छूना नहीं · Not touching
Longing at its full sweetness. The training is not to stop wanting. It is to let the thing open without taking it.
If something light green is near you, a thread or a cloth, tie it on your wrist. Light green is Bharata's colour for śṛṅgāra. Or begin as you are.
First the body, later the voice, later still only inside. Any of them, any time; nothing is locked.
It opened, and nothing was taken.
In Bharata, hāsya arises from śṛṅgāra (VI.39). That road is there for another time.
Why this
Bharata shows a feeling in four ways, the four abhinayas: by the body (āṅgika), by the voice (vācika), by what is worn (āhārya) and from within (sāttvika) (Abhinayadarpaṇa 38; Ghosh 1957). This practice goes through them from the outside in.
Sri Aurobindo, in a letter to someone anxious about possessions (Letters on Yoga IV, CWSA 31, p. 254): “Ananda is one thing and vital enjoyment is another. One can have the rasa of a beautiful thing, for instance a picture, without wanting or needing to possess it or turn it to one’s own purpose.” The flower is that one sentence, given to the hand.
The Gītā says that the things of the senses fall away from one who does not feed on them, but the taste for them stays; the taste itself goes when the Highest is seen, rasavarjaṃ raso ’py asya paraṃ dṛṣṭvā nivartate (2.59). Nothing here asks the wanting to stop. It is given something larger to taste.
Śṛṅgāra in Bharata is unhurried (XIX.43 and XIX.58 to 59), its notes madhyama and pañcama, so the flower opens to Ma and Pa on the flute. Its colour is śyāma, which Ghosh gives as light green (VI.42 to 43), and its deity is Viṣṇu (VI.44 to 45).
How near counts as near, and how soft as soft, are ours. Nothing you do here is kept or sent.