“And what is good, Phaedrus? And what is not good? Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

— Plato [Symposium], and the epigraph to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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To recap, political anarchism is not about dope, guns, and fucking in the streets. Outward signs of unrestrained pandemonium that often coincide with anarchy are a clear sign that the state of social order we mean by anarchism is not present. Pandemonium is not indicative of an empowered public, but rather of an immature, authority-dependent mobocracy, made of enfants terribles whose apron strings were cut too soon, like a house full of 12-year olds living on their own.

Political anarchism involves owned responsibility and voluntary cooperation. It involves government by ad hoc committees, formed in the recognition that there are collective needs that require group efforts, but without solidifying into the non-human, authoritarian corporate personhood we call “the state.” Anarchism asserts that, for all its messiness and inevitable travails, human life is best lived in a state of freedom and self-control, without the artifice of an authoritarian “head” above all that is human-scale and real.

To achieve this state, though, political anarchism must evolve. It cannot be imposed on an unprepared public by a band of revolutionaries. Romantic as the idea is, people cannot be rescued from their dependence on authority and set free like a domesticated dairy cow in the wilderness. We must do the unsexy grunt work of empowering them first. People must voluntarily unlearn the need to be governed by others.

Oddly enough, the best way for the individual human to become both ungovernable and without the need to be governed is by overthrowing their own internal “head of state”—the ego. As without, so within. 

That’s where spiritual anarchism comes into play. 

Likewise, spiritual anarchism is not a willy-nilly spirituality of “anything goes,” nor does it endorse the smashing of other people’s temples and idols. These are signs of someone whose artifice of ego is still running the show, and is manipulable by the whims of the culture architects who define the roles that make up the ego.

Instead of committees and cooperatives, internally-oriented anarchism focuses on contemplation: discernment of the real from falsehood. A spiritual anarchist thus learns to parse what is ego-driven from what is essential to the health and vitality of the true self, not by being told so by an authority figure, but through meticulous, direct observation of the self. This is the grunt work that makes internal self-empowerment possible and enables the spiritual anarchist to walk away from authoritarian religion.

To paraphrase Ammon Hennacy, a spiritual anarchist is someone who doesn’t need God, the ultimate celestial cop, to make him behave.

But what takes the place of the Heavenly Head of State that replaced or subdued the unrefined natural self?

(And to be very clear, it did so fruitfully and according to need. This is a subject for an entirely different inquiry, but I propose that Homo sapiens would not have survived the self-domestication process that made civilizations possible without the binding-up influence of organized religion and our ability to submit the individual will to a greater collective one. That doesn’t mean that this will always be the best solution for our evolutionary challenges though, and I’d say we are long past the time when it was.)

This passage from The Peasant and the King introduces the answer:

“As a peasant [human], you tend to experience your thoughts after they arrive [in the semantic brain], where they are draped in lexical imagery and encased in semantic meaning. But the thought itself is an upwelling from pure consciousness. It originates in the King [which can best be translated here as Brahman or Tao]. Words are your interpretation of the footprints left behind where the King has tread.

“Had you not fallen into the spell of Duo [duality], you would know this more clearly than your own name. You would perceive your thoughts with your sentience, feel them with your sapience, and yes, even think them with your cognizance before conceptualizing them as words. You would think in images and emotions and ideational structures more clearly than in words, and you would do this as simply as you move and breathe. 

“Humanity is not unfamiliar with thought as it precedes the formation of words— you simply categorize it as something other than thought, and trace it to mysterious realms of which you have no clear concept. Thoughts about right behavior and judgment are relegated to ‘conscience,’ while novel ideas or arrangements of form are called ‘intuition.’ Artists and scientists speak of inspiration and insight. The religious flock to those who speak of premonition and prophecy, while the self-propelled spiritualists among you tell of occult messages, visions, communion with angels, or channeling of any number of astral helpers and ‘higher selves.’ These are all different concepts you have for the same experience of receiving pre-conceptual thought [from universal Mind, the omniscient progenitor of all mental activity]. None of this is abnormal or paranormal or out of line with the basic experience of thought traced back to its source. Nor will all such thought be expressed in words: visual images, music, and mathematical formulas are among many other manifestations of thought that appear as non-verbal mental activity. The wise among you remain open to all that rises up within them.”

To this list of concepts we have developed to explain pre-conceptual thought, we could add “the still, small voice of God.” The figurehead behind that voice is a symbol and nothing more, but the voice is real, and it is yours. Not the speaking voice of your person; it come from something more truly you than that. 

This singular voice, given many names as it performs different functions, is that of consciousness itself, or the universal Mind if you’re thrown by that use of “consciousness.” It is beyond the scope of this article to explain why (but not this, that, or the other), but there is reason to see the interior functions historically attributed to God and other divine personages as fruits of non-dual awareness of the “highest Self” common to all beings and things. 

Likewise, there is reason to see every contemplative aspect of each religion, spirituality, mindfulness practice, or mystical self-improvement racket taught by humanity as a codified system for learning to tap this universal source of wisdom and guidance —to find it, to listen to it, to trust it, and to live by it. 

A personal relationship with Jesus Christ, for instance, is an elaborate and often highly ritualized enactment of the same interior connection depicted between the mortal Arjuna and the universal being of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, which is not essentially different than the very full nothingness that guides the Zen master without the trappings of exterior concepts and personification, which is none other than the “high power” evoked by “friends of Bill W.” at AA meetings everywhere. What differs drastically in these contemplative milieus are the cultural contexts and conceptualizations of the root source of guidance; what never changes is the root source itself. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and the voice of innermost Self in any other form would sound as savory to the inner ear.

Because God is most often cited as the source of moral standards for human behavior, let’s focus on this function of the voice of God as it is commonly known (but horribly understood) in both religious and secular contexts: conscience.

Spiritual anarchism stakes out two fundamental positions regarding conscience, one to address encroachments on it from without, and the other from within.

Outwardly, it asserts that no authority stands between an individual and conscience. It is important to remember that conscience is a property of the universal Self, not of individuals, though individuals must discern and decipher its voice in order to utilize it. The contemplative arts are what teach the skills of discernment, and just as with any art there are varying degrees of attainment and proficiency among artists. But ultimately, anarchism says, the skill to teach someone else how to access conscience does not also make one an arbiter of what conscience says to anyone else. You may have mastered the art of portrait drawing, but you cannot draw a more authentic representation of my imaginary friend than my stick figure drawing of her, though you may endeavor to teach me how to draw better. Likewise, the most learned religious scholar or priest may teach a neophyte all he knows about the practices that engender attention and surrender to conscience, but he cannot authentically tell her what conscience is saying to her. As soon as she gives him the power to do so, she is disempowered and an authoritarian hierarchy of access is established, which anarchism rejects.

Inwardly, spiritual anarchism asserts that the empowered individual must also reject the subjective authority of the ego in order to retain the power to follow conscience. The ego entices the individual to place their interests above all others, but conscience does not play such games of favoritism. It places the individual’s interests within all others, and observes a homeostatic principle of ecology rather than egocentricity. With the aid of conscience (as with all intuitive mental functions), we can think in holistic ethical systems, not just fragmented segments as the ego does.

We tend to think of ego as an expression of individuality, but this doesn’t hold water when you look closer at what actually constitutes the ego: a mishmash of social roles defined by various collectives. The ego is a self-marking tool of a finite social unit of being, not an individual with access to infinite insight and wisdom. It is a container of limited knowledge and specialization, not “an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.” (Alan Watts) Therefore the ego is a blind guide and a rather unqualified monarch. In a very real sense, a spiritual anarchist is an ego who endeavors to depose herself from the throne of selfhood and put her true self in its rightful place, for the ultimate purpose of its abdication. The Peasant and the King is an allegorical walk-through and outward depiction of this mostly interior process.

Most of Western society is stuck in the phase of liberating the self from the cloak of collectively defined ego, because we recognize the fictional nature of collectives but we lack the metaphysical insight to take it to the next step. The self is then seen as a self-propagated and self-propelled ego, an atomized unit of being devoid of any proper grounding beyond a natural imperative to survive at all costs, a phase I call hyperindividualism. This is a difficult part of the process to manage because it seems to be the opposite of what we need as spiritual beings. It seems to set the stage for the ego to run amok and have its final pyrrhic triumph in destroying the society that created it, so there is an instinct to retreat back into identification with collectives. But intuition knows we can only go forward, that the illness is the cure, and that hyperindividualism creates the crucible we need to pivot forward into what spiritual anarchism proffers as our deliverance:  the crowning of the true self that knows it is not separate from anyone or anything in existence. 

Most specifically, we must recognize at this point that the challenges of climate change cannot be adequately addressed by collectives acting in clumsy, fragmented spurts of egocentric action. Nothing short of humanity seeing from the holistic perspective of the entire biosphere is going to keep this world hospitable to complex life forms. Ideally, then, nature would encourage intuitive capacity as an adaptive trait. But it is questionable whether we can afford to wait for natural selection to create adequate numbers of capable humans. We may need to accelerate the process by encouraging more individuals to recognize their own sovereignty and pursue their own deposition.

Introduction to Spiritual Anarchism

Part 1: Anarchism vs Anarchy

Part 2: Political and Spiritual

Part 3: Conscience, the Anarchist Voice of God

Part 4: Pacifism, Not Passive-ism

Part 5: The Kingdom of Heaven Is Possible, Another World is Within You

You may also read the whole series as a composite article at Not Two