absolute truth. Your unconscious mind can contain useful wisdom, as well as old fears, conditioning and limiting beliefs, this is where the sophistication of NLP becomes important. You can learn to believe in your intuition and investigate it, becoming curious about its structure. When you begin to notice and question structure, getting really curious about the neural pathways a thought is taking, the distinction is powerful.

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Hypnosis offers a doorway into this territory because hypnosis changes the relationship between conscious analytical processing and unconscious experience. As your attention becomes more focussed and your usual critical filtering softens, you can become more receptive to internal information. You can think of hypnosis as lowering the volume of the busy radio station of conscious thought so that another frequency becomes easier to hear, changing where you place your attention.

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A simple self-hypnotic process can begin with something remarkably ordinary, that’s stillness. Let’s experiment…

Close your eyes and allow your breathing to settle. Become aware of the sensations within your body. Notice the contact between your feet and the floor. Notice your breathing without attempting to change it. Become aware of sounds around you, then gradually bring your attention inward.

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Now think of a question for which you genuinely do not have an immediate answer and allow your unconscious mind to respond in whatever way is appropriate. You might notice an image, a sensation, an internal narrative, a memory. You may notice somatic changes, perhaps your breathing will shift location or pace, you may notice movement or feel a sense of contraction or expansion. Take your time. The moment you rush to interpret an unconscious signal, your conscious mind can begin writing the story. Instead, become an observer of your own internal landscape. This is where the process becomes almost magical.

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You may discover that your unconscious mind communicates differently from your conscious mind. It may speak through metaphor rather than sentences or produce a symbolic image rather than a linguistic explanation. It may give you a bodily sensation rather than a logical argument. Your body can become a compass.

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Think of your conscious mind as the captain of a ship and your unconscious mind as the vast network of instruments beneath the deck. The captain sees the horizon and the instruments detect pressure, temperature, movement and changes in conditions that may not yet be visible. You need both to navigate the waters. If you ignore the instruments you may sail confidently into a storm, and if you ignore the captain and you may drift without direction. Your 6th sense becomes particularly valuable when navigating complexity.

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When it’s time to make a decision, you rarely have complete information. You are often required to make decisions in environments where certainty is impossible and your ability to detect subtle patterns can give you another layer of intelligence. The greatest gift of awakening your 6th sense is that you begin to experience the world as richer than you previously imagined. You notice more, listen differently and become increasingly sensitive to patterns, coincidence, metaphor and meaning. You begin to appreciate that thinking does not always have to mean consciously reasoning your way from A to B. Sometimes insight arrives like a bird landing unexpectedly on a windowsill. You cannot force it to arrive, you can only create the conditions in which it is more likely to appear.

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NLP gives you tools for becoming exquisitely aware of the architecture of your experience. Hypnosis gives you ways to quiet the conscious noise and explore the deeper layers of that experience. Together, they can help you develop a more sophisticated relationship with intuition. Your 6th sense does not need to become mysterious in order to become magical. Perhaps the magic is discovering that the information you have been searching for outside yourself has been whispering unheard within you all along.

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Awakening your 6th sense requires you to be still, curious and perceptive enough to notice it and give it space to work its magic.

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