Expert: Joe McSorley - 12/5/2006

Question
Joe I was surfing the web and read your response 3-20-06!
Do you mean that the Eastern version of the afterlife (soul) is when the individual reunites with the universe as if you were to tear a paper and mend it back together!
Whereas the western version of the soul considers the soul a separate identity from God and or the Universe as a whole?
This is very important to me. I think the latter is what you meant?  

Answer
Hi Darren,
    I don’t know what my response was on 3-20- 06 or how to retrieve it.  I hope that my response here is accurate and I apologize if I am totally off the point.  I am guessing it has something to do with the difference between the Eastern version of human/nature and the western version of man/God/nature.  I don’t talk about the Eastern version of an afterlife for many reasons.  First of all there is no ‘one’ Eastern version, there are many articulations and ideas.  Zen does not talk about an afterlife at all while some Buddhist schools have an entirely different take on the subject.  Fundamentally Buddhism teaches that the self is empty of any real substance, that we are a composite of things, memories, desire, cognitions, that think we are a thing apart and separate from the Universe.  It is often explained in this story:  A man comes to study with the historical Buddha and is having a difficult time understanding its ideas.  The Buddha welcomes him but does not face his questions rather he asks him about his journey to meet him.  The Buddha asks ‘how did you get here’ and the man replies ‘ on a chariot’, the Buddha then says ‘I’m sorry but I don’t know what a chariot is, can you describe it to me?’ The fellow proceeds to tell him how a chariot is constructed and its layout from axel, wheels, buckboard, shroud to harness and horses.  The Buddha takes this in and says ‘ so all of these things together make a chariot?  When is it no longer a chariot?  When you take away the wheels is it no longer a chariot or the buckboard or the axel?  At what point does it become or not become a chariot?  This is a conglomeration of things you call a chariot but what really is the chariot?’  The man is puzzled by this and ponders it but the Buddha says ‘who are you?  Are you your thoughts, desires, senses, or memories?  Remove what and you are no longer you?  When do you become you or not you by this composite of aggregates?’  Now this plunges the man into a deep inquiry of who the self really is.
  There is no singular substance in the universe called a chariot or one that is the self rather it is the particular arrangement of things at that time that we call a self or chariot.  It is the illusion of our minds that we think we have an identity that is apart from the rest of the Universe.  We are the Universe expressing itself as ourselves in this particular moment.  Awakening is to realize that we are not this separated self but the Universe as expressed in this  form not at all separated from itself.  There is no afterlife here but seeing the eternal now.  It is man’s ignorance that makes him think there is this separation.
  There is another way to describe this.  D.T. Suzuki has the analogy of a wave on the ocean as symbolic of man’s sense of a separate self.  A wave arises on the ocean and looks down and sees the ocean all around.  It says, “ I  know that I am because I am not the ocean nor am I all the other individual waves, I exist separate from them”.  It has separated itself from the ocean to know itself as an individual wave.  This separation actually creates the ‘self’, it is both an act and a fact of this separation.  Now it makes all its judgments as a separated self.  In this act it is also separated from itself, it knows that it is but not who it really is.  Now it tries to go outward to find itself but it cannot.  When it goes inward it is also problematic, why? Because the act of going inward is still the act of separating from the ocean to be able to go inward.  So this wave is alienated from itself, it’s surroundings and the ocean.  But the fact of the matter is, who is the wave fundamentally?  Is it the individual wave?  No, there’s really no such thing because it’s fully the ocean.  There is not a soul in the wave that connects it to the ocean, it truly is the ocean but doesn’t see this.  So who is looking for this awakening?  The fact is that the wave is really just a manifestation of the ocean, it never was separated in reality but only knew itself as separated.  It has to stop the ego process, the act of separating, in the hope that the ocean can rise up to see itself as both the wave and the ocean.  It is one hundred percent wave and one hundred percent ocean, not at any point ever separated.  The wave seeking the ocean/enlightenment/nirvana is the ocean seeking the wave.  When the breakthrough occurs it is not new or just starting but a realization of what always really was.  This is a non-dual duality.  Both itself as wave and ocean.  Pure non-dualism would have just been the ocean with a wave never arising.  We rise out of nature and now ourselves as separate from it but in fact we are nature in search of itself.
This is not something that happens in an afterlife; it’s all in the eternal present.
  In the Western view of things we and nature are a creation of God and as such, not God but separate from him.  The idea of the soul is that it is the eternal part of God in us and we must reunite with Him to be in heaven.  This is a general view and nowadays some people are arguing against it but it does hold some merit historically.  There is no creator in the Buddhist view of things and man and nature are identical and inseparable.
 I hope this has answered your question.
Take care,
          Joe