If we want to attend to overcoming duality, it seems at first blush that there’s two ways to do it.
The first is that we try to change our ideas. The second is that we meditate in an intense way and then have a dramatic awakening experience.
The Soto position of practice realisation is neither of those, but it has a clear idea at its core: when we’re meditating, we’re engaging our somatic sense. We’re very particular about the posture because we want to have an activated spine, we want to be able to feel the breath at the centre of our body and generally, we want to have an active, energetic embodiment free of ownership by the mind.
And we want to activate the somatic sense because duality is not the result of ideas about us being separate. It’s because of the dominance of our visual sense. We’re carrying around with ourselves an idea of what we look like from the outside, an odd two-dimensional visual re-presentation of our body, which is very connected with the mind. By activating the somatic sense, we displace the visual sense, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for longer. That is practice realisation. Because paradoxically, when we feel ourselves more as a somatic three-dimensional being, we’re not disconnected from the rest of creation.