Smells and Bells

Reading Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous made me think about the way I consider nature itself to be magic. I see the sixth sense as any sensation that cannot be explained by the other five senses, which includes all magical and supernatural experiences. While I see the supernatural as unexplainable the same way I do magic, I see magic as something that is unexplainable but inherently natural. The ways plants, and all other living things communicate with each other and work together to create the world in all its beauty is magic to me. And yes I know most of that can be explained by science, but I feel like science is just a means to explain things that are known to be magic. I don’t want to be that guy, but I think science is kind of dumb. I see the benefits of science in every aspect of it, but I also think it’s kind of unnecessary; we don’t have to have an explanation for everything. While this goal to be able to explain everything has led to some incredible discoveries, it has also led...

Classen’s idea of often being warned not to touch things and then feeling reluctant to really examine and discover things in the world  reminded me of when I was a little kid, my family would go into fancy shops and they would be “no-touching stores” for me and my sisters. When my family would be out exploring a new town, as we did a lot as I was growing up, we would go into pretty much any store that any of us wanted to. Some of them were toy shops, thrift stores, or random chains, but sometimes my parents would want to go into “grown-up stores”, and by that I mean a store with a lot of breakable items. I feel like in most families, one parent would go inside the store and the other would stay outside with the kids, but my sisters and I were well behaved so we got to go into the fancy stores. The rule was, though, that we could go in but we weren’t allowed to touch anything there, so that kind of store quickly became known among the whole family as “no-touching stores”.  I th...

  Reading about Darsán and its critical role in Hindu worship, made me think: what if you’re blind? There are other aspects to the rituals, yes, but if physically seeing the deity is such a central point, what replaces that aspect of worship when sight isn’t possible? Part of me hopes that there is something else that the visually impaired can do that fills the time during rituals that would be for Darsán, something that allows them to feel like they’re seeing the image of the deity, but that can be perceived with the other senses. I think that there probably isn’t any other specific activity that fills in for Darsán. In a lot of cases, rituals and types of worship are as much about the things you physically perceive as they are about the way those things make you feel. I would assume that if you’re blind, being in the presence of the image of the deity is enough and you focus more on the emotional aspect of the experience. Rather than physically seeing the image of the deity and p...

  I think the idea that most reciters of the Qur’an don’t understand the words is really important. I feel like most people would assume that if you don’t know what the words literally mean then you can’t understand the meaning behind them but that’s not true. Prayers, songs, and even prose is usually not about the true meaning of all the words, but rather how it makes you feel when hearing it. I assume this is true for many people who pray, whether it be in a language you are fluent in or not; the prayer is not about the specific words that you say, it’s about the emotion and meaning you convey with those words. I feel similarly when it comes to music. There will be times when I’m listening to music and I find myself singing along to a song I didn’t know I knew the words to. If you asked me to tell you the words to the song at some other point I wouldn’t know them, but in the moment, I do. It’s not that I just forget the words when I’m not hearing the song, it’s more of a connecti...

  Growing up a picky eater, with two sisters who were also picky eaters, my parents probably struggled with cooking crowd pleasing meals a lot more than they let on. Granted, I distinctly remember their general attitude being that if we didn’t like some part of the dish to just pick it out (as their parents had told them to do when they were kids), it wasn’t like they were figuring out something that completely satisfied everyone. Pretty much every night there would be part of dinner that I (and usually one of my sisters) would pick out, usually peas. I still don’t like peas, I think they’re pretty gross. There were foods that my parents liked that we would never have at home simply because nobody else would eat it, which I guess is one of the sacrifices of having children. Fish was one of those things; only 3/5 of us liked fish, so it was never the meat of choice for dinner, which meant we never bought it at all. At restaurants there would be one dish that I would always get (so...

I found the idea that women's use of aromatic items being seen as witchcraft, which is explained in the following quote, pretty sexist, but also thought provoking. “Perfume, for example, which is often associated with romance, sexuality, and tranquility, can be viewed quite positively when referring to God (with attendant images of mercy and memory) but may have strong negative associations (witchcraft and idolatry) when applied to women” (Green, 15). The fact that when rabbis would burn incense, it was seen as something being done to be closer to God, but if women were to burn incense, it would be assumed that it was for witchcraft bothers me. It states that rabbis have taught that if you walk past a town and smell and pleasant scent you should only say a blessing if you know that a majority of the inhabitants are Israelites, as you wouldn’t want to say a blessing over idolaters using incense for witchcraft or those using it for garment scenting. However, Rabbi Yossi states that e...