Smelling meditation

Experiments with mastering the sense of smelling

The Meditation Second for now:

Smelling with fine awareness the air that I breathe

Benefits:

The sense for smelling has been repressed in our culture. The fear of sexuality induced by smell is very strong. Becoming more aware of smelling a new world of sensitivity opens in daily life. Your smelling will be more clear the more silent you become.

  

Osho on mastering the smelling sense

The great art of mastering the senses

"Buddha says: Master your senses…. He could have simply said: Destroy your senses. But mastery is a totally different phenomenon; it needs great art, skill, awareness, meditativeness, watchfulness, alertness. Only then the senses will remain there. In fact, the master is more sensitive than the slave. 

Buddha smells more deeply

My own understanding is that Buddha smells more deeply; his sense of smell is far deeper than yours. Your sense of smell is repressed, very much repressed. For centuries you have been repressing sex, and the sense of smell is very much connected with your sexuality. You have been repressing your sense of smell. You use so many perfumes just to hide the smell of your sexuality. Otherwise, when a woman has her period she smells differently; you can smell that she has her period. When a woman is sexually aroused she starts smelling differently; you can know just by her smell that she is sexually aroused. And the same is true about man: sexually aroused, his body starts smelling because there are great chemical changes happening inside him. They affect his body, his perspiration, his breathing, his blood.

Smell and sexuality

Man has been so much afraid of his sexuality: somebody may become aware, somebody may note what is happening to him. He has used clothes to hide his body, he has used perfumes to hide his natural smells. He has tried in every possible way to appear as nonsexual as possible. And we have had to repress our noses very much….

Smelling without repression

My understanding is that Buddha’s sense of smell is far more clear than yours because there is no repression in him. His eyes see better than you can see because his eyes are not clouded by any prejudice, by any a priori conceptions. He hears perfectly well because his ears are not full of noise, his mind is silent.

Osho, excerpted from The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 10, Chapter 9

Osho on sexuality and smell

Smell is a sexual door into the body

Those who have been working deep into these layers say that it is because of the repression of sex that smell is lost. Physically man is as sensitive as any other animal, but psychologically his nose has been corrupted. Smell is one of the most sexual doors into your body. It is through smell that animals start feeling whether a male is in tune with the female or not. The smell is a subtle hint. When the female is ready to make love to the male she releases a certain kind of smell. Only through that smell does the male understand that he is acceptable. If that smell is not released by the feminine sexual organism, the male moves away; he is not accepted.

Culture destroyed body odor

It is not just accidental that in cultured countries much time is wasted in removing all kinds of smell from the body. The body odor has to be completely destroyed by deodorants, deodorant soaps. It has to be covered by layers of perfume, strong perfume. These are all disguises; these are ways to avoid a reality that is still there. 

The smell of orgasm

When you make love, both male and female release a certain kind of smell. That smell has to be destroyed because if the man is making love to the woman and the woman is not really into it she will not release the smell. The man will be offended, hurt. He will immediately feel that the woman is not having any orgasm. And the male ego will feel very offended. The smell has to be destroyed completely, so that the man never knows that the woman was simply pretending that she was having an orgasm, just making empty gestures, befooling him, buttressing his ego. And he feels satisfied because the woman looks satisfied. But once the smell is destroyed, there is no way to detect whether she is really satisfied or not.

Freeing the smell

Smell is very sexual, that’s why we have destroyed the nose, utterly destroyed the nose. Even in language you can see the difference. To see means one thing; to hear, one thing – but to smell means just the opposite. To see means a capacity to see, but to smell does not mean the capacity to smell. It means that you are smelly. Even in language the repression has entered. And the same has happened with other senses."

Osho, excerpted from Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol. 2, Chapter 5