Lighter, to no edge, home; then inward, and home again

1. Lighten the touch as in Dhalnā: firm, lighter, barely there, not touching, the memory. Touch for each.
2. Then widen: the clothes, the ground, the skin, the room, the wind, no edge. Touch for each.
3. In the silence past the edge, hold, and stay.
4. Hold again. Come back, closer and closer, touching as each comes back, until the touch is firm.
5. Now go inward: the breath at the nostrils, the throat, the chest, the pulse, the feeling. Touch for each.
6. In the feeling, silence. Hold, and stay.
7. When you are ready, hold. Come back out through the pulse, the chest, the throat, the nostrils.
8. You are back. Sit a moment before you get up.

• The way back is always one hold away, or the button at the top: it never leaves you in the middle.
• Eyes may stay open.
• If the body aches and a touch on it hurts, stay with a cloth or a stone in your hand. That is a whole practice.
• If the pulse frightens you, stay with the breath at the nostrils.
• Nothing sharp, nothing hot. The touch is to be felt, never to hurt.

Sri Aurobindo, to someone afraid of the emptiness that came in concentration:

Consciousness is not dissolved; it is the limits of the consciousness that are dissolved.

Letters on Yoga III, CWSA 30, p. 276

This is the journey of Nādamaya with a touch instead of a sound, made at Jyotirgana from Arjun's own description. Its widening goes through the air, because that is where Sri Aurobindo places touch. This form is ours.

It has not been tested. We claim no result from it.

the paper →

Sri Aurobindo, reading Gītā 7.8 and 9 in his Essays on the Gita:

“I am taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energy of light in fire,” and, it may be added for more completeness, touch or contact in air.

Essays on the Gita, CWSA 19, p. 272

Sri Aurobindo, in A System of National Education (1910), on how a teacher helps a child to know a flower:

His touch should assure itself of the texture and its peculiarities.

Early Cultural Writings, CWSA 1, p. 404

sarvasrotonibandhena prāṇaśaktyordhvayā śanaiḥ |
pipīlasparśavelāyām prathate paramaṃ sukham || 67 ||

All the senses' streams held, the breath rising slowly: at the moment of a touch like creeping ants, the highest joy spreads.

In an old book of such practices, the smallest touch is a door.

Vijñāna Bhairava 67, in the text of GRETIL (Göttingen), in Roman letters as it is given there. The translation is ours.