Another note in keeping with the theme of Science: It works, bitches (see the posting below):
The New Scientist has also reported on research into the “smell” of fear. While the article focuses on particular research testing “stress sweat” and the brain’s reaction to it, don’t we all have our own personal experience of the correlation between smell and fear as well? I certainly have experienced the differences that exist between groups of people who have collectivized their states of mind to very specific intentions.
Here are just a few personal observations to that point. Waiting with others to be called to serve on a jury, I have felt a very different collective “aura” than I experienced in a room with a similar sized group who were about to embark on a group meditation. That shift in the group aura has a number of components to it—vibration, “geometry” (for want of a better word) and odor. But the collective energy makes what can be very subtle more apparent.
I am energized by the hope that more of the great unmeasurables of life—like fear as a smell, energetic states, vibrational differences, love itself—become more scientifically substantiated. That makes those elements of life harder to dismiss and a bit less furtive.
A friend, Capt. Genie (Eugenia), was one member of a four man man crew delivering a yacht up the Atlantic coast. The concurrence of a full gale and and critical equipment failures demanded that someone go up to the top of the mast as the only chance of saving craft and crew. Genie, as the only female and lightest crew member, was tapped for the job of being hauled up up in the bosun’s chair (for the uninitiated, chair is a euphemism. We’re talking a little slat of wood and some lines.) It’s scary to go up the mast in the harbor on a calm day. In a ten foot seas and sheets of rain, it’s beyond terrifying. Great physical strength, courage, and a cool head are mandatory and even then, it’s possible to be bashed to death against the mast. Genie, in full foul weather gear, harness and sea boots, alternately groaning and praying, was winched up the mast, completed her task and safely returned to the boat. She later found that her foul weather gear was so completely permeated by the smell of fear, of terror, that laundering it did no good. She had to get rid of it because the odor of that rain gear, both jacket and pants, could not be tolerated by any sailor, least of all by Genie, especially not in the close quarters of a boat’s cabin.
Love that tale Sally. The viscerality demonstrated perfectly.