"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".
(Henry IV part 2)
It's considered to be
one of his most famous quotes.
Many have used this method of gaining power.
As Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, idi Amin,
and lately, Mugabe, did by overthrowing lawyers.
I choose to believe that ol' Shakey
had something far deeper in mind
when he penned those words.
What if we were to apply this principle to
the overthrow of the legal system in our own mind?
Until the 1970s lawyers, being one of
the recognised professions,
were not allowed to advertise.
And since that time the pursuit of clients
has highlighted their seedier side.
The ambulance chasing fraternity seeks to
persuade us that it's always somebody else's fault.
Some years back, on a Winter mountaineering course
I watched helplessly while my friend careered down an ice slope
like a sack of potatoes. The solicitor member of our party
suggested that he could successfully sue the hosts,
because the guide was inexperienced and clearly out of his depth,
a course of action which my friend politely refused.
He chose to accept the fruits of his own actions.
Did you have PPI?
Had an accident, not your fault?
Someone said something malicious about you?
My wife tripped on a pavement.
"Are you suing the council?
Meta-noia, change in perception, is needed now like never before.
Thoughts in the mind follow each other mechanically, connected by
similarity in space, time or feeling attachment. In meditation
(inappropriately called 'mindfulness'), we can stand apart from this
stream of thought, stand under, or understand it. In yoga this is called
'watching the monkey jump'.
While passive to this
state-educated, mechanical, monkey jumping, we go along with general
flow of the culture we've been brought up in.
I've seen too many
people dying because they were passive to it, and some, even in their
final days, collecting to fund the research into more chemicals of the
type that very often hasten their death.
"Adequate knowledge is activity; activity is happiness.
"Inadequate knowledge is passivity, is misery."
(Spinoza)
Inadequate knowledge can lead to the taking of a magical pill for any
illness. Far easier to do that than work to change your ideas, your diet
and your emotional attachments.
Adequate knowledge can convince
that we are wholly responsible for our responses to what life throws at
us. We don't pin the blame for our misfortune on anyone else.
The
errors I make put me in that place where I am 'self-accuser,
self-judge, self-jury, self-executer of sentence, and self sufferer of
my own decision to correct myself.
I understand my friend's decision not to sue.
I understand that my own internal law is more important than any
external law. Always keeping in mind the yoga principle of 'ahimsa',
doing no harm, it means the death of lawyers is in the death of their
influence over the way I choose to live my life.