Follow your nose

The intuitive sense.

Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours,
And none can tell how from so small a center comes such sweets,
Forgetting that within that Center Eternity expands

— William Blake, Milton, The Book of Second

---

Imagine yourself atop the lip of a flower petal. Now, this is no ordinary petal: it’s monumental—palm-open-bleeding-edge-of-a-mountain-face-monumental. Bound by your finitude, you can’t help but fail to notice its infinitude, until one night you look up. Twinkling above, you find a vast cosmos splashed with stars spinning in loving bewilderment. You realize they’re dancing alongside the ground beneath you, which itself seems to ever-so-slowly unravel in a spiral unfold. After this, you start noticing a brilliant diversity of experiences arising around you: you see throbbing treetops wave in the wind, you hear the excited hum of a passing crowd, you feel a gentle warm wind wash over you. As these flowing experiences press themselves gently upon you, in delightful appreciation you return their embrace, clasping them tight and pressing them into something bearing enough heft to withstand the praise you drape over them, as you exclaim to the star-splashed sky, “Oh these wonderful treetops; that buzzing crowd; this invigorating wind!”

But some experiences begin impressing themselves upon you that you simply can’t find the words for. When this happens, ‘whatever-it-is’ not only envelopes you, but reaches within you. You can’t pin down its location, yet its gravity feels central. Emanating from this mysterious source, ‘whatever-it-is’ stirs and bubbles and unravels in loose streams that writhe, coil, and swirl on currents drawn in by your breath. Down it creeps into your core, its fragrant soul-stirring tendrils untying silken manifolds within you that pour forth from your exhalations, wafting sheets of a body-enveloping aroma that spill back into the current of ‘whatever-it-is’ that spills into you, each tumbling and twirling into the other to become a spiraling, harmonious, mutually enfolding, expanding cloud of ceaseless becoming.

This flowering sense of inexpressible knowing will be the center of our discussion today, and it turns out that your sense of smell may offer the best way of finding its sweet nectar.

--

There are at least two ways of getting to know the world.

One is through logical analysis. Analysis (literally, from the Greek ἀνάλυσις, to ‘break apart’) makes experiences explicit and concrete by breaking up and reducing them to categories shared with already known objects. Describing analysis, Nietzsche remarked that

just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the ‘leaf’: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.¹

The 13th century Persian poet Rumi would have concurred, writing that “leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical, but the globe of soul fruit we make, each is elaborately unique.”²

Analysis lives in the world of seems like, unable to work with what’s unique, lest those leafy categories go to waste! French philosopher Henri Bergson put it this way: “to analyse [...] is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself.”³ Analysis, then, describes a thing via its resemblances to other things; yet, those other things are also described via resemblances to yet other things, leading to an abstractive regress where objects are described by things-other-than-themselves.

Which isn’t to say analysis isn’t valuable and crucial. It is. To see every leaf as unique would quickly leave us drowning in a pile of leaves. Concepts, also, afford anchors on which to cling so that we aren’t floating aloft. Nor is this to say that analysis can’t help in approaching truth, but just to point out that, since its foundations rest on models rather than reality itself, truth will always slip through its theory-loving-fingers.

While exceptional manipulators and pattern-recognizers, these fingers have a habit of clinging too tightly, which not only limits what can be captured, but causes fluidic reality to burst from their clenchedness. If we were instead to hold our hands palm-open, our hands could kiss the infinite reality above as it spilled over our palms, but, again, all would flow past and none would be contained. The mature approach seems to lie somewhere between: hands held cupped so that we may at least get to know some of the world, while cultivating the recognition that we capture only a portion.

But the maturing approach seems to me to involve the sacrificial act of gradually opening those palms like blosssoming petals, relinquishing satisfying rigid analytical knowledge in exchange for a softer wonderous mystery. And much like a blossoming flower, when we mature in this way we really do release an attractive fragrance that advertises the unique, generous, life-giving nectar contained in each of our cores.

--

For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space;
Res Miranda

— Middle English carol, c. 1400s⁴

As we gaze in wonder at the ambrosial fluid falling through our cupped hands, might we wonder what brought us to plunge those hands into that oceanic mystery in the first place?

This brings us to our second means of getting to know the world: intuition. As mathematician Poincaré point(caré)s out,

it is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, but to know how to create is better… Without [intuition], the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.⁵

Bergson likened intuition to an intellectual sympathy⁶, where we enter into what we intuit to coincide with what makes it unique and, consequently, inexpressible. But prior to entering into this mysterious participation, we are somehow drawn towards it. So how do we intuit intuitions?

I’m going to reach here for our external sensory faculties and turn them inwards to reveal their internal, mental equivalents. Of these five internal senses, then, which best describes how we feel our way towards intuitions?

By sight? Intuition is like seeing the silhouette of a friend from afar—mysterious yet familiar—but, in general, sight seems too tangible and analytical with its crisp edges and high contrast. How about touch? While insights are intimate, touch seems too intimate; once graspable, we’ve already ventured into the hands of analysis. Taste? Richly familiar yet difficult-to-describe flavours lend themselves nicely to the complex inexpressibility of intuitions, though there’s still a tangible proximity with taste that lends itself to analysis. Sound? The faint trickle of the stream you hear off in the distance, just beyond sight, when roaming through the wilderness thirsting for water—ah, now we’re talking. Lastly, smell. Remember that whiff of distinct house-smell you’d get when visiting a friend’s house as a child? If I were to have asked you to describe that smell, could you? My guess is no, but this wouldn’t make the smell any less real, familiar, and knowable to you. This is the inexpressible yet intimate intellectual sympathy Bergson is talking about, and smell seems to me to capture both the intimate, complex flavourfulness of taste and the mysterious, ethereal, off-in-the-distance nature of sound.

Of the five internal senses, then, I find that smell fits closest to intuition. But the point is that all of the senses have their place and could be made to fit. Intuition, after all, is by no means categorical and constraining: it breathes and flows, birthing and enveloping those very categories. Speaking of enveloping categories, to wrap this section in a saintly bow I’ll leave you with this post-revelatory reflection from Saint Augustine. Notice the reference to (1) external ‘shapely things’, (2) how they could not be if not for something greater, and (3) the sensual analogies he reaches for in describing his encounter with that greater Beauty.

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new,
late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong,
I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.

— Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X (Transl. Maria Boulding)

--

This aromatic intuition left me wondering which of the five external senses is most fundamental. In other words, how was contact first made with Nature, so that life could then, in turn, get to know Her?

Cells first got to know Nature through Her perfume, that is, through chemosensation: the ability to sense, and hence respond to, chemical gradients. Put simply, if sensation of helpful chemicals increased, life approached; if sensation of harmful chemicals increased, life avoided.⁷ Fast-forward a bajillion years to multicellular nervous systems and we find fully formed olfactory bulbs in fish and amphibians and mammals, evolved to detect a rich array of chemicals.

Which is all to say that the fragrance following nature of chemosensation is one of life’s most mature abilities of making sense of the world, and, importantly, afforded the ability to sense patterns beyond the limits of the local organism. And because Nature’s way of making herself known to life has long come through something like what we now call taste and smell, that long, intimate history is buried within each of us.

By trusting your gut, you trust this history. The gut is where things beyond you enter into you and become you; where your body carefully decomposes the wholes you consume and recomposes them into the whole you call ‘you’; and thus where our most intimate and transformative relationships with Nature take place.

Notice the similarity between this bodily process and the mental equivalent, where intuitions reveal to us experiential wholes that we enter into, disassemble via analysis, and reconstitute into new holistic understandings. This similarity shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since the physical and metaphysical, the bodily and spiritual, the corporeal and mental—whatever you want to call it—are married together by your being. These divisions make for useful concepts (and I’ll therefore make use of them), but it’s worth keeping in mind that they’re abstractions courtesy of the analytical mind, and in reality their delineations may not be so clear.

Back to the gut. If the gut is where without becomes within, it’d best be sensitive towards absorbing what might cause ‘the within’ harm. And sensitive it is. In fact, your gut has its own sense-making network, known as the enteric nervous system, that can coordinate digestion independent of the brain. Not only that, but your gut also serves as fertile soil for a host of microbial colonies that outnumber the cells in your body. Your gut is teeming with life and intelligence.

But the gut (and its microbial colony) requires a means of reaching beyond itself. While threats can be handled post-ingestion, better to prevent their ingestion in the first place.

Enter disgust. I find disgust interesting because it’s an intuitive response that has both physical and mental manifestations. I also find that understanding our revulsion towards rotten food enriches understanding of intuitive aversions to rotten behaviour. With that seed planted, why don’t we depart the gut, make like Jack, and climb the nervous beanstock (ahem...the vagus nerve) that unites body and brain to see if any treasure awaits us above.

--

In the brain we find two principle regions associated with disgust: the amygdala and the insula. The amygdala sits in the primitive limbic system and is involved in avoidance responses (among other things). The insula, on the other hand, sits wedged atop the limbic system and just below the more recently evolved neo-cortex, acting as a sort of bridge between the two. We spoke earlier about internal and external senses, and the insula (the right insula especially) seems to play a part in internal sensing through interoception: the ability to feel internal bodily sensations (such as heartbeat, breath, and gut feelings).

Feelings of disgust in particular tend to be associated with the left insula⁸, the more analytical, instrumental, and disembodying side of the brain. In other words, disgust removes emotional depth from, and emotional embodiment with, the object of disgust, which makes sense if that object poses a threat: it’s for the best that I don’t long for a loving union with the mold growing on my strawberries, better to just toss ‘em in the compost. For now, though, I’d just like to note that this devitalization is the inverse of Bergson’s intellectual sympathy: an intellectual antipathy. We’ll return to this idea later.

Okay, so the amygdala plays a role in avoidance and the insula gives rise to subjective internal feelings, disgust being one of them. Couple the two and you get the wonderful facial contortions and repulsive retreats that arise when a foul smell graces your nostrils, all to prevent what threatens to disintegrate you from being integrated with you. But these feelings aren’t privy just to foul physical smells, but foul moral smells, too. The insular bridge opens disgust to the broader, social awareness afforded by the neo-cortex.

This broader awareness reveals to you the bodies beyond your body on which your body depends. As we’ve matured as a species and our neo-cortices have collectively developed, so too has this collective awareness, enveloping the social organizations upon which we’ve become increasingly dependent. A similar maturation occurs to each of us as we age: selfish urges are gradually pruned and inhibited by the prefrontal cortex, making room for selfless revelation as we develop relationships, have children, and oh-so-gradually come to realize that the thriving of these loved ones depends on the thriving of the broader collective. Naturally, a desire to preserve that collective arises, too. So arises the sacred.

Notice that the awareness of this broader—dare I say spiritual—body is less tangible (and consequently less amenable to logical analysis) than the more direct awareness of your physical body, because it requires an expansion of awareness in both space and time. This expansion thus requires imagination; you must imagine what it’s like to be those engulfed in your loving awareness, you must sympathize with—step into and feel-with—them. Note that these imaginative abstractions have a different flavour than those projections of the more logical, theoretical sort⁹. You stand inside of your imaginations, but from projections you stand separate and see from afar.

This more imaginal way of encountering the world is not as ‘imaginary’, or unreal, as we may be led to believe. As Iain McGilchrist suggests,

Imagination is not, as it is sometimes conceived, the capacity to conjure the unreal, but, for the first time, to see the real - the real that is, for reasons of deeply ingrained habit, no longer present to us. It is not a means of placing something else between us and the world, but of removing the accretions that prevent us from that world’s fuller realisation. To see is not just to register sense-data, but to see ‘into’ the life of what is seen; and ‘through’ it to the greater picture that lies beyond it, is implicit in it, and makes sense of it in terms of the totality of experience.¹⁰

--

Okay, so we have a sense of this spiritual body that extends beyond us and enwraps those we love—that is, those we can imagine seeing ‘into’ and ‘through’. And, to bring things back to the brain and disgust, when we sense something that may harm that spiritual, moral body, those same brain regions, the amygdala and insula, shake their neuronal pompoms as feelings of moral revulsion take to the field.¹¹

Like picking up a subtle foulness from rotten food, our moral noses pick up hints of selfishness and deception: the two largest threats to the moral body. This revulsion is a sign that something toxic is approaching, or has entered, the moral body that requires avoiding or purging. Because we sniff out these intuitions, they can be difficult to describe (in the way your childhood friend’s house-smell is hard to describe). But this doesn’t mean we should ignore them. “Never ignore those intuitions,” writes Rumi, “when you feel some slight repugnance about doing something, listen to it. These premonitions come from God... It’s not always a blind man who falls in a pit. Sometimes it’s the one who can see.”¹²

At least the blind man treads cautiously so that he doesn’t fall in the pit, or worse—push others into it. The seeing man, on the other hand, may arrogantly press on, blissfully unaware of whether he’s in the dark. Each of us see less than we think, so we’d be wise to pay attention to our metaphorical noses.

Notice how Rumi says slight repugnance; subtlety implies needing to be in a state of open receptivity to receive its message. If we’re caught up in ourselves, we’ll miss the message entirely. Ironically, we’ll also miss it if we’re overwhelmed by repugnance. Disgust is dangerous. Recall its association with the antipathic nature of the left insula, which preemptively labels objects of disgust to prevent us from unifying with them. But this antipathic labeling, clearly, can lead us astray, especially in the moral landscape where other human beings risk being transmogrified into objects of disgust. Atrocities sprout from this kind of reckless disgust, which is why I find it so disappointing when those who (rightfully) protest against moral atrocities meanwhile sluggishly sling disgust-driven insults at the other side—the modality that birthed the atrocity in the first place.

Thus when disgust overwhelms us, we ourselves become disgusting. Catching intuitive whiffs of ‘slight repugnances’ may be in our best interest, but careless indulgence in moral disgust is a form of moral gluttony. Fortunately, though, gluttony has an antidote: temperance.

In the poem Purgatorio, while departing the terrace of gluttony, Dante and his guides are visited by an angel. In his short description of the encounter, Dante manages to illuminate (1) the limits of sight, (2) the strengths of hearing and scent in divine participation, and (3) the importance of ‘just measure’, i.e., temperance. “But [the angel’s] appearance had deprived me of my sight,” he writes,

so that—as one who uses hearing
as guide—I turned and followed my two teachers.
  And like the breeze of May that—heralding
the dawning of the day—when it is steeped
in flowers and in grass, stirs fragrantly,
  so did I feel the wind that blew against
the center of my brow, and clearly sensed
the movement of his wings, the air's ambrosia.
  And then I heard: "Blessed are those whom grace
illumines so, that, in their breasts, the love
of taste does not awake too much desire—
  whose hungering is always in just measure."

— Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 24 (Transl. Allen Mandelbaum)

--

Our sensual appetite for truth leaves us vulnerable to impulsivity, and thus vulnerable to exploitation, which, paradoxically, lures us toward falsehood. Just as fast food companies attempt to cloak unhealthy food in delicious flavours, so it is with the digital equivalents strewn across social media feeds: disgust-laden thumbnails with a side order of absurd headlines, anyone?

And notice how a flattened two-dimensional plane is suitable for sight, but gives the nose nothing to work with. There’s just an utter lack of depth, richness, and room for fragrance to flow in that flattened world. Paul Tillich, writing in the 1950s, warned of this flattening:

Life in the dimension of depth is [being] replaced by life in the horizontal dimension. The driving forces of the industrial society of which we are a part go ahead horizontally and not vertically ... He transforms everything he encounters into a tool: and in doing so he himself becomes a tool. But if he asks, a tool for what, there is no answer ...¹³

To come up with an answer would require having some sense of where we’re heading and where we’ve come from: our story. That story, unfortunately, won’t be found in the feeding trough of visually stimulating, disjointed, and sensational projections churned out in the form of breaking news, economic predictions, and political analyses. To realize a more realistic sense of purpose requires creativity, coherence, a richer sensationality (in the literal sense), and restraint to make space for our stories to come to life.

Speaking of vital stories, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace one of the protagonists, Pierre, gets captured by the French and becomes a prisoner of war. Pierre himself is a man who inherited great privilege and spent much of his youth in isolated intellectual pursuits. But it is only through the restrictions and sufferings he endures as a prisoner that he realizes the freedom and meaning of life; it was only through his emptying that life in its fullness was able to pour into him.

One lesson poured into Pierre came in the form of a peasant named Karataev. Pierre ended up sharing his prison hut with this simple and illiterate, yet profoundly intuitive, man. In stark contrast to the siloed thumb-twiddling that dominated Pierre’s earlier life, Karataev revealed to Pierre the value of a more embodied way of life, which,

as [Karataev] regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.¹⁴

--

Would you look at all these fragrant references we’ve encountered! Quite the garden, I must say. Wait, I think I smell one more off in that lake…

In the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, prince Bhima sets off to collect lotus flowers from a lake for his wife, Draupadi. His journey happens to take him past Kubera’s mountain fortress. Now, Kubera happens to be the god of earthly treasure, so he’s always on the lookout for thieves. When Bhima passes by and is pressed by Kubera and his guards, Bhima calmly replies,

All the things you have are overlooked by the birds and dismissed by the animals. I came for some flowers of fragrance.¹⁵

Kubera recognizes Bhima’s dignity, allows him to continue, and encourages Bhima to come visit sometime since he doesn’t get many visitors, probably due to all that material wealth of his. To really connect, we’d be wise to unload the material wantings that burdens us and reconnect with what is not ‘overlooked by the birds and dismissed by the animals’: Nature.

So, rather than gorging yourself with material conveniences, consider emptying yourself of them instead, as a flower empties itself of its nectar. This is how love proliferates. If you give yourself, and others, room to breathe, not only will more of life’s music pour through you in delightful resonance, but your richer exhalations will send your fragrance further. And who knows, it might mingle with the perfume of that blossoming Flower you found yourself on at the beginning.

Follow your nose. Maybe you’ll end up closer to that Center.

1. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche (1873)

2. The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks (emphasis added)

3. Introduction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson (1903)

4. Res Miranda = a wondrous thing.

5. The Value of Science, Henri Poincaré (1905)

6. Sympathy is derived from the Latin sun- ‘with’ + pathos ‘feeling’, a ‘feeling with’.

7. See chemotaxis for more.

8. Specific disgust processing in the left insula: New evidence from direct electrical stimulation, Papagno et al. (2016)

9. Radical political movements tend to become drunk on projections of the theoretical sort, abhorring past and/or present to work towards some cherished theoretical future. Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer treats this subject masterfully.

10. The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist (2021) (emphasis added)

11. Since these two forms of digust, physical and spiritual, cross neurological paths, we find interesting phenomena where people with foul moral behavior (e.g., those who cheat or lie or steal) are more likely to sanitize themselves physically (see Lady Macbeth effect). For a great overview on the neurobiology of disgust, see Chapters 2 and 15 of neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky’s Behave.

12. The Long String, Rumi (Transl. Coleman Barks)

13. “The Lost Dimension in Religion”, Saturday Evening Post, Paul Tillich (1958)

14. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, Book Twelve, Chapter 13

15. Mahabharata, retold by William Buck