Really have to marvel
...at Whomsoever Drives This Bus. Particularly with regard to the olfactory. No, not the Ol' Factory. The sense of smell, the schnaz if you get my point!
Is it not rather amazing that our noses want to breathe in certain smells: scent of baby, vanilla, cinnamon, sexual musk; and balk from others such as aged beer on linoleum, putrefaction, fecal matter? How about those smells that are not necessarily life-affirming such as gasoline, skunk, or ripened cheese that some of us nonetheless love to smell?
Esoteric wisdom considers the sense of smell to be occupied with discriminating, "perfecting the interrelation between the Self and the not-self." * Only someone with a Virgo sun sign would use footnotes in her journal. So as I am smelling you, I am also drawing molecules of you inside of me. And I didn't even buy you dinner first. We are interrelating.
Little wonder that we (especially those of us who were raised in the U.S. and Canada) take such pains to avoid being smelled: showering, deodorizing, douching, powdering, spritzing, masking with other, stronger scents such as perfume, cologne, scented hairspray. What are we saying--that we don't want to interrelate? Or that we want to be perceived as other than we are?
Some of my favorite non-human things with which to interrelate (smell): My cat Fiona's fur, especially after she's been sunning herself on the balcony; peppermint, grapefruit/lemon/lime/orange zest; geraniums, roses, gardenias; meat being grilled; popcorn; cut green apples; bleached cotton; coffee!
What do you love to smell? What do you hate to smell?
* Source: A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, Alice A. Bailey