Zen would say that in adopting, too completely, the scientific view of reality we have closed the door on a more holistic view of life and are limiting ourselves to a rather mundane view of something altogether extraordinary. Zen maintains that our dualistic view of life means that whatever we perceive goes through our mental filtering systems before being cognitively understood. We use mental boxes for all aspects of our daily lives so we can make sense of our world and interact with oth- ers. With the development of language, though, this cognitive grasp of reality means that everything we perceive is subject to these men- tal processes, and so from early childhood we lose the ability to directly perceive the world. This is the point where dualism starts.
