What is a caress?
It’s the place where mundane love meets divine love, where we reach from our material bodies to our spiritual.
If, as we believe, our souls are made of a tiny drop of the ocean of the soul of God, then the love we feel, mundane or magnificent, is an expression of the divine love in us.
We all carry this love. We all experience this love. And yet we struggle to identify ourselves with it. We struggle to understand and realise that, at the bottom, we are nothing else but this love.
Bhakti philosophy teaches that the material energy that shapes our daily lives (māyā-śakti) is there by purpose. The struggle against our material attachments is our journey of devotion. Māyā-śakti guides us. It gently loosens the guṇas, the ropes of our material attachments, all in the right time, the right way, with right intensity and feeling. Māyā-śakti is a school for lovers, taking us tenderly by the hand and guiding us back to ourselves, to our svarūpa, our soul identity, as servants of Rādhā, the servant of love for God (prema).
Our mundane, material lives are crucial. It is through our material practice, acts of material devotion, that we learn how to love, learn how to become the lovers that we naturally are. This is the beauty of material life: everyday we learn something new about how to love, how to devote ourselves, how to care, and how to live.
One who has reached spiritual perfection (siddha-dehe) is a glorious soul indeed. This soul has arrived before the feet of the divine. The voyage is completed.
On the other hand, we sādhakas experience a different kind of joy. It is the joy of deepening every day—some days more than others—our understanding of our soul identity (svarūpa).
This evolution, this transition, is like the unfolding of a caress.
A caress is the softest, gentlest touch of the skin of one by the hand of another. It is the simplest, most merciful expression of love.
A caress is a passage, a movement, a meeting, a communication. It’s the traveling of the hand across the surface of the body of another. The hand, the fingertips, among the most sensitive parts of the body, the most open, the most receptive.
The miracle of the caress is that its intensity grows with its lightness, its depth increases with its distance
Indeed the less our fingertips touch the skin, the more they touch the heart. A caress is a gesture that increases with pleasure as it decreases with force. The lighter the touch, the greater the sensation.
If anywhere we could imagine the spiritual pleasure of physical love, it is this. As the pressure of the pleasure-giving touch of the caress is lightened, the pleasure it produces grows. It grows until the sublime and paradoxical moment arrives when the hand that caresses hovers over the skin that is caressed, infinitesimally close, and yet separated, and the rapture is without end. This touch-less caress is the love of God.
Prema, divine love, love of the divine, is the caress so light that it does not touch the skin.
The beginning and end of all love is love of God. God is the source of the most elementary feeling of love touching our senses, both material and spiritual.
Any love I feel for you, from the tiniest grain a of emotion to the grandest passion I am capable of, is nothing other than the divine in me loving the divine in you.
The caress is a doorway to this process: physical sensation becoming spiritual.