Zen Buddhism and The Eastern Mystical Traditions Bhagavad Gita

The Eastern mystical tradition isn't the only affront to dualism. In the West, the logical positivists also deny metaphysics.

In fact, the logical positivist world-view might be considered the orthodox world-view today. When people claim that they believe in the scientific world view, they make an error in diction. Science has no world-view; it's not a philosophical system. But logical positivists make the leap of faith to the position that the constructions of science should be accepted as a description of reality.

They claim that we should accept the evidence of the senses as a starting point and use rigorous inductive logic, deductive logic, and experimental verification to construct a unified description of the interrelationships among phenomena (this is the scientific method), and then we should make the leap that this construct is a description of reality. So, logical positivists do agree with Hindus that metaphysical speculation is a meaningless word-game, but the positivists disagree with the Bhagavad Gita about about the results of rejecting dualism.

Logical positivists claim not to be materialists, yet their position differs from the materialists only in the weakness of the positivist stance.

The positivist position reminds me of a statement made to me by a friend's mother when I was an adolescent. As a young person, I, as I guess most young people do, began to question the orthodox beliefs of my parents. Since my parents were Christians, I began to question and then doubt some of my parent's religious beliefs, but I had no idea what I did believe. I took great solace in a concept that I discovered at that time when I learned of a term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley, apologist for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Huxley coined the term "agnostic" to refer to someone who didn't consider himself or herself to be a theist or an atheist. This was what I was! I didn't know, and that's the etymology of the word. I remember proudly telling a friend's mother (who I didn't know was an atheist at the time) that I was an agnostic, thinking that I would shock her a bit and impress her with the big word I had learned. She replied, " An agnostic is an atheist without [I will use a euphemism here to avoid offense to the reader because of the possible vulgarity and sexism in the term she used] "guts." I was the one who was shocked. But she had a point. An agnostic doesn't believe in God, so he or she differs from the atheist only in the weakness of his or her stance.

Logical positivist are like agnostics in that they act like materialists without claiming to be so. But if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck . . . So, I do think that logical positivists may be considered materialists without "guts." However, perhaps the inverse can be said about the Eastern mystical tradition. Perhaps, from a Western perspective, the Gita presents idealism without "guts."