"Thornley, Kerry - Zenarchy v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thornley Kerry)

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
LAUGHING BUDDHA JESUS STILL LOVES US ALL!

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.



Chapter 3
Son of Zenarchy
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 10th 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 10th 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.