|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
One of my students asked me about a woman who had stated that she chose her husband by his scent because he had reminded her of a familiar smell from her childhood. Indeed, our sense of smell is one of the most primal mechanisms in human nature. Scent is no mere physical perception. It is a direct pathway into our earliest impressions, into memories and sensations formed before we could even speak. It awakens impressions that became embedded in us earlier in life.
Childhood leaves us with the strongest impressions of all, i.e., sensory ones of warmth, protection, familiarity, and safety. Scent is the most powerful carrier of such impressions. It is absorbed without analysis or barriers.
Thus, when the lady in question smelled an aroma that echoed her childhood in her future husband, she felt something immediate and irresistible: “This is mine. This is familiar. This is connected to something deep inside me.”
Scent bypasses reasoning. It enters not through the mind, but through the deepest layers of the heart.
In that moment, the lady did not choose by personality or by looks. Instead, she inhaled a part of the man that was intimate and unconscious, and it awakened a memory of a feeling—of a world—that once formed her inner foundation. That is why she felt so bonded, almost helplessly so.
This is purely animalistic. It belongs to the animate level of perception, the most ancient in us. Since it is so primal, it is also extremely binding. We can break arguments, appearances, and logic, but we cannot break the imprint of scent. It is etched inside us like a memory.
Even if the physical scent disappears over time, it remains alive within us. We do not need the outer smell after the inner impression has been recorded. It becomes part of our emotional archive. That is why people can stay attached to one another for a lifetime through something as subtle and invisible as scent.
Accordingly, we can keep the internal scent alive by carrying it with us, recalling it, nurturing it, and feeling it even when it no longer exists externally.
This is how such a small and intangible phenomenon becomes the root of an entire relationship.
Based on the video “How Important Is the Scent of a (Potential) Partner to You?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.