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Title: Zenarchy Author: Kerry Thornley Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: anti-politics, counterculture, marxism, psychology, religion, right libertarian, satire, sexuality Source: Retrieved on December 19, 2009 from http://www.impropaganda.net/1997/zenarchy.html Notes: Copyright 1991, 1997 Kerry W. Thornley, IllumiNet Press and Impropaganda. All contents are not ©opyright Impropaganda Networks. “Screws with your mind until you come to your senses”® is not ©opyright MOFOCO. All rites reversed. Use what you want, just please give us or the appropriate folks credit.
Zenarchy is a way of Zen applied to social life. A non-combative,
non-participatory, no-politics approach to anarchy intended to get the
serious student thinking.
In the words of Antero Alli, author of Angel Tech and other rebellious
manifestoes: “Zenarchists everywhere will be delighted... an arsenal of
strange loops and fractal surprises... don’t leave OM without it!”
Enjoy!
For Camden Benares and Robert Anton Wilson
Very early in the Zen tradition in China, a seeker was instructed to
return to his face before he was born. In other words, be yourself.
Don’t put on a face for the outside world. Let your attitude be as
unconditioned as before you emerged from the womb. Cultural trends and
movements also have unborn expressions. When Jesus spoke, his words were
not immediately called Christianity.
In 1967 in California something existed that has since been
characterized as the Love Generation, the Hippie Movement, the
Counter-culture and Flower Power. But those were names given it by the
media. Before then it was more or less unconditioned, and it consisted
of people who believed in being unconditioned — in finding their faces
before birth. They hadn’t decided to be the Love Generation; they had
decided to put aside striving for appearances.
An interview was published in the Los Angeles Oracle, a transcript of a
conversation between Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder and Alan
Watts. At one point they chatted about the flamboyant new people
populating the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Alan Watts said
that as soon as somebody discovered a name for the phenomenon, it would
kill it.
Although we sometimes called ourselves hip or hipsters or hippies or
flower children, at that time those were just names among many that
seemed occasionally fitting. As a social entity we were not yet
stereotyped. Between a hard-bopping hipster and a gentle flower child
there was a distinction, and neither label stretched to include us all.
Usually we called ourselves heads. Pot heads, acid heads, or both.
Bohemians, Beatniks, mutants, freaks and groovy people were names used
with due caution. For in those days what we called ourselves was not to
obscure what we were, and what we were was open to experience.
Becoming hung up on avoiding names, of course, can be as misleading as
being named, classified and forgotten. We were not making an effort in
either direction. We intended, however, to avoid abstractions that
short-circuit thought. An unborn face entailed a naked mind.
Zen is called Zen, but when the monk asks the master, “What is Zen?” he
does not receive a definition but a whack on the head, or a mundane
remark, or a seemingly unrelated story. Although such responses might
baffle the student, they did not encourage him to glibly pigeon-hole the
Doctrine.
Zen remained alive and vigorous for many more generations than would
otherwise have been possible. Neither was it easily co-opted nor did it
degenerate into superstition. Among the people in the Haight-Ashbury
that Alan Watts did not want to see named were many scholars of Zen.
More recent traditions also influenced what was coming to be.
Every year near Thousand Oaks, California, was something called a
Renaissance Faire. As a custom it survives even now, but before the
media discovered the hippies it was not the same. That it was less
commercialized was only part of the difference.
What could be gathered about the people who came there to peddle their
wares was significant. Self-sufficient individuals who lived by means of
their craft, whether it was leather carving or pottery or one of a dozen
other skills, they were bearded and long haired in the years before
anyone employed by a corporation was permitted to look so outlandish.
Self-styled gypsies who lived in the canyons and foothills and desert
areas up and down the coast from Los Angeles, they were tanned, wiry and
weathered. In their conversation they were knowledgeable without seeming
pompous. A natural sensuality appeared in their body movements that did
not seem distracting. Playing music, singing folk songs and dancing
whenever they felt like it, they did not seem especially gaudy in their
colorful clothes.
People like them had been in existence in California at least since the
early Forties. Gary Snyder insists in his writings that their tradition
goes back in West Coast history past the turn of the century. I recall
seeing them when I was a child — my nose pressed against the car window
as we drove through the environs of Hollywood. In those days, they were
generally gathered around the entrances of the local health food stores.
I asked my mother what they were and she said they were crackpots; I
determined then and there that when I grew up I was going to be a
crackpot.
Then there was the Beat Generation of the Fifties. Overlapping with the
Bohemian craftspeople, it was not identical. Beatniks tended to be more
urban and vocal, less stable and more pessimistic. Among the most avid
readers of Beatnik poetry were these serene artisans, who also mingled
with them socially. By 1967, though, most of the Beats were consigned to
the dead past, at least in the public mind, while the older and less
conspicuous group endured without benefit of the obituaries written for
the Beat Generation after its heyday. Lawrence Lipton used to argue in
the Los Angeles Free Press that the demise of Beatdom was a media hoax,
but in any case the word “beat” had been beaten silly, and only the most
naive flower child or the most sophisticated hipster could any longer
use it without sounding square.
Critics of the counter-culture have charged that such mores indicated a
system of conformity among the hip just as oppressive as the one they
were trying to escape, but that was not the way it was at all. A wide
range of behavior was lovingly tolerated. Only stepping back into the
plastic world of mindlessness was discouraged.
I remembered, as one of my early contacts with the hip culture, a visit
I’d made in the early Sixties with a young woman of an acquaintance, to
the home of a jazz musician. Tucked away in the hills above the Sunset
Strip, it was the pad where his friends gathered to jam. I had been
attracted to a picture of Ramakrishna, the Vedantic Indian saint,
sitting on a dresser with a little flower in a vase in front of it. So
late in the spring of 1967 I designed a simple meditation table — a
rectangular plywood board with a brick under each corner — for incense,
flowers and Zen books, not to mention my marijuana stash. Symptomatic
neither of a belief system nor a discipline, meditation became for me a
relaxing way to spend part of an hour, from time to time, seated
cross-legged in a corner of the living room.
Raga music played on the stereo, sunlight coloring the walls through the
homemade stained-glass window behind and above me; wisps of smoke
gyrating from the end of a joss stick, a cup of tea — these simple and
inexpensive enjoyments added more to my life than any collection of art
treasures could have. Such was the unborn face at the time of becoming.
An eternal paradox of this kind of subject matter: the specifics are
irrelevant, but it cannot be conveyed at all in general terms. Certainly
it isn’t about a handful of cheap decorations. Stopping to dig them was
what it was.
After my second LSD trip was when it began. Horrible bummer that it was,
I came down from it nevertheless knowing for the first time what it
would take to make me genuinely happy — not much. But I didn’t have it.
More time, less hustle.
So I spoke with my wife. I told her I was tired of busting my ass. I
would keep up my end of the load; she worked part-time. I was no longer
into rushing through life as if it were something to be gotten over
with. I would awake each morning and sit and think until I figured out a
way to make ten dollars that day — writing, selling grass or working odd
jobs. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I had only wanted to make as
much money as possible, and suddenly it was obvious that I had been
completely out of touch with my own values.
Since I was editor of a libertarian newsletter with all the free ad
space I wanted, and since my contacts in Los Angeles were numerous, it
proved simple to earn my daily bread in this fashion.
An understanding woman, my wife contributed an idea of her own. We could
live without paying so much rent. My grandparents were now in an old
people’s home and their house was vacant. We arranged to rent it from my
family for fifty dollars a month plus upkeep.
A big old house in which I first came to consciousness as a toddler, it
contained two bedrooms and a large living and dining area composed of
two adjoining rooms, a glassed front porch, a gigantic old fashioned
kitchen, and an enormous backyard with a charming, if decrepit, walnut
tree.
With so much room for guests, this house on 77^(th) Street in Southwest
Los Angeles became a social center of sorts. We harbored my brothers
when they became acid heads and had to quit living with my parents,
occasional runaways they brought home from hitch-hiking adventures,
visiting libertarian and Kerista acquaintances from out of town — and
together we gardened, listened to rock music while stringing beads to
peddle on consignment in head shops, and of course, partied. In
retrospect, I always think of that house as 77^(th) Street Parade.
About the same time the Human Be-Ins started happening. Announcements in
the Free Press and occasional comments from my teenage brothers first
brought them to my attention.
Then there was the Easter Love-In and Gathering of the Tribes in Elysian
Park. That was my initiation into the possibilities inherent in our
situation. Converging before sunrise from all directions they came —
high and grinning people garbed in ceremonial dress. Sounds of tinkling
bells worn around necks and on the sashes of robes, together with the
rattle of an occasional tambourine, filled the air. At the center of the
field was an ensemble of gongs and temple bells called Spontaneous Sound
— with one man, stripped to the waist, leaping among them, striking one
and then another.
Believing in reincarnation or genetic memory was a temptation. A friend
walked up to me and said, “Well, here we are again.” Tribal banners hung
in the trees. A voluntary extended family of one kind or another was
assembled under each of them. Among many others were represented the Hog
Farm, the Oracle Tribe, Strawberry Fields/Desolation Row as well as the
Free Press and KPFK.
Why they were called Human Be-Ins was obvious, for just by being there
we had created all this haunting beauty.
Although it lacked the strident quality of a demonstration, this
gathering could not help being an eloquent protest of all that was drab
and uninspired in the surrounding dominant culture. Only the tiniest
children took it all in stride as something quite natural to be
expected.
More Gatherings of the Tribes followed during the spring and summer of
1967 in the Crystal Springs area of Griffith Park. Before long we
organized a tribe of our own called the Gentle Folk with our friends who
were into sexual mate sharing and psychedelics. Most of them we had met
through Kerista, a movement that enjoyed a brief, spectacular success as
the hip religion — establishing communes in ghetto slums — until the
founder, Jud the Prophet, turned most of us off by coming out strongly
in favor of the war in Vietnam.
I recall carrying our banner through the early morning mist, sitting
beneath it later as an American Indian squatted in front of me and,
without uttering a word, made a beautiful flower out of some feathers
and colored pipe cleaners we’d brought to give away. Then he handed it
to me.
Before dawn I would also gather rose balls — flowers just about to bloom
— from bushes around our house. Whenever I made eye contact with someone
at the Love-In, I’d toss them one. Some Diggers who liked my rose ball
idea once gave me a big, fat joint of Acapulco Gold.
Our whole tribe huddled one morning under the same blanket, giggling.
God’s eyes made of yarn. Peace emblems and scented oils.
Guitar-strumming minstrels. Beautiful women in flowing long dresses.
Laid-back Hell’s Angels. Bewildered crew-cut servicemen on liberty and
little old ladies looking for Communists. Afro-Americans with drums.
Practically everything and everybody you wouldn’t expect to find
anywhere else was here.
One of the little old ladies went home with flowers in her hair and
wrote a nice column about us in the Pasadena newspaper for which she
happened to work. As she was to note, when we cleared out of the park in
the evening, not a speck of litter was left behind. For the most part,
the rest of the media confined itself to inaccuracies such as
underestimating our numbers by many thousands or implying that we were
outstandingly sacrilegious. Every effort was made from the start to
insure that we would become nothing more than a passing fad.
By the middle of that summer, the cops were infiltrating us and making
busts for marijuana possession with increasing belligerence. Earlier,
Timothy Leary had said, “I didn’t mind it when they were calling us a
cult because that means a small group of people devoted to an ideal, but
now they are calling us a movement, and that means we are in danger of
becoming a minority group.” By this time it was worse, for we were a
generation. As the misrepresentation and persecution increased, the
morale of our fragile social miracle deteriorated and with it went most
our much-touted love.
“Hippies don’t like to take baths!” became a popular cliche and so
everyone opposed to personal cleanliness ran away from home and joined
us. Whoever originated that rumor was probably speaking for how they
themselves would have opted to behave in an atmosphere of freedom.
Mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy insured that every unseemly trait
projected our way by those who feared themselves would become the truth
in short order, for Time and Newsweek began to function as recruiting
literature. So it was not long before it was no longer hip to be a
hippie.
Astonishing, though, was that anything had happened in the first place.
Nobody could say precisely what brought us to be, but LSD got much of
the credit. Unlike junkies, pot heads were always a sociable lot. Acid,
however, was to endow them with a cosmic confidence in the righteousness
of their way. That in turn led to lectures and light shows and
psychedelic boutiques and, ultimately, a movement strong and vigorous
enough to be taken for a generation. But in fact, it had contained
people of all ages with little more in common than independence of mind.
Among my friends in those days was a man named John Overton. A technical
writer for the aero-space industry, a White devotee of Black culture and
a consummate seducer of women, he began to blossom spiritually with LSD,
psycho-drama and human potential groups. Briefly he became involved with
an Indonesian cult that recommended legally changing one’s name in order
to reprogram an unwanted self-image. So he changed his first name to
Camden, because he liked the sound of it, and his last name to Benares,
after the city where the Buddha delivered his first sermon.
Since then, he has written Zen Without Zen Masters (Falcon Press, 1985),
a book that inspired this one and which seems to have grown out of our
stoned 1967 discussions about mysticism and authority. To the best of my
knowledge he also wrote in those days the first American Zen story, as a
result of a visit to the Oracle Tribe’s mansion. Published in his book
as “Enlightenment of a Seeker,” it is about a young man who didn’t know
what to think of himself. Then one day he overheard another say of him,
“Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead.” As Camden
explains, “Hearing this, the man was enlightened.”
Among the scholars of hip I did not know personally, Gary Snyder was
into something he called Zen Anarchism. Everything else he said also
attracted me.
As Japhy Ryder, he was hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums. In
the interview with Ginsberg, Leary and Watts he seemed at once the most
sensitive and the most politically sophisticated.
As a libertarian I was acquainted with that astute minority among us
calling themselves anarchists. That they were not a bunch of
psychopathic bomb throwers out to stir up chaos and violence, but a
group of sociologists independent of the constraints of institutional
financing, was just beginning to dawn on me.
At the library I was always obtaining books about Zen Buddhism, for I
was aware that it was one of the keys to the fresh liveliness of what
was happening. Writers in the Free Press and commentators at KPFK
frequently quoted Zen sayings. When I was serving in the Marines in
Japan I’d made a cursory study of the subject, but came away more
puzzled than enlightened — both with Zen and Japanese culture in
general.
Now Zen struck me as the natural lifestyle implied by anarchist politics
— and from the Taoistic perspective of Zen, anarchism seemed the logical
political option. Like the Yin and the Yang, they belong together in a
dynamic synergy of creative power.
In his final work, Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts was to reach the
same conclusion, linking the principles discovered by Lao Tzu and Chuang
Tzu — Taoist sages as responsible as the Buddha for the flavor of Zen —
with the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin.
Pondering the words of Alan Watts in the Oracle interview, about the
destructive power of names, I decided it was not the labels so much as
our attachment to them that constituted the problem. Much like the
Psychedelic Movement, our consciousness began to narrow. As the Hip
Culture we were used by Madison Avenue to sell fashions. As the Love
Generation we became hateful and angry because we saw ourselves as
loving and young, and those opposing us as spiteful and old. Perhaps the
secret of survival, now that we were being named from the outside
anyhow, was to forever create new names and always be ready to let the
old ones go.
Early one Saturday morning, wooden blocks seemed to tumble and clatter
away from my mind in all directions. Had it been satori (enlightenment),
I wouldn’t have been so annoyed since then by the trials and
tribulations of living. But it was something that nearly allowed me to
understand what those old guys meant. When my mind closed in on it, it
slipped away like an eel — but that took time because I was quite
thoroughly stoned on marijuana. After that, my fascination with Zen
outstripped my devotion to rigid anarchist ideology.
Then there was the night I was having a bout of insomnia and jumped from
bed, ran into the dining room, grabbed a sheet of paper and a laundry
marker and wrote one single bold word: Zenarchy!
I hope that didn’t kill anything.
During the days at 77^(th) Street, I didn’t write much about Zenarchy,
but I contemplated the notion of a periodical by that name. I was
experiencing considerable frustration over lack of editorial freedom as
managing editor of the libertarian newsletter. My fascination with the
counter-culture was not shared by the publisher. But then nearly
everything was getting on my nerves by the middle of the summer.
Degenerating under police pressure and media hoop-de-la, the hip culture
was becoming steadily more difficult to defend as my enthusiasm for
promoting it increased. Smog-ridden Los Angeles with its maze of
freeways kept bringing to mind Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune
in, drop out”. (Or as Camden was to phrase it: “fly up, freak out, fuck
off”.)
Everyone was saying urban existence was not for heads. I was turned on
and I fancied that I was tuned in, so I began making jaunts to the woods
to see what smoking a number there was like. A whole new drug experience
seemed to result in nature’s universal living room — both overwhelming
and comfortable.
As did many before and after me, I searched for a place to live in the
outskirts of Los Angeles — only to discover there were none. Expensive
hill property or desert comprised the major alternatives to the
megalopolis. So my wife, Cara, and I decided to sell our Volkswagen and
use the money to move to Florida. Our ultimate aim was to purchase or
build a houseboat and plunge into the Everglades.
As it happened, we never got any farther in the direction of unspoiled
wilderness than a cottage on a farm near Tampa, Florida. Then, I got a
job across the bay and we moved into town. At least there was no smog.
After becoming immersed in the writings of Chuang Tzu — the only person
in history besides Diogenes whose reincarnation I would care to be — I
began publishing a sporadic newsletter in flyleaf format called
Zenarchy. Principally this was to keep in touch with my California
friends.
Usually I would type up a page or two when the mood suited me, paste a
dingbat or two swiped from another publication between blurbs, and then
pay the local offset printer to run off two or three hundred copies.
My original ambition in California had been for a monthly or quarterly
journal, but the sparse format proved serendipitous. Most of my friends
were inspired to begin issuing newsletters of equally simple design,
stimulating their friends in turn to do the same. In the early Seventies
there emerged a whole network of one-person journalistic efforts, most
of them well worth the reading.
Following are portions of the Zenarchy broadsides, beginning with the
August 19, 1968 issue published in Tampa:
Zen is Meditation. Archy is Social Order. Zenarchy is the Social Order
which springs from Meditation.
As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to
abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or
— that failing — nobody will give a damn.
“Having said that zen study is knowing yourself, the roshi went on: In
America you have democracy, which means for you government of the
people, by the people, and for the people. I in my turn am bringing
democracy to Japan. You cannot have democracy until people know
themselves. The Chinese said that government was unnecessary and they
were right. When people know themselves and have their own strength,
they do not need government. Otherwise they are just a mob and must be
ruled. On the other hand, when rulers do not know themselves, they push
the people around. When you do not know yourself, you busy yourself with
other people. Zen study is just a matter of getting your own feet on the
ground.” (from Matter of Zen by Paul Wienpahl, New York University
Press, 1964)
Having as little as possible to do with the powerful — that was Dogen’s
splendid Way of Buddhas and Patriarchs. So when one of his followers
accepted for his Zendo a gift of land from a grateful Regent whom Dogen
had instructed, the fool was driven by the master from the monastery.
Moreover, Dogen ordered the portion of floor where the erring monk
customarily sat in zazen torn out — and in the earth beneath it he had
his students dig a six-foot-deep hole.
Zenarchy is new in name alone. Not only is it the Bastard Zen of America
which has grown to flower over the recent decades in nearly everybody’s
pot — it is the heretofore nameless streak that zig-zags back through
the Zen Tradition, weaving with delirious defiance in and out of various
sects and schools — slapping the face of an Emperor here, rejecting a
high office there, throwing a rule-blasting koan at a bureaucrat
elsewhere — and coming to rest finally in the original true words of Lao
Tzu (from a translation in Laotzu’s Tao and Wu-wei by Dwight Goddard,
Thetford, Vermont, 1939): “When the world yields to the principle of
Tao, its race horses will be used to haul manure; when the world ignores
Tao, war horses are pastured on the public common.”
Nevertheless, there was never a greater Zenarchist than old Dogen Zenji
— for in that astounding hole of his can be found a monument to Freedom
as enduring as the very Void.
Such gentle tolerance as he displayed is a rare thing, too, in the world
of men and Buddhas. But then his Compassion for the foolish monk was no
doubt boundless, as befits an Enlightened One.
That was followed by a September 4, 1968, flyleaf titled “Quotations
from Chairman Lao” containing these statements from Lao Tzu:
“It is taught in books of strategy: ‘Never be so rash as to open
hostilities; always be on the defense at first.’ Also: ‘Hesitate to
advance an inch but be always ready to retreat a foot.’ In other words,
it is wiser even in war to depend upon craft and skill instead of
force.”
“When well-matched armies come to conflict, the one which regrets the
need for fighting always wins.”
“The good commander strikes a decisive blow, then stops. He does not
dare assert and complete his mastery. He will strike the blow, but will
guard against becoming arrogant. For he strikes from necessity, and not
out of a zest for victory.”
“Both arms and armor are unblessed things. Not only do men come to
detest them — but a curse seems to follow them. Therefore, the True Man
avoids depending upon arms.”
“I am teaching what others have taught — that the powerful and
aggressive seldom come to natural deaths. But I make this wisdom the
basis of my whole outlook.”
“If one attempts to govern either himself or another, he is sure to
become frustrated. For it will seem that whatever he tries to grasp,
slips away. The Sage makes no such attempts, makes no failures, has
nothing to lose — is therefore at peace with himself.”
“He who wants to take over the country and remake it under his own
reforming plans will fail. ‘Mankind’ is an abstract concept that cannot
be remade after one’s own ideas. Under any system of reform, a ruler
must make use of different, real-life people — some as they seem and
some not, some who will assist and others who will resist, some strong
and some brittle and unsafe to rely on. That is why the Sage never tries
to take over things and reform man, but is instead content to reform
himself — letting others follow his example, but never forcing them.”
“Nothing is more fragile, yet of all the agencies that attack hard
substances nothing excels water. Likewise, the powerless can wear down
the mighty and the gentle survive the strong. (Everyone knows this but
few can practice it.) So the Sage accepts the disgrace of his country
and in so doing becomes a true patriot; he is patient under the
misfortunes of his cause and is therefore worthy to lead it.”
(Translated from the Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tzu by Ho Chi Zen.)
Appearing promptly on September 16, 1968, the next Zenarchy began with a
verse from a poem I had written just before the 1967 Easter Love-In:
Come and play the poet game with me!
Let’s call out the cries of anarchy!
Let’s be happy; let’s be soft, and free;
Come and play the game of liberty.
“Totalitarian states, however, know the danger of the artist. Correctly,
if for the wrong reasons, they know that all art is propaganda, and that
art which does not support their system must be against it. They know
intuitively that the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who
under the guise of irrelevance creates and reveals a new reality. If,
then, he is not to be torn to pieces like Orpheus in the myth, the
liberated artist must be able to play the countergame and keep it as
well hidden as the judo of Taoism and Zen. He must be able to be ‘all
things to all men’, for as one sees from the history of Zen any
discipline whatsoever can be used as a way of liberation — making pots,
designing gardens, arranging flowers, building houses, serving tea, and
even using the sword; one does not have to advertise oneself as a
psychotherapist or guru. He is the artist in whatever he does, not just
in the sense of doing it beautifully, but in the sense of playing it. In
the expressive lingo of the jazz world, whatever the scene, he makes it.
Whatever he does, he dances it — like a Negro bootblack shining shoes.
He swings.” (from Psychotherapy East and West by Alan Watts, Random
House, 1961)
Spin your inhibitions off and see Flowers in your heart and let them be.
(Come and play the poet game with me!)
It is no coincidence that the cultural currents of Zen and Anarchism
immediately joined when Zen came to the West. For nowhere in recent
Western history is the life of the Eastern renunciate more closely
paralleled than in that of the dedicated revolutionary, forsaking all
attachments for a single goal. And no Eastern sage comes closer to the
zestful life sense of the Anarchist than the Zen Master.
But the deeper fruits of this union, speaking at least with reference to
the Anarchist, are yet to be realized. What Zen has most to offer
Anarchism is freedom here and now. No longer need the Anarchist dream of
a utopian millennium as he struggles to outwit the State — for he can
find freedom in the contest, by simply knowing that freedom is
everywhere for those who dance through life, rather than crawl, walk, or
run.
For if a man has renounced inward ownership of property, renounced
possessive attachment to his loved ones, and is cheerfully detached from
time, with no fear or hope for what the future might bring — he is
immune to all threats and pleadings of any State in the world. On the
streets or in prison — indeed, on his very way to execution — he can
play!
That is, he can become aware of his true nature as a player in the
cosmic maya game, and can therefore openhandedly let his karma play
itself out. He can blend with the life forces around him, as a dancer to
his music, and prance boldly into the collage of events — with no fears,
no regrets, and no compromises — turned on, tuned in, and made One.
Come and cry the cries of anarchy!
Running through the streets of history,
Let’s be happy; let’s be nice, and free.
“In the year 326 the persecution of the Christian ceases. Emperor
Constantine becomes a Christian and raises the Christian Church to
become the State Church. Christianity, which for three hundred years had
borne a shining fruit in the darkness of the catacombs, could blossom on
the surface. The Christian is liberated from the permanent fear of
death. The church of the early community, whose power lay in prayer and
the formation of the ascetic personality irradiated by Christ, becomes
now a power which also carries weight in the world. Dogma is fixed,
wonderful churches are built, the magnificent liturgy develops. But the
face of the Christian alters. Where formerly a Christian was a
Christian, now he is Everyman. Where formerly there had been a community
of saints, now saints become more and more rare in the community. They
flee into solitude, to prayer, meditation and need of union with God.
Thus in the fourth century ends the wonderful experience of a closeness
to God, a bringing down of heaven to earth, a general spiritualization
of the cosmos with healing divine forces, a joyousness and peace which
we can no longer imagine, because the organs to understand and
experience these conditions are blocked.” (from Meditation and Mankind
by Vladimir Lindenberg, Rider and Co., London)
Come and play the childhood game, and be!
Oh the peace you’ll know, the ecstasy!
Spin your inhibitions off and see!
Come and play the poet game with me.
As you can see, in spirit I was still issuing invitations to Love-Ins.
That was my gospel, and in no way was it intended to be taken the least
bit esoterically. Authoritarian psychology was also of interest to me,
for it was our failure to make appropriate psychological warfare against
the bureaucratic mentality that was our undoing in California. So I
addressed myself to that issue in the October 5, 1968, Zenarchy,
briefly, as follows:
“Hold up!” said an elderly rabbit at the gap. “Six pence for the
privilege of passing by the private road!” He was bowled over in an
instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the
side of the hedge chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly
from their holes to see what the row was about. “Onion-sauce!
Onion-sauce!” he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could
think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started
grumbling at each other, “How stupid you are! Whey didn’t you tell him
—” “Well, why didn’t you say —” “You might have reminded him —” and so
on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is
always the case. (from Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, The
Heritage Press, 1944–66)
Shun proposed to resign the throne to Shan Chuan, who said, “I am a unit
in the midst of space and time. In winter I wear skins and furs; in
summer, grass-cloth and linen; in spring I plough and sow, my strength
being equal to the toil; in autumn I gather my harvest, and am prepared
to cease labor and eat. At sunrise I get up and work; at sunset I rest.
So do I enjoy myself between heaven and earth, and my mind is content: —
why should I have anything to do with the throne? Alas! that you, Sir,
do not know me better!” Thereupon he declined the proffer, and went
away, deep among the hills, no man knew where. — Chuang Tzu (from Volume
II of The Texts of Taoism, translated by James Legge, Dover
Publications, 1962)
In the October 21, 1968, edition of Zenarchy I followed this thinking a
step further, stressing now the positive aspects in this way:
“What is really being said is that intelligence solves problems by
seeking the greatest simplicity and the least expenditure of effort, and
it is thus that Taoism eventually inspired the Japanese to work out the
technique of judo — the easy or gentle Tao (do).” (from Psychotherapy
East and West by Alan Watts, Random House, 1961)
“The True men of old waited for the issues of events as the arrangement
of Heaven, and did not by their human efforts try to take the place of
Heaven.” — Chuang Tzu (from the Texts of Taoism by James Legge, Dover
Publications, 1962)
“It is interesting in this connection to recall Dr. Reich’s distinction
between matriarchy and patriarchy, as given in The Mass Psychology of
Fascism. According to Dr. Reich, work-democracy and self-regulation of
primary drives were characteristics of primitive matriarchy, and both
were destroyed by the rise of authoritarian patriarchy. Recent
anthropology has cast doubt on the existence of the ‘primitive
matriarchy,’ but, as G. Rattray Taylor shows in his Sex in History,
there can be little doubt that cultures do show more Matrist tendencies
in some periods of their development, and more Patrist tendencies at
other periods. Patrist periods are characterized by sexual repression,
limitation of freedom for women, political authoritarianism, fear of
spontaneity, worship of a Father God, etc. Matrist periods, on the other
hand, are characterized by sexual freedom, high status for women,
political democracy, spontaneity, worship of a Mother Goddess, etc. This
agrees with Dr. Reich’s picture of the distinction between Patriarchy
and Matriarchy.
The valley spirit never dies She is called the Eternal Female
“According to Needham, Blakney and other Sinologists, this Eternal
Female is the goddess of pre-Chou China forgotten by the conventions of
the Patrist Chou State and official Confucian philosophy. Blakney
considers the early Taoists to have been recruited from peasants who
remembered the Shang State and its Matrist orientation.”
(from “Lao-Tse and Wilhelm Reich, Prophets of Inner Freedom” by Robert
Anton Wilson in the September 1963 issue of A Way Out, School of Living,
Brookville, Ohio)
“The True men of old did not reject (the views of) the few; they did not
seek to accomplish (their ends) like heroes (before others); they did
not lay plans to attain those ends. Being such, though they might make
mistakes, they had no occasion for repentance; though they might
succeed, they had no self-complacency. Being such, they could ascend to
the loftiest heights without fear; they could pass through water without
being made wet by it; they could go into fire without being burnt; so it
was that by their knowledge they ascended to and reached the Tao.”
— Chuang Tzu (from the Texts of Taoism by James Legge, Dover
Publications, 1962)
So Follow the Way
Of the True Men of Old:
Find Shade in the Summer;
Grow Fur in the Cold.
This was followed by a portrait of the archetypal counter-cultural woman
drawn exclusively from my old New Orleans French Quarter friend, Loy Ann
Camp. Therein I compared her to the woman in Bob Dylan’s song of whom he
says, “She’s got everything she needs; she’s an artist; she don’t look
back...” For in the most literal sense Loy, like so many of the hip
females of the early Sixties, was an artist by profession who was
“nobody’s child” and who never stumbled because she had no place to fall
— a perfect balance of gentleness and strength. Like a waiter I once met
who acquired a reputation as a karate expert because he slipped and
kicked his opponent just as he was beginning to get in a fight, I
inadvertently gave the impression that I knew what I was talking about —
at least in relation to what I have since gathered about intelligence
community secret societies based upon matriarchy, etc. Since, in order
to add a sense of universality to the image of the modern-day Eternal
Female, I did not mention Loy by name, many people seem to have assumed
that I understood the deeper levels of Dylan’s lyrics, up to and
including who he was really singing about. As a matter of fact, I
assumed it was Joan Baez. Here is what I had to say:
“And upon this day I say unto you: Each Sentient Being is an Incarnation
of Me, and whosoever upon hearing this Truth shall come to know it, is
blessed; and twice-blessed are they who shall be unable again to forget
it; but thrice-blessed is that Man or Woman who needed never to be
told.” — Visitations 13:5 The Honest Book of Truth
You know her. We all do. Anyone who has ever lived in the Haight or
North Beach or Taos or Old Town or the French Quarter or the East
Village or anyplace like that has met her, because that’s where she
belongs, and she knows it from childhood.
She has a horsey angular face and long straight hair and is dedicated to
her art, whatever it may be. Bob Dylan had to be thinking about her when
he wrote that song about how “She’s got everything she needs; she’s an
artist; she don’t look back...”
So serene is this chick that everybody wants her — for friend, lover or
just to have around — and it is that serenity which so transcends her
features (that on everyone else would be homely), making her the center
flower in every bouquet of Beautiful People.
Usually she hangs out with heads. Not because she is necessarily a head
herself, though she may or may not blow a little pot, but because she
has that thing about her — that cool. And she never goes around boasting
about not needing a crutch to get there (and thereby revealing a far
greater dependency than anyone ever develops for drugs). But you know
she’s turned on by her ways — just watch her pet a cat!
I used to sit up all night with her once in awhile. She’d sketch and I’d
write. Maybe between us we’d have a dime and so we would buy a coffee or
Coke and relax in a place where they didn’t care how long we sat around.
When our asses got numb, we’d go for a walk and go up and sit on her
balcony in the summer night air.
No matter what her name is, her voice is always soft — except when she
expels that hyena laugh. And then it doesn’t matter because what she is
laughing about is really very funny.
She is so thin and frail, and you think her blood must be ten degrees
cooler than yours. You worry about her because you know that she is a
poor judge of character, accepting as friend everyone who comes along,
no matter how bad their scene. This gets her into an occasional creepy
situation and sometimes puts her through some drastic changes. But when
it is all over, you feel silly that you got uptight, because she’ll be
the same as before.
Maybe some night when you’re talking, she’ll tell you that the squaw
boat, made from hide stretched over a light wooden frame, is the safest
way to go — because in a storm that’ll sink the mighty battleship, the
little saucer-like vessel just rocks up over the biggest waves and down
again on the other side.
In the next Zenarchy newsletter, I decided to be cute. Here is the
entire content of the November 25, 1968, edition:
Our text for today is a quotation from Chun Chou which appears in The
Zen Teaching of Huang Po (Grove Press, 1959): “Stepping into the public
hall, His Reverence said: Having many sorts of knowledge cannot compare
with giving up seeking for anything, which is best of all things. Mind
is not of several kinds and there is no Doctrine which can be put into
words. As there is no more to be said, the assembly is dismissed!”
There followed a page and a half of blank paper.
As Christmas was nearing, I decided with the December 1, 1968, issue
that it was time to say a thing or two about Jesus. What follows
continues to this day to seem to me an accurate representation of the
personality that comes through when I read the Gospels:
In his book, Zen Catholicism (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), the
Benedictine monk, Dom Aelred Graham, says:
“The word ‘Buddha’ means simply the ‘Enlightened One’; so understood,
there have been many ‘Buddhas’. As Dr. Edward Conze points out: ‘In the
official theory, the Buddha, ‘the Enlightened’, is a kind of archetype
which manifests itself in the world in different personalities, whose
individual particulars are of no account whatsoever.’ From this point of
view, Jesus of Nazareth would undoubtedly be accorded the title
‘Buddha’, since He is revealed, according to St. John, as both uniquely
‘Enlightened’ and the ‘Enlightener’.”
Moreover, the Edgar Cayce readings (quoted in Many Mansions by Gina
Cerminara, New American Library, 1967) inform us that “Those who walk
closer with the Creative Forces should indeed be full of joy, pleasure,
peace, and harmony within,” and that “the principle of the Christ life
is joyous!” “Remember,” they urge, “He laughed — even on the way to
Calvary — not as so often pictured; He laughed.” Yea: “This is what
angered them the most.” So: “Cultivate the ability to see the ridiculous
and retain the ability to laugh.”
Wow! Can you dig that Jesus was a Buddha? Can you grok a laughing
Savior? A Zen Buddha from Nazareth?
Nothing is more heretical. Nothing is more treasonous. Jesus had a sense
of humor. That idea will destroy Western Civilization as we know it.
Come, brothers. Come, sisters. Let’s all join hands and enter the Church
Invisible of the Laughing Christ. Let’s all join hands and find the
Hidden Temple of the Happy Jesus. Let’s all join hands and giggle.
Another Zenarchy flyleaf did not appear until May of 1970. By that time
we had moved to Atlanta, but it concerned an experience in California in
1967. One night as I sat in the half-lotus position stoned on grass and
listening to an Indian raga, my eyes rolled up behind my eyebrows, the
images I saw enacted the following drama, which I now titled “Bummer”:
God appeared.
He looked off in three directions at once. His four arms flew out. Time
to dance!
A display of Divine Majesty — lightning steaks, planets on His
fingertips — a Cosmic Juggler, moving so fast He became a still pattern,
humming. (Like a rock whirling on the end of a string becomes a ring or
a fast-spinning wagon wheel turns into a disc.)
Then — disintegration! A skull-headed machine gunner popping people
open.
I fear. Drop out — down into the body. Into a cell. Cell. With rats
underneath! Or worse — reptilian rats, gnawing upward.
Fangs of steel break through the floor.
The floor is a door.
And I am a poor Jew, clinging to the wall.
The door gave way.
The drum was silent.
Outside was Nothing, the Void.
Hung Mung, laughing madly, turned my way and said:
“There is no enemy — A N Y W H E R E.”
A Character from Chuang Tzu, Hung Mung was just an embellishment. But
the rest of it actually happened with the plot resolving itself
precisely at the final drum beat of the raga. In those days I was doing
a lot of LSD and, as any head will attest, acid heightens the marijuana
experiences that occur immediately afterwards. Rolling the eyeballs back
enhances your ability to perceive internal images in psychedelic states
of consciousness, as simply pressing them with your fingers — applying
pressure against your closed eyelids — will also do. Such images are a
natural phenomena of consciousness and are to be seen, albeit less
vividly, in ordinary states of mind. But that was the only time they
ever enacted a drama for me as well plotted as a nocturnal dream!
In July of 1970 I published a parting shot before turning my attention
as a Zenarchist to politics. Aimed at the excessive seriousness that by
then was transforming the open-minded spirituality of the hippies into a
regular occult reich of competing and increasingly fanatical cults, this
Zenarchy was titled “Lila Yoga”, meaning: the discipline of play:
Laughter is the Universal Salute of the Cosmic Mind. It is how the Mind
greets Itself in Ten Thousand new Incarnations every moment. It is
love’s loudest voice.
“Humor and cheerfulness not only do not interfere with the progress of
meditation but actually contribute to it.” — Meher Baba
“Humor is not sinful, unless it be cruelly directed against one who is
helpless, honest, and sincere. When directed against hypocrisy,
stupidity, and error, humor can be a flaming beautiful weapon in the
cause of light and beauty.
“We must learn to love so deeply, widely and purely that our instincts
for laughter will always be true ones, and our capacity for humor
another facet of our joyous sense of power and being.” — Gina Cerminara
“I shall be a tornado of laughter, toppling the timbers and towers of
sorrow. Zooming over endless miles of mentalities, I shall demolish
their troubles.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
“Cultivate the ability to see the ridiculous, and retain the ability to
laugh.” — Edgar Cayce
“It is time to come to your senses. You are to live and learn to laugh.
You are to listen to life’s radio music and to reverence the spirit
behind it and to laugh at the bim-bim in it. So there you are. More will
not be asked of you.” — Hermann Hesse
“In the year 1166 B.C., a malcontented hunchbrain by the name of
Greyface got it into his head that the universe was as humorless as he,
and he began to teach that play was sinful because it contradicted the
ways of Serious Order. ‘Look at all the order about you,’ he said. And
from that, he deluded honest men to believe that reality was a
straitjacket affair and not the happy romance as men had known it.
“It is not presently understood why men were so gullible at that
particular time, for absolutely no one thought to observe all the
disorder around them and conclude just the opposite. But anyway,
Greyface and his followers took the game of playing at life more
seriously than they took life itself and were known even to destroy
other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own.
“The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering
from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes
frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes a bad trip. Man
has been on a bad trip for a long time now.
“It is called the Curse of Greyface.” — Malaclypse the Younger
Unfortunately, the Meher Baba people and the Edgar Cayce enthusiasts and
the Hermann Hesse fans of my acquaintance, as well as the Hare Krishnas
and the Jesus freaks, not to mention the Paramahansa Yogananda devotees,
were all victims of the Curse of Greyface. Worse, my Zenarchy about lila
yoga did nothing at all to expand their personalities.
In this chapter I have used some words with which some of you maybe
unfamiliar. So I’ll explain what those terms mean as I also relate what
I learned from publishing the Zenarchy newsletter.
Rational arguments alone, together with quotations from the arguments of
others, are insufficient to transform “the human mind and everything
that resembles it” — in the words of Andre Breton, the Surrealist — so
in Zen there is zazen (sitting in meditation). As Gary Snyder points out
this is a natural function of all higher mammals except for humans of
the civilized variety. We might gather that it is therefore a
manifestation of, as well as a means of attaining, unconditional
consciousness. Cats and dogs are excellent examples, readily at hand, of
animals who practice what the Zenji (Zen people) sometimes translate as
“just sitting”. Zazen is usually practiced in a Zendo (Zen center), and
is particularly emphasized in the Soto sect.
Within the Rinzai sect more attention is paid to the koan (a paradox or
riddle of sorts for contemplation), designed to stop the student short
of a superficial understanding that goes in one ear and out the other
without affecting the nervous system.
Nothing is less inclined to cultivate spontaneous gifts, of which humor
and intellectual generosity partake, than pointing out to anyone their
lack in that department and advising them to correct it. All it does is
put them on the psychological defensive. For as Alan Watts said in
Psychotherapy East and West, an essential ingredient of the countergame
is tact — and I must admit that I am as tactless today as I was then,
especially when it comes to lecturing and scolding those who do not
display tact. As Watts also observes in that most valuable book, the one
condition where spontaneity becomes next to absolutely impossible is
when one person puts another on the line and orders them: “Be
spontaneous!” Zen masters understand this, but they do it anyway — for
the poor monk is likely to be in their clutches for a good many years
and when he finally aquires the knack of responding unselfconsciously to
an order like, “Show me your freedom!” he is absolutely free forever.
Another word I have used in both this and the first chapter is raga, a
form of Hindu music that illustrates the balance of spontaneity and
discipline, of chaos and order, that we are talking about very much as
jazz music attains the same effect.
As propaganda, the Zenarchy flyleaves were very successful in preaching
to the converted. And for that reason I guess they served a purpose in
raising the morale of the people who already knew what I was talking
about. After a student of Zen attains satori (enlightenment) it is
necessary to undergo further training to become a master skilled in the
art of transmission.
I do not remember when or where it was that inspiration struck again
with the nom de guerre of Ho Chi Zen. Ho Chi Minh was of course the
prototype, the courageous leader of the North Vietnamese called in his
own language “Son of the Nation”. Calling myself after such a great
revolutionary and on top of that changing the denotation to “Son of Zen”
was of course outrageous, inexcusably so — and I guess that’s what I
liked most about the idea. For it partook of the chip-on-the-shoulder
spirit of Zen.
With me very much in the early days in Tampa, the name endured our move
to Atlanta in late 1969 — although I had used it only once in Zenarchy,
designating Ho Chi Zen translator of “Quotations from Chairman Lao.”
Actually those quotations were not translations at all, but a rephrasing
based upon a number of different translations of Lao Tzu. So Ho Chi Zen
began his career as a rascal, and he has not changed in the least since
then.
Like most of the colorful pen names my eristic friends and I have fallen
into using, the Ho Chi Zen moniker is just as often used as the name of
a character in my writings as by-line. For John Wilcock’s Other Scenes
Cara and I were to write an essay inspired by Timothy Leary’s Politics
of Ecstasy idea called “Subjective Liberation”. Intended as the first
chapter to a book I never wrote called The I Tao (Way of Changes), the
article first appeared under our real names and then was reprinted again
in the same publication under Ho Chi Zen.
In Zen Without Zen Masters, Ho Chi Zen makes a number of guest
appearances, usually to steal one of my best lines, such as: “By the
study of Zen one can learn to help people — or, that failing, at least
to get them off your back.” Moreover, he surfaces every now and then in
the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
In the summer of 1970 in Atlanta’s very political Marxist-Leninist
underground paper, The Great Speckled Bird, was when and where he first
rode to fame. Most of the serious young Bird staffers were out of town
that season, cutting sugar cane in Cuba or running guns for the
Palestinians in the Middle East. Someone mentioned to me that for that
reason the editors were extremely hard-up for material. They didn’t pay
anything, but what the hell? Here was a chance to have some fun,
especially since they were in search of material that would appeal to
the “freaks”, hippies living in the 10^(th) Street area and engaging in
violent struggle from time to time with local police and rednecks.
My first instinct was to endeavor to dampen tempers with a certain
amount of instructive humor. For I saw more creative ways to make
revolution than by grabbing for a gun at the least provocation. So Ho
Chi Zen wrote an article for the Bird called “Mind Fucking Zen”.
Briefly, it argued that the essential element of Zen tactics is
surprise. For surprise is nature’s way of saying, “You’re wrong! Think
again!” Sanctified by aeons of evolution, this survival trait, the
capacity for surprise, could be used by revolutionists to change minds.
To illustrate, Ho told a Zen story.
Results of publication were spectacular. Folks from the 10^(th) Street
region called the Bird office to congratulate them for “the hippest
thing” they’d ever printed. One woman kept calling demanding to know who
Ho Chi Zen was. As I soon learned, she was the former wife of our
neighbor, Carl Hendrickson, certain that “Mind Fucking Zen” was his
creation. When I mentioned to Carl that I was the culprit, he said, “My
God, everybody in town has been accusing me of writing that rap!” We
decided we must have something in common and resolved to spend more time
getting stoned together.
Carl Hendrickson was a heavy old-timey hipster who belonged to the White
Panther Party, closely associated in those days with the Yippies.
Anarchistic and psychedelic, he resembled me in his thinking just enough
for sparks to fly.
When Timothy Leary broke out of jail that year and abandoned his former
charming pacifism with a violent, angry manifesto, Carl said: “They
never should have taken away that man’s dope! Before they were fucking
with a Catholic, but now they are fucking with an Irishman!”
I liked that one. For the most part, though, Carl resembled nearly all
other Atlanta radicals — guns appealed to him more than flowers and
humor. I wasn’t that angry yet.
As a journalistic celebrity, Ho Chi Zen was now much in demand at the
Bird. So I followed “Mind Fucking Zen” with a number of similar
contributions from the Zenarchist Arsenal.
One was a story I borrowed from the arguments of the anarchists and
clothed in the legend of the Robber Cheh, a favorite character used by
Chuang Tzu for making points about thieves.
Once an apprentice to the Robber Cheh got word that the village of Yin
lost favor with the Duke, falling behind on taxes; the royal constables
were withdrawn. Meanwhile, the neighboring village of Yang remained
under guard day and night. Which village to steal from was the subject
of discussion.
For while the apprentice wanted to attack Yin, the Robber Cheh insisted
it would be safer to commit robberies in Yang. Since the residents of
Yin knew they were without protection, they would guard their property
with fierce dogs, dig pits around their homes, alert their neighbors to
keep an eye out, and moreover, few residents of Yin would not be armed.
Whereas Yang, reasoned the Robber Cheh, would be easy pickings. All his
band had to fear was the police, who could be watched on their rounds
until they passed through a neighborhood, and then the thieves could
strike.
Another piece celebrated Timothy Leary’s jailbreak, drawing parallels
between Leary and the Mexican revolutionary, Emil Zapata, who used to
retire to the mountains and ingest psychedelic mushrooms.
When curiosity as to the identity of Ho Chi Zen reached an intolerable
level, I dispatched a fictitious reporter to Atlanta’s nonexistent
Chinatown to interview my inscrutable Oriental. My object was to
satirize Western stereotypes about Asians. Found living behind a Chinese
red door in an opium den, cloaked in every possible cliche associated
with Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, with a gong on his front porch bearing
the seal of the Illuminati, his ornate home scented unmistakably with
fumes of Peking Proletarian Incense, Ho delivered an interview that was
characteristically surprising — though not nearly as surprising to me as
that the Bird possessed enough humor to publish it.
Therein, Ho explained that the State is a figment of its own imagination
and that the Zenarchist Revolution is inevitable; “In fact, it just took
place as I was speaking that sentence! Now that you have your freedom,
how will you hide it from robbers?”
Another time he was quoted from a speech he didn’t actually deliver in
Piedmont Park on “the dope problem”, that being the problem of what to
do about the dopes who thought marijuana and LSD should remain illegal.
Thereafter, dedicated Bird writers began returning from the far-flung
barricades and Ho Chi Zen faded into the ornate Oriental woodwork — with
parting tips about how guerilla warriors could survive in the
wilderness, gleaned from my research about dropping out.
Among Ho Chi Zen’s contributions that summer had also been a five-step
program for social change, called Yin Revolution, that utilized drop-out
skills in conjunction with political action. More about that in the
pages to follow.
Predictably, many Marxists regarded Ho Chi Zen as a deviationist with
pronounced petty bourgeois tendencies. That is a charge I would not
deny, since in the view of anarchism the petty bourgeois is a natural
revolutionary ally of the worker, something to which even Mao Tse-Tung
gave significant recognition in planning the Chinese revolution. For Mao
had read Kropotkin and Bakunin along with his Marx.
When I wrote a letter to the Bird a year or two later recommending the
flags of all nations be burned, as well as the red flag of revolution,
the black flag of anarchy and the white flag of peace, in order to
assert that human lives were more valuable than rags, signing it Ho Chi
Zen, I was brought to task. I had included in my list the Viet Cong flag
which, unlike all the other examples mentioned, was not a rag, but a
symbol for which thousands of revolutionary soldiers had given their
lives.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote me to say that I was wrong and the Bird was
right in repudiating my letter, “For while the flags of most nations are
made only of cloth and hence are simply rags, the flags of the socialist
nations are made one-hundred-percent of gossamer and angel feathers.”
Soon a San Francisco printing collective joined the fray when called
upon to reprint certain of Ho Chi Zen’s Bird articles in Saint John’s
Wednesday Bread Messenger. In a rider on which they insisted, they
accused Ho of racism for resembling Fu Manchu, missing the point of the
satire. Moreover, this Marxist printing collective went on to point out,
with no little outrage, that there was no evidence that Ho Chi Minh was
into Zen, a possibility that never occurred to me in the first place.
(Chairman Mao, on the other hand, possessed a profound grasp of Taoism
and often resorted to Taoist concepts to explain Marxism to the Chinese
people.)
So to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, I bumped Ho Chi Zen off and
wrote him an epitaph. Since Ho Chi Mihn was affectionately known to his
people as Uncle Ho, the Atlanta high schoolers who also read the Bird
had taken to calling Ho Chi Zen by the nickname, Nephew Ho. Called
“Obit, for Nephew Ho”, the poem began with the lines: “When Lester
Maddox raised all Hell/Ho Chi Zen would break the spell/Lampooning every
racist myth/Yankees napalmed Asians with...” Ho proved irrepressible,
however, and it turned out soon enough that my report of his death was,
in Mark Twain’s famous words, “greatly exaggerated.” Nonetheless it was,
belatedly, the only reply I ever made to the sober-sided charge that Ho
Chi Zen was just a modern-day version of the Yellow Kid.
Many an artist has tried to capture the elusive Ho Chi Zen with pen and
ink. Nothing quite presents him as I imagine he looks, as the picture in
Zen Without Zen Masters that accompanies the story, “Ho Chi Zen’s
School”. There he is shown waiting to pounce on any student who puts
money in his donation bowl three times in a row, in order to expel that
unfortunate for excessive gullibility.
Times are, though, when Ho Chi Zen is just too cute for the serious
business of Zenarchy. That is why I tried to kill him. Too much the
gimmick and not enough the funky human being I’m trying to give
permission to exist in everyone. He gets in the way. But he is as wily
as Bokonon in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Just when I think I am rid
of him, he pops up somewhere new. Rasputin’s assassins had it easier.
Nephew Ho is as immortal in his own way — and sometimes as detested by
his creator — as was Sherlock Holmes. I seem stuck with him.
As the Chinese Buddhist Layman P’ang Jung used to say of too-clever a
Zen antic, “Bungled it trying to be smart.”
Toward the final, desperate days of the Nixon regime, though, Ho Chi Zen
made a return appearance in The Great Speckled Bird that was neither too
facile nor the least bit offensive to my sincere Marxist comrades. Done
up on the front page like an album cover, the lyrics to Nephew Ho’s
“Watergate Rock” began with: “I want to make one thing perfectly
clear:/I’ve nothing to hide and nothing to fear...” Repeated at the
beginning of each stanza, this couplet was followed at the song’s end
with, “...but angry women of all ages,/Buddhist monks in tiger
cages,...” and continued with a list of who Nixon had to fear, of people
whose pain and heartbreak had made possible Richard Nixon’s sorry career
as President of the United States of America.
That time Ho Chi Zen was what they call “right on”. And I guess that,
more than anything else, is why I still let the little rascal monkey
around in my written work. When his country and the rest of the world
needed him, Ho Chi Zen was there.
No one complains more loudly and sincerely about hippie games than
hipsters. Zen masters object likewise to something they call “the stink
of Zen”.
A famous roshi once said to his inquiring monks: “All this talk about
Zen is making me sick to my stomach!”
If you like to eat with chop sticks and fan yourself with imported
Japanese fans, that’s lovely. Just don’t get the idea it has a tinker’s
dam to do with Zen.
In every society ridden with class distinctions there is a tendency to
turn everything into games of oneupsmanship. Japan is no more an
exception than the United States. Zen literature is replete with
transcripts of quarrels among masters about which of them is most
enlightened. Such arguments frequently begin and end as jokes, however,
for Zen people try to remember what they are about. Once a drunken monk
wandered into the room where two Zen masters were ferociously contending
and both of them collapsed in laughter, never to cross wits again.
Yet as Alan Watts points out in “Hip Zen, Square Zen”, even in Japan
there is a trend to formalize Zen schools that tends over the centuries
to rob them of much of their spontaneous appeal.
Slapping his master was how the great Zen lunatic, Rinzai, signified his
awakening. (Only fair to note: his master had been hitting him with a
stick whenever he asked a question.) Said Rinzai of his master: “There
is not so much to the Buddhism of Huang Po after all!” Nevertheless,
today the school founded in Rinzai’s name issues certificates to
students who attain satori.
In America, the hip counter-culture has not even fared that well, but
was co-opted in a matter of years, instead of generations.
What to do? What to do? For you cannot make rules to preserve liveliness
and originality. A Zenarchist answer is to keep destroying old forms —
or abandoning them — including the habit of destroying old forms when it
gets in the way. For the practice of Zen or Zenarchy or psychological
nakedness or whatever you want to call it says with Bob Dylan: “I got
nothing, Ma, to live up to.” In fact, a popular Zen saying goes, “If you
meet the Buddha on the path to enlightenment — kill him!”
As Alan Watts says in The Way of Zen, “There must be no confusion
between Zen masters and theosophical ‘mahatmas’ — the glamorous ‘Masters
of Wisdom’ who live in the mountain vastness of Tibet and practice the
arts of occultism. Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die;
they know joy and sorrow; they have bad tempers or other little
‘weaknesses’ of character just like everyone else, and they are not
above falling in love and entering into a fully human relationship with
the opposite sex. The perfection of Zen is to be perfectly and simply
human. The difference of the adept in Zen from the ordinary run of men
is that the latter are, in one way or another, at odds with their own
humanity, and are attempting to be angels or demons.”
To invent ego games wherein the points to be scored are for egolessness
is, therefore, to miss the spirit of what we are talking about. Having
nothing to do with hierarchies, mundane or spiritual, we are not out to
prove anything — except that status is nonsense, as when we lightly
bestow lofty titles on one another and ordain each other Zenarchs. Our
purpose is, rather, to understand ourselves, our whole beings, and to
“remember” something so simple that it tends to elude classification and
satisfactory definition. For that reason, it is hard to remember.
Captured in this or that string of words, unconditioned and
unconditional mind tends soon to become confused in our thoughts of it
with the words or sentences that only indicate its possibility. Thus one
day we repeat to ourselves words that may once have awakened us, only to
find them hollow. Then we find ourselves no longer dealing with the
miracle of ordinary existence, but with an abstraction about it — a
nervous twitch enshrined idolatrously somewhere in the frontal lobe of
the brain! Rote learning is impossible when what we want to remember is
spontaneity in living.
Words are useful tools of reference. Clinging too desperately to them is
like grasping our lives in fear. We shut out our perceptions that made
the thing worthwhile in the first place. We become like lovers who get
into a spiteful fight over which of them loves the other the most.
All human activity is this way. Outward forms of religious reverence
become so much more important than what religion is trying to teach,
that devotees kill for them. Jesus would have to arise in every
generation to denounce the scribes and Pharisees of every age for it to
be any different. That was the point of the saying about new wine in old
skins. Over and over, any such prophet would be crucified or stoned or
lynched, besides. Objects of art suffer much the same fate. Pointing
beyond the uptight concerns of the market place, they wind up objects of
its calculations, investment speculations and status seeking.
In Psychotherapy East and West, Watts recommends dealing with this
frantic compulsion to compete. What he calls for is a counter-game. More
than a game against games, a counter-game is any activity selected
because it is by nature more exciting than status games. At that point,
however, all comparisons must end. For the counter-game is played
outside the context of direct competition.
When missionaries or school teachers taught young Hopi Indians the game
of basketball, the latter steadfastly refused to keep score. With their
strong taboos on competition, the Hopi turned basketball into a
counter-game!
Usually, though, a counter-game is something going on over to one side.
Gradually, individuals become curious about it and, when it is
successful, they forget all about what they were doing previously. No
such course of action is without pitfalls. There is no getting around
that a counter-game is in part trying to be more fascinating than other
games and is therefore in competition with them, indirectly.
Watts insists the counter-game must be soft and sexy and invitational,
rather than imperative in tone. When everything not forbidden — no
matter how desirable — becomes compulsory, then we are back where we
started. Like good lovers we must let the matter go when our seductions
fail. To become bitter and resort to intimidation or guilt as a means of
persuasion would be to lose the spirit of the counter-game.
Here the dictum of karma yoga is useful: devotion to our activity for
its own sake with detachment from the results. Or, as Jesus phrased it,
what your hand finds to do, do it with a whole heart.
Precisely because these things are too simple for words, it has been
necessary to develop a whole literature about them! We could say, for
example, that if you want to step out of Zen games and into Zenarchy,
then throw away your rice bowl and begin drinking coffee instead of
green tea. Every now and then some serious student of Zen would find
liberation upon reading those words. “Trees are trees again and
mountains are again mountains” is the way one Zen master summed up that
feeling. Or, as Robert Anton Wilson once said, “God is dead: you are all
absolutely free!” Taken too literally or not literally enough, though,
such words are nonsense at best. Not only do words mean slightly
different things to different people, an action taken in the context of
one person’s life produces different results in another’s. For that
reason Zen monks are exposed to whole barrages of stories and sayings
that are all windows into the same reality. Hopefully, sooner or later
one statement or another clicks. When that happens an intuitive
perception makes clear that every object is a thing in itself, and all
our grand ideas are simply distractions: visitors “look at these flowers
as if in a dream.” They were not seeing flowers at all; a thousand and
one ideas about the flowers and about everything else cluttered their
minds — as their conversations must have revealed.
Conceptions help us locate things and they tell us something about their
natures. Unfortunately, they are also frequently preconceptions that
screen out any direct awareness of what we perceive. Many optical
illusions result from this phenomena, and it is chiefly for that reason
that Gestalt psychology examines them in so much detail. When we miss
the beauty of a flower because of our mental activity, that is sad. When
for the same reason we miss the shape of a form or the nature of a
diagram, that is puzzling. When we miss the unique character of a human
being, that is tragic. What we call prejudice is a result of
stereotyping, and yet stereotyping is only an exaggerated and crude form
of something that occurs even among the most liberal individuals in
almost every human encounter.
With enlightened, or naked minds (the no-mind of Zen) we enjoy the
flowers. What’s more, we avoid the depersonalization of individual human
beings.
When the reality of what I’m talking about is brought home to us with
traumatic force by some remark or event, those with understanding say we
are enlightened, or hip, or aware. That makes us in their eyes desirable
company. We don’t bring them down. Beyond that much, though, there is no
badge of status.
In the words of the Lankavatra Sutra, this is a “turning about in the
deepest seat of consciousness.” Perhaps because our culture is not
Buddhist and because it stresses belief more than what D.T. Suzuki
called the noetic aspect of conversion, such a once-and-for-all
realization is rare. Instead, we experience something when we are not
grasping for it at all and then, when we try to hold onto it, it eludes
us. After that we know the sneaky thing is there, somewhere. Like a wild
bird, it comes into view only if we learn to be patient and wait for it
— never when we try to summon it forth by beating a drum.
So there is not so much to the Zenarchy of Ho Chi Zen after all. When a
priest boasted to Bankei that the founder of his sect could perform
miracles, Bankei replied, “My miracle is that I eat when I’m hungry and
drink when I’m thirsty!”
In a like spirit, Chaung Tzu wrote: “What I call good at hearing is not
hearing others but hearing oneself. What I call good at vision is not
seeing others but seeing oneself. For those who see others but not
themselves, or take not possession of themselves but of others, possess
only what others possess. In thus failing to possess themselves, they do
what pleases others instead of what pleases their own natures.”
At first this may seem to contradict what was said earlier about
allowing ourselves to perceive others as they are. What becomes clear
when we dispense with our mental categories and conceptions in favor of
what they indicate is that self and others belong to the same reality.
When your own nature is not felt you cannot possibly empathize
accurately with what others feel. When you fail to perceive others
without the subtle prejudice of expectation, you cannot use the
information you absorb about them to evaluate your own behavior
objectively.
Words by their nature stress distinctions at the expense of
interrelatedness. That is why so many mystics bad-mouth distinctions and
speak of the oneness of it all. Not that these distinctions don’t exist!
A map that shows only political boundaries looks far different than a
map of only mountains and valleys and rivers and streams. Yet both
indicate the same territory. Likewise, we have the verbal and conceptual
map and the map given us directly by our senses. When using one, it is
best not to forget the other.
“Speech is obscured by the gloss of this world,” lamented Chuang Tzu.
“The net exists because of the fish. Once you catch the fish you can
then forget the net. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Trap
the rabbit and you can leave the snare. Words exist because of the
meaning. Get the meaning and then you can forget the words. Where can I
locate someone who forgets words, so that communication will be
possible?”
Do his words contradict what I said about not forgetting one map while
using the other? Only on the surface. Once you’ve got the meaning, you
can forget both his words and mine! Words are tools and what Chaung Tzu
is saying is that at times they must be laid aside. After you cut the
wood, forget the saw and grab the hammer.
With relational, or spiritual, matters this is much less obvious than
with maps and saws and hammers and the things we use them for. As a
remedy Ho Chi Zen suggested Spiritual General Semantics, saying, “Every
religion asserts that God is unknowable and beyond all human
comprehension — then they define God in precise, finite terms and
persecute all who disagree with their definition. This is not a struggle
on behalf of the Divine. It is a struggle on behalf of a collection of
words!”
General Semantics teaches that the word is not the thing as the map is
not the territory and the menu is not the meal. “That doesn’t mean not
to look at the menu,” says Ho Chi Zen, “but, for Heaven’s sake, don’t
eat it!”
Alan Watts claims that much of what Buddhist sages mean when they say
nothing is real or that everything is maya (illusion) is that our words
and thoughts about reality are not real in the sense that they are not
the reality they talk and think about. What ordinary people usually
speak and think of as reality is “only a finger pointing at the moon”,
say the Zen masters; it is not the moon itself.
Certain of them have even been known to urinate upon and, in other
instances, burn statues of the Buddha. For a wooden Buddha is only a
menu. Bowing to Buddhas without getting and practicing the meaning of
what the Buddha said is far greater blasphemy than pissing on them!
Occasionally, Buddhists resort to what at first may appear as Orwellian
newspeak, in that they assert that something is its opposite in meaning.
“Nirvana (Paradise) is Samsara (Hell) and Samsara is Nirvana.” Unlike
Big Brother, they are not trying to mystify us in order to dominate.
They are just trying to get us around the traps we lay for ourselves
with words. For Heaven and Hell are states of mind that result from how
we perceive reality. Perceive it clearly and, even at its worst, there
is a terrifying beauty to behold. Misapprehend it and fail to function
appropriately; the inevitable result is suffering.
As Krishnamurti says in The Urgency of Change: “As the man in the jungle
must keep terribly awake to survive, so the man in the jungle of the
world must keep terribly awake to live completely.”
Looking at it that way, we see that the problem in the Sixties was not
that they named us the Love Generation. The problem is that we allowed
ourselves the luxury of accepting their flattery. After that, every time
we failed to love them we felt like hypocrites. Once we felt that way,
we lost our confidence and our actions reflected as much. Then our lives
changed for the worse.
What if, instead, we had responded to the Love Generation appellation by
laughing and saying, “Yeah, sometimes!”?
Far and away the best answer to the problem dealt with in this chapter
was given without resort to words. Ho Tai is the mountainously rotund
Laughing Buddha whose statues are almost as common a theme of Chinese
art as those of Gautama Buddha. A Chinese Zen sage who wandered about
dispensing gifts of sweets from a sack slung over his shoulder, Ho Tai
was once asked to explain the theory of Zen.
Befuddled and bewildered by the question, he furrowed has brow and sat
on a log and thought and thought. When the questioner at last despaired
of ever getting an answer, he went on to ask: “What is the practice of
Zen?”
Ah! Ho Tai brightened at once, stood, shouldered his bag and went his
merry way!
Devised for use by individuals or small groups or movements or whole
nations as the case may be, Ho Chi Zen’s strategy of Yin Revolution
offers freedom in every sense of the word to everyone willing to go
through the Five Changes: Subjective Liberation; Economic Independence;
Parallel Communications; Liberated Trade; Objective Political Freedom.
Named after the female or receptive and serene side of the Taoist
dialectic, Yin Revolution enables any number of persons to proceed
directly to freedom without waiting until all society joins the
struggle. Without a transition phase where a self-appointed vanguard
rules on behalf of the masses, it avoids the danger that such an elite
will never relinquish power in the end.
Resembling judo and karate, its tactics lend themselves most readily to
the weak and oppressed — eluding the means the mighty must use to secure
their dominance. For as Ho Chi Zen has observed: “Men do not hold power;
power holds men.”
Common enough is the saying that the master is no freer than the slave.
A systematic study of power and its dictates restricting its holders has
to my knowledge never been made. Usually, students of political power
stress its rather questionable benefits to its holders or simply take
for granted that ruling is a desirable and enjoyable activity.
Yet it is easy to see that, as sages and commoners observe, the power
over others so coveted by politicians and so glorified by the scholars
that write for them is not much good for attaining personal
satisfaction. Not only is the quest for power addicting and wearing on
the youth and health of its participants, those who grasp it
successfully find themselves preoccupied with keeping it. In that task
their choices are restricted both by the actions of the loyal opposition
and by the conspiracies of the worst gang of cut-throats in their
empire.
All options of the mighty must, in other words, be selected with a mind
to how anyone who would oust or supplant them might respond. Within such
a politically realistic context they wind up doing what they must
instead of what they would like. That is one reason why politicians
seldom keep their campaign promises.
Should they come down too harshly on nonviolent protesters, a more
determined and menacing faction will use the incident to make political
hay. If they behave too leniently toward genuine threats to their
security, they will be overthrown. Distinguishing between one opposition
faction and the other is a full-time job that would require spying on
everyone. yet if they spy on all their subjects, their unpopularity will
escalate. Predicaments like these lead to loss of a rational
perspective.
During the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon and most of his advisors
once spent at least an hour discussing what to do about a picketer who
was then carrying a sign back and forth across the street from the White
House. To worry about a lone individual who is harmlessly expressing an
opinion is hardly to enjoy freedom.
Keeping the dictates of power in mind, we can scurry beneath the feet of
our oppressors and tie their shoelaces together. Or we can evade the
brunt of their worst policies, much of the time, simply by remaining
alert.
Growing up authoritarian-submissive we suffer a profound imprint on our
nervous system, living as a result in what Timothy Leary called
neurological cages. Internalized pecking orders would be just as apt a
name. Something about what these mechanisms are like and how they are
escaped has already been discussed without using either of the above
names.
Essential to realize is that most individuals are wholly unprepared to
live without neurological cages altogether. Upon springing themselves
from one, they will usually quickly seek another. Slavery seems more
comfortable than freedom to those long accustomed to it. And what most
people object to about foreign despotisms is not so much that they
enslave, but that their manacles chafe in strange places.
Permanent Subjective Liberation requires us to get used to the
responsibilities and uncertainties and stimulating difficulties of
freedom. While the birds of the air have their nests and the foxes of
the field have their burrows “the Son of Man,” Jesus warned, “has
nowhere to lay his head.” Like an infinitely prolonged LSD high, life
beyond the ruts of convention and conditioned reflexes can seem a heady
way to be. Until we learn to calm the winds and waters of heightened
awareness, we may feel like a boat adrift in a storm.
Just as submission to material or psychic authority demands mastery of
certain disciplines — the ones we learn in church, school and work place
— so certain other skills are needed for independence of being. Since
most of us are, by background, conditioned for the problems of
authoritarian society only — and even the freest present-day society is
authoritarian — we generally feel at odds with ourselves upon tasting
freedom. This is as true of Subjective Liberation from former cultural
restrictions as for emancipation from physical slavery. We love our
freedom and yet we long for the “massa”. We become like the Apostle Paul
who confessed after his liberation from the religious orthodoxy of the
Jews that what he would not do, he did, and what he would do, he did not
do.
Most yogas and systems of contemplation, most psychological therapies
and human potential exercises, most psychedelic substances and Zen
pointings give us an indication of freedom. All too often results are
incomplete or temporary. For that reason, comprehending the nature of
the unconditioned human being is helpful. Sadly, most ways of liberation
recognize from the outset only one or two of the four aspects of
untrammeled being, nearly always emphasizing one at the expense of all
the others.
Rationality or curiosity, sexuality, sociability or compassion or
gregariousness, and spirituality or esthetic intuition are all the focus
of this or that pathway to liberation. Additionally, they are all
personality characteristics found in newborn babies and toddlers.
Laboratory animals will satisfy their curiosity about something unknown
to them before they will seek out animals of the opposite sex, or food.
Children will automatically reason logically with the limited
information available to them, sometimes with comic results. Above all,
as higher mammals and particularly as primates, we are beings that
ingest and correlate data. We don’t have to be taught this. In fact, in
existing societies we have to be discouraged from carrying it too far.
When our elders slap our hands for grabbing delicate possessions or for
placing objects in our mouth, that is called socialization. They are
teaching us to behave. What they are also teaching us is to associate
learning with pain and scoldings. Unconsciously, we begin to regard
knowledge as vaguely evil and forbidden, or useless and boring. And
logic without facts is useless and boring, like a mill without grist. By
the time we reach school age there is little danger that many of us will
be as eager to learn as we all were as toddlers. So the bosses and the
politicians can relax, secure in the knowledge that not many people will
catch on to their game. And those that do will be tamed with awards and
scholarships and guided to jobs that benefit from keeping the system the
way it is.
So we have to teach ourselves all over again, in the deepest levels of
our being, that we need never apologize for seeking information. In
exploring our own sexual natures we will be called perverts. In probing
social mechanisms wherein genuine political and economic power resides
we will be called paranoids. Words like that serve little more purpose
than to intimidate curiosity. With most of us they are quite effective.
Much else in our language and habits of thought endures because it
dovetails nicely with the purposes of past and present authoritarians.
Our logic is so filled with short-circuits, quirks, kinks and cliches
that it is an effort to think clearly for ourselves. By studying all the
paths of liberation, including General Semantics and the writings of the
British libertarian philosophers who inspired the American Revolution —
not to mention the works of the anarchists — we can begin to identify
and ferret out these authoritarian-submissive presumptions that have
deprived us of our natural reason. Nothing but the truth of the
rationality of the unconditioned mind gives such power to the
ever-popular story of the emperor’s new clothes.
By itself, intellectual liberation that does not come to terms with
human sexuality can be worse than useless. And regaining our original
lusty sexual innocence requires, beyond reviving our curiosity, an
entirely different approach than liberating reason. For now we are
called upon to deal with that portion of the human mind called the human
body, regarded in speech as a separate entity from the body. They are
interconnected. That explains why erotic matters are usually
imponderable even to poets. So much is sexuality part of us, closer than
breathing, that trying to understand it is akin to the eye endeavoring
to see itself — in a beautiful metaphor used in another context by Alan
Watts — or like the hand trying to grab itself.
Possibly, sexuality is the mother of religion. Primitive mystics may
have been ascribing symbols to aspects of what we call lust, both
genital and the more pervasive non-genital kind of which Norman O. Brown
writes so eloquently. Certainly when religion becomes organized and
established it begins to regard sex jealously as a dangerous competitor,
perhaps in an effort to hide its own not-so-miraculous-and-immaculate
origins.
Politicians intuitively grasp the usefulness of sexuality as a sure way
to divide people and distract them from the business of becoming free in
other ways. Whether they choose to be for or against sexual repression,
they can create such an uproar that political and economic crimes and
failures will fade into the background. Jay Gould, the monopoly
capitalist, once boasted that he could cure unemployment by hiring one
half of the jobless to kill the other half. As long as they can keep
their subjects quarreling with one another about personal affairs, they
need not fear a united effort to oust them. Since organized religion is
politically powerful, it usually takes the side of repression. As Aldous
Huxley showed in Brave New World, they could just as easily reduce us to
submission by taking the opposite approach. In contemporary culture,
factions of the ruling class sometimes join forces with organized crime
to create turmoil by supporting sexual freedom. Efforts like that are
not sexual liberation movements; they depend as much on guilt and
blackmail and puritanical legislation as drug smuggling depends on
narcotics laws — without which there would not be much profit in the
activity.
Once I was driving through Atlanta with my Hindu friend, Suresh, an
exchange student from India. Upon noting that the largest adult book
center in town was located right next door to the Baptist book store,
also the largest of its kind, he commented, “Why not? They keep each
other in business!”
Yet, granted that sex is a powerful tool for distraction, it can and
does also distract from what is trivial and unworthy of incessant
preoccupation, as was characterized in the Sixties by the slogan: “Make
love — not war!” In the chapter about the counter-game called
“Invitation to the Dance” Alan Watts insists, correctly I think, that
the counter-game must possess an essentially erotic aspect. Between a
counter-game and a melodrama there is a vast difference. A melodrama
splits the cast up into “good guys” and “bad guys”. A counter-game seeks
to reconcile opposites, side stepping dichotomous traps such as Eros
against Thanatos by a kind of judo.
Allowing sexuality to exist as an end in itself, to such extremes as
abandoning even the quest for orgasm — abandoning, not rejecting; (the
difference between allowing and demanding) — we permit sexuality to
regain its spontaneously seductive nature. Both suppression and
exploitation of sex can serve authoritarian purposes. Only wu-wei
(letting be) can make way for the side effects of sexual enjoyment —
such as a healthy, free erotic elan — to serve the cause of liberty. And
this kind of attitude cannot help but advance freedom, any more than the
sky can help being high.
Simply because the Establishment sometimes exploits human sexuality, we
cannot allow its members to get away with seeming like the only sexy
people in town. This mistake has been made in recent decades by almost
all Marxist-Leninist organizations; the consequences have cost them
dearly. For as the communist anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to warn,
a social revolution is much more than a political revolution. Comparing
the social revolution to a fragile flower, he says it must be cultivated
with gentle care. More than that, it must in the long run be far more
pervasive.
Had the Great Human Be-In and Tribal Gatherings been promoted in
strictly intellectual terms with button words like “socialism” or
“individualism,” opposition to them would have been fierce and
immediate. Presenting them without definition invited attendance, and
won converts from every philosophical school.
Perhaps compassion is called com-passion because, intuitively, we
understand it is the companion of passion. When our natural capacity to
become sexually aroused vicariously over pleasure experienced by others
is repressed, so is our natural empathy for the suffering of the less
fortunate. Again the map of speech tends most often to divide what in
the territory of mind and body employs the same basic biophysical
energy. Sexually repressive ways of living must devise elaborate moral
codes that pay lip service to compassion and humanity to restrain their
adherents from acts of sadism. With all their endless chatter about
compassion and humanity, the Confucians earned the scorn of the Taoist
sages — who delighted in twitting the Confucian need to make ado about
what comes naturally to people who are in touch with themselves, who
have not “lost the Tao”. For humans are gregarious mammals who live in
tribes and extended families without fuss or forethought until they fall
into the clutches of missionaries or imperialist politicians.
“The True People of Old,” says Chuang Tsu, “were kind to one another
without knowing it was called compassion. They deceived no one and did
not know it was called honesty. The were reliable and did not know it
was called dependability. They lived together freely giving and taking
and did not know it was called generosity. For this reason their actions
have not been recorded and they made no history.” Calling this the Age
of Perfect Peace, the sage tells us its citizens lived like deer in the
forests, sleeping without dreaming and awakening without anxiety.
Sociality comes as easily to the unconditioned mind as reason or sex.
When Dom Aelred Graham complained in his Conversations Christian and
Buddhist that Zen seemed to him amoral due to the absence of anything
like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, a Zen master responded
that compassion is one of the definitive components of Zen
enlightenment, and that without compassion it isn’t Zen.
Rules — unlike contractual agreements useful to many situations and at
least bilateral in nature — are only needed by those who have lost the
capacity to govern themselves humanely. Once they are established it is
a vicious cycle, for those who grow up under them never reach the
maturity required for common-sense living.
Having mentioned that the fourth characteristic of unconditioned
personality is spirituality, I’ll begin by pointing out that I am
obviously not talking about theological belief systems, since those
things can be argued forever without any corresponding change in human
actions. Metaphysics should not stubbornly be dragged into community
affairs; in return, the community ought to respect freedom of personal
belief among its individual members. Otherwise, it will be divided and
ruled.
All religions participate in spirituality. Yet it is something also
available to the skeptic, as Julian Huxley shows in Religion Without
Revelation. Psychedelic consciousness is at this point a rather passe
term, yet it functions to show that what we are talking about is not a
monopoly of religious faith. Quoting Blake, Aldous Huxley called it a
cleansing of “the doors of perception” in his book by that name. Since
nothing direct can be said about it, and since most of this book is
devoted to indicating how it may be experienced, further elaboration is
next to useless. Lord Buddha responded to all inquiries about
metaphysical spirituality with what he called “a noble silence”. For
that reason he is sometimes called the Silent Sage.
That what we are discussing, under whatever name, is closely related to
our sense of the beautiful is clear because it has always inspired the
creators of great art. Like reason and sex and compassion, esthetic
discrimination seems largely inborn. And, therefore, Zenarchists who are
skeptical of religion may prefer to call this characteristic of
unconditioned mind esthetic, instead of spiritual.
Buried under all the layers of ignorant assumption and fable and reflex
conditioning called individual personality, at the center of every human
soul, is a pure flame of undivided rationality and sexuality and
sociability and spirituality. When you reach that flame in self or other
without evoking a knee-jerk reaction from armoring which imprisons it,
you have touched the most private holy of holies within the living human
being. You are then participating in the work of Subjective Liberation.
As Marx and Kropotkin and other revolutionaries have observed, trying to
attain and maintain psychological liberation under deficient material
conditions is practically impossible. More than scarcity is involved.
Regimented working conditions (endured today in both capitalist and
socialist nations) are also deadening to the spirit. Equally difficult
is finding any options in the struggle for freedom when you must report
for work like a soldier to muster in order to produce, must dress and
conduct yourself in such a way as not to scandalize the sensibilities of
your boss, and must remain at production until a given hour when you are
dismissed.
Lack of control by workers of the means of production is certainly the
root of the problem. Marx erred, though, in thinking if corporations
were turned into public bureaucracies the monotonous routine would
transform itself. Until the communist anarchist dream of direct
expropriation of the tools of production is realized, or until there is
a laissez-faire free market where small businesses can survive easily
enough that we can become self-employed, it is up to us to find ways to
break out of the predominant system. For an independent economic base of
action is almost necessary for maintaining inner liberation and making
the imaginative responses to political authority required by the
counter-game.
Fortunately a wealth of information for attaining that much is readily
available in The Whole Earth Catalog publications.
An excellent preparatory step is to heed Henry David Thoreau’s
observation: we are rich not according to what we possess, but according
to the number of things we can do without. Take inventory of what you
own or consume that genuinely contributes to your happiness. Identify
what you purchase in order to impress others whose opinions do not
matter. Many people own stocks, for example, because of an addictive
compulsion to gamble, not for reasons of a security that leads to peace
of mind. What is the point of winning and losing symbolic wealth that is
seldom if ever seen, touched or tasted by the owner? Much the same thing
can be said for the desire to purchase, year after year, a late-model
car. How many home appliances cost more trouble and money in maintenance
than they are worth?
For direct enjoyment of living, what about purchasing your own tools of
production and using them with your own brain and hands? The Whole Earth
Catalog and its widely available sequels are subtitled “Access to
Tools”. Once in possession of your own means of production, you fit both
capitalist and socialist definitions of the free individual. And if you
don’t own enough luxuries to sell to buy the tools, you need not
despair. Knowledge is as valuable as capital for self-employment and can
often be used to acquire any tools you may need.
A statement of purpose in The Whole Earth Catalog reads: “We are as gods
and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory —
as via government, big business, formal education, church — has
succeeded to point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response
to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power
is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education,
find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his
adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are
sought and promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog.” To be included, an item
must be deemed useful as a tool relevant to independent education, of
high quality or low cost and easily available by mail.
Guides and implements listed make it possible for you — if you want — to
forage, grow, hunt or raise your own food, make your own clothing and
shelter, provide yourself with competent medical care for most ailments.
That isn’t the only use for The Whole Earth Catalog and how far you or
your group wants to go in that direction is of course optional. No
matter how much or how little time and effort you expend in learning
independent survival, though, you are that much ahead of the game. For
to tread the money mill, if you are not a banker, is to labor against
house odds.
“A bank may, under Federal Reserve rules, loan eight times as much as it
has on deposit,” cautions Robert Anton Wilson, asking then, “if seven
dollars out of every eight that are so produced by bank credit are not
created out of nothing, what are they created of?”
Inflation is the name of the result. Note the power of the banks when
you read articles and hear speeches on inflation by apologists for
capitalism and socialism alike. They seldom mention banks.
Not only does fractional reserve banking erode your purchasing power,
you also pay in the same way for deficit spending by government. Again,
only bankers benefit. They collect the interest. And interest is made
necessary only by coercive regulations on money supply, amounting to a
bank-government partnership. Otherwise you could issue I.O.U.’s on your
own collateral and buy things with them, paying only a minimal fee for a
credit investigation.
In Great Britain the average worker also spends one working day out of
every nine paying for his or her automobile — in purchasing cost,
repairs, insurance and highway taxes. Add to this the burden of taxation
in general, both direct and hidden in prices of what we buy from taxed
and tariffed industries. Then take into consideration the giant’s share
of your paycheck you probably fork over for rent. You can’t possibly
secure a just return for your labor.
“Never buy what you can make,” my grandfather used to say. If you follow
that advice you will gain much more than you lose by forsaking what were
once the advantages of division of labor. Beyond that, of course, is
producing something useful or desirable in goods and services for
purposes of barter.
First, though, exchanging goods and services depends on your ability to
communicate with other independent producers.
Every center of political-economic authority strives to monopolize
communications. Mass media, telephone and postal systems are all
controlled by corporate-government oligarchies. If we enjoy freedom of
expression, it is managed freedom of speech.
Unfettered communications between self-liberating people is required for
both communal and free market activities outside the rip-offs of
coercively monopolized capital.
Brainstorming and combing publications of the libertarian right are both
useful methods for developing ideas about creating alternative
communications. Networks using advanced electronics, associations of
nomadic individuals and, when necessary, cyphers and codes, are among
these alternatives.
Periodicals and books pertaining to libertarian right applications of
principle can usually be found among individuals on the fringes of the
Libertarian Party, since even many politically active libertarian
capitalists are also interested in direct free market action outside the
system.
By scrutinizing advertisements in libertarian publications for yet other
printed material and products and by corresponding and personally
visiting libertarian technicians and entrepreneurs, you will quickly
find much that will contribute to creating and participating in
liberated systems of communication.
Free contracting for the exchange of labor for goods and services,
barter and monetary (accounting) systems free from inflation and usury —
parallel market places are the modes of Liberated Trade. Libertarians
call them agoric systems of production and exchange.
Both the Whole Earth movement and the libertarians you meet for creating
parallel communications will be able to show you how to comprehend this
activity and make it, or let it, work for you.
Having previously mastered the first three changes you will find it easy
to now become an essentially free person or family or tribe. For by this
time you will know where to acquire further data for participating in
Liberated Trade.
“Now that you have your freedom, how will you hide it from robbers?”
Political governments, organized crime syndicates and intelligence
community bureaucracies known popularly as conspiracies, are the only
threats to your liberty at this point. You don’t necessary have to
overthrow them to be free of them. That would, besides, be like cutting
the heads off a Hydra.
What they all possess in common is the blunt recognition that, as
Chairman Mao said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Governments are generally devoted to public relations for the purpose of
obscuring that fact. Mafia dons have traditionally been more honest
about their line of work, but they are getting smarter.
Self-defense skills, defensive weaponry and technology, authoritarian
psychology and, if you are fanatical, emergency suicide techniques can
all be studied for the purpose of coping with violent enslavers. If you
let it be known that you are prepared to kill yourself rather than
submit to coercive authority — and have the means at hand, such as a
poison pill in a locket around your neck — you may find that many an
authoritarian will decide harassing you would cause too many problems.
Judo, karate and other Oriental methods of arguing by hand are
additionally valuable as Zenarchist disciplines. Non-lethal weapons such
as gas guns are useful for people who would rather attain instant
security in this area. Other defensive weaponry can include alarm
systems for protecting personal property and communication arrangements
for identifying potential oppressors. One application of authoritarian
psychology is to make an appointment with a harassing bureaucrat at 4:30
Friday afternoon and then borrow the neighbor’s kids and dogs and bring
them along.
These are just a few examples of the many methods of dealing with the
ultimate source of political authority — the armed agent, as cop or
squad of soldiers or hit man.
Since the eye is superior protection to the sword, evolution equips all
animals with sensory organs — only a few with fangs or claws or horns,
etc. It behooves you to devote the most attention to whatever will
expand your awareness, including fancy alarm systems.
Or use them to enlighten your oppressor.
Doctor George Boardman, a libertarian who believed in living without the
dubious protection of government, once suggested what I would call a
Zenarchist burglar alarm. A nocturnal intruder triggers a mechanism to
flood the area with blinding light and activate an amplified recording
that says: “How about a little light? Thief.”
As the great Zenarch, Gregory Hill, says: “’Tis an ill wind that blows
no minds!”
Potential dangers exist in Yin Revolution. Without a comprehensive
overview of its extent we cannot estimate success or failure. In one
sense that makes it like Hopi basketball, and yet ignorance is never a
good thing. Yin Revolution is essentially nonconfrontive; confrontation
makes for communication with the so-called enemy and such communication
sometimes resolves the problem. A minority of those who become free may
not have attended sufficiently their own Subjective Liberation and, like
the Pilgrims who settled New England, might quickly turn around and
begin oppressing others. Without any consensus whatever, Parallel
Communications could degenerate into a form of technocratic feudalism
complete with wizards and warlords — something that is already more
prevalent than is widely acknowledged.
Today we are nearing the possibility of winding up in a world like the
nightmare reported by Gary Snyder in Earth House Hold: “ — dreamed of a
new industrial-age dark ages: filthy narrow streets and dirty buildings
with rickety walks over the streets from building to building — unwashed
illiterate brutal cops — a motorcycle cop and a sidecar drove up over a
fat workingman who got knocked down in a fight — tin cans and garbage
and drooping electric wires everywhere —”.
Widespread Economic Independence will of course militate against such a
trend. But only a high degree of voluntary social cohesion will prevent
it or something worse — like sanitary but sterile totalitarian
regulation — from afflicting the bulk of humanity.
Zenarchy is the art of steadfastly failing to provide political
leadership and, by having as little to do with political power as
possible, thereby transforming the empire. For the spirit of freedom is
the fundamental ordering principle of the whole universe. Chaung Tzu
chronicles the history of sages who refused the throne. Superior people
understand that in forsaking the chance to administer a kingdom they can
sometimes foster the values of an age.
In the Age of Perfect Peace the True People of Old lived in harmony
equal to the rhythm of the seasons and the ebb and flow of tidal cycles.
With no concept of law and order, they lacked occasion for crime and
turmoil.
Likewise: enjoying the resources of a kingdom, Prince Siddartha could
not attain tranquility; fasting and mortifications also failed to bring
serenity; sitting under a tree and doing nothing though, he was taken by
Buddhahood.
“From one standpoint, governments, wars, or all that we consider ‘evil’
are uncompromisingly contained in this totalistic realm,” says Gary
Snyder of Buddhahood. “The hawk, the swoop and the hare are one. From
the ‘human’ standpoint we cannot live in those terms unless all beings
see with the same enlightened eye. The Bodhisattva lives by the
sufferer’s standard,” because of a compassionate nature, “and he must be
effective in aiding those who suffer,” according to “Buddhism and the
Coming Revolution” in Earth House Hold.
Peter Kropotkin once observed that, “Throughout the history of our
civilization, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in
conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial
tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and
the libertarian tradition.”
Old George Boardman was an instructor at Robert LeFevre’s libertarian
Freedom School in Larkspur, Colorado, where I was a student in 1964.
Most of the time Boardman lived in a ghost town called Chloride,
Arizona, population: 250. No government was present there at that time,
not even as a figment of its own imagination.
As for crimes against person or property, the most recent one was
committed five years earlier by some Californians who were passing
through. No crimes with victims occurred, said George Boardman, because
there were no police to protect criminals from a watchful populace.
George wrote a regular column for the Santa Ana Register recounting his
adventures in Chloride and setting forth his wise, usually slightly
cranky or downright stubborn views of various issues. In 1969 he passed
away and I wrote him a tribute that was published in the Register.
That man could cause an Orange County, California, Bircher to see the
contradiction between “law” and “order” without ever feeling his mind
had been changed about politics. In Zen, such tactful persuasion is
called upaya, the “gentle method”. And though Boardman’s rhetoric was
conservative, his philosophy was both humorous and — well, I hesitate to
say “radical”. For once he said, “I’m not an anarchist nor a
libertarian, or anything else. I’m George Boardman — and I don’t want to
be held responsible for anyone’s views but my own”.
In a discussion of Natural Law, the philosophical basis of early
American conceptions of liberty, Henry B. Veatch (in an article,
“Natural Law: Dead or Alive?” in Literature of Liberty, October-December
1978) writes: “What, though, is this doctrine of so-called ‘natural
law’, that thus had such a long and chequered career, and has even
displayed, in the words of more than one authority, the happy faculty of
repeatedly being able to bury its own undertakers!”
So it was also with a doctrine called ‘tao’ which buried its Indian
Buddhist missionary undertakers in China by way of a Taoistic response
called Ch’an Buddhism that Japanese pronounce as Zen. For when the
emperor became a Buddhist, many Taoists joined and influenced the Ch’an
sect of that religion rather than loudly resisting its attempts to
convert the empire. That is why in Zen today we hear so much about the
Tao. For the Ch’an Buddhists did a better job of preserving the spirit
of the philosophy of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu than did the formally Taoist
religion which, instead, degenerated into fortune telling and other
superstitions.
A similarity in content between Natural Law philosophy and the original
Taoism preserved in Zen is uncanny. Both consist of the same
common-sense observations about human be-ing in accord with nature and
uphold the notion that laws of nature also apply to society. Yet neither
view much resembles Social Darwinism, which also claimed to derive its
principles from the natural world.
Speaking of Natural Law in the ancient world of the West editor Leonard
Liggio comments elsewhere in Literature of Liberty: “The Stoics posited
an identification of physics and nomos, nature and law. The wise man
lived in harmony with nature; he was not dragged in the train of
events.” What is that but following the Tao?
Veatch also says in “Natural Law: Dead or Alive?” that the views of
Natural Law held by Thomas Aquinas did not go far enough. “But why not,”
Veatch asks, “consider ethics and politics, as construed in the light of
this conception of natural law, an analogous to certain arts, skills,
and crafts? Why does the skilled surgeon, for instance make his incision
in one way rather than another?”
Exactly the same point is made about an ox butcher in one of the
parables of Chaung Tzu. Why make an incision one way instead of another?
Following the Tao, an expert butcher cuts between the joints and thus
never has to sharpen his blade. Although a good surgeon is anything but
a butcher, incisions must just the same be made one way and not another.
This fact can be generalized to all reasonable human activity, including
construction of social arrangements. So we see there are rights, or
naturally right ways to behave, ways of the Tao, that take conditions
into consideration, as well as ecology and sociology. Therefore it is
possible with common sense to distinguish between natural ethics that
work and unnatural moralities that eventually only produce widespread
misery.
If Tao is not Natural Law or, in other words, if Natural Law is not Tao
independently discovered by Western philosophers, then what is the
difference between them? Alan Watts says in Psychotherapy East and West:
“The whole literature of Taoism shows a deep and intelligent interest in
the patterns and processes of the natural world and a desire to model
human life upon the observable principles of nature as distinct from the
arbitrary principles of a social order resting upon violence.” That is
exactly the project of Natural Law philosophy!
Zenarchy is the politics of the mind emptied of useless anticipation.
Principles are seen as tools for making decisions when inspiration fails
or prolonged deliberation is impossible. Ideology and analysis are only
seen as preparation. For naked awareness characterizes the moment of
clear and perfect action.
Preaching is ineffectual and neither cute ideas nor a quick wit will
carry anyone through this “gateless gate”. Everything is good in its own
time and therefore must be taken in terms of context. Yet when the
moment inviting a wholehearted response appears, the learned is
relegated to the unconscious and obstacles to pure perception are
obliterated. That way, we are open to the unexpected.
Actor and action unite.
Among certain varieties of ants there is a worker who spends her whole
life clinging to the ceiling of a tunnel serving as a storage tank for
nectar gathered by workers of other occupations. Among ants this is Tao.
Among people it is called being valuable to society.
As long as we think of the individual as something society needs, we
will not evolve any higher than the ants. Society — like food, clothing
and shelter — is something the individual human being needs. Society
exists for the sake of the individual. As Laughing Buddha Jesus said,
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” No person
rightfully lives entirely for the sake of society.
When anyone is used for the sake of society — conscripted, enslaved or
sacrificed — society has ceased to function as intended. Instead, it has
become a system of social arrangement that oppresses, rather than
serves, those who comprise it. In accord with Natural Law, the
Declaration of Independence says any system like that is to be altered
or abolished.
Pointing to a gnarled tree no woodsman had cut for lumber, Chaung Tzu
says, “Everyone understands the value of usefulness. But how many
perceive the value of being useless?”
Sometimes it is valuable to everyone to be useless to society.
If you permit society to oppress you then it will oppress others and the
result will be decadence and cynicism. Eventually “society” will become
a blood-thirsty god with a will of its own that acts contrary to the
will of its participants.
The extent to which society is kept firmly in the service of all
individuals is the measure of how much it is performing its function:
safeguarding basic rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Healthy societies always find defenders and supporters in time of
crisis. They need not rely on taxation or wage slavery to endure. At
Valley Forge there were no draftees.
Voluntarily supported societies earn that support, and as long as they
remain voluntary there is an added check upon the system. Volunterism
leads not to the collapse of order, but to its renewal.
Societies — systems of social arrangements, not collections of people —
command enormous material and creative resources. When their survival as
social organizations depend on it, they can usually be counted on to
place these resources at the service of their participants. So there is
seldom danger of societies collapsing.
Only when individuals collapse — one at a time, first here and then
there — does social order then also eventually decay. Through the
collapse of human beings — a Wilhelm Reich here, a Lenny Bruce there, a
Janis Joplin elsewhere — the social order begins to crack and heave,
edging toward ruin.
Sacrifice never was and can never become a viable principle of social
construction. On the contrary, it is called for only in life-boat
situations — emergencies or “worst cases” — never in peaceful day-to-day
living. And, of course, voluntary self-sacrifice, resulting from natural
compassion, is neither uncommon nor oppressive.
A wholly sacrificial society, however, is totalitarian and despotic.
Systems like that appear strong for awhile. Internally, though, they are
weak and ridden with contradictions — because, within them, human needs
run contrary to social demands at every turn. “A house divided against
itself cannot stand.”
A voluntary society — based literally upon the teachings of Jesus and
other great sages, including the philosophers of Natural Law — is more
than possible. Only when large numbers of individuals cherish and pursue
that end does it become a reality, though — when, in universal
enlightenment everyone says together: “Off our backs!”
So the heathen rage because they have dreamed a dream. This dream comes
not to those who are sleeping, but to all who remain fiercely awake. And
the heathen rage because they must live with that dream and also with
what is their lot under imperialism.
We Zenarchists seldom call ourselves Christians or Buddhists, for that
would make us useful to organized religion. And for the same reason we
call our politics The No Politics — to avoid becoming useful to
politicians.
Cultures that validate their elders possess wise old people; cultures
that invalidate them have senile old ones.
Cultures that validate sexuality enjoy clean, healthy and beautiful
erotic play; societies that invalidate it have dirty, exploitive
commercial smut.
Societies that validate women possess strong, serene and intelligent
females; societies that invalidate them suffer dumb broads and bitches.
Societies that validate children possess cheerful, wise and responsible
youth; societies that invalidate them end up with delinquents and brats.
A culture that validates its ethnic minorities boasts of rich pockets of
exotic cultural variety; a society that invalidates them is divided
between drab suburbs on one hand and filthy ghettos on the other.
Validation is not automatic agreement with someone you think is wrong.
All forms of flattery are deceptive and, hence, invalidating.
Validation is treating someone with a respect that assumes that if they
are given enough information, they’ll use it with their minds.
Conversely, if someone is acting weird or pissed off or
self-destructive, validating attitudes assume there is a reason. Usually
such people are oppressed. A validating approach assumes that if
everyone will just get off their backs not many will have to help them.
A derivative of Natural Law in our legal system is the assumption of
innocence until guilt is proven. When, as individuals, we keep that much
in mind while at the same time searching for the reasons for offensive
behavior, then our attitude toward others is validation. The opposite
view assumes that everyone is a social invalid until they prove they
aren’t. That is why so-called law and order attitudes are frequently
coupled with racism and sexism. Assumptions about others are important
because our expectations often mold their response.
An art of Zenarchy consist of saying “No!” or “I won’t” to oppression.
As the active ingredient of the strike, it becomes a potent factor when
a critical mass of rebels transform “I won’t” into “We won’t”.
Other policies rigidly and aggressively attack the opposition. No
Politics heeds the advice of Chairman Lao to “always be on the defensive
at first”. A good offense is not the best defense; the best defense is
no offense at all.
Recognizing the utility of conscious inaction, of refusal, is mindful of
the humanity of the so-called enemy. Struggle aimed at complete
annihilation is alien to the Zenarchist spirit. Victories in battle are
celebrated with tears of mourning.
A “willow tree” mentality that avoids ideological constipation is
possible through the Zen knack of seeing the “suchness” of things. They
are so much what they are. So are people. Every person does a perfect
job of being that particular individual and no other. So living,
changable and surprising humanity takes precedence over the urgency of
winning at all costs each and every contest. For the one is a territory
of flesh and blood; the other is only based on our map of who is friend
or foe.
Great is the mind kept forever sharper than the sword. Reading the Tao
Teh of Lao Tzu is useful in absorbing this style of struggle that
emphasizes a mood of restraint, with conscious and decisive action at
crucial moments.
Principles are tools for thinking. Useful especially for keeping in mind
the overall context relating to every decision, they are not to be
confused with the specific sensory data of thought.
Without attending to all the sources of oppression, we cannot hope that
our Yin Revolution will become popular with all oppressed people. And
without principles pertaining to those sources of oppression we cannot
assure that in liberating in one area we’ll not become oppressors
ourselves in another.
That prisons breed crime is the First Principle of The No Politics of
Zenarchy. Penal systems are vast chains of universities in criminal
activity. Harsh punishments reinforce hostility and alienation so as to
provide additional motives for antisocial behavior. As we begin to
research alternatives to retribution in history and anthropology it
quickly becomes obvious that a more reasonable approach is to insist on
restitution from those who commit crimes with victims. This can be
enforced when necessary by community refusal to cooperate with
unrepentant transgressors. How effective such a method could be is
indicated by A.S. Neill in Summerhill and by Eric Frank Russell in the
closing chapters of The Great Explosion. Law by contract and enforcement
by strike is one viable alternative to unilateral coercive law and
chaos. We endeavor to educate the populace toward a Permanent Universal
Abolition of Retribution, resulting in Government by Strike and Not by
Gun. As for the incurable psychopath who goes around murdering people
and continues to make the scene through unstinting looting? Whoever shot
that individual would receive a common-sense public hearing for the
purpose of determining the facts. Even our present system recognizes the
defense of “justifiable homicide”.
Although Big Brother said the opposite, ignorace is slavery. That is our
Second Principle. If secrecy were national security, you could vote with
your eyes shut and save freedom. Democracies that keep their citizens in
the dark are democratic in name only. That corporations are entitled to
conduct business in an atmosphere of confidentiality is the result of
superstition. Unlike acts in the bedroom, which all misdirected
communities try to control, corporate decisions affect everyone in
society. Timothy Leary’s battle cry of No More Secrets inspires us to
see ten thousand ways to bring about the Permanent Universal Abolition
of Institutional Secrecy everywhere in the world.
It ain’t the landlord; it’s the rent is our Third Principle. No rational
system of land tenure would require inhabitants of this planet to pay
fees for the dubious privilege of living here. Even if for the sake of
argument we grant validity to first claim theory, then the whole Western
Hemisphere belongs to Native American Indians. And their system of land
tenure was based upon occupancy and use. Either one was enough to insure
ownership. Uninhabited and unused land, in cases where both conditions
prevailed, was up for grabs. Evidence indicates the ancient natives of
Europe maintained a similar system, and in common law there is such a
thing as squatters’ rights. Lords and ladies of the land, as the names
imply, are feudal traditions. Pollution is profitable and fifteen
million people starve to death every year due to absentee landlordism
more than to any other single cause. Neither agri-business nor
collective farms offer quality, speedy solutions to those problems
since, among other things, they use petro-chemical fertilizers. To
protest ground rents and the oppression that makes them thinkable, we
Zenarchists believe in chanting and writing as often as possible this
powerful mantra: Permanent Universal Rent Strike. Hopefully, that will
stimulate a nonviolent transformation in the direction of Ecological and
Equitable Use of Land and Natural Resources.
Since money is only a symbol to keep track of exchanges in goods and
services or labor, that is our Fourth Principle. No clique of bankers in
conspiracy with any government possesses the right to declare that we
must accept for all debts only this or that form of currency in payment.
When all retain the right to reject payment in symbols of value that are
not trusted, then Gresham’s Law functions in reverse and we call it
Mahserg’s Law. The good money drives out the bad. That way the free
market assures that the money supply will not exceed the value of
available goods and labor, so inflation becomes impossible. Zenarchists
advocate you Make Good Money in Your Spare Time by issuing your own
certificates of value or cheques, redemptive in your wealth in goods and
services. If everyone did this, we would have something like a Direct
Barter Free Credit Economy, where money is a convenient symbol of credit
and nothing more. Alan Watts discusses a similar idea in “Wealth Versus
Money” in Does it Matter? Last but not least, liberated money is an
important issue because the multinational central banking corporations
organized just before World War I are almost certainly to blame for
contributing to wars and violent social unrest. Without the threat of
such tragedies — made possible by extending credit for the purchase of
arms — the bankers would possess no means of enforcing collection of
interest payments on national debts from governments.
That absentee control of the workplace is the root of all oppression (or
at least most of it) is the Fifth Principle. Because of private credit
monopolies and regulated currency it is, under the present system,
usually necessary to borrow money (called investments) for tools (called
capital). Interest payments (called dividends) are made on these capital
investments. We advocate a pluralistic free market economy and therefore
support both communist anarchist struggles for industrial democracy and
the libertarian rightist goal of small-business laissez-faire. In a free
society, where people can issue their own money backed with collateral
or credit instead of having to obtain loans or investments, both
communism and the free market are possible. In order to abolish absentee
bossism Zenarchy calls for a Permanent Universal Absentee Boss Lock Out
and the Complete Deregulation of Nonabsentee Entrepre-neurs. We seek to
combine the working class and the petty bourgeoisie in a powerful surge
against both cartel capitalism and statist socialism.
As Zenarchists and Yin Revolutionaries we believe it makes sense to
resist all forms of coercive authority and that is our Sixth Principle.
To advance it, we repeat the mantra, Permanent Universal Tax Strike. We
further seek to probe all cryptocratic methods of extortion so as to
bring about Exposure of All Forms of Conscription, for human slavery is
alive and well in the intelligence community. Foreign-born and second
generation Americans are extorted by intelligence bureaucracies that
threaten to kill or injure their kin in the old country. Technocratic
methods of surveillance and death-threat extortion also exist, ranging
from artificial induction of cancer to halting Pacemakers with
micro-waves when orders are disobeyed, using miniature observation
devices to detect the least gesture of rebellion. As Zenarchists we also
oppose the temporary and more humane type of slavery called military
conscription, for no country that remains worth fighting for need rely
on a draft. Another coercive institution we oppose is the trade tariff
for it is an old saying in economics that where goods do not cross
borders, soldiers do.
Liberation is for everybody and this is our Seventh Principle. We oppose
racism, sexism and the persecution of intellectual minorities (including
even bigots who abstain from force). Zenarchists want Permanent
Universal Cultural Autonomy by means of Self-Selecting Intentional
Neighborhoods made possible by communitarian computer matching services.
Further, we endeavor always to raise consciousness against
discrimination that dehumanizes any individual human being.
Transistorized untouchables exist. Our Eighth Principle pertains to a
humanoid robot caste among us that authoritarian technocrats are
creating at this time, although not much is said about it in the media.
As incredible as it may seem, subcutaneous brain-wave transmitters and
cranial silicone chips and ultra-high frequency sound wave projectors
are already developed and in use for manipulating the minds of human
beings. As Walter Bowart writes in Operation Mind Control: “Although the
first victims of Operation Mind Control were perhaps especially suitable
personality types for such use, with the advances being made in the
psycho-sciences all but a few of us may eventually be victimized.”
An examination of the bibliography of Bowart’s book will convince the
average skeptic that sophisticated mind manipulation is not a paranoid
fantasy. The notion that reflex conditioning of any kind will create
order instead of a social nightmare is based upon an unexamined
Behaviorist assumption. For individuals cannot unilaterally manipulate
beings of approximately equal intelligence; counter-manipulation comes
into play. Unlike laboratory mice, human beings imitate their
manipulators instead of responding to them mechanistically. We begin to
resemble our oppressors. Try to condition a child with B.F. Skinner’s
techniques, for example, and that individual will become a
wheeler-dealer, not an obedient servant. That is why the Taoist sages
said that the more punishments and promotions there are, the more
turmoil there is. When everyone tries to control everyone else — and
that is what happens when one group tries to manipulate another — all
society becomes a howling madhouse. We therefore call upon everyone to
Defeat the Behaviorist Technocracy by means of Exposure and Dismantling
of All Sleeper Agent Projects, as they are often called. When scientists
gain political power, warned the anarchist Bakunin, they can be expected
to treat their fellow humans just as they treat rats and mice in
laboratory experiments. In that, as in most other things, Michael
Bakunin has proven prophetic.
Moreover, in all systems of domination of one human by another
communications snarl because effective communication is only possible
between equals. That is called the S.N.A.F.U. Principle and it is our
Ninth Principle in the No Politics. Zenarchists promote and demonstrate
Alternatives to Bureaucracy such as affinity groups, tribalism,
town-meeting democracy and participatory parallel institutions. All such
alternatives resemble each other in that elected representatives of
families, clans, tribes or whatever are not powered to make laws in
meetings with representatives of other groups. Instead, they may
negotiate contracts, subject to approval by the members of the group
they represent. That’s the first difference between a libertarian
federation and a bureaucracy. Everyone is equal in power; elected
officials are not more equal than everyone else — as were the pigs in
George Orwell’s Animal Farm. A second crucial difference is that
contracts are enforced, not at gun point, but by community sanction. A
family or tribe or township that breaks an agreement suffers a loss of
credit, for others refuse to do business with it to a degree dependent
on the seriousness of the breach. That system works today on Wall
Street; when a broker says on the phone he or she will buy a certain
number of shares, that commitment stands, even if the price of the stock
in question declines before the deal is made. Corporate bureaucracies
also use the second method, but not the first — thus they are slightly
more efficient than government bureaus: they experience fewer
S.N.A.F.U.’s. When cooperatives in which all are equal fail, it is
usually because the members lack skills in conducting meetings or in
nonviolently arbitrating disputes, not because voluntary federations are
less effective.
So-called meeting-house Quakers possess excellent skills in conducting
meetings. Much can learned from them and from the secular Movement for a
New Society, a pacifist organization with Quaker origins.
As for dispute resolution, see the advice given by Jesus in the Bible
for treatment of an offending brother and note the similar Essene method
reported in The Wilderness Revolt by Diane Kennedy Pike. Also refer to
Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane to see how quarrels are
resolved without recourse to coercion in Middle East market places.
Taken separately, many of these Nine Principles do not sound like much.
When studied to a point that they are absorbed wholistically — as a
Gestalt — they are seen as intimately interconnected. Taken together,
they reinforce one another and in fact function as the Vital Organs of
Human Liberty.
In summary: The No Politics is Taoistically skeptical of rewards and
punishments, because humans learn by imitation and all money and prisons
teach is manipulative behavior; the truth about everything will help
more than anything else to make everyone free; public, corporate and
technocratic bureaucracies don’t function as effectively as voluntary
federations.
There are at least seven natural rights, or the Tao of human activity in
society possesses seven attributes, or people are like machines only in
the respect that they don’t work good if you neglect their maintenance
requirements.
What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, liberty,
the pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights,
the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations
they promote the view that only food, clothing, shelter and medical care
are rights.
We are further encouraged to argue about whether rights must be earned
or whether it is the duty of the government to guarantee them. Everyone
necessarily struggles for their rights, and no government can ever
guarantee anything except death and taxes.
All that bickering begs the relevant question: What can we do in
voluntary cooperation to see that our natural rights, our intimate
functional needs, are respected? Without that much, human beings are
incapable of behaving as constructively rational and loving members of
any population.
Looking at reality is like trying to stare at both ends of a very long
stick at the same time. Our minds function in such a way as to see first
one side and then another of a concept. We see the black on the white
background or the white on the black in the famous optical illusions
used to illustrate Gestalt theories of perception, whereas it is
virtually impossible to see both at once.
Zen Buddhists have sensed as much since ancient times. What they have
also realized is that while the history of something may be necessary or
at least helpful in coming to terms with it, that much alone is usually
insufficient. Likewise, although abstracting the essential principles of
a process can communicate a mechanistic sense of what it does and does
not include, there are times at which that is a little like outlining a
story plot and presenting it in place of a whole novel. Also, sometimes
the more concisely a principle or an idea is stated the more it tends,
even if memorized, to go “in one ear and out the other”.
In the teaching of Zen, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism and Sufism the use of
brief, often humorous anecdotes serve to transmit glimpses from a
multitude of angles and for a profusion of varying minds. Great
spiritual teachers like Jesus and Ramakrishna of course employed the
similar technique of the parable and illustrative anecdotes are valued
in all types of education. There is however, a flavor most known in
connection with the Zen story — a hint of mindfucking absurdism
approaching conceptual art of the surrealist school — which, when
adopted by anarchism, transforms it into Zenarchy.
Zenarchy stories are probably just what is needed to establish and
maintain a Zenarchist revolutionary tradition.
Ho Chi Zen: “What is God like?”
Tom: “Somebody. I don’t care.”
Here is a spiritual exercise that will help you apply Laughing Buddha
Jesus’ advice about loving one another.
As you are walking the streets or riding a public conveyance imagine
yourself the father or mother or each person you look at — regardless of
age. See all adults as your grown children, contemplating them one at a
time even if that makes you feel a hundred years old.
Or imagine that every man or woman you pass or encounter is a Zen master
— each with her or his own method of teaching. Sometimes they will sense
your respect for them and will glance at you and grin. Take the dress
and posture of each individual as evidence of his or her style of
expressing enlightenment. Hear every scrap of conversation as a Zen
riddle.
And never forget the saying, “Tao is your everyday mind.”
One of Ho Chi Zen’s students asked him, “What was the occasion of your
enlightenment?”
Ho replied: “I forget.”
This true story was actually published in one of the humor sections of
Reader’s Digest many years ago:
At an interdenominational religious conference in Hawaii, a Japanese
delegate approached a fundamentalist Baptist minister and said, “My
humble superstition is Buddhism. What is yours?”
Chuang Tzu said: “A keeper of monkeys told them, ‘I will give you three
nuts in the morning and four in the evening.’ That made them mad, so he
said, ‘Very well. I will give you four in the morning and three in the
evening.’ That made them happy.”
One of the few formalities of Zenarchy, the Coffee Drinking Ceremony
must be observed in strict conformity with the following procedure:
Roll five joints of high quality marijuana and prepare one large pot of
very strong coffee. Place these items in the center of a kitchen table
together with a book of matches. Next, place on the table two large
earthenware mugs and one simple but attractive ashtray.
Now sit at the table with someone you love very much and spend the hours
from late night until sunrise animating conversation.
Inwardly observe the discipline of always keeping in mind a heartache
during intervals of the discussion that are light and full of laughter.
When you chat of sorrowful things keep in mind something beautiful,
funny and hopeful.
Says Gary Snyder, “Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the
talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the
cage they were tricked into entering.”
One of the characters to appear in the writings of old Chaung Tzu is
Hung Ming, whose name means Primal Chaos, for which reason he was
adopted as a Chaoist Sage by the Discordian Society — a nonprophet
ireeligious disorganization about which you will learn more and
understand less if you read Principia Discordia. As such, he is also a
Zenarchist Immortal, for Zenarchy is to Discordianism much as Zenis to
Buddhism or Taoism.
In Chuang Tzu he is visited by another character, Great Knowledge, whose
inquiries he answers by laughing and slapping his knee and shouting, “I
don’t know! I don’t know!” Great Knowledge persists in questioning Hung
Mung, who at last enlightens him with an appropriately chaotic, rambling
speech.
Not claiming to know anything, Primal Chaos reveals everything to
informed curiosity — though not usually in a very orderly format. In
becoming acquainted with this sage who knows nothing and does not care
tht he does not know anything, we can learn enough to accomplish nearly
anything.
Discordians say you can get a look at Hung Mung by getting stoned and
tuning your television to a channel that is not broadcasting. His
dancing image will become more and more visible the harder you look for
it. And having no sponsors, Hung Mung — they say — is never interrupted
by commercials. Zenarchists are skeptical of that much.
Of the same tradition as Hung Mung and Ho Chi Zen is Rabbi Koan, who
brings to Zenarchy the sect of Kosher Zen. For much of what Zen sages
have called “a special transmission outside the scriptures” of Buddhism,
seems to hae been discovered independently by the Hasidic Jews of
Eastern Europe who study the oral traditions of the Cabala.
As every reader of Martin Buber is already aware, the Hasidic Zen
master, called a Zaddik, is fond of telling all kinds of Kosher Zen
stories.
For example, once such a Rabbi entered the sacred meeting house to find
his disciples playing checkers. “Ah, ha!” he exclaimed. “Do you know the
rules to the game of checkers?” Too taken aback to answer, the young men
maintained a guilty silence. So the Rabbi said: “Very well, I will
instruct you in the rules to checkers. The first rule is that you can
only move forward. The second rule is that you can only make one move at
a time. And the third rule is that, upon reaching the back row, you may
move in any direction you wish!”
Another Hasidic tale concerns a student who undertook a food and water
fast for one week. On his way to see the Rabbi on the last hour of his
fast, he went by a well. Overwhelmed by temptation, he drew a bucket of
water. As his lips touched the ladle, he decided that to yield to thirst
would wipe out a week’s work. So he went off to the meeting house
instead. When he entered the Rabbi looked at him and said, “Patchwork!”
In Flight of the White Crows, John Berry reminds us that Chaung Tzu says
the true sage is absent-minded: “The absent-minded man cannot remember
his bad deeds; he cannot remember his good deeds.”