This is an indelicate oracle. If you're offended by the mention of bodily functions in a prophetic context you should STOP READING NOW. Still here? OK. I was walking through my neighborhood when I spied an older woman standing over her aged Yorkshire Terrier next to a bush. The dog was in discomfort, squatting and shivering but unable to relieve himself. "He's having trouble getting his business done," his owner confided in me. "He's been struggling for ten minutes." I felt a rush of sympathy for the distressed creature. With a flourish of my hand, I said, "More power to you, little one. May you purge your burden." The dog instantly defecated. Shrieking her approval, the woman exclaimed, "It's like you waved a magic wand!" Now I am invoking my wizardry in your behalf, Aries, although in a less literal way: More power to you. May you purge your psychological burden.

Do you wish you could get more clarity about the foggy, ambiguous situations you're dealing with? Want more help in exploring the Great Mystery that is your life? I discuss your coming week in greater depth in your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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In honor of your enhanced power to be yourself, I hereby reward you with a host of fresh titles. From now on you will be known as the Senior Vice President of Strawberry Fields and Hummingbirds, and the Deputy Director of Green Lights and Purple Hearts. Consider yourself, as well, to be the new Puzzle-Master Supreme, the Chief Custodian of Secret Weapons, and Field Commander of Free Lunches and Poetic Licenses.

"You won't do it at the right time," warns writer Kate Moller. "You'll be late. You'll be early. You'll get re-routed. You'll get delayed. You'll change your mind. You'll change your heart. It's not going to turn out the way you thought it would." And yet, Moller concludes -- are you ready for the punch line? -- "it will be better." In describing your future, Taurus, I couldn't have said it better myself. Fate may be comical in the way it plays with your expectations and plans, but I predict you will ultimately be glad about the outcome.

Do you want further explorations of the intriguing twists and turns of your personal evolution? Would you like help in solving the riddles that confuse you? Check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Consider the possibility that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: It needs to reach its full term. Just as a child isn't ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth we're creating has to ripen in its own time. The recalcitrant reactionaries who resist the inevitable birth are simply making sure that the far-seeing revolutionaries don't conjure the future too suddenly. They serve the greater good.

In the coming weeks, you Geminis could be skillful and even spectacular liars. You will have the potential to deceive more people, bend more truths, and even fool yourself better than anyone else. On the other hand, you will also have the knack to channel this same slipperiness in a different direction. You could tell imaginative stories that rouse people from their ruts. You might explore the positive aspects of Kurt Vonnegut's theory that we tend to become what we pretend to be. Or you could simply be so creative and playful and improvisational in everything you do that you catalyze a lot of inspirational fun. Which way will you go?

Need more help in figuring out the questions life is asking you? Crave more support in your efforts to build your courage? Check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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If you have encountered examples of the following evidence, tell us about it. Send your testimony to the Beauty and Truth Lab at uaregod@comcast.net. You might want to include the following:

1. bliss that flows toward you because you've made a habit of expecting it and cultivating it;

2. good news that's really interesting; fascinating stories that provide an antidote to the media's obsession with hardship, anguish, deterioration, and death;

3. states of emotional wealth and psychological health: raw material for the manual that will be the corrective for the DSM-IV; the missing half of the story;

4. mirabilia: mysterious revelations, rejuvenating prodigies, ineffable breakthroughs, beguiling ephemera, sudden deliverance from boring evils;

5. plain old everyday miracles;

6. the good news you've gone out and created.

I'm all in favor of you indulging your instinct for self-protection. As a Cancerian myself, I understand that one of the ways you take good care of yourself is by making sure that you feel reasonably safe. Having said that, I also want to remind you that your mental and emotional health requires you to leave your comfort zone on a regular basis. Now is one of those times. The call to adventure will arrive soon. If you make yourself ready and eager for changes, the changes that come will kick your ass in mostly educational and pleasurable ways.

What fresh blessings will life bring you? What questions should you be asking? To explore the ripening trends further, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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You're a gorgeous mystery with a wild heart and a lofty purpose. But like all of us, you also have a dark side -- a part of your psyche that snarls and bites, that's unconscious and irrational, that is motivated by ill will or twisted passions or instinctual fears. It's your own personal portion of the world's sickness: a mess of repressed longings, enervating wounds, ignorant delusions, and unripe powers. You'd prefer to ignore it because it's unflattering or uncomfortable or very different from what you imagine yourself to be.

If you acknowledge its existence at all (many of us don't), you might call it the devil, your evil twin, your inner monster, or your personal demon. Psychologist Carl Jung referred to it as the shadow. He regarded it as the lead that the authentic alchemists of the Middle Ages sought to transmute into gold.

How are you doing on your work of changing your own personal lead into gold?

Who exactly do you want to be when you grow up, and what is the single most important experience you need in order to make that happen? What riches do you want to possess when you are finally wise enough to make enlightened use of them, and how can you boost your eligibility for those riches? Which one of your glorious dreams is not quite ripe enough for you to fulfill it, but is primed to be dramatically ripened in the coming weeks? If I were you, Leo, I would meditate on these questions. Answers will be forthcoming.

Want to explore this chapter of your life story even further? Dig deeper? Push harder? Consider tuning in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Thousands of amazing, inexplicable, wondrous, and even supernatural events occur every day. And yet most are unreported by the media. The few that are cited are ridiculed. Why? Here's one possible reason: The people most likely to believe in miracles are superstitious, uneducated, and prone to having a blind, literalist faith in their religions' myths. Those who are least likely to believe in miracles are skilled at analytical thought, well educated, and yet prone to having a blind, literalist faith in the ideology of materialism, which dogmatically asserts that the universe consists entirely of things that can be perceived by the five human senses or detected by instruments that scientists have thus far invented.

The media is largely composed of people from the second group. It's virtually impossible for them to admit to the possibility of miracles, let alone experience them. If anyone from this group manages to escape peer pressure and cultivate a receptivity to miracles, it's because they have successfully fought against being demoralized by the unsophisticated way miracles are framed by the first group.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab we're immune to the double-barreled ignorance. When we behold astonishing synchronicities and numinous breakthroughs that seem to violate natural law, we're willing to consider the possibility that our understanding of natural law is too narrow. And yet we also refrain from lapsing into irrational gullibility; we actively seek mundane explanations for apparent miracles.

At an elementary school festival some years ago, I performed the role of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. One of my tasks was to ask kids to make a wish, whereupon I sprinkled their heads with magic fairy dust. Some of the kids were skeptical about the whole business. They questioned the proposition that the fairy dust would make their wishes come true. A few were so suspicious that they walked away without making a wish or accepting the fairy dust. Yet every single one of those distrustful kids came back later to tell me they had changed their minds, and every single one asked me to bestow more than the usual amount of fairy dust. They are your role models, Virgo. Like them, you should return to the scene of your doubts and demand extra fairy dust.

You're got more strength and intelligence than you realize. For help in accessing those untapped inner resources, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Conventional wisdom implies that the best problems are those that place you under duress. There's supposedly no gain without pain. Stress is allegedly an incomparable spur for calling on resources that have been previously unavailable or dormant. Nietzsche's aphorism, "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger," has achieved the status of a maxim.

We half-agree. But it's clear that stress also accompanies many mediocre problems that have little power to make us smarter. Pain frequently generates no gain. We're all prone to become habituated, even addicted, to nagging vexations that go on and on without rousing any of our sleeping genius.

There is, furthermore, another class of difficulty -- let's call it the delightful dilemma -- that neither feeds on angst nor generates it. On the contrary, it's fun and invigorating, and usually blooms when ­you're feeling a profound sense of being at home in the world. The problem of writing this book is a good example. I've had abundant fun handling the perplexing challenges with which it has confronted me.

Imagine a life in which at least half of your quandaries match this profile. Act as if you're most likely to attract useful problems when joy is your predominant mood. Consider the possibility that being in unsettling circumstances may shrink your capacity to dream up the riddles you need most; that maybe it's hard to ask the best questions when you're preoccupied fighting rearguard battles against boring or demeaning annoyances that have plagued you for many moons.

Prediction: As an aspiring lover of pronoia, you will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't require pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before ­you're forced to do so by fate's kicks in the ass.

"The door to the invisible must be visible," wrote the surrealist spiritual author Rene Daumal. This describes an opportunity that is on the verge of becoming available to you. The opportunity is still invisible simply because it has no precedents in your life; you can't imagine what it is. But just recently a door to that unknown realm has become visible to you. I suggest you open it, even though you have almost no idea what's on the other side.

How are you going to change what needs to be changed and accept what needs to be accepted? To get some support from me, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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The Yanyuwa Aboriginal people live along the coast of Australia's Northern Territory. Their word for "fat" is nalu-ngiliny. It doesn't merely refer to the greasy stuff that grows naturally under the skin of animal bodies. It's also a metaphysical term for vitality.

Anything that's rich in nalu-ngiliny is healthy. A certain landscape may be considered fat, for instance, which means that it's fertile and sacred. When acacia flowers bloom each year, it's a sign that sea turtles and the marine mammals known as dugongs, favorite foods of the Yanyuwa, are "fat" and ready to be hunted.

I have a fantasy that you will identify the things in your life that are nalu-ngiliny, and give them the honor and gratitude they deserve.

In Tim Burton's film Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the White Rabbit, "How long is forever?" The talking rabbit replies, "Sometimes, just one second." That's an important piece of information for you to keep in mind, Scorpio. It implies that "forever" may not necessarily, in all cases, last until the universe dies out five billion years from now. "Forever" might actually turn out to be one second or 90 minutes or a month or a year or who knows? So how does this apply to your life right now? Well, a situation you assumed was permanent could ultimately change -- perhaps much faster than you have imagined. An apparently everlasting decree or perpetual feeling could unexpectedly shift, as if by magic.

Sometimes it's a challenge to try to figure out what's important and what's not important. If you'd like more of my input, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter.

And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it's impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be.

That's why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good.

"I need a little language such as lovers use," wrote Virginia Woolf in her novel The Waves. "I need no words. Nothing neat . . . I need a howl; a cry." If I'm reading the astrological omens correctly, Sagittarius, Woolf is speaking for you right now. You should be willing to get guttural and primal . . . to trust the teachings of silence and the crazy wisdom of your body . . . to exult in the inarticulate mysteries and bask in the dumfounding brilliance of the Eternal Wow. Are you brave enough to love what can't be put into words?

How well is your imagination working these days? Could it use a boost? A prod? A jolt of inspiration? Try tuning in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Activist and author Naomi Klein tells a story about the time she traveled to Australia at the request of Aboriginal elders. They wanted her to know about their struggle to prevent white people from dumping radioactive wastes on their land.

Her hosts brought her to their beloved wilderness, where they camped under the stars. They showed her "secret sources of fresh water, plants used for bush medicines, hidden eucalyptus-lined rivers where the kangaroos come to drink."

After three days, Klein grew restless. When were they going to get down to business? "Before you can fight," she was told, "you have to know what you are fighting for."

"I get bored with the idea of becoming a better listener," writes business blogger Penelope Trunk. "Why would I do that when interrupting people is so much faster?" If your main goal is to impose your will on people and get things over with as soon as possible, Capricorn, by all means follow Trunk's advice this week. But if you have other goals -- like building consensus, finding out important information you don't know yet, and winning help from people who feel affection for you -- I suggest that you find out how to have maximum fun by being an excellent listener.

Want more clues? Need further insight? For more evocative questions and pithy suggestions about your unfolding destiny, check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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The Maasai people of Kenya don't have running water, toilets, or electricity, and their per capita income is $300 a year. They use cattle dung as plaster in building their homes because the scent helps repel lions, which dislike it, from venturing too close. And yet they are as happy with their lives as Forbes' magazine's "400 richest Americans" are with theirs -- even though the latter may live in 10,000-square-foot palaces with stained glass windows, French patio doors, limestone kitchen counter tops, spas, wine cellars, and Olympic-sized swimming pools.

This assertion comes from "Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being," a report done by psychologists Ed Diener and Martin E. P. Seligman. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is "extremely dissatisfied," 4 is "neutral," and 7 means "extremely satisfied," the Maasai, the Inuit of northern Greenland, and the wealthiest Americans all scored 5.8.

The last time meteorologists officially added a new type of cloud formation to the International Cloud Atlas was 1951. But they're considering another one now. It's called "asperatus," which is derived from the Latin term undulatus asperatus, meaning "turbulent undulation." According to the Cloud Appreciation Society, it resembles "the surface of a choppy sea from below." But although it looks rough and agitated, it almost never brings a storm. Let's make asperatus your mascot for the next few weeks. Aquarius. I suspect that you, too, will soon discover something new under the sun. It may at first look turbulent, but I bet it will mostly just be interesting.

How much do you want to know about your life? How far do you dare to go in your quest for self-mastery? For more insight into your intriguing fate, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Dear Gorgeous Genius: You possess exceptional capacities that are absolutely unique. You're a masterpiece unlike any other that has ever lived in the history of the world.

Furthermore, the precise instructions you need to ripen into your genius have always been with you, even from the time before you were born. In the words of psychologist James Hillman, you have a soul's code.

You might also call it the special mission you came to Earth to carry out; the divine blueprint that contains the open secret of how to be perfectly, unpredictably yourself; the master plan that is your heart's deepest desire.

Would you like help in deciphering it? The Divine Intelligence Formerly Known as God is always on call, ready to help. It's your birthright to ask Her a specific question every day about what you need to do next to express your soul's code; it's also your birthright to receive a response.

The divine revelation may not be as unambiguous as a little voice in your head. It might appear in the form of a TV commercial, an odd dream, or an encounter with a stranger. It could be demanding and difficult, delivering information you'd rather not have to deal with. Or it might show up as a clear and simple feeling of knowing exactly what to do, and it could be easy and fun.

Should you try private experiments that might generate intimate miracles? Yes! Should you dream up extravagant proposals and schedule midnight rendezvous! By all means! Should you pick up where your fantasies left off the last time you got too timid to explore further? Naturally! Should you find out what "as raw as the law allows" actually means? I encourage you! Should you question taboos that are no longer relevant? Most assuredly! Should you burn away the rotting pain with a show of liberated strength? Beyond a doubt! Should you tap into the open secret at the core of your wild beauty? Of course!

Would you like to hear more about the hidden factors influencing your life? Do you want to uncover the secrets you've been hiding even from yourself? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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You know beyond any doubt that each of your heart's beats originates as a gift of love directly from the Goddess herself. You understand that the laws of physics are fine-tuned to create a universe in which you can thrive. You realize with visceral lucidity that everything you see is permeated with a single, unified conscious intelligence, of which you partake intimately. This intelligence is immortal, and thus, so are you. As you register the shocking joy of these truths imprinting themselves on your perfect body, every one of your cells purrs with luminous gratitude.