Allergies
The human rhinencephalon and
smell
from grey's
anatomy
The rhinencephalon, or smell
brain, a large remnant of our mammalian brain, lying deep
in the temporal lobes is responsible for our awareness and
reactivity to new and old situations. We constantly
reference the new with memories of the old - even if the
memory is vague, approximate or dissimilar. Our brain seeks
out information deep in the amygdala nuclei that hold deep
seated memories which, when accessed immediately trigger
off our endogenous hormonal flight-fight complex as they
elicit fear. This sense of the unknown - which is what fear
is – has a primary function. It activates our mammalian
self, our instinctual reactivity - the impulse to run, be
guard, stand and fight, draw up reserves, flood the system
with adrenalin to prepare for the worse. Some of us operate
from this overactive yet hidden pair of nuclei which
constantly alert us to dangers that do not exist.
The Realms of Being: our vegetal and mammalian
selves
You may ask what do
we mean by 'vegetal' kingdom. There is within us an ordered
arrangement of forces Our being exists in a hierarchy or
arrangement of forces. Our physical body, human in form,
houses our being, The physical body armed with its many
faculties or senses [which includes Mind] and 'our inner
Self' are developing and growing, and this epigenesis of
consciousness and being is because we contain the
wherewithal to rise vertically into altered states –
awareness, attentiveness, mindfulness and consciousness.
The matter of our physical body contains the energies of
what has gone on before us, as we contain phylogenetically
the remnants, memories, aspects of the DNA / genome of
kingdoms below us. This information is 'carried' within us
through our genome, but also manifests by the differing
frequencies of each kingdom, these are known as the life
forces – they contain the elements and data from all the
other realms, which signal or resonate within us as
memories, and states associated with these lower kingdoms.
This may be why we
resonate with stories from the brothers Grimm [material
kingdom], fairy stories [vegetal or unseen kingdom], fables
[animal kingdom], myths [human kingdom] and odysseys [a
noble human station]. It could be said that a human being
is composed of material, vegetal, animal and human elements
and each of these elements, being matter, are also energies
and when affecting us, become a 'force'. The sum of these
elements within us, when suportive, ordered and congruent,
and when acting as if servants to our nobility, can lead us
on our personal odyssey towards a more noble Self and life.
The vegetal kingdom within us could be referred to as that
which 'provides'. It is our physiology, and is seen in the
largely autonomic functioning of our body, providing
sustenance or nourishment, elimination, cleaning,
temperature and metabolic [e.g. sugar levels in the blood]
control. This part of us, which can also be upgraded to
include the higher senses act to tune us into our internal
and external environments, providing a detailed awareness
of our state, or what is going on external to ourselves.
These senses of ours alert us in every way to danger,
dysfunction, error, fear, collective states of
consciousness and of course our internal milieu.
The vegetal kingdom - is the part of us that acts as if it
were a radio receiver – of resonances and signals. It also
acts as a repository, and gestational arena [holding
feelings and emotions in the chakras or sympathetic plexi]
and can uplift it for us to emote the sensation or emotion
to enable it to transform [amplifies the signal] into
feelings [decodes it] and ultimately provides the
wherewithal for Mind to decipher the original signal
[delivers the message].
It can be seen graphically:
Our mammalian brain
ought to give the instructions for the vegetal system
[physiological response] to do something with the input:
that is, sweat, defecate, urinate, snort, shake and release
the pheromone, signal or data stored. In animals the
sympathetic and parasympathetic mechanism [ANS] – a direct
relation to our chakra system – comes back into balance a
minute or so after flight-fight has occurred: danger
passed, another day lived. The original smell or input is
released usually through snorting – blowing its nose – if
the nose was the entry or portal and the endogenous supply
of hormones elicited by the fear response stops and all
[physiology] settles down, as the animal again grazes,
sits, sleeps or generally hangs out.
However, we humans have a neocortex - the small 2mm thick
rind that encloses the mammalian brain – which often over
rides this 'primitive' whistle blower and hangs onto the
resonance, signal, emotion, feeling etc., and allows the
input – often self generated – to gestate, where the
feeling grows, fills space, occupies what many call the
'chakra' but is, in fact, the neurologically-derived
electromagnetic field from the flow of electrons within the
neural plexus. It is our human self that sabotages the self
ordering and self-cleaning aspect of our system, and holds
onto a charge or force. This in our case, may not be the
smell of a lion, but the pheromone induced memory of some
situation when we were small. To the child a large shadow
is 'what it is', to the adult years later, the shadow is
only the moon highlighting the end of the bed and the
clothes hanging from it. Perhaps that memory was
accompanied by a set of parameters such as the smell of
crisps or crackers, old dirty sheets, and a the particular
odor of fresh grass. The combination of smells that night
become imprinted to recall the nightmare. Only the
nightmare was a one-off, not an absolute signal for danger.
The smell brain holds the charge and we reference it when
ever that similar smell is around, only we do not remember
the dream or shadow save it become 'unknown'.
The use of the right oil, and the right memory extracted,
can change a person's whole outlook on life, particularily
if they have operated off an unknown or known fear for much
of their lives.