I love to burn incense …. been at it for 30 + years.
Inscence changes the reality right in front of you by tripping different areas of your brain and helps take you to other places of thought and emotion.
Churches and temples have special blends for the exact same reason.
My father used to use sauted onions as the clarion call to get the idea of dinner into peoples brains without having to leave the kitchen.
Alzheimer programs use music to assist people in finding memories and safe harbor for their brains.
Why do we wear perfume and cologne and use all manner of fabric softeners and scented detergents?
I have no idea if pheromones really work … lets google this …. hold on …..
Ok … they do … not in the male conquering women into the bed way — but in a multitude of other more subtle ways https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3987372/
Hey Dooey why the long fucking tangent here?
Because i want to establish that intangible things like smell and sound and color and ….. affect our mood and openness to experiences and feelings.
There’s a million ways we know this. and we use this in specific ways when we operate in the world — power ties — cinnamon scent in the air at an open house — air freshener in a car — position of a person in a photo — putting items in a photo that are not immediately noticeable but using them to create an impression …. etc ….. buzz words …..
There’s a universe of people in uncertainty right now.
All of our “Fuck Around and Find out “ “I told you so” articles and lambasting aren’t really motivating people to change. The price of gas is… price of groceries … and the list goes on ….
But that upset and the need for the “fuck around and find out” finger pointing is almost something we need to cope with the historical moment. It just doesn’t get us what we want.
And now i have opened up the space where the intangibles are a saws all in your tool box.
How can we set the table to get people to really change. Attacking leads to increased defensive reaction. But triggering memory and other ways of being and finding emotional linkages to the political and policy places we need to go are very important right now — thinking and debate and facts will not get you over the finish line.
The billionaire class has known for a long time that a direct usurpation of power through financial advantage is not enough to win. The invested heavily in psychological research — and they got frank luntz on the case and made a lot of headway taking his advice — Thomas frank can tell you all about it as well.
By and large what do we do when we read about this stuff ??????
we get upset and write articles about why we should fear these people and the billionaires that are taking advantage of us…
Wrong take away …….. better take away — It’s science — and we can use it too.
So i burn incense every day and for different reasons and in different ways and different kinds.
I fill my neighborhood with smoke fairly regularly now as well. I do this because i was out night hiking on a full moon on some trails near me — I could smell incense all over — turns out there are a lot of wicca oriented people all around me and it was a special moon. Holy Fucking shit did i feel great that night I felt the comfort of not being alone. I don’t run in circles with these folks — but i know their hearts and minds are mostly on my side. So I smoke signal everyone in my area from time to time that they are not alone.
i have long developed the habit of wearing inspiring t shirts at work rather than business casual. I have evolved a massive t-shirt inventory and I only wear them at work so that they stay nice. It works — proof? The people i work with show up with their fun t-shirts and bring their “a” game when we meet in terms of statement shirts.
If you have come this far in the article i hope you are looking at the things in your life that bring you joy and transport your feelings and thoughts to being a member of the world you want to live in and a harmony no matter how fictitious it is — a harmony with the rest of the world.
These ways of being are helpful when you break a cult. Confrontation breeds resistance. Soften up the distance between you and the other — let the ideas you want to take root show up in inviting packages that side step the political debate of the moment and trigger peoples feelings and desires of belonging.
How we show up in the world is how we vote on non election days, it’s how we find our tribe, it’s how we make new ones it’s how we find who future friends or allies are ….
The world is a fucking boiling pot of chaos — let’s be a lighthouse to our friends and the warm hand of friendship that helps people get out of the storm.
