One of the primary issues in Zen is the problem of Duality–the sense that there’s a split between me and the world.
The temptation is to try and heal that split in the realm of thought. We think the split is there because we think of ourselves as separate beings and hence regard the world as a resource: stuff to use, stuff to throw away.
The cure for that would seem to be changing that perspective, replacing selfish individualism with a matrix of ideas emphasising interconnection, compassion, kindness and so on.
Laudable as it is to foster those qualities, that way of approaching the problem is fundamentally mistaken. The source of the duality is not at the level of mind or ideas, or not at least in this sense that we normally take that to be. Rather, the source of the duality is the dominance of our visual sense.
If we examine our experience carefully, we’re very often carrying around a kind of proto image of ourselves, seen, as it were, from the outside.
That visual sense is culturally our dominant sense. It is very connected to the Mind and to our sense of self. It dominates all our other senses, particularly our somatic sense, our momentary, felt, embodied sense.
This explains some aspects of meditation which might appear to be otherwise odd.
Why is there such an emphasis on posture for example?
Because if we’re sitting in the correct posture, our spine becomes activated. We have this sense of visceral aliveness we can’t really articulate, but which is clearly there.
And if our posture is correct, we experience our breath right at our centre.
When we’re breathing like this, we’re very aware of the constant interaction between our breath and our flesh, our breath and our bones
The breath is something which the mind can’t conceptualise or temporise.
But you can see it in other ways as well. For instance if we develop more of a sense of the interiority of the mouth; the fleshiness of your tongue, the depth of your mouth, this has a similar effect; alerting us to the aliveness ‘inside’. When we put our tongue on our hard palate, it sometimes activates our third eye, it sometimes creates this curious sense of dynamic uplift in our head and neck.
All this reactivates our somatic sense. Which diminishes the visual sense. It doesn’t dispel it, but diminishes it. Paradoxically, by reactivating the somatic sense, the sense of ourselves as being three-dimensional rather than as if it were a visual two-dimensional image, breaks down that primary self/world duality.
It’s an illusion to think that duality has to be suddenly flipped over in some miraculous kensho experience.
It’s enough that its grip is gradually loosened.