How to make a revolution? It's a question that's hounded me intermittently throughout my adult life. Its roots lie, I suppose, in a sense that there is more to existence than normally meets the eye; and, furthermore, what does meet the eye is inadequate and frequently not up to much at all. Some of my earliest memories hold this unmistakeable feeling-tone - though that's no great surprise for any small and sensitive soul growing up in the stuffily rationalistic atmosphere of late 1950s middle-class Britain.
Fast forward: Among the various scribblings still extant from my late teens and early twenties is a short piece entitled just this: 'How to make the revolution. The demonstration or Zen?' Is it politics and direct confrontation, or a change in consciousness? Confrontation and radical politics, I argued then, 'could be counter-productive', and 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else, and I can't see them heralding a new wise and peaceful society'. 'The ecological harmonious commune is a better answer', and 'the extreme is the inner trip, the voyage' - or Zen.
Even at this fairly tender age I had a certain amount of experience to base my musings on. A brief flirtation with communism took place in my mid-teens, but I saw through it pretty quickly. I moved into political anarchism, including a short-lived relationship with Oxford Anarchists, involving revolutionary graffiti under cover of midnight, and selling our broadsheet 'Carfax Comic' outside the college gates. However, I couldn't swallow anarchism's overly rosy view of humanity once stripped of its capitalist shackles. Plus, as stated previously, 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else...'
Thenceforth, 'sort your own shit out and create an alternative world as a microcosm of the ideal' became the watchword. I grew vegetables, became vegan for a while, and several years later helped to start a commune, in which money and other resources were pooled, everybody took turns in cooking, cleaning etc. This was great, except that we were all too young to commit long-term to such an extreme lifestyle; differences began to emerge, unlived lines of the soul-body which needed acting out before anything else could gel. I recall our visiting a plot of land that we had been offered a few miles north-west of Aberdeen. It was Easter time, the wind was blowing snow showers in off the North Sea, and I realised I was not ready to sign away the rest of my life to growing parsnips.
The revolutionary wheel had turned full circle from those earlier political aspirations. Fuelled further by psychedelic voyages to the distant reaches of outer and inner space, transformation of consciousness was undoubtedly the way to go. But how to do it? My life was disintegrating for a whole variety of reasons - the sort of stuff that happens when you are twenty-two years old and fresh out of the commune - and I needed some kind of framework to help stucture my angst and mystical aspirations. Buddhism seemed to most closely fit the bill and, in the tradition of a true renunciate, I gave away the last of my acid, sold my record collection for next-to nothing, and moved to London to do Buddhism western-style.
The Buddhist organisation that I was involved with for many years was one attempt to find a solution to the revolution problem. My original intention was to find a part-time job and spend the rest of my hours meditating and studying Buddhist texts. However, I soon found myself helping to set up a Buddhist-run healthfood business, and within two or three years I was teaching meditation myself and chairing a Budddhist centre. The effort to create a Buddhist world within the mainstream was in many respects laudable. The wheel gradually fell off, however. Any 'organisation' or 'movement' (as the Buddhist project labelled itself) is fundamentally flawed in its revolutionary impact, I have come to conclude. In particular, organisational hierarchy, even with the best will in the world, begins to mimic mainstream culture, with its overtly hierarchical pyramids of power. Thus political manoeuvering, strategies of power and influence, and pressure (sometimes subtle but there nevertheless) on the underlings to conform or be damned, all creep in. I am not 'anti-hierarchy' as such: it is impossible to be so, since the cosmos is composed of hierarchies. Life forms with different levels of complexity, humans with different degrees of experience, abilities and so on. But the minute a hierarchy is formalised, committed to paper, marks the beginning of the end of the revolution.
Neil Kramer has spoken recently of 'guerilla psychonautics', and guerilla-style is, I suspect, the way forward. Small cells, a web-like network of contacts and fellow travellers through outer and inner space, shapeshifting, impossible to pin down. Try to stamp it out here and it pops up somewhere else. Psychonautic Vietcong. No fixed or formal hierarchy, just direct communication of being.
And, as with shamanic cultures past and present, there is a secret weapon: knowledge and experience of multidimensional realities. Through this, the modern guerilla of psyche has access to ways of seeing and being that are beyond the reach of the dominators. Maybe life and world can be influenced more through their other dimensions than can ever be achieved merely through consensus reality. It's actually there in Buddhism too, in its more shamanic/Tantric wing at least; Milarepa the yogi, solitary in a cave, changing the world.
This is by no means my last word on the subject; it's work in progress. In the meantime, you can do worse than get out your rattles and drums, secret sounds and songs; meditations, divinations, mantras and yantras. Call up your power animals and spirit allies, bring out your sacred plants. Polish your antennae. These, in the end, could be the real tools of the revolution.
To be continued......
At this moment, in the parallel podcast world, we may stop to dream and be transported by the beatific first movement of Schubert's Piano Concerto in Bb major, D960. Ha!
Fast forward: Among the various scribblings still extant from my late teens and early twenties is a short piece entitled just this: 'How to make the revolution. The demonstration or Zen?' Is it politics and direct confrontation, or a change in consciousness? Confrontation and radical politics, I argued then, 'could be counter-productive', and 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else, and I can't see them heralding a new wise and peaceful society'. 'The ecological harmonious commune is a better answer', and 'the extreme is the inner trip, the voyage' - or Zen.
Even at this fairly tender age I had a certain amount of experience to base my musings on. A brief flirtation with communism took place in my mid-teens, but I saw through it pretty quickly. I moved into political anarchism, including a short-lived relationship with Oxford Anarchists, involving revolutionary graffiti under cover of midnight, and selling our broadsheet 'Carfax Comic' outside the college gates. However, I couldn't swallow anarchism's overly rosy view of humanity once stripped of its capitalist shackles. Plus, as stated previously, 'a lot of people in these things don't seem to have their heads together any more than anyone else...'
Thenceforth, 'sort your own shit out and create an alternative world as a microcosm of the ideal' became the watchword. I grew vegetables, became vegan for a while, and several years later helped to start a commune, in which money and other resources were pooled, everybody took turns in cooking, cleaning etc. This was great, except that we were all too young to commit long-term to such an extreme lifestyle; differences began to emerge, unlived lines of the soul-body which needed acting out before anything else could gel. I recall our visiting a plot of land that we had been offered a few miles north-west of Aberdeen. It was Easter time, the wind was blowing snow showers in off the North Sea, and I realised I was not ready to sign away the rest of my life to growing parsnips.
The revolutionary wheel had turned full circle from those earlier political aspirations. Fuelled further by psychedelic voyages to the distant reaches of outer and inner space, transformation of consciousness was undoubtedly the way to go. But how to do it? My life was disintegrating for a whole variety of reasons - the sort of stuff that happens when you are twenty-two years old and fresh out of the commune - and I needed some kind of framework to help stucture my angst and mystical aspirations. Buddhism seemed to most closely fit the bill and, in the tradition of a true renunciate, I gave away the last of my acid, sold my record collection for next-to nothing, and moved to London to do Buddhism western-style.
The Buddhist organisation that I was involved with for many years was one attempt to find a solution to the revolution problem. My original intention was to find a part-time job and spend the rest of my hours meditating and studying Buddhist texts. However, I soon found myself helping to set up a Buddhist-run healthfood business, and within two or three years I was teaching meditation myself and chairing a Budddhist centre. The effort to create a Buddhist world within the mainstream was in many respects laudable. The wheel gradually fell off, however. Any 'organisation' or 'movement' (as the Buddhist project labelled itself) is fundamentally flawed in its revolutionary impact, I have come to conclude. In particular, organisational hierarchy, even with the best will in the world, begins to mimic mainstream culture, with its overtly hierarchical pyramids of power. Thus political manoeuvering, strategies of power and influence, and pressure (sometimes subtle but there nevertheless) on the underlings to conform or be damned, all creep in. I am not 'anti-hierarchy' as such: it is impossible to be so, since the cosmos is composed of hierarchies. Life forms with different levels of complexity, humans with different degrees of experience, abilities and so on. But the minute a hierarchy is formalised, committed to paper, marks the beginning of the end of the revolution.
Neil Kramer has spoken recently of 'guerilla psychonautics', and guerilla-style is, I suspect, the way forward. Small cells, a web-like network of contacts and fellow travellers through outer and inner space, shapeshifting, impossible to pin down. Try to stamp it out here and it pops up somewhere else. Psychonautic Vietcong. No fixed or formal hierarchy, just direct communication of being.
And, as with shamanic cultures past and present, there is a secret weapon: knowledge and experience of multidimensional realities. Through this, the modern guerilla of psyche has access to ways of seeing and being that are beyond the reach of the dominators. Maybe life and world can be influenced more through their other dimensions than can ever be achieved merely through consensus reality. It's actually there in Buddhism too, in its more shamanic/Tantric wing at least; Milarepa the yogi, solitary in a cave, changing the world.
This is by no means my last word on the subject; it's work in progress. In the meantime, you can do worse than get out your rattles and drums, secret sounds and songs; meditations, divinations, mantras and yantras. Call up your power animals and spirit allies, bring out your sacred plants. Polish your antennae. These, in the end, could be the real tools of the revolution.
To be continued......
At this moment, in the parallel podcast world, we may stop to dream and be transported by the beatific first movement of Schubert's Piano Concerto in Bb major, D960. Ha!
