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Horoscopes by Rob Brezsny


Week of November 29th, 2007

♍ VIRGO

(August 23-September 22)
First let me make it clear that I'm not predicting you will face difficult events in the coming days. Not at all. Second, I'm not saying you will have to endure more pain than usual. Third, I believe your suffering will be about average -- similar to what normal people bear in normal times. Having said all that, though, I encourage you to be aggressively exploratory toward the pain you feel. Have long talks with your murky fears. Gaze bravely into the parts of your life that make you sad. Why? Because it's a favorable time to search for treasure that's buried in the shadows -- to enhance your psychological health by dealing with what's not so healthy. Recall Carl Jung's wise words: "The foundation of all mental illness is an unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."


Want more help in exploring the Great Mystery that is your life? I discuss your coming week in greater depth in your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT
The English language is in a state of rapid ferment. New words are barging into the dictionary at an unprecedented rate, even as old familiars fall into disuse. There's one exception to this trend: profanity. Hoary favorites like "fuck," "shit," and "asshole" have gained an acceptance unthinkable 30 years ago, but fresh curse words are rarely coined.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we find the overused classics inadequate for expressing our evolving rage at injustice, ignorance, and ugliness. Furthermore, as deadening clichés, they don't satisfy the pronoiac mandate to use language with sonorous precision.

There's another problem. Anger has become one of the trendiest emotions of all. In moderation it can be a righteous force for constructive change. But its hackneyed omnipresence means the vast majority of its outbreaks are trivial. The paucity of colorful obscenities is aggravated by an abundance of frivolous fury.

How can you purge the clichéd ire that dilutes the useful, inspired stuff? One good method is to make fun of it by expressing it bigger than life. Try this. Go alone to a place where it's safe to feel blind rage. Envision a person or thing you love to hate, then unleash the following mantra 15 times in the most vulgar tones possible: "You miasmic heap of shaved-off cemetery warts. You mangled preen of politicians' tongue scabs. You brackish tripe of experts' ego tinkles. You fragile crap of orphaned tyrants. You demented cluster of fickle weasel vows. You curdled slosh of rotting fracas-spawned opinions."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.