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

Face of the Unborn

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 77th 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 77th 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.

The Birth of Zenarchy

During the days at 77th 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)

Stoned Sermon #1: Dogen’s Hole

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!)

Stoned Sermon #2: The Way of Play

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:

How to Reason with Authorities

“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:

The Only Solution is a Yin Revolution

“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.

Chapter 6 of the Tao Teh Ching Says:

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:

Incarnations: Everything She Needs

“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:

Stoned Sermon #3: The Dharma Made Simple

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:

Stoned Sermon #4: Laughing Buddha Jesus

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

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.

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.

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.

Zen Games, Zenarchy Counter-Games

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!

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.

“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.

Change Number Two: Economic Independence

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 en