You can have a fruitful life within the tangible world that exists in 3 dimensions and 5 senses, but you’d be leaving some life on the table. We all have a 6th sense that’s more powerful than all the other senses, if you sharpen it and learn to rely on it. Although the challenge with sharpening it is that there’s no common understanding and therefore few attempts to document the process of developing it. Your 6th sense is belief. It’s an abstract and multi-dimensional sense that doesn’t follow the natural rules of the other senses.

To believe something is to accept it as true or real. Well, isn’t believing things is just a core part of life? How could it be a sense? For a reasonable answer, we first have to get over our colloquial understanding of senses. Specifically- the 5 senses that we’re used to in the physical world. Now, let’s abandon those 5 in favor of a more general definition: sensing is perceiving or feeling based on stimulus.

While it’s hard to get past the fact that there are stimuli all around us that we can’t capture with our five senses, we can look to something like WiFi waves for a reminder. It’s no surprise that most of us are being peppered with (2.4 or 5 Ghz) waves, which could technically be considered a stimulus since they’re literally touching us. Yet, we’re not physiologically equipped to feel them. On the other hand, practically everyone has had a “gut” feeling coming from stimuli that might not have fit cleanly into the 5 senses. Suddenly, we literally have a feeling in our stomach or chest, along with an associated set of thoughts. Often triggered by something we see or hear, but sometimes the feeling comes when we’re in isolation.

Sure, we’re familiar with that gut feeling, but how does what we believe inform or even create the feeling? At the most fundamental level, we actually have to believe in the notion of a gut feeling for it to have any meaning beyond something that might get easily mistaken for a digestive abnormality. By that logic, a gut feeling can have as much meaning as you believe. So if you believe that you can have a gut feeling about a distant loved one being in trouble, then it becomes possible [not guaranteed] to have a feeling deep in your stomach that something’s just off with a family member.

Belief sets the boundaries of what’s possible, and our subconscious has a mysterious way of pushing those boundaries when we sincerely believe something. For instance, if you believe that you can feel when a salesman is lying to you without them exposing any tells, then it suddenly becomes possible to interpret a feeling deep inside your body as the person lying. Of course, you’re not sure to catch the lies, but at least you have a chance of not being deceived by your ears. And in a world that’s full of people deceiving others for their own gain, it’s not hard to see why your 6th sense can be more valuable than the others.

It’s a sad reality that selfish people have become experts at manipulating the 5 basic sensory inputs. And if you’re not careful in independently deriving your beliefs, then people can influence your 6th sense. Fortunately, though, if your beliefs are sound, then there’s no sliding past the feelings you seem to pull out of thin air. And the more abstract a belief is, the harder it is for any external source to manipulate any associated feelings. For example, if you believe that there’s a truly ubiquitous force of love that moves things to increase everyone’s capacity for love, then you may have a gut feeling that something challenging is happening for you instead of a random accident happening to you. For someone with such a belief, the thought paired with the feeling they get when a significant other leaves them suddenly may be ‘I just know there’s someone who will love me more’ instead of depression.

Remember, we’ll never feel a feeling that we don’t believe in, and our instincts do a unexplainably good job at finding the feelings we do.