श्रोत्रं चक्षुः स्पर्शनं च रसनं घ्राणमेव च।अधिष्ठाय मनश्चायं विषयानुपसेवते॥
śrotraṃ cakṣuḥ sparśanaṃ ca rasanaṃ ghrāṇam eva caadhiṣṭhāya manaś cāyaṃ viṣayān upasevate
Word by word
The verse says
Settled in hearing, in sight, in touch, in taste and in smell, and in the mind as well, he takes in the things of the world.
In plain words
The list is deliberately plain. Ears, eyes, skin, tongue, nose. Then mind, counted as a sixth.
The self does not touch the world directly. It sits behind six openings and takes delivery.
That is a strange thought the first time you have it. Everything you have ever known about anything came in through one of six doors.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
The woman who cooks at the canteen near your office tastes a spoon of dal that somebody else made and says, correctly, that there is a little jaggery in it. You taste the same spoon and you get dal. Her tongue is no better than yours. She has spent twenty years paying attention through that one door, and the same mouthful simply carries more to her than it does to you.
Going deeper
Counting the mind as a sixth sense is a real claim, not a neat bit of arithmetic.
We normally picture five senses collecting facts and a mind sitting above them, judging. The Gita puts the mind in the row with the others. Manas is an instrument, like an ear. It brings in thoughts the way an ear brings in sound, and you chose the thought about as much as you chose the noise outside.
That is oddly freeing. If a thought is something that arrived rather than something you made, you can look at it instead of being it. A sound in the street does not mean you have failed at anything.
So the next unwelcome thought you have does not need to be argued with. It needs to be heard, the way you hear a scooter go past, and then it needs nothing further from you.