Expert: Joe McSorley - 11/13/2007

Question
Besides yourself Joe who else or what do you believe in?
Where will Joe go when Joe ceases to exist as a human? This isn't silly thinking When you prepare for a trip do you read a map that has the destination on it? Most likely. So if you were to do that for just a simple cross country trip why wouldn't you do it for your life? Much about being awake in the here & now is about preparing for the otherside with moderation of course.
-Good day!

Answer
Hello Elizabeth,
  Hello,
  Thank you for your questions.  Since you have several of them I will try to deal with each one individually though some answers will overlap.

  You ask “Besides yourself Joe who else or what else do you believe in”.

This forum here is about Zen Buddhism, not Joe McSorley and his beliefs , which I assure you would be incredibly boring. I don’t ever recall saying on this forum or elsewhere in my adult life that one should just believe in themselves, believe in me or that I believe in an egocentric self as an answer. I don’t know if this is something you are surmising or misunderstanding about what I have written about Zen. It isn’t a matter of what I believe; believing in something doesn’t make it real.  Millions of children believe in Santa Claus but he does not exist.  I was raised to believe that eating a hot dog on Friday would send me to hell.  As trivial or funny as that may seem today, I did believe it as a child and with many other beliefs, just as insane, that I held as real and true.  As I aged I saw that others held other beliefs that they swore from the depths of their hearts were true and real.  I’ve had many different groups of people over the years trying to convince me to ‘just believe’ or just ‘have faith’ in what they held sacrosanct and I would be happy or saved.  When I offered that others held opposing beliefs and why should I choose one over the other each proclaimed the others wrong and that theirs was the right way. It is easy to dismiss arguments about belief as extreme or nonsensical but if you take a true objective view about it and view it historically it is not so easily dismissed.  What one person believes over another can be the source of great aid for humanity or great slaughter. It does not stop at the individual.  We separate ourselves from one another and dehumanize one another simply because we believe different things.  Each thinks the other is not saved or going to hell because they don’t believe a system they so personally cherish.  I often hear, ‘you have to believe in something’ but I ask, why do I?  Does nature believe something to be real, nature is just nature.  This belief is central to Western religions, it can’t be any other way, but for Eastern religions it’s the source of illusion and creates many problems.  At this moment there are thousands of people dying all over the world because one group believed something about the other and it was not founded in reality and fact.

 Here are some of the problems I see with belief systems:

  Christians believe one thing while Mormons and Muslims another.  Many will kill for what they believe in and the history of these religions are full of such atrocities. The idea of killing to convert or killing another simply because they don’t follow one groups belief is seen in the Judeo Christian and Muslim traditions. Just because you believe in something does not make it real. The Judeo Christian religions base their belief on old texts that have been transcribed over the centuries and often altered.  We don’t know what the original texts were so we choose to believe in different versions of them.  Biblical scholars argue over what is the most accurate and what is not and know they will never have a definitive conclusion. Islam is split and wars over the two different schools of belief, Sunni and Shi’a, that formed after Mohammed’s death. Many native religions have entirely different sets of beliefs with differing versions on what the self is, how to live their lives and what happens at death. It is precisely the arbitrary nature of belief that makes it so problematic.  When one religion tells you to feel in your heart and love and another says feel in your heart and bomb both sincerely believe they are doing God’s will.

   Here is an example of the type of problems belief systems can and do create:
If the news was to report to Americans that an insurgent commander in Iraq slaughtered an entire village, every living breathing thing, men, women, children and animals, they would be outraged at this atrocity.  If it was committed by an American it would be investigated and the offenders would hopefully be punished for the crimes.  But when you put the name Joshua from the Old Testament on it and his army slays every living creature under God’s dictate, including women and children it becomes something excusable because God commanded it.  If it were Allah commanding it today it would be inexcusable. The Old Testament is full of warriors believing in their rightful God and killing others in his name.  It’s what you believe that makes it right or wrong according to religion.  So belief can lead one to some very malevolent places. The road map and rules set out in the Old Testament, Book of Mormon and the Quaran regarding what we do, slavery, how we treat women and children, punishment for infidelity, polygamy and how we should worship, like sacrificing animals, are things that would get you arrested in today’s society.  They were the road map of the time and following it dictated whether or not you made it to the ‘other side’. I have yet to find two groups of believers, whether in religion or politics, that both believe the exact same thing.  It becomes a very arbitrary thing when you get down to the details of a religion or a political party and people pick and choose what is the ‘real’ belief.  I don’t know what it is you believe in but I guess you can substantiate your belief with a religious system, scripture or some other form just as someone with an opposing view can do.
  
Belief in self/myself and what it implies.
  There is a belief in self that is simply the belief that one can accomplish a task or obtain a goal. This belief in self is based upon past experiences, successes and failures and is based in empirical knowledge by what you already know from the past.  If I believe I can run a marathon it would be because I would train for it but this is not the same as faith.  You might have faith that you can run a marathon and not train and find yourself sore and sorely disappointed when you try.  It seems to me when you talk about believing in yourself/myself it implies an extreme egotism. It is this type of egotism that makes one march forward pushing their beliefs on others, be they religious or political.  Dictators and facists have their beliefs and Joshua his but we excuse those with the same religious belief we have. The slaughter of innocents is okay in the Old Testament but not today.  I know this really angers people when you bring it to their attention but it is a fact of history. If you change religious names to political names they become crimes against humanity but when just kept in the religious realm, or more accurately, the religion we believe in, then it is an excusable act under the name of God.  If we don’t understand how that could happen we call it a mystery that will be solved after we die. As varied as the beliefs are for the rules of this life they are just as varied for what the ‘other side’ is and how to get it.  I can believe in worshipping a God for eternity or that I get 71 virgins or that I will be reborn as a gnat or turtle, all are arbitrary as to which system I put my faith in.  When a new belief, like Scientology arises, we criticize it under the introspective minds of the 21st century and declare it as false mainly because it is considered new and contrived and not ‘real’ like the old beliefs are.  In fact, in the early days of many religions, they were considered just as outlandish and fringe but time tempered them to what they are accepted today.  Before there were these books to believe in what did people believe? Were they all doomed because these books did not exist?  By the way I am just as critical of the belief in reincarnation in some sects of Buddhism as I am critical of other systems.

 To your question “ where will Joe go when he ceases….”

 In the East life is not a journey but a cycle of living and dying.  It is the root of life that Buddhism hopes to realize.  From the Buddhist perspective we know that we are but don’t know who we are. There is a Buddhist saying “ who are you before the birth of your parents”.  This is an attempt to get one to realize who they are before a self identity, before there was a person called Joe, what is the root of his nature, how did he/I come into being?  In the West we come into being at conception according to some beliefs but this is not the case in the East.  To see reality in the here and now does not mean to simply live in a mindless hedonistic present.  It is the attempt to see reality on its own terms, not our myopic and self-centered terms.  To live in the moment is not a psychological state but an existential state.   


  Your question in the form of an analogy about taking a trip and the assumption of a here after>

  I will now deal with your idea of taking a trip.   If I choose to vacation in Yosemite Park I know that it a real place.  I know it exists and is not just a construct of my mind, some book or what I was taught to believe in.  Knowing this I can plan a trip for it, consult maps and make plans.  If I were to follow the directions and get the precise location and it was not there then I would know that I had been deceived or given a bad map.  It’s concrete, substantial and real.  If one person believes in Yosemite and one doesn’t does not make it any more or less real.  A person’s personal belief does not effect the reality of its existence.  Before the ‘new world’ was discovered people did not believe it existed but it had no effect on its existence.  Maps either lead you there or they don’t, it’s not at all arbitrary.  As far as the road map for living it is a matter of what one I choose to believe in and, like Yosemite, it does not make it real or unreal just because I or millions of others believe it.  With all the spiritual road maps out there which should I choose?  Should I choose the one set by Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism or Hinduism?  Which one is the right map?  Is the map I believe in the right map simply because I choose to believe in that one or was born in the country where that belief is prevalent?  Once I tell a Christian I choose the Islamic map they will tell me I am wrong, if I tell the Muslim I choose the Jewish map they also will tell me I am wrong.  This is very problematic.  In the past people of faith have proclaimed to me that I just have to believe, period.  That is really ingenuous for what they really mean is that they want me to believe what they believe in.  It’s not a question of ‘just belief’ but belief in the particular agenda of a particular group.  In the New Age religions and philosophies this is taken to an extreme with the idea of whatever we believe in is real.  Reality doesn’t work that way or I’d be sitting outside waiting for Santa on December 23 evening with a net. (joke)

 Your assumption that dealing with the here and now is a preparation for an assumed other side:

   In Buddhism being in the here and now means eternally and not temporally, in other words it is not linear.  It is a here and now that contains past, present and future. This is a foreign concept to Westerners and is not part of the religious teachings. There is one biblical quote that echoes the sentiment of Buddhism but is not often quoted by preachers and it is, “Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”  They are in the moment, full and complete reflecting all of nature’s greatness and beauty.  They are not on a trip, living to prepare for dying, or thinking of the other side, they are simply fully alive. This is the real here and now, coming into being and going out of being.
 In the end it does not matter what I believe for my belief does not affect reality.
 I hope this helps you.
 Take care,
           Joe