Touch is an interesting sense partly because of its constancy. Unlike the eye, it cannot be closed, so we learn to stop paying attention to it unless it crosses some threshold of type or duration. We notice touch, for example, when it begins to be uncomfortable whether from pain or pleasure. There are both internal and external sensors, although there are far more external sensors (e.g. the skin) than there are internal ones. We tend to feel internal space only when there are immediate bodily needs to be attended—hunger, thirst, a full bladder, a sore stomach. The skin seems to register nearly everything else. We feel small temperature and pressure changes: the tiny hairs on our limbs quiver. We can feel very soft touches on certain parts of our bodies and only fairly hard pressure on other areas. Arousal states—whether anger or lust—alter what we can feel. We feel a host of different textures and interpret the time and place sequence of contact as movement along the skin.

Blindfolding, to allow concentration on the sense of touch, will develop one’s awareness of the subtleties of this sensory system. Its building blocks—intensity, duration, texture etc—get built into a whole, an organized world that is quite distinct from the world-view of the eye. To the skin and the internal sensors the world is a place of immediacy with no real spatial extension. It is a place of no radical demarcation or edge. Reality is continuous, unfolding and pretty much commensurate with what the skin describes spatially, or at its greatest range, the limits of what changes the small hairs can feel. This reality is as important to the successful operation of a body as is any of the other senses but its “world” is, for whatever reason, seemingly one of the most difficult to keep in the aware mind.