Theresa May takes some drugs
Part One
I've never found Zen a particularly attractive manifestation of the sacred path. Classic Zen stories typically involve the student spending years staring at a wall, or wrestling with an apparently insoluble riddle called a koan until he (it's normally 'he') feels on the verge of total madness. Then, one fine day, unbidden and unexpected it seems, something happens. The student experiences 'satori', a kind of deep spiritual insight and/or release. Typically, this is put into words (if that is indeed possible) in the realisation that 'everything is just as it is', or 'everything is exactly as it should be'. The student relaxes, releases the mountain of pent-up energy that has accumulated within, and gets on with life.
I used to find these Zen satori people irritating. It's OK for them, I would think, mindfully raking the stones in their pretty little Zen gardens. Some of us have jobs to go to, bills to pay. People are hungry, dying of cancer, for crissake. Just recently, however, I've been wondering whether this Zen style has something valuable about it after all.
'Everything is just as it should be' is not a moralistic statement; this is the most important thing to realise. It is an expression of an existential, metaphysical even, experience. It is saying that everything in the world we inhabit is reflecting perfectly what it is, who it is. Everything and everybody, including ourselves, is in the right place at the right time, manifesting its own unique state of being. In fact, things could not be any other way. This is what we see when the veils fall away, and our hopes, wishes, views, judgements and preferences go into temporary abeyance. This is it, folks, miraculous in its manifestation is the Zen way. Shut up, quit complaining, get over it, and go and have breakfast.
Taking 'everything is just as it should be' as a basic underpinning of perception changes everything. For myself, it helps me cut through a lot of inappropriate and not very helpful responses to the world around me, especially the crappy bits. Notions such as justice, equality, rights, can be jettisoned into the wastepaper bin of abstract fantasy, created by the human mind but with no existential reality. 'We are all one' is another blanket base attitude that is found wanting (it is the New Age nightmare). Similarly the sense of total alienation and disconnection that comes from feeling completely different (the dark conspiratorial nightmare). No need for all this stuff, Zen seems to say. Take a good, long, stripped-down look. Everyone, everything is manifesting perfectly its own being - its own level of consciousness, if you will. Putting down its own marker on the path of life.
Zen satori and the 'everything is as it should be' does not imply passive acceptance of whatever's happening, however - an error which I used to make. It doesn't imply anything, really. Somebody doing their level best to provoke change is as it should be, as well. Now, having cut through a lot of the perceptual distortion, having opened up the channels to more appropriate responses, we can turn our attention to those antitheses of Zen wisdom, the dark forces of behaviour control......
Part Two
The brave new Brave New World UK Tory misgovernment has prepared its draft bill for what it calls 'a blanket ban on legal highs'. In the early days of Pale Green Vortex I wrote about mephedrone ('plant food'), a pioneer example of these mind-altering substances. Things have moved on rapidly since then. Researchers developed the irritating knack of discovering new mind-affecting substances very easily: tweak a molecule here, a molecule there, no problem. No sooner did the government issue a loud 'no' to a substance than a new one would appear to take its place. This game of cat-and-mouse made the misgovernment appear like a troupe of bumbling village idiots (not difficult, actually). So now we have the official response to this control freak's nightmare: a blanket ban.
I urge anybody reading this to take a few minutes out and check out the wording of this proposed piece of legislation for yourself. It is a remarkably inept piece of work - maybe this is deliberate. A primary school kid would see how stupid it is, taken at face value. It focuses around banning any 'psychoactive', barring the few control-system-approved substances such as alcohol and coffee. But almost anything can be a psychoactive i.e. influence our state of mind and mood. In principle, the UK misgovernment is granting itself carte blanche to ban almost anything it cares to.
'Legal highs' need to be banned for the sake of the children, so the story goes. Protecting children - from pervs, paedos, mind alteration, camping gas - is a favourite theme of our current Westminster chums in their bid to exert control over more and more of our life. It's a good ploy: you can't knock family-friendliness, can you? Proposals to introduce age restriction verification on internet pornography is another obvious example of 'looking after the children', while in reality setting up the conditions for more general internet restrictions. Probably nobody thinks it's a good idea for thirteen year-olds to spend all afternoon watching porn on the internet. But, hold on a minute: isn't that what parents are for? To look after the kids? So this is the serious side of the thing. Removing power from parents and granting it, instead, to the state (which always knows best). You wll find that Cameron, May and buddies have a special predeliction for control of the internet (all in the name of protecting us from various types of nasty people and things). This is not surprising, since they must be terrified about access to real information through the internet, which threatens their entire game.
It is a necessary shift in perception to recognise that ISIS, terrorists, paedophiles, producers of heroin, drug dealers, are the government's best friends. They provide the pretexts needed for yet more legislation of control, which actually applies to the population at large while the real criminals go their own merry way. Without this little insight, anyone wanting to get at what is really going on will remain in confusion, I feel.
Applying five seconds of rational thought to this 'protecting the children' stance of the misgovernment will immediately make this clear. Should it be sincerely concerned about reducing harm experienced by children, it would overnight completely change its policies on 'drugs'. One feature of many of these 'legal highs' is that they are physically far more dangerous than the illegal drugs they replace. Many of them attempt to mimic amphetamine or ecstasy-type drugs in particular. Ecstasy, as pure MDMA, is statistically among the safer of psychoactive substances, yet is classified as a Class A drug. Its 'legal high' equivalents are far more dodgy. It is no exaggeration to state that every emergency hospitalisation, or untimely death, from legal highs is blood on the hands of the Home Secretary. I mean this perfectly seriously: it is a direct result of the stupid criminal policies on drugs for which she has to take responsibility, in wilful ignorance of other more intelligent approaches.
As far as stopping younger folk watch pornography, teenagers will be far more capable than their parents in busting any access-limiting internet features. If the misgovernment were at all serious about protecting children from undesirable material, they would ban all those magazines to be found at supermarket check-outs, detailing stories more sordid and perverse than any porn company has ever dreamed up (long-term incest is a favourite in these happy family mags).
There are those who can find nothing better to do with their precious human lives than try to control everybody else - tell them what to do, or more often, what they can't do. They have a well-defined box into which people are being squeezed - or unceremoniously jammed. There is no other rational way to read the evidence, and this is not a state of affairs that I want to see. In Cameron, May, and the rest, the higher echelons have found a bunch of rather sad control freaks who are more than willing to act as agents for a dark agenda. As emissaries of darkness (witting or unwitting) on a path leading far from the Zen garden, they are behaving just as they should. And us, Brute?....
