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Right
from our school days we have been taught that
humans have five senses viz. sight, hearing,
smell, taste and touch. However, an elusive
sixth sense has been much talked about. What is
this sixth sense? Is there a seventh, eighth or
more senses? People while narrating incidents
say "I had a sixth sense." They often refer to
an intuition, premonition, insight etc. as sixth
sense. I have tried to analyze the feeling. It
is a feeling that suddenly surfaces from the
deep folds of your brain for no apparent or, at
times, no logical reason. It is referred to
using terminologies like "deep gut feeling" or
"feeling in the bones." We all have these
feelings every day and much of our actions are
governed by these feelings. Do we understand
them? Have we devoted time and mental energy to
understand why we feel the way we feel?
Another elusive
aspect is a thing which happens to us often but
for a few seconds. You may be rushing from point
A to point B in the rat race of life and
suddenly you hear an old song which you used to
hear as a child. What happens? For some moments
you are transported back in time and many long
lost memories and feelings surface. The same
happens with smells. A whiff of a particular
smell and you float back to your childhood days.
The memories and feelings come flooding in. The
tragic part is that this happens for a few
fleeting seconds. I have tried desperately to
hold on to those moments for longer but they
simply evaporate and one comes back to the
present.
One of the smells
which I have identified is the smell of burning
coal. These days we hardly ever come across
burning coal but sometimes when I get a whiff of
that smell, I tend to float back the memory lane
to my childhood days when coal ovens were used
for cooking food. I feel like what I felt as a
small kid for a few brief moments but then the
shutter closes and I land back in the present.
I request the
readers of PD to come forward and discuss this
mysterious part of ourselves.
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