How Did This Happen?
For several years, I studied “phenomenological epistemology,” that is, how we construct knowledge through interactions with sense data. At base, I take the experienced world to be a mental representation that is embedded in the whole host of experiences, including non-sensory features like emotion and cognition. It is not clear where the mind does or ought to draw boundaries, but we see categorical blending everywhere in childhood development, anthropology, and studies of confusion. For example, the Huichol Indians would say corn is deer is hikuli is the world, and use one manifestation to promote rituals of the others. Magic, spirits, material equivalences, object-body relations, ego navigations, and naive hypotheses enrapt me.
Being interested in qualia and solving the mystery of consciousness, I naturally found myself gravitating toward the Qualia Research Institute, where Andres had published his wealth of experiments in odor space. For my part, olfaction is my second-strongest phantasia (after proprioception), so I picked up a beginner’s set and began taking notes. Some of the early notes look like this:
Cyclamen Aldehyde, 10% – 1st: sea breeze, lime, slight playdough association, cut leaf, slightly acidic but with a fluffy element, inbreath trajectory toward seabreeze.
That’s rough for a qualia researcher. Clearly, I had no special talent or sensitivity that made this journey easy. It turns out, it wasn’t a problem of sensitivity, but of orientation. By organizing neighborhoods of qualia and analyzing their contrasts, interesting properties began to stand out. Once plenty of references developed, I found that moving between them involves selective focus, selective relaxation, and semantic imposition. With these, I now have several pages for cyclamen aldehyde. What I wish to say is: if you are a casual reader without a background in scents– your abilities are much greater than they seem, and I invite you to start exploring with scent as a skillful means of meditation.
Linalool was the chemical I absolutely had to have in my first package. I had gone searching when visiting Taipei and come back with Ho Leaf oil, which was a harsh camphorous linalool. It wasn’t until I received the package of synthetics that I first experienced the effects Andres talked about. Linalool, the fabric softener of consciousness. What a true and beautiful way to put it. The effect was not immediate, but followed from hours and days of exploration in meditation. Linalool could actually accept mental tensions and guide them to relax. Soon, it became unnecessary to call linalool to mind because the texture it implemented in my experience was now within my means to recreate.
After some time, the notes I open-sourced in Substack were the size of a novella and Andres picked me up to do work for his Magical Creatures line. This association has led to many great friendships that encouraged the development of meditation and phenomenology tools.
