Believe in nothing

Shunryu Suzuki: “It is absolutely necessary for everyone to believe in nothing.” That’s Zen straight up. Unfiltered. Unadulterated. And so we ask ourselves, What did we believe in our pre-infancy, before we were born, when we were timeless and formless and free? “Get back to where you once belonged,” sang the Beatles. But no, full of fear, we run a bit of material up a pole and salute it, sing to it, send men in their teens and 20s off to die for it, later draping it over their coffins. My country, right or wrong, thunders the culture from the stadia. “My mother, drunk or sober,” rejoins G.K. Chesterton. And so it goes. “Believe in me,” sings Lenny Kravitz. Okay, sure. But why? Right here, right now, where is the necessity for belief? In anything? “A ‘sin’ is something which is not necessary.” said George Gurdjieff, speaking, as he always did, in unmeasured tones from behind his Armenian moustache.