Touch – Laughing Man Magazine – Adi Da Samraj

Touch is precisely the dimension in which you must become awake. You must transcend the intellectualizable senses of sight and hearing and so forth. Samadhi is simply a matter of passing through all the internal lights and sounds and visions associated with the intellectual senses into the domain of the sense of touch where all the intellectual senses are suspended. At the level of touch we read the very condition of the nervous system in space. But, as touch, that condition is blind, it is prior to the usual body sense, prior to all the intellectually organized complexity of inwardness. Inwardness vanishes, and what is seen is at the skin level. Our contraction from infinity can possibly even be measured in terms of electrical activity at the skin level. It is only when the sense of touch becomes Enlightened that the subtle activity at the level of the skin achieves the Native State and permits bodily intercourse with the Infinite Radiance.  

The ultimate dimension or mode of the nervous system is cognized at the level of touch, not via the intellectual senses-which include all the senses except touch. You propose, in your egoic fashion, to go about exploiting the intellectual senses, the receptor senses, which can be associated with higher person contemplation, in separation from the physical. Yet, separation from the physical is basically separation from the sense of touch. You tend to exploit these other senses because the surface of your being is not entirely released though touch into infinite Radiance. Your neurosis is reflected at the level of touch, in your avoidance of relationship, your contraction of the sense of touch. You recoil, you turn upon yourself toward the inward part. Therefore, you principally violate the organization of the being relative to the sense of touch, or simple, whole-bodily surrender.

You are least conscious of the dimension of touch. You think information comes first through these intellectual senses such as vision-and all the games you play with these senses which are associated with higher imagination. But long before you see, the very surface of the eye balls is contracted by fear. The very surface of the brain is contracted. The extremity as well as the root of the nervous system is contracted. The very presentation of the whole/bodily being is fundamentally contracted. Thus, the media of the body/mind all provide information qualified by a fundamental error of the whole bodily being at the level of its most basic presentation.  

The Way is founded on touch. Only when the whole body, or the total surface of the body is Enlightened, rather that when some isolated part is stimulated, can you fully involve yourself in the sense of touch. The whole body is associated with touch. All the other organs of sensation are creepy little internal senses and yogis always exploit these sensors. They do not take up the Way of touch, which is founded in whole-body sense of touch.  

Thus, the liberation, the Enlightenment, of the sense of touch and not its inversion-is the vehicle of the Way. Touch transcends all the other dimensions of sensation and awareness. Touch transcends sight and sound and all the mystical experiences that can be realized through the inversion of any of the other senses. You can experience all kinds of visions of the Great Being by inverting the sense of sight, but an entirely other dimension is revealed when the dimension of touch is liberated, freed from the subtle effort of contraction that separates the body at the skin level. The whole-body being resumes its fundamental presentation of itself prior to inwardness and recoil from the universal design and from its own Being and Radiance, its Condition in Truth.