Tantra I - iii. Touch

Is touch the most important of the sense organs. What do we mean by touch in the context of our writings here? The tantric analysis would suggest that it relates directly to the energising of the body and enables the unification of everything within the body that will lead to the central experience.

It is interesting that tantric commentary will name most sensory phenomena as distractions - and the list suggests something of what is going on in the process of achieving an altered state: strange luminous dots, smells, tastes in the mouth and sounds.

Touch is not apparently mentioned although surely the references to tingling situations should be counted here and indeed a tingling sensation is common in the literature.

Nevertheless, perhaps for rhetorical effect, the idea is that all these other sensory perceptions are, indeed, distractions but touch is not.

Looking deeper, however, the idea of touch seems to be closer to our understanding of proprioception, the sense of the body being in space - or, to quote Wikipedia, the 'sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement'.

It could be argued that the re-location of the body from the world to a 'transcendent' state is precisely the loss of external sense perception and of awareness of one's self (interoception) into this neither/or state of sensing, driving the self forward from being-in-the-world into an altered state of presumed being-in-being.

It might be further argued that the training involved in tantric exercises is precisely designed to shift what science has claimed to be proprioception in this way. Or it might not.