Kerry Thornley

Zenarchy

1991
Contents

Face of the Unborn ............................................ 5

The Birth of Zenarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Stoned Sermon #1: Dogen’s Hole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Stoned Sermon #2: The Way of Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
How to Reason with Authorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
The Only Solution is a Yin Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter 6 of the Tao Teh Ching Says: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Incarnations: Everything She Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Stoned Sermon #3: The Dharma Made Simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Stoned Sermon #4: Laughing Buddha Jesus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Laughing Buddha Jesus Still Loves us All! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Son of Zenarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Zen Games, Zenarchy Counter-Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Yin Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Change Number One: Subjective Liberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Change Number Two: Economic Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Change Number Three: Parallel Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Change Number Four: Liberated Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Change Number Five: Objective Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
The No Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Tao Is Where You Find It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Tao West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Seize the Timeless! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Why the Heathen Rage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Validation: A Stoned Sermon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Suchness in Action: The No Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Vital Organs of Human Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
The Seven Noble Natural Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
The Care and Feeding of Zenarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Zen Koens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
The Shortest Theological Debate in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Everyone a Zen Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

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Satori Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Reader’s Digest Zen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Three in the Morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Zenarchist Coffee Drinking Ceremony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Words of a Zen Anarchist Poet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Hung Mung, Television Personality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Zen Judaism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
The Forgotten Sage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

3
 Zenarchy is a way of Zen applied to social life. A non-combative, non-par-
ticipatory, 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 mani-
festoes: “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

4
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 conver-
sation 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 oth-
erwise 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

5
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 deter-
mined 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 Bo-
hemian 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

6
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 home-
made 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.

7
 A big old house in which I first came to consciousness as a toddler, it contained
two bedrooms and a large living and dining area composed of two adjoining
rooms, a glassed front porch, a gigantic old fashioned kitchen, and an enormous
backyard with a charming, if decrepit, walnut tree.
With so much room for guests, this house on 77 th Street in Southwest Los
Angeles became a social center of sorts. We harbored my brothers when they
became acid heads and had to quit living with my parents, occasional runaways
they brought home from hitch-hiking adventures, visiting libertarian and Kerista
acquaintances from out of town — and together we gardened, listened to rock
music while stringing beads to peddle on consignment in head shops, and of
course, partied. In retrospect, I always think of that house as 77 th Street Parade.
About the same time the Human Be-Ins started happening. Announcements
in the Free Press and occasional comments from my teenage brothers first brought
them to my attention.
Then there was the Easter Love-In and Gathering of the Tribes in Elysian Park.
That was my initiation into the possibilities inherent in our situation. Converging
before sunrise from all directions they came — high and grinning people garbed in
ceremonial dress. Sounds of tinkling bells worn around necks and on the sashes
of robes, together with the rattle of an occasional tambourine, filled the air. At the
center of the field was an ensemble of gongs and temple bells called Spontaneous
Sound — with one man, stripped to the waist, leaping among them, striking one
and then another.
Believing in reincarnation or genetic memory was a temptation. A friend
walked up to me and said, “Well, here we are again.” Tribal banners hung in the
trees. A voluntary extended family of one kind or another was assembled under
each of them. Among many others were represented the Hog Farm, the Oracle
Tribe, Strawberry Fields/Desolation Row as well as the Free Press and KPFK.
Why they were called Human Be-Ins was obvious, for just by being there we
had created all this haunting beauty.
Although it lacked the strident quality of a demonstration, this gathering could
not help being an eloquent protest of all that was drab and uninspired in the
surrounding dominant culture. Only the tiniest children took it all in stride as
something quite natural to be expected.
More Gatherings of the Tribes followed during the spring and summer of 1967
in the Crystal Springs area of Griffith Park. Before long we organized a tribe of our
own called the Gentle Folk with our friends who were into sexual mate sharing
and psychedelics. Most of them we had met through Kerista, a movement that
enjoyed a brief, spectacular success as the hip religion — establishing communes
in ghetto slums — until the founder, Jud the Prophet, turned most of us off by
coming out strongly in favor of the war in Vietnam.

8
 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. No-
body could say precisely what brought us to be, but LSD got much of the credit.

9
Unlike junkies, pot heads were always a sociable lot. Acid, however, was to en-
dow 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 consum-
mate 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

10
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 destruc-
tive 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.

11
The Birth of Zenarchy

During the days at 77 th Street, I didn’t write much about Zenarchy, but I con-
templated 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 pub-
lisher. 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 wilder-
ness 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.

12
 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 custom-
arily 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.”

13
 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 de-
test 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.)

14
 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 immedi-
ately 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 ded-
icated 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

15
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 posses-
sive 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.

16
 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

17
 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. Accord-
ing 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 His-
tory, 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

18
 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

19
 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:

20
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 Cermi-
nara, 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.

21
 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!

22
 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 trans-
forming 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 medi-
tation 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

23
 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 unfa-
miliar. 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 resem-
bles 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 psy-
chological 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

24
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.

25
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 10 th Street area and engaging in violent struggle
from time to time with local police and rednecks.
My first instinct was to endeavor to dampen tempers with a certain amount
of instructive humor. For I saw more creative ways to make revolution than by

26
grabbing for a gun at the least provocation. So Ho Chi Zen wrote an article for
the Bird called “Mind Fucking Zen”. Briefly, it argued that the essential element
of Zen tactics is surprise. For surprise is nature’s way of saying, “You’re wrong!
Think again!” Sanctified by aeons of evolution, this survival trait, the capacity for
surprise, could be used by revolutionists to change minds. To illustrate, Ho told a
Zen story.
Results of publication were spectacular. Folks from the 10 th Street region called
the Bird office to congratulate them for “the hippest thing” they’d ever printed.
One woman kept calling demanding to know who Ho Chi Zen was. As I soon
learned, she was the former wife of our neighbor, Carl Hendrickson, certain that
“Mind Fucking Zen” was his creation. When I mentioned to Carl that I was the
culprit, he said, “My God, everybody in town has been accusing me of writing
that rap!” We decided we must have something in common and resolved to spend
more time getting stoned together.
Carl Hendrickson was a heavy old-timey hipster who belonged to the White
Panther Party, closely associated in those days with the Yippies. Anarchistic and
psychedelic, he resembled me in his thinking just enough for sparks to fly.
When Timothy Leary broke out of jail that year and abandoned his former
charming pacifism with a violent, angry manifesto, Carl said: “They never should
have taken away that man’s dope! Before they were fucking with a Catholic, but
now they are fucking with an Irishman!”
I liked that one. For the most part, though, Carl resembled nearly all other
Atlanta radicals — guns appealed to him more than flowers and humor. I wasn’t
that angry yet.
As a journalistic celebrity, Ho Chi Zen was now much in demand at the Bird.
So I followed “Mind Fucking Zen” with a number of similar contributions from
the Zenarchist Arsenal.
One was a story I borrowed from the arguments of the anarchists and clothed
in the legend of the Robber Cheh, a favorite character used by Chuang Tzu for
making points about thieves.
Once an apprentice to the Robber Cheh got word that the village of Yin lost
favor with the Duke, falling behind on taxes; the royal constables were withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the neighboring village of Yang remained under guard day and night.
Which village to steal from was the subject of discussion.
For while the apprentice wanted to attack Yin, the Robber Cheh insisted it
would be safer to commit robberies in Yang. Since the residents of Yin knew they
were without protection, they would guard their property with fierce dogs, dig
pits around their homes, alert their neighbors to keep an eye out, and moreover,
few residents of Yin would not be armed. Whereas Yang, reasoned the Robber
Cheh, would be easy pickings. All his band had to fear was the police, who could

27
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 Pied-
mont 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 pro-
nounced 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

28
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.”

29
 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.

30
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 awak-
ening. (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 Bud-
dhism 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,

31
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!

32
 Usually, though, a counter-game is something going on over to one side. Grad-
ually, 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 de-
sirable — 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 na-
tures. 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

33
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.

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 “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. “Nir-
vana (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.

35
 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!

36
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 sys-
tematic study of power and its dictates restricting its holders has to my knowledge
never been made. Usually, students of political power stress its rather question-
able 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 deter-
mined 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 over-
thrown. Distinguishing between one opposition faction and the other is a full-

37
time job that would require spying on everyone. yet if they spy on all their sub-
jects, 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

38
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

39
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 sexual-
ity can be worse than useless. And regaining our original lusty sexual innocence
requires, beyond reviving our curiosity, an entirely different approach than liber-
ating 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 im-
ponderable 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 di-
vide 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 back-
ground. 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 politi-
cally 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 some-
times 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 de-
pends on narcotics laws — without which there would not be much profit in the
activity.

40
 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 char-
acterized 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,” opposi-
tion 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

41
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

42
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 con-
ditioning 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.

43
 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 pro-
duction and using them with your own brain and hands? The Whole Earth Catalog
and its widely available sequels are subtitled “Access to Tools”. Once in possession
of your own means of production, you fit both capitalist and socialist definitions of
the free individual. And if you don’t own enough luxuries to sell to buy the tools,
you need not despair. Knowledge is as valuable as capital for self-employment
and can often be used to acquire any tools you may need.
A statement of purpose in The Whole Earth Catalog reads: “We are as gods
and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory — as via
government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to point
where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to
these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the
individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own
environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid
this process are sought and promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog.” To be included,
an item must be deemed useful as a tool relevant to independent education, of
high quality or low cost and easily available by mail.
Guides and implements listed make it possible for you — if you want — to
forage, grow, hunt or raise your own food, make your own clothing and shelter,
provide yourself with competent medical care for most ailments. That isn’t the
only use for The Whole Earth Catalog and how far you or your group wants to go
in that direction is of course optional. No matter how much or how little time and
effort you expend in learning independent survival, though, you are that much
ahead of the game. For to tread the money mill, if you are not a banker, is to labor
against house odds.
“A bank may, under Federal Reserve rules, loan eight times as much as it has
on deposit,” cautions Robert Anton Wilson, asking then, “if seven dollars out of
every eight that are so produced by bank credit are not created out of nothing,
what are they created of?”

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 Inflation is the name of the result. Note the power of the banks when you read
articles and hear speeches on inflation by apologists for capitalism and socialism
alike. They seldom mention banks.
Not only does fractional reserve banking erode your purchasing power, you
also pay in the same way for deficit spending by government. Again, only bankers
benefit. They collect the interest. And interest is made necessary only by coercive
regulations on money supply, amounting to a bank-government partnership.
Otherwise you could issue I.O.U.’s on your own collateral and buy things with
them, paying only a minimal fee for a credit investigation.
In Great Britain the average worker also spends one working day out of every
nine paying for his or her automobile — in purchasing cost, repairs, insurance
and highway taxes. Add to this the burden of taxation in general, both direct and
hidden in prices of what we buy from taxed and tariffed industries. Then take
into consideration the giant’s share of your paycheck you probably fork over for
rent. You can’t possibly secure a just return for your labor.
“Never buy what you can make,” my grandfather used to say. If you follow that
advice you will gain much more than you lose by forsaking what were once the
advantages of division of labor. Beyond that, of course, is producing something
useful or desirable in goods and services for purposes of barter.
First, though, exchanging goods and services depends on your ability to com-
municate with other independent producers.

Change Number Three: Parallel Communications

Every center of political-economic authority strives to monopolize communi-
cations. Mass media, telephone and postal systems are all controlled by corporate-
government oligarchies. If we enjoy freedom of expression, it is managed freedom
of speech.
Unfettered communications between self-liberating people is required for both
communal and free market activities outside the rip-offs of coercively monopo-
lized capital.
Brainstorming and combing publications of the libertarian right are both useful
methods for developing ideas about creating alternative communications. Net-
works using advanced electronics, associations of nomadic individuals and, when
necessary, cyphers and codes, are among these alternatives.
Periodicals and books pertaining to libertarian right applications of principle
can usually be found among individuals on the fringes of the Libertarian Party,
since even many politically active libertarian capitalists are also interested in
direct free market action outside the system.

45
 By scrutinizing advertisements in libertarian publications for yet other printed
material and products and by corresponding and personally visiting libertarian
technicians and entrepreneurs, you will quickly find much that will contribute to
creating and participating in liberated systems of communication.

Change Number Four: Liberated Trade

Free contracting for the exchange of labor for goods and services, barter and
monetary (accounting) systems free from inflation and usury — parallel market
places are the modes of Liberated Trade. Libertarians call them agoric systems of
production and exchange.
Both the Whole Earth movement and the libertarians you meet for creating
parallel communications will be able to show you how to comprehend this activity
and make it, or let it, work for you.
Having previously mastered the first three changes you will find it easy to now
become an essentially free person or family or tribe. For by this time you will
know where to acquire further data for participating in Liberated Trade.

Change Number Five: Objective Freedom

“Now that you have your freedom, how will you hide it from robbers?”
Political governments, organized crime syndicates and intelligence community
bureaucracies known popularly as conspiracies, are the only threats to your liberty
at this point. You don’t necessary have to overthrow them to be free of them.
That would, besides, be like cutting the heads off a Hydra.
What they all possess in common is the blunt recognition that, as Chairman
Mao said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Governments are
generally devoted to public relations for the purpose of obscuring that fact. Mafia
dons have traditionally been more honest about their line of work, but they are
getting smarter.
Self-defense skills, defensive weaponry and technology, authoritarian psychol-
ogy and, if you are fanatical, emergency suicide techniques can all be studied for
the purpose of coping with violent enslavers. If you let it be known that you are
prepared to kill yourself rather than submit to coercive authority — and have the
means at hand, such as a poison pill in a locket around your neck — you may
find that many an authoritarian will decide harassing you would cause too many
problems.

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 Judo, karate and other Oriental methods of arguing by hand are additionally
valuable as Zenarchist disciplines. Non-lethal weapons such as gas guns are useful
for people who would rather attain instant security in this area. Other defensive
weaponry can include alarm systems for protecting personal property and com-
munication arrangements for identifying potential oppressors. One application of
authoritarian psychology is to make an appointment with a harassing bureaucrat
at 4:30 Friday afternoon and then borrow the neighbor’s kids and dogs and bring
them along.
These are just a few examples of the many methods of dealing with the ultimate
source of political authority — the armed agent, as cop or squad of soldiers or hit
man.
Since the eye is superior protection to the sword, evolution equips all animals
with sensory organs — only a few with fangs or claws or horns, etc. It behooves
you to devote the most attention to whatever will expand your awareness, includ-
ing fancy alarm systems.
Or use them to enlighten your oppressor.
Doctor George Boardman, a libertarian who believed in living without the
dubious protection of government, once suggested what I would call a Zenarchist
burglar alarm. A nocturnal intruder triggers a mechanism to flood the area with
blinding light and activate an amplified recording that says: “How about a little
light? Thief.”
As the great Zenarch, Gregory Hill, says: “’Tis an ill wind that blows no minds!”

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The No Politics

Potential dangers exist in Yin Revolution. Without a comprehensive overview

of its extent we cannot estimate success or failure. In one sense that makes it like
Hopi basketball, and yet ignorance is never a good thing. Yin Revolution is essen-
tially nonconfrontive; confrontation makes for communication with the so-called
enemy and such communication sometimes resolves the problem. A minority of
those who become free may not have attended sufficiently their own Subjective
Liberation and, like the Pilgrims who settled New England, might quickly turn
around and begin oppressing others. Without any consensus whatever, Parallel
Communications could degenerate into a form of technocratic feudalism complete
with wizards and warlords — something that is already more prevalent than is
widely acknowledged.
Today we are nearing the possibility of winding up in a world like the nightmare
reported by Gary Snyder in Earth House Hold: “ — dreamed of a new industrial-age
dark ages: filthy narrow streets and dirty buildings with rickety walks over the
streets from building to building — unwashed illiterate brutal cops — a motorcycle
cop and a sidecar drove up over a fat workingman who got knocked down in a
fight — tin cans and garbage and drooping electric wires everywhere —”.
Widespread Economic Independence will of course militate against such a trend.
But only a high degree of voluntary social cohesion will prevent it or something
worse — like sanitary but sterile totalitarian regulation — from afflicting the bulk
of humanity.
Zenarchy is the art of steadfastly failing to provide political leadership and,
by having as little to do with political power as possible, thereby transforming
the empire. For the spirit of freedom is the fundamental ordering principle of
the whole universe. Chaung Tzu chronicles the history of sages who refused the
throne. Superior people understand that in forsaking the chance to administer a
kingdom they can sometimes foster the values of an age.
In the Age of Perfect Peace the True People of Old lived in harmony equal to
the rhythm of the seasons and the ebb and flow of tidal cycles. With no concept
of law and order, they lacked occasion for crime and turmoil.
Likewise: enjoying the resources of a kingdom, Prince Siddartha could not
attain tranquility; fasting and mortifications also failed to bring serenity; sitting
under a tree and doing nothing though, he was taken by Buddhahood.
“From one standpoint, governments, wars, or all that we consider ‘evil’ are
uncompromisingly contained in this totalistic realm,” says Gary Snyder of Buddha-
hood. “The hawk, the swoop and the hare are one. From the ‘human’ standpoint

48
we cannot live in those terms unless all beings see with the same enlightened
eye. The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard,” because of a compassion-
ate nature, “and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer,” according to
“Buddhism and the Coming Revolution” in Earth House Hold.
Peter Kropotkin once observed that, “Throughout the history of our civilization,
two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition
and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the
authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.”

Tao Is Where You Find It

Old George Boardman was an instructor at Robert LeFevre’s libertarian Free-
dom School in Larkspur, Colorado, where I was a student in 1964.
Most of the time Boardman lived in a ghost town called Chloride, Arizona,
population: 250. No government was present there at that time, not even as a
figment of its own imagination.
As for crimes against person or property, the most recent one was committed
five years earlier by some Californians who were passing through. No crimes
with victims occurred, said George Boardman, because there were no police to
protect criminals from a watchful populace.
George wrote a regular column for the Santa Ana Register recounting his adven-
tures in Chloride and setting forth his wise, usually slightly cranky or downright
stubborn views of various issues. In 1969 he passed away and I wrote him a
tribute that was published in the Register.
That man could cause an Orange County, California, Bircher to see the con-
tradiction between “law” and “order” without ever feeling his mind had been
changed about politics. In Zen, such tactful persuasion is called upaya, the “gentle
method”. And though Boardman’s rhetoric was conservative, his philosophy was
both humorous and — well, I hesitate to say “radical”. For once he said, “I’m not
an anarchist nor a libertarian, or anything else. I’m George Boardman — and I
don’t want to be held responsible for anyone’s views but my own”.

Tao West
In a discussion of Natural Law, the philosophical basis of early American
conceptions of liberty, Henry B. Veatch (in an article, “Natural Law: Dead or
Alive?” in Literature of Liberty, October-December 1978) writes: “What, though,
is this doctrine of so-called ‘natural law’, that thus had such a long and chequered

49
 career, and has even displayed, in the words of more than one authority, the happy
faculty of repeatedly being able to bury its own undertakers!”
So it was also with a doctrine called ‘tao’ which buried its Indian Buddhist
missionary undertakers in China by way of a Taoistic response called Ch’an
Buddhism that Japanese pronounce as Zen. For when the emperor became a
Buddhist, many Taoists joined and influenced the Ch’an sect of that religion
rather than loudly resisting its attempts to convert the empire. That is why in
Zen today we hear so much about the Tao. For the Ch’an Buddhists did a better
job of preserving the spirit of the philosophy of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu than
did the formally Taoist religion which, instead, degenerated into fortune telling
and other superstitions.
A similarity in content between Natural Law philosophy and the original
Taoism preserved in Zen is uncanny. Both consist of the same common-sense
observations about human be-ing in accord with nature and uphold the notion
that laws of nature also apply to society. Yet neither view much resembles Social
Darwinism, which also claimed to derive its principles from the natural world.
Speaking of Natural Law in the ancient world of the West editor Leonard Liggio
comments elsewhere in Literature of Liberty: “The Stoics posited an identification
of physics and nomos, nature and law. The wise man lived in harmony with
nature; he was not dragged in the train of events.” What is that but following the
Tao?
Veatch also says in “Natural Law: Dead or Alive?” that the views of Natural
Law held by Thomas Aquinas did not go far enough. “But why not,” Veatch asks,
“consider ethics and politics, as construed in the light of this conception of natural
law, an analogous to certain arts, skills, and crafts? Why does the skilled surgeon,
for instance make his incision in one way rather than another?”
Exactly the same point is made about an ox butcher in one of the parables of
Chaung Tzu. Why make an incision one way instead of another? Following the
Tao, an expert butcher cuts between the joints and thus never has to sharpen his
blade. Although a good surgeon is anything but a butcher, incisions must just
the same be made one way and not another. This fact can be generalized to all
reasonable human activity, including construction of social arrangements. So we
see there are rights, or naturally right ways to behave, ways of the Tao, that take
conditions into consideration, as well as ecology and sociology. Therefore it is
possible with common sense to distinguish between natural ethics that work and
unnatural moralities that eventually only produce widespread misery.
If Tao is not Natural Law or, in other words, if Natural Law is not Tao indepen-
dently discovered by Western philosophers, then what is the difference between
them? Alan Watts says in Psychotherapy East and West: “The whole literature of
Taoism shows a deep and intelligent interest in the patterns and processes of the

50
natural world and a desire to model human life upon the observable principles
of nature as distinct from the arbitrary principles of a social order resting upon
violence.” That is exactly the project of Natural Law philosophy!

Seize the Timeless!

Zenarchy is the politics of the mind emptied of useless anticipation. Principles
are seen as tools for making decisions when inspiration fails or prolonged delib-
eration is impossible. Ideology and analysis are only seen as preparation. For
naked awareness characterizes the moment of clear and perfect action.
Preaching is ineffectual and neither cute ideas nor a quick wit will carry anyone
through this “gateless gate”. Everything is good in its own time and therefore
must be taken in terms of context. Yet when the moment inviting a wholehearted
response appears, the learned is relegated to the unconscious and obstacles to
pure perception are obliterated. That way, we are open to the unexpected.
Actor and action unite.

Why the Heathen Rage

Among certain varieties of ants there is a worker who spends her whole life
clinging to the ceiling of a tunnel serving as a storage tank for nectar gathered by
workers of other occupations. Among ants this is Tao. Among people it is called
being valuable to society.
As long as we think of the individual as something society needs, we will not
evolve any higher than the ants. Society — like food, clothing and shelter — is
something the individual human being needs. Society exists for the sake of the
individual. As Laughing Buddha Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath.” No person rightfully lives entirely for the sake of society.
When anyone is used for the sake of society — conscripted, enslaved or sacri-
ficed — society has ceased to function as intended. Instead, it has become a system
of social arrangement that oppresses, rather than serves, those who comprise it.
In accord with Natural Law, the Declaration of Independence says any system
like that is to be altered or abolished.
Pointing to a gnarled tree no woodsman had cut for lumber, Chaung Tzu says,
“Everyone understands the value of usefulness. But how many perceive the value
of being useless?”
Sometimes it is valuable to everyone to be useless to society.

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 If you permit society to oppress you then it will oppress others and the result
will be decadence and cynicism. Eventually “society” will become a blood-thirsty
god with a will of its own that acts contrary to the will of its participants.
The extent to which society is kept firmly in the service of all individuals is the
measure of how much it is performing its function: safeguarding basic rights of
life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Healthy societies always find defenders and supporters in time of crisis. They
need not rely on taxation or wage slavery to endure. At Valley Forge there were
no draftees.
Voluntarily supported societies earn that support, and as long as they remain
voluntary there is an added check upon the system. Volunterism leads not to the
collapse of order, but to its renewal.
Societies — systems of social arrangements, not collections of people — com-
mand enormous material and creative resources. When their survival as social
organizations depend on it, they can usually be counted on to place these re-
sources at the service of their participants. So there is seldom danger of societies
collapsing.
Only when individuals collapse — one at a time, first here and then there —
does social order then also eventually decay. Through the collapse of human
beings — a Wilhelm Reich here, a Lenny Bruce there, a Janis Joplin elsewhere —
the social order begins to crack and heave, edging toward ruin.
Sacrifice never was and can never become a viable principle of social construc-
tion. On the contrary, it is called for only in life-boat situations — emergencies or
“worst cases” — never in peaceful day-to-day living. And, of course, voluntary self-
sacrifice, resulting from natural compassion, is neither uncommon nor oppressive.
A wholly sacrificial society, however, is totalitarian and despotic. Systems
like that appear strong for awhile. Internally, though, they are weak and ridden
with contradictions — because, within them, human needs run contrary to social
demands at every turn. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
A voluntary society — based literally upon the teachings of Jesus and other great
sages, including the philosophers of Natural Law — is more than possible. Only
when large numbers of individuals cherish and pursue that end does it become a
reality, though — when, in universal enlightenment everyone says together: “Off
our backs!”
So the heathen rage because they have dreamed a dream. This dream comes
not to those who are sleeping, but to all who remain fiercely awake. And the
heathen rage because they must live with that dream and also with what is their
lot under imperialism.

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 We Zenarchists seldom call ourselves Christians or Buddhists, for that would
make us useful to organized religion. And for the same reason we call our politics
The No Politics — to avoid becoming useful to politicians.

Validation: A Stoned Sermon

Cultures that validate their elders possess wise old people; cultures that invali-
date them have senile old ones.
Cultures that validate sexuality enjoy clean, healthy and beautiful erotic play;
societies that invalidate it have dirty, exploitive commercial smut.
Societies that validate women possess strong, serene and intelligent females;
societies that invalidate them suffer dumb broads and bitches.
Societies that validate children possess cheerful, wise and responsible youth;
societies that invalidate them end up with delinquents and brats.
A culture that validates its ethnic minorities boasts of rich pockets of exotic
cultural variety; a society that invalidates them is divided between drab suburbs
on one hand and filthy ghettos on the other.
Validation is not automatic agreement with someone you think is wrong. All
forms of flattery are deceptive and, hence, invalidating.
Validation is treating someone with a respect that assumes that if they are
given enough information, they’ll use it with their minds. Conversely, if someone
is acting weird or pissed off or self-destructive, validating attitudes assume there
is a reason. Usually such people are oppressed. A validating approach assumes
that if everyone will just get off their backs not many will have to help them.
A derivative of Natural Law in our legal system is the assumption of innocence
until guilt is proven. When, as individuals, we keep that much in mind while at
the same time searching for the reasons for offensive behavior, then our attitude
toward others is validation. The opposite view assumes that everyone is a social
invalid until they prove they aren’t. That is why so-called law and order attitudes
are frequently coupled with racism and sexism. Assumptions about others are
important because our expectations often mold their response.

Suchness in Action: The No Politics

An art of Zenarchy consist of saying “No!” or “I won’t” to oppression. As the
active ingredient of the strike, it becomes a potent factor when a critical mass of
rebels transform “I won’t” into “We won’t”.

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 Other policies rigidly and aggressively attack the opposition. No Politics heeds
the advice of Chairman Lao to “always be on the defensive at first”. A good offense
is not the best defense; the best defense is no offense at all.
Recognizing the utility of conscious inaction, of refusal, is mindful of the
humanity of the so-called enemy. Struggle aimed at complete annihilation is alien
to the Zenarchist spirit. Victories in battle are celebrated with tears of mourning.
A “willow tree” mentality that avoids ideological constipation is possible
through the Zen knack of seeing the “suchness” of things. They are so much
what they are. So are people. Every person does a perfect job of being that partic-
ular individual and no other. So living, changable and surprising humanity takes
precedence over the urgency of winning at all costs each and every contest. For
the one is a territory of flesh and blood; the other is only based on our map of
who is friend or foe.
Great is the mind kept forever sharper than the sword. Reading the Tao Teh of
Lao Tzu is useful in absorbing this style of struggle that emphasizes a mood of
restraint, with conscious and decisive action at crucial moments.

Vital Organs of Human Liberty

Principles are tools for thinking. Useful especially for keeping in mind the
overall context relating to every decision, they are not to be confused with the
specific sensory data of thought.
Without attending to all the sources of oppression, we cannot hope that our
Yin Revolution will become popular with all oppressed people. And without
principles pertaining to those sources of oppression we cannot assure that in
liberating in one area we’ll not become oppressors ourselves in another.
That prisons breed crime is the First Principle of The No Politics of Zenarchy.
Penal systems are vast chains of universities in criminal activity. Harsh punish-
ments reinforce hostility and alienation so as to provide additional motives for
antisocial behavior. As we begin to research alternatives to retribution in history
and anthropology it quickly becomes obvious that a more reasonable approach is
to insist on restitution from those who commit crimes with victims. This can be
enforced when necessary by community refusal to cooperate with unrepentant
transgressors. How effective such a method could be is indicated by A.S. Neill
in Summerhill and by Eric Frank Russell in the closing chapters of The Great Ex-
plosion. Law by contract and enforcement by strike is one viable alternative to
unilateral coercive law and chaos. We endeavor to educate the populace toward a
Permanent Universal Abolition of Retribution, resulting in Government by Strike
and Not by Gun. As for the incurable psychopath who goes around murdering

54
 people and continues to make the scene through unstinting looting? Whoever
shot that individual would receive a common-sense public hearing for the pur-
pose of determining the facts. Even our present system recognizes the defense of
“justifiable homicide”.
Although Big Brother said the opposite, ignorace is slavery. That is our Second
Principle. If secrecy were national security, you could vote with your eyes shut
and save freedom. Democracies that keep their citizens in the dark are democratic
in name only. That corporations are entitled to conduct business in an atmosphere
of confidentiality is the result of superstition. Unlike acts in the bedroom, which
all misdirected communities try to control, corporate decisions affect everyone
in society. Timothy Leary’s battle cry of No More Secrets inspires us to see ten
thousand ways to bring about the Permanent Universal Abolition of Institutional
Secrecy everywhere in the world.
It ain’t the landlord; it’s the rent is our Third Principle. No rational system of
land tenure would require inhabitants of this planet to pay fees for the dubious
privilege of living here. Even if for the sake of argument we grant validity to first
claim theory, then the whole Western Hemisphere belongs to Native American
Indians. And their system of land tenure was based upon occupancy and use.
Either one was enough to insure ownership. Uninhabited and unused land, in
cases where both conditions prevailed, was up for grabs. Evidence indicates
the ancient natives of Europe maintained a similar system, and in common law
there is such a thing as squatters’ rights. Lords and ladies of the land, as the
names imply, are feudal traditions. Pollution is profitable and fifteen million
people starve to death every year due to absentee landlordism more than to
any other single cause. Neither agri-business nor collective farms offer quality,
speedy solutions to those problems since, among other things, they use petro-
chemical fertilizers. To protest ground rents and the oppression that makes them
thinkable, we Zenarchists believe in chanting and writing as often as possible this
powerful mantra: Permanent Universal Rent Strike. Hopefully, that will stimulate
a nonviolent transformation in the direction of Ecological and Equitable Use of
Land and Natural Resources.
Since money is only a symbol to keep track of exchanges in goods and services
or labor, that is our Fourth Principle. No clique of bankers in conspiracy with
any government possesses the right to declare that we must accept for all debts
only this or that form of currency in payment. When all retain the right to reject
payment in symbols of value that are not trusted, then Gresham’s Law functions
in reverse and we call it Mahserg’s Law. The good money drives out the bad. That
way the free market assures that the money supply will not exceed the value of
available goods and labor, so inflation becomes impossible. Zenarchists advocate
you Make Good Money in Your Spare Time by issuing your own certificates of

55
value or cheques, redemptive in your wealth in goods and services. If everyone
did this, we would have something like a Direct Barter Free Credit Economy,
where money is a convenient symbol of credit and nothing more. Alan Watts
discusses a similar idea in “Wealth Versus Money” in Does it Matter? Last but
not least, liberated money is an important issue because the multinational central
banking corporations organized just before World War I are almost certainly to
blame for contributing to wars and violent social unrest. Without the threat of
such tragedies — made possible by extending credit for the purchase of arms —
the bankers would possess no means of enforcing collection of interest payments
on national debts from governments.
That absentee control of the workplace is the root of all oppression (or at least
most of it) is the Fifth Principle. Because of private credit monopolies and regu-
lated currency it is, under the present system, usually necessary to borrow money
(called investments) for tools (called capital). Interest payments (called dividends)
are made on these capital investments. We advocate a pluralistic free market
economy and therefore support both communist anarchist struggles for industrial
democracy and the libertarian rightist goal of small-business laissez-faire. In a
free society, where people can issue their own money backed with collateral or
credit instead of having to obtain loans or investments, both communism and the
free market are possible. In order to abolish absentee bossism Zenarchy calls for
a Permanent Universal Absentee Boss Lock Out and the Complete Deregulation
of Nonabsentee Entrepre-neurs. We seek to combine the working class and the
petty bourgeoisie in a powerful surge against both cartel capitalism and statist
socialism.
As Zenarchists and Yin Revolutionaries we believe it makes sense to resist all
forms of coercive authority and that is our Sixth Principle. To advance it, we
repeat the mantra, Permanent Universal Tax Strike. We further seek to probe all
cryptocratic methods of extortion so as to bring about Exposure of All Forms of
Conscription, for human slavery is alive and well in the intelligence community.
Foreign-born and second generation Americans are extorted by intelligence bu-
reaucracies that threaten to kill or injure their kin in the old country. Technocratic
methods of surveillance and death-threat extortion also exist, ranging from arti-
ficial induction of cancer to halting Pacemakers with micro-waves when orders
are disobeyed, using miniature observation devices to detect the least gesture
of rebellion. As Zenarchists we also oppose the temporary and more humane
type of slavery called military conscription, for no country that remains worth
fighting for need rely on a draft. Another coercive institution we oppose is the
trade tariff for it is an old saying in economics that where goods do not cross
borders, soldiers do.

56
 Liberation is for everybody and this is our Seventh Principle. We oppose
racism, sexism and the persecution of intellectual minorities (including even
bigots who abstain from force). Zenarchists want Permanent Universal Cultural
Autonomy by means of Self-Selecting Intentional Neighborhoods made possible
by communitarian computer matching services. Further, we endeavor always
to raise consciousness against discrimination that dehumanizes any individual
human being.
Transistorized untouchables exist. Our Eighth Principle pertains to a hu-
manoid robot caste among us that authoritarian technocrats are creating at this
time, although not much is said about it in the media. As incredible as it may
seem, subcutaneous brain-wave transmitters and cranial silicone chips and ultra-
high frequency sound wave projectors are already developed and in use for manip-
ulating the minds of human beings. As Walter Bowart writes in Operation Mind
Control: “Although the first victims of Operation Mind Control were perhaps
especially suitable personality types for such use, with the advances being made
in the psycho-sciences all but a few of us may eventually be victimized.”
An examination of the bibliography of Bowart’s book will convince the aver-
age skeptic that sophisticated mind manipulation is not a paranoid fantasy. The
notion that reflex conditioning of any kind will create order instead of a social
nightmare is based upon an unexamined Behaviorist assumption. For individ-
uals cannot unilaterally manipulate beings of approximately equal intelligence;
counter-manipulation comes into play. Unlike laboratory mice, human beings
imitate their manipulators instead of responding to them mechanistically. We
begin to resemble our oppressors. Try to condition a child with B.F. Skinner’s
techniques, for example, and that individual will become a wheeler-dealer, not an
obedient servant. That is why the Taoist sages said that the more punishments
and promotions there are, the more turmoil there is. When everyone tries to
control everyone else — and that is what happens when one group tries to manip-
ulate another — all society becomes a howling madhouse. We therefore call upon
everyone to Defeat the Behaviorist Technocracy by means of Exposure and Dis-
mantling of All Sleeper Agent Projects, as they are often called. When scientists
gain political power, warned the anarchist Bakunin, they can be expected to treat
their fellow humans just as they treat rats and mice in laboratory experiments.
In that, as in most other things, Michael Bakunin has proven prophetic.
Moreover, in all systems of domination of one human by another communica-
tions snarl because effective communication is only possible between equals.
That is called the S.N.A.F.U. Principle and it is our Ninth Principle in the No Pol-
itics. Zenarchists promote and demonstrate Alternatives to Bureaucracy such
as affinity groups, tribalism, town-meeting democracy and participatory parallel

57
institutions. All such alternatives resemble each other in that elected represen-
tatives of families, clans, tribes or whatever are not powered to make laws in
meetings with representatives of other groups. Instead, they may negotiate con-
tracts, subject to approval by the members of the group they represent. That’s
the first difference between a libertarian federation and a bureaucracy. Everyone
is equal in power; elected officials are not more equal than everyone else — as
were the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. A second crucial difference is
that contracts are enforced, not at gun point, but by community sanction. A
family or tribe or township that breaks an agreement suffers a loss of credit, for
others refuse to do business with it to a degree dependent on the seriousness
of the breach. That system works today on Wall Street; when a broker says
on the phone he or she will buy a certain number of shares, that commitment
stands, even if the price of the stock in question declines before the deal is made.
Corporate bureaucracies also use the second method, but not the first — thus
they are slightly more efficient than government bureaus: they experience fewer
S.N.A.F.U.’s. When cooperatives in which all are equal fail, it is usually because
the members lack skills in conducting meetings or in nonviolently arbitrating
disputes, not because voluntary federations are less effective.
So-called meeting-house Quakers possess excellent skills in conducting meet-
ings. Much can learned from them and from the secular Movement for a New
Society, a pacifist organization with Quaker origins.
As for dispute resolution, see the advice given by Jesus in the Bible for treatment
of an offending brother and note the similar Essene method reported in The
Wilderness Revolt by Diane Kennedy Pike. Also refer to Discovery of Freedom by
Rose Wilder Lane to see how quarrels are resolved without recourse to coercion
in Middle East market places.

***

Taken separately, many of these Nine Principles do not sound like much. When
studied to a point that they are absorbed wholistically — as a Gestalt — they are
seen as intimately interconnected. Taken together, they reinforce one another
and in fact function as the Vital Organs of Human Liberty.
In summary: The No Politics is Taoistically skeptical of rewards and punish-
ments, because humans learn by imitation and all money and prisons teach is
manipulative behavior; the truth about everything will help more than anything
else to make everyone free; public, corporate and technocratic bureaucracies don’t
function as effectively as voluntary federations.

58
The Seven Noble Natural Rights
There are at least seven natural rights, or the Tao of human activity in society
possesses seven attributes, or people are like machines only in the respect that
they don’t work good if you neglect their maintenance requirements.
What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, liberty, the
pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the
multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that
only food, clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.
We are further encouraged to argue about whether rights must be earned or
whether it is the duty of the government to guarantee them. Everyone necessarily
struggles for their rights, and no government can ever guarantee anything except
death and taxes.
All that bickering begs the relevant question: What can we do in voluntary
cooperation to see that our natural rights, our intimate functional needs, are
respected? Without that much, human beings are incapable of behaving as con-
structively rational and loving members of any population.

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The Care and Feeding of Zenarchy

Looking at reality is like trying to stare at both ends of a very long stick at the
same time. Our minds function in such a way as to see first one side and then
another of a concept. We see the black on the white background or the white
on the black in the famous optical illusions used to illustrate Gestalt theories of
perception, whereas it is virtually impossible to see both at once.
Zen Buddhists have sensed as much since ancient times. What they have also
realized is that while the history of something may be necessary or at least helpful
in coming to terms with it, that much alone is usually insufficient. Likewise,
although abstracting the essential principles of a process can communicate a
mechanistic sense of what it does and does not include, there are times at which
that is a little like outlining a story plot and presenting it in place of a whole novel.
Also, sometimes the more concisely a principle or an idea is stated the more it
tends, even if memorized, to go “in one ear and out the other”.
In the teaching of Zen, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism and Sufism the use of brief,
often humorous anecdotes serve to transmit glimpses from a multitude of angles
and for a profusion of varying minds. Great spiritual teachers like Jesus and
Ramakrishna of course employed the similar technique of the parable and illus-
trative anecdotes are valued in all types of education. There is however, a flavor
most known in connection with the Zen story — a hint of mindfucking absurdism
approaching conceptual art of the surrealist school — which, when adopted by
anarchism, transforms it into Zenarchy.
Zenarchy stories are probably just what is needed to establish and maintain a
Zenarchist revolutionary tradition.

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Zen Koens

The Shortest Theological Debate in History

Ho Chi Zen: “What is God like?”
Tom: “Somebody. I don’t care.”

Everyone a Zen Master

Here is a spiritual exercise that will help you apply Laughing Buddha Jesus’
advice about loving one another.
As you are walking the streets or riding a public conveyance imagine yourself
the father or mother or each person you look at — regardless of age. See all adults
as your grown children, contemplating them one at a time even if that makes you
feel a hundred years old.
Or imagine that every man or woman you pass or encounter is a Zen master —
each with her or his own method of teaching. Sometimes they will sense your
respect for them and will glance at you and grin. Take the dress and posture of
each individual as evidence of his or her style of expressing enlightenment. Hear
every scrap of conversation as a Zen riddle.
And never forget the saying, “Tao is your everyday mind.”

Satori Story
One of Ho Chi Zen’s students asked him, “What was the occasion of your
enlightenment?”
Ho replied: “I forget.”

Reader’s Digest Zen

This true story was actually published in one of the humor sections of Reader’s
Digest many years ago:
At an interdenominational religious conference in Hawaii, a Japanese delegate
approached a fundamentalist Baptist minister and said, “My humble superstition
is Buddhism. What is yours?”

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Three in the Morning
Chuang Tzu said: “A keeper of monkeys told them, ‘I will give you three nuts
in the morning and four in the evening.’ That made them mad, so he said, ‘Very
well. I will give you four in the morning and three in the evening.’ That made
them happy.”

Zenarchist Coffee Drinking Ceremony

One of the few formalities of Zenarchy, the Coffee Drinking Ceremony must
be observed in strict conformity with the following procedure:
Roll five joints of high quality marijuana and prepare one large pot of very
strong coffee. Place these items in the center of a kitchen table together with a
book of matches. Next, place on the table two large earthenware mugs and one
simple but attractive ashtray.
Now sit at the table with someone you love very much and spend the hours
from late night until sunrise animating conversation.
Inwardly observe the discipline of always keeping in mind a heartache during
intervals of the discussion that are light and full of laughter. When you chat of
sorrowful things keep in mind something beautiful, funny and hopeful.

Words of a Zen Anarchist Poet

Says Gary Snyder, “Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of
people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were
tricked into entering.”

Hung Mung, Television Personality

One of the characters to appear in the writings of old Chaung Tzu is Hung Ming,
whose name means Primal Chaos, for which reason he was adopted as a Chaoist
Sage by the Discordian Society — a nonprophet ireeligious disorganization about
which you will learn more and understand less if you read Principia Discordia. As
such, he is also a Zenarchist Immortal, for Zenarchy is to Discordianism much as
Zenis to Buddhism or Taoism.

62
 In Chuang Tzu he is visited by another character, Great Knowledge, whose
inquiries he answers by laughing and slapping his knee and shouting, “I don’t
know! I don’t know!” Great Knowledge persists in questioning Hung Mung, who
at last enlightens him with an appropriately chaotic, rambling speech.
Not claiming to know anything, Primal Chaos reveals everything to informed
curiosity — though not usually in a very orderly format. In becoming acquainted
with this sage who knows nothing and does not care tht he does not know any-
thing, we can learn enough to accomplish nearly anything.
Discordians say you can get a look at Hung Mung by getting stoned and tuning
your television to a channel that is not broadcasting. His dancing image will
become more and more visible the harder you look for it. And having no sponsors,
Hung Mung — they say — is never interrupted by commercials. Zenarchists are
skeptical of that much.

Zen Judaism
Of the same tradition as Hung Mung and Ho Chi Zen is Rabbi Koan, who brings
to Zenarchy the sect of Kosher Zen. For much of what Zen sages have called
“a special transmission outside the scriptures” of Buddhism, seems to hae been
discovered independently by the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe who study the
oral traditions of the Cabala.
As every reader of Martin Buber is already aware, the Hasidic Zen master,
called a Zaddik, is fond of telling all kinds of Kosher Zen stories.
For example, once such a Rabbi entered the sacred meeting house to find his
disciples playing checkers. “Ah, ha!” he exclaimed. “Do you know the rules to
the game of checkers?” Too taken aback to answer, the young men maintained
a guilty silence. So the Rabbi said: “Very well, I will instruct you in the rules to
checkers. The first rule is that you can only move forward. The second rule is that
you can only make one move at a time. And the third rule is that, upon reaching
the back row, you may move in any direction you wish!”
Another Hasidic tale concerns a student who undertook a food and water fast
for one week. On his way to see the Rabbi on the last hour of his fast, he went
by a well. Overwhelmed by temptation, he drew a bucket of water. As his lips
touched the ladle, he decided that to yield to thirst would wipe out a week’s work.
So he went off to the meeting house instead. When he entered the Rabbi looked
at him and said, “Patchwork!”

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The Forgotten Sage
In Flight of the White Crows, John Berry reminds us that Chaung Tzu says the
true sage is absent-minded: “The absent-minded man cannot remember his bad
deeds; he cannot remember his good deeds.”

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 The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright
May 21, 2012

Kerry Thornley
Zenarchy
1991

Copyright 1991, 1997 Kerry W. Thornley, IllumiNet Press and Impropaganda.

All contents are not ©opyright Impropaganda Networks. “Screws with your
mind until you come to your senses”® is not ©opyright MOFOCO. All rites
reversed. Use what you want, just please give us or the appropriate folks credit.
Retrieved on December 19, 2009 from www.impropaganda.net