“There are so many ways of knowing, but of those ways that you once had, few remain to you today. One of these was scent. There were whole worlds of experience and wisdom and knowing that opened through the nose and lived in the nostrils. Now you experience the world only with your eyes, your ears, and your skin, but once you knew it with your nose.
“You cannot imagine how limited your world became when you began to measure that world with a line of sight. Before then, your nose could follow the shifting current of the breeze, and that “following” changed your experience of space, of distance, and of time.
“Today, something like a phantom feeling remains of this world that you have lost. You burn incense in your churches, cathedrals, ashrams, and temples. You place flowers on the altar, make prayer beads of rose petals or sandalwood. But this is only to evoke the memory of what you have lost. The scents of your world are still there. The trees and flowers, the animals, insects, and birds—these all live and have their being within broad, deep, delicate rivers of scent.
“I would call you back to this knowledge at this time of year. You have only to leave the door of your mind and close it fast behind you, silence your ears, darken your eyes, let your skin become quiet and still. Then open your nose and clear the pathway between the wind and your heart. You are nothing but wind, and the messages and love letters borne by the air. It passes within you and without you on an endless circuit so long as you are alive.
“The human body is an eddy of scent in the river of life. You must learn again to become that eddy, and in this way seek reunion with the world that you have lost.”