Edward’s Diary Entry 83: The Five Senses: 5. “Touching” is very down-to-earth...

This is skin to skin, skin to material, body to body. Very basic. Again, there are “receptors” in the skin, Merkel, Meissner’s, Pacinian, Ruffini…. But a few tricks can fool even these smart little fellows. In a #Sadhguru exercise, we were told to rub our open palms together quickly for some 15 seconds. Then bring our palms towards each other slowly. Where does the supposed “skin” of one palm pick up on the skin of the other palm? When they touch? Or before? Try it and see. Touching means connecting two boundaries, but where are these boundaries?

Being a “bag of skin” separated from the “outside” world means – as the therapists say – that we need people to touch us. Our mothers and fathers are supposed to do this when we’re young. But when we grow older and wiser we need to increase the boundaries of our petty “selves enclosed in a sack” to reach out with our Self-Awareness to the entire universe, otherwise we become very small, lonely, constricted human beings – the kind who always complain and make trouble in the world; or the kind who are always asking to be touched... instead of touching others. Sit still and sense your body, and soon you no longer know exactly where your “body” ends and the “rest of the world” begins… This is learning to reach out, touch and live…

We all know there are people we like touching and other contacts we draw back from. I sometimes agree with the Chinese writer and philosopher Lin Yutang in that the cultivated Chinese custom of bowing to another person avoids the embarrassment of having to detect the state of mind and body of a stranger, like when we perform the Western custom of shaking hands. Do I really have to find out how clammy and cold or limp the hand is? Or how robust, dry and meaty it happens to be? Do I really need to ascertain that by touching? Can we not communicate on a higher level? The Indians, too, perform a simple inclination and do Namaste with their hands, placing Yin and Yang together to bring balance to the encounter. Isn’t that sometimes much better?

Tree huggers I think are OK, although some could be a bit nutty, but smiling people dressed like teddy bears in the street offering free “hugs” to people only tell us how infantile we really are. Do we really need hugs from strangers to feel good? Do we hate ourselves that much that just about anybody hugging us will do? Can’t we love ourselves better? I guess not, we’re too full of crap, and unconsciously, we know it. So we pine for the touch of a warm hand…

“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.

O, that I were a glove upon that hand

That I might touch that cheek!”

- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Touching is down-to-earth, a basic instinct, often infiltrated with the game of sex and desire, however pretty the words are made to sound... 

Now we have looked at the "five senses"… stay here for more soon.