Write a Letter to the Future You

WRITE A LETTER TO THE FUTURE YOU

I invite you to write a letter to the person you'll be one year from today. Tell this Future You that you've taken a vow to accomplish three feats by then.

Say why these feats are more important to you than anything else. Describe them. Brainstorm about what you'll do to make them happen. Draw pictures or make collages that capture your excitement about them.

Then create a sanctified space where you will put this letter. Open it one year from today.





COURTING A BREAKTHROUGH

Search your memory and recall a time when you pushed yourself to your limits as you labored over a task you cared about very much.

At that time, you worked with extreme focus and intensity. You were rarely bored and never resentful about the enormous effort you had to expend.

You loved throwing yourself into this test of willpower, which stretched your resourcefulness and compelled you to grow new capacities.

What was that epic breakthrough in your past?

Once you know, move on to your next exercise: Imagine a new assignment that fits this description, and make plans to bring it into your life in the near future.





ARE YOU CONSPIRING?

All of creation is conspiring to shower you with blessings. But here's my question: Are you conspiring to shower all of creation with your blessings?

I invite you to say, "I love all of creation."

Life is crazily and innocently in love with you. Are you ready to be crazily and innocently in love with life?

I invite you to say, "I love the high and the low, the light and the dark, the yes and the no."

The universe always gives you what you need when you need it. But are you willing to give the universe what it needs when it needs it?

I invite you to say, "The deeper I love, the smarter I grow. The stronger I love, the more I know. The bigger I love, the better I see. The wilder I love, the freer I be."





SUBVERSIVE POWER OF JOY

The subversive power of joy by Janey Stephenson: “The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective celebration is one of the great equalisers of social and political struggle.

“Holding onto and centering joy is a vital tactic for personal and group resilience, as well as political resistance to an agenda that seeks to enforce hierarchy and division through mass fear.

“Authoritarianism is directly incompatible with collective joy; it demands fear, obedience, hierarchy and an obsession with security and preparation for war.

“The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective joy takes people off guard and is one of the great equalizers of social and political struggle.”

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“Liberation movements have a long history of communal dance. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has documented the history of collective joy in her book Dancing In The Streets. She argues that collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for binding groups together.

“Physical movement—a powerful escalation of typical protest chanting—not only releases emotion, it also creates bonding, trust and equality, dissolving hierarchy and increasing a sense of community.”

More.





VIKTOR FRANKL ON HOW LOVE IS KEY TO UNDERSTANDING

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

"Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
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— Holocaust survivor, Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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I love Frankl’s quote, but also feel a longing to translate it into a the language of another gender:

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of her personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless she loves her. By her love she is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, she sees that which is potential in her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

"Furthermore, by her love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making her aware of what she can be and of what she should become, she makes these potentialities come true.”





Jump-Up-and-Down Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming a delightfully excitable, actively receptive, smoothly inquisitive Master of Discerning Joy

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1. There's a three-mile stretch of Interstate 880 south of Oakland, California, that I call the Singing Highway.

For reasons I don't understand, it generates low humming melodies every time I drive over it, similar to the guttural chants of Tibetan monks. Sometimes I swear I can even hear lyrics.

Once, as I was driving to the airport on the Singing Highway, I swear I heard the same lyric repeating over and over again:

"a shortcut to the path with heart
a shortcut to the path with heart
a shortcut to the path with heart"

Where's the path with heart for you? What would it involve for you to take a shortcut to get on it?

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2. If a cow is given a name by her owner, she generates more milk than a cow that's treated as an anonymous member of the herd.

That's the conclusion of a study done by researchers at Newcastle University in the UK. "Placing more importance on knowing the individual animals and calling them by name," said Dr. Catherine Douglas, "can significantly increase milk ­production."

Building on that principle, I suggest that you give everything in your world names, including (but not limited to) houseplants, insects, cars, appliances, and trees.

It will help you get more up-close and personal with all of creation, which is an effective way to cultivate pronoia.

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3. Qabalist teacher Ann Davies told a story about a U.S. Army general negotiating with a cannibal chief in New Guinea during World War II.

The general wanted the chief to rally his tribe to help American troops fight the Japanese.

The chief refused, calling the Americans immoral.

The general was shocked. "We are not immoral!" he protested. "The Japanese are immoral!"

The cannibal chief replied, "The Japanese and Americans are equally immoral. You both kill far more people than you can eat."

Using this tale as your impetus, describe how parts of your moral code may not be rooted in an absolute standard of what's good and evil, but rather bound by the idiosyncrasies of your culture and historical era.

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4. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke urged an aspiring bard to change the way he imagined the Supreme Being.

"Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming," Rilke said, "who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?

"Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?"

How would your life change if you made this idea your working hypothesis?

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5. Comment on the following rant, which Beauty and Truth Lab operatives put on flyers and tacked up on laundromat bulletin boards all over San Francisco:

"The Doctrine of Original Sin? We spit on it. We reject it. We renounce it and forget it and annihilate it from reality.

"In its place we embrace the Doctrine of Original Fun. This reformulation asserts that it is our birthright to commune with regular doses of curious beauty and tricky truth and insurrectionary love.

"A robust, heroic joy is even now roaring through us, bringing us good ideas about how to apply the metaphor of ingenious foreplay to everything we do.

"We will not waste this euphoric deluge on any of the million and one numbing little diversions that pass for pleasure among the ecstasy-starved pursuers of mediocre joy. Rather, we will remain ever alert for the call of primordial delight."

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6. Psychotherapists say it's not only naughty but counterproductive to blame others for your problems. A skilled practitioner urges her clients to accept responsibility for the part they've played in creating their predicaments.

The reason is as much pragmatic as it is ethical: When you're obsessed with how people have done you wrong, you have little ambition to change the behavior in yourself that led you into the mess.

While I endorse this approach, I also know that dogmatic adherence to it can warp your mental health as much as any other form of fanaticism.

That's why I urge you to enjoy an unapologetic Blame Fest. Choose a time when you will find fault with everyone except yourself. Howl in protest at the unfair slights people have committed against you. Wallow in self-pity as you visualize the clueless jerks who have done you wrong.

For best results, bark your complaints in the direction of no one but God, an inanimate object, or your mirror.

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7. "Esoteric astrology teaches that anyone whose future can be predicted by any means is living like a robot. It assumes that some people are more robotic (predictable) than others; and that further implies some of us have more free will than others." Author Carolyn L. Vash wrote that in the Noetic Sciences Review.

How much free will do you have?

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8. We all have a war going on inside ourselves. What's yours? Is it a just and fruitful war or a senseless and wasteful war, or both?