Knowing and Accepting Truth and Our Sense of Smell

I was first confused when I tried to understand the relationship between our olfactory sense and cycle of Know and Accept Truth.   As I sat in my morning contemplation, a visual image came to me like a video looping through my mind.  I first, saw one dog, running paces in a field.  It was then joined by two more dogs. They ran a systematic pattern across the field, sniffing intently one side to the next. I could see nothing out of the ordinary about the field, grass and prairie flowers, and a few trees at the edge. As I watched, I saw that the dogs kept going back to the same area and circling around.   Leaving and coming back again.

“Ah hah”, I thought.  We use our olfactory sense to sniff things out in our life. We have phrases we use that refer to finding out a truth, like ‘something smells fishy’.  Our sense of smell tells us if something is pleasing or repulsive.  It also influences how food tastes, even whether food has a taste at all.   The sense of smell is probably the second sense experienced by an infant after birth.  Indeed, most mammals and birds bond with their parent figures through their olfactory senses.  I began to understand how the deeper discriminating qualities of our olfactory sense can support us in our knowing and accepting of the Truth of our life.