Ursula K. Le Guin inspired Spiritual Anarchism

“Anarchism is like Christianity; it’s never really been practiced...[but] it is a necessary idea.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Spiritual anarchism may be understood not just as a political or practical theology, but also as a significant pathway to a mystical apprehending of cosmic consciousness. The path towards cosmic consciousness requires complete freedom from the constraints and laws of prefigured systems and institutions.

We are asked then to purge the law of men from our inner-self, our truest self.  “Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world,” St. Paul tells us. Though this process may not be self-evident and difficult for most, this is likely because of the tyrannical influence of the patterns of this world. We are asked by St. Paul to put on our New Humanity. 

There are many mystics who have found their path to cosmic consciousness in this way - mystics such as Lao Tzu, Buddha, Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Emerson, and Thoreau. Though many of these may not have considered themselves anarchists, their writings about becoming and the freedom of the self are supportive of an anarchist understanding of spirituality.  Christian anarchists, according to the mystical way, are always in the process of becoming — of becoming more and more human, more and more free. Jesus is an archetype of such a spiritually evolutionary understanding of humanity.

Ursula K. Le Guin examined Taoism to encounter a precursor to anarchism. Le Guin insists, we do not need to wait for our society to turn up a nonauthoritarian collective before we may regain agency; freedom is available to those who choose. A traveler asks in Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, “If each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?” The point is that human beings have the power to change, regardless of the social institutions and traditions which seem to bind them; although such things can, and will, interfere with a life rightly lived, we may choose to change those traditions and make something good and meaningful out of our lives. Le Guin’s writing describes what should be familiar to Christians but is too often strange: the significance and worth of the individual human spirit. 

The scientist and mystic Pierre Tielhard de Chardin said “humanity will not succeed unless it strives with all its might to realize its potentialities.  And as we said with reference to human development, the believer is more closely tied than anyone to this great task, because in his eyes the victory of humanity over the diminishments of the world—even physical and natural—to some extent conditions the fulfillment and consummation...”Tielhard is saying here that we each must take our own spiritual evolution into our own hands. We each must choose to pursue cosmic consciousness to attain to our fullest self, which is at the heart of a spiritual definition of anarchy:  the freedom to accept the responsibility of our choices, the freedom to become.

“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” 

-Ursula K. Le Guin