Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on the first two lines of verse 46 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“To recognize smells as unborn is the crucial point of the completion stage;

Clinging to odor as fragrant or foul is liberated into its own nature.

Free of grasping, all smells are the fragrant discipline of Supreme Chenrezi;

In the self-liberation of smelling, recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 Full Disclosure:

Exploring the scents of things helped me explore the sense of things.

Written Sunday, November 16, 5:00AM

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

There are few things I enjoy more than the smell of brewing coffee. My favorite scent of coffee is when it’s a really, really dark brew, like French Dark Roast. There’s something about that sharp rich scent that makes me think of early mornings in cafes in Paris, watching the sun lift into the sky. It makes me think of brisk mornings in London, with the only warmth coming from that strong brew warming my hands through a thick porcelain cup.

At this point, I should make a few confessions. I almost exclusively drink ‘girl coffee’. You know, the light roast flavors like Raspberry Chocolate Truffle or Caramel French Vanilla. I don’t like the taste of dark roast coffee. It’s far too bitter. While I was born in England, I was far too young when I left to ever be allowed to hold a cup of steaming hot liquid in my tiny hands, and sadly, I’ve never been to Paris. But the sense of smell is so evocative, that it can make us have ‘memories’ of things that never happened. Of course the seduction of scent is that much stronger if it’s tied to an actual memory.

This week in working with this verse, I’ve really paid attention to the smells in my life. What I’ve noticed is that smells give the illusion of immediately evoking an emotion. There doesn’t seem to be a feeling of unpleasant, pleasant, or indifference. This week I really took notice of how smells are a part of the rhythm of life. In the early mornings, there’s the scent of the soap I use in the shower, the toothpaste, the mouthwash, even the floss has its own minty scent. Interestingly, all of these scents are pleasant, but they evoke anxiety, because they’re part of my ritual before going to work.

I bake nearly every weekend. Yesterday, I took the time to notice how just opening the container of All Purpose flour and taking in the light scent of unbleached flour brought a whole flood of emotions. I was so happy at the thought of being in my kitchen most of the day baking, then giving away what I’d baked. The scents of the cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla as I added them to recipes were a foretaste of good things to come—literally. I could almost taste the finished muffin as I put the ingredients together.

In taking the time to slow down and watch how scents weave in and out of my life, I saw what Dilgo Khyentse meant when he wrote, “We love to savor fragrant scents […], yet all smells…are void in nature.” Yes. This week I noticed how utterly empty scents truly are. It was a little bit easier to see it with scents because they have such strong associations.

As my week went on, I tried to get as close as I could to stripping away the associations I have with scents. It was nearly impossible. The scent I had the most success with was soap. I realized that I use a lot of different soaps—bath soap, soap for my face, soap for the laundry, soap for the dishes, soap for the dishwasher, soap for cleaning the bathroom, soap for cleaning the kitchen counters. My life is inundated with the scent of soap. I was able to notice that in every instance the soap itself had a ‘pleasant’ scent, but I didn’t always enjoy smelling it because many times the scent was associated with doing a household task that I don’t particularly enjoy doing.

Being able to take that step back, I was able to notice that the smell itself wasn’t actually pleasant or unpleasant. And even though I thought of soap as ‘clean smelling’, it actually smells like a lot of cleverly mixed chemicals, all of them poisonous, I’m sure.

What did I learn from this little exercise with soap? I experienced that it was my clinging that was creating the experience of ‘clean smelling’. I saw that the actual experience of ‘soap’ is completely manufactured in my mind based on my past experience with similar scents. I saw that the experience of the scent of ‘soap’ is unborn, a projection of my own karmic tendencies.

And if that’s true of soap, I began to ask myself as the week went on, isn’t it true of all our experience? Yes. I think it is.

***

 Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?)

When I was a little girl, it was a stressful time in my mother’s life. She was in nursing school, she didn’t get much sleep, and she had yours truly on her hands almost 24/7. The only time she ever seemed to be at peace was in the kitchen. As a little girl, I lived in an apartment that was mostly drafty, especially in the cold and damp of a tiny suburb just outside London. The kitchen was the warmest place in the little apartment.

My happiest memories of that apartment are being in the kitchen with my mother while she created these wonderful scents that came from mysterious things called ‘garlic’ and ‘thyme’ and ‘spring onion’. I was the Chief Fetcher. I learned quickly what all these things looked like and more importantly, what they smelled like.

In the kitchen, watching my mother cook was a time of grace for me. Most of the time, my mother didn’t want me around. She was always busy, I was always in the way. But in the kitchen, I learned how to find things, get things, and stay out of the way. The smells that came from the stove, which was absolutely FORBIDDEN territory, were divine. To me, as a little girl, those smells were the scent of peace.

As a woman, I think I’ve looked for that peace in all the wrong places. Looking back on that time in my life, I can notice that the peace didn’t come from outside of me. I can notice that the scent of peace was coming from within me, arising from my inherent capacity for peace and clarity. If I had noticed this at an earlier stage in my life, I wouldn’t have spent decades searching for a peace that had been within me all along.

***

 Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The biggest thing going on in my life right now is working from home. The work site of my job changed, but last weekend we learned that the new building wasn’t quite ready yet. After spending about three hours on the phone with tech support, I was set up to work from home. Wow. It’s been amazing.

One of the things I noticed this week was how the same scent can evoke completely opposite emotions. This week when I took a shower, the scents of soap and toothpaste and floss evoked absolutely no anxiety, because I knew I’d be working from home.

On my breaks, since I was at home, I was able to knit on my knitting machine. I’ve been knitting and crocheting for decades. And only this week did I realize that yarn has its own special scent. Talk about the scent of peace. I’ve always associated knitting or crocheting with peace and calm, but I never thought of my crafting as having a scent.

This week the sense of smell has been a sort of window into emptiness for me. When I experienced a scent, I would make myself take a step back and I would question my judgment of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Then I’d take careful notice of what images the mind conjured to go with the scent. More interesting was when images evoked scents. King Arthur Flour is having a sale this week. They send emails with ads for “Fall Must Haves”. One of the things you must have this fall for your baking is Vietnamese Cinnamon. I have to say, it’s the best cinnamon I’ve ever used, and I’m out of it. I’m planning to get more. Interestingly, the moment I saw that ad, I could smell the cinnamon, and even taste muffins I’ve made with it.

I couldn’t be this observant with every scent. That would be impossible, I think. I never noticed before how many scents we encounter as part of our everyday lives. But when I was able to watch mind in action with the sense of smell, it was a window into how the mind is constantly creating our internal representation of ‘the outside world’ based solely on our karmic tendencies and previous experiences.

When I observed mind in action, I tried saying to myself, ‘This isn’t a good smell or a bad smell. It’s just a smell.” That didn’t work. I still thought the smell was good or bad, but I became aware that ‘good’ or ‘bad’ was a view, an opinion that I was imposing on reality and then clinging to. This helped me understand the role of peace and clarity in the mind. The more peace and clarity, the less clinging. The less clinging, the less suffering. The less suffering, the greater our experience of mind’s true nature of empty luminosity.

***

 Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

Next week, the tech issue with the work site will be fixed, and I’ll have to go to the office to go to work. I’ve been trying to think of how I can work with liberation of the sense of smell in working with my anxiety and dread over facing imprisonment in a tiny cubicle to do the same job I can do here in the comfort of my own home.

I have to be honest. I haven’t come up with anything. So I guess now is a good time to try it out.

My primary objection to returning to the office is that there’s no good reason. Absolutely none. In fact, my monitor at home is nicer than those rinky dink cheap office models. When I asked about telecommuting opportunities (as work at home is known in corporate parlance), I was told…no opportunities are available at this time. Interesting. They’re available in Fort Lauderdale. They work from home. My manager works from home…in Austin. What’s wrong with Dallas?

As I work my way through returning to the office to work, I can notice that mind is doing exactly the same thing it does with the sense of smell. Mind is creating an internal representation of reality based on my tendencies, previous experiences, and afflicted emotions.

The reality is that I’m going to be in a different building, with a different configuration. I don’t have any idea what the computers will be like because I’ve never been there before. The office is very, very close; barely a five minute drive. The reality is I have a dream commute, a ridiculously easy job, a good salary in a time of economic hardship across the country (and the world), and I’m whining because I have to drive a few minutes instead of getting to work at home in an oversize sweater and flannel jammies.

The reality is my back hurts. So do my wrists. I never really appreciated the ergonomics of the corporate environment until this week. If I actually were to work at home long term, I would have to invest in a very good chair, a wrist rest, and another monitor. Some tasks are very difficult to do without the dual monitor system I’m used to at work. I would probably also have to invest in an actual desk.

The reality is that it will save me a great deal of expense to work in an office because all of the equipment is provided. Another reality is that my commute is so ridiculously short that I barely notice it.

The reality is there are upsides and downsides to returning to work in an office. While the experience of returning to work in an office, in and of itself will be neutral, how I experience it will depend entirely upon where I choose to focus my attention. Of course, if I let mind go hog wild and run willy nilly, I’ll be in a state of nervous exhaustion by Wednesday, the anticipated return date. On the other hand I can choose to focus my attention on the many advantages to returning to work in an office.

And there we have it. Just like the sense of smell can be liberated by watching the mind at work, any opinion (view) we have of reality can be liberated when we come to recognize how our karmic tendencies and afflicted emotions color what we experience.

In this coming week, mind will offer up many ‘reasons’ why working from home is so much better than the dreaded return to an office. Right now, I believe wholeheartedly that mind is right, that returning will be dreadful. But at the same time, I’m aware that this wholehearted belief is an opinion, a view of reality that’s probably not so right.

That’s a good place to start my week. I think it’s a good place to start our lives each day…I’m thinking this, I believe it, but it’s just an opinion. The truth isn’t out there. It’s in here.

I can work with that. I think we all can.