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

As the great Zenarch, Gregory Hill, says: "'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds!"
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Chapter 6
The No Politics
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."

Tao Is Where You Find It
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".

Tao West
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!

Seize the Timeless!
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.

Why the Heathen Rage
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!"