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

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!


Chapter 5
Yin Revolution
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.

Change Number One:
Subjective Liberation
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.