"Listen! I will be honest with you. I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes." Walt Whitman wrote that in his poem "Song of the Open Road," and now I'm saying it to you. If you expect the events of 2007 to bring you old smooth prizes, you'll be disappointed. But if you can figure out how to change your attitude in such a way as to actually yearn for rough new prizes, you will be rewarded beyond anything you can imagine. The first hint of how true this is will arrive soon.

Want to hear more about the hidden factors influencing your life in the coming week? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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"Whoever has, shall be given more and more," reads the Gospel of Matthew, "while whoever has nothing, even what he has will be taken away from him."

Pronoiac translation: Whatever you choose to focus your attention on, you will get more of it. If you often think of everything you lack and how sad you are that you don't have it, you will tend to receive abundant evidence of how true that is.

If, on the other hand, you dwell on the good things that make you feel grateful to be alive, they will probably multiply.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Drugs and alcohol need play no role in activating this week's potentials. Your mind will just naturally inhabit what we in the consciousness industry call an "altered state." This is very different from being sick or crazy, and it could turn out much better than being merely healthy. My advice to you? Break taboos that are no longer necessary to observe. Wander uninhibitedly in zones that have previously been off-limits. Explore the frontiers of fun. (P.S. If you try what I'm suggesting, chances are good that you'll finally be able to scratch an itch that has been maddeningly inaccessible. But be sure you know when you've scratched enough.)

What blessings will life bring you in the coming week? What challenges will you be invited to dive into? To explore the ripening trends further, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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I'm allergic to dogma. I thrive on the riddles. Any idea I believe, I reserve the right to disbelieve as well.

But more than any other vision I've ever tested, pronoia describes the way the world actually is. It's wetter than water, stronger than death, and truer than the news. It smells like cedar smoke in early spring rain, and if you close your eyes right now, you can feel it shimmering like the aurora borealis in your organs and muscles. Its song is your blood's song.

Some people argue that life is strife and suffering is normal. Others swear we're born sinful and only heaven can provide us with the peace that passes understanding. But pronoia says that being alive on the rough green and brown earth is the highest honor and privilege. It's an invitation to work wonders and perform miracles that aren't possible in any nirvana, promised land, or afterlife.

I'm not exaggerating or indulging in poetic metaphor when I tell you that we are already living in paradise. Visualize it if you dare. The sweet stuff that quenches all of our longing is not far away in some other time and place. It's right here and right now.

Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew the truth: "Earth's crammed with heaven."
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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 Barnes & Noble.

"God was a little too busy to do anything about the genocide in Darfur last weekend," reported Fark.com a while back, "but did manage, during a snowstorm in Buffalo, to leave fallen tree limbs in the form of a crucifix on a statue of Jesus." That's a mean-spirited interpretation of the Divine Wow's behavior, although it's funny in a snarky kind of way. Your assignment in the coming week, on the other hand, is to joke about spiritual matters with a more generous attitude. It's prime time for you to be humorously amazed by the tricky enigmas of creation.

Need a few more whacks applied to your mental blocks in the coming week? A few more caresses administered to your growing edge? Cruise on over to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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The novelist Willa Cather once said: "One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness. One only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere."

But I disagree with Willa Cather. I share the view of Rick Foster and Greg Hicks, who wrote the book, How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People. They say that the number one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy. In other words, they say bliss is not an accident that you stumble upon by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere. Bliss is a habit that you can cultivate. Which theory would you prefer to believe?

Here's what I say. Terence McKenna said it for me: "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy."
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Imagine you're with a team of explorers in Antarctica. You're climbing the 2,000-foot granite spire called Rakekniven that thrusts up out of the ice in Queen Maud Land. The temperature is ten degrees below zero. There's not a plant or animal in sight. The blinding white emptiness of the wasteland beneath you fills you with desolate reverence, alienated awe, and soaring gratitude. As far as you are from everything that normally gives you comfort, you've rarely felt stronger or more alive. Got that scene in your mind's eye, Cancerian? Though you won't experience it literally, I bet you'll experience emotions similar to those you'd have if you did.

Where do you want to go in the coming week? Who do you want to be? For more clues, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Try this meditation: Imagine that you are both the wood and the fire that consumes the wood. When you focus your awareness on the part of you that is the wood, you hurt; it's painful to feel your sense of solidity disintegrating. But as you shift your attention to the part of you that is the fire, you exult in the wild joy of liberation and power.

It may be tempting to visualize yourself more as the fire than the wood. But if you'd like to understand life's blessing in their fullness, you've got to be both wood and fire simultaneously.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Your face alternately contorts with strain and breaks into beatific grins. Your body language careens from garbled jargon to melodic poetry. Your clothes make a fool of you one day and show off your inner beauty the next. Are you becoming bi-polar? Probably not. The more likely explanation is that you're being convulsed by growing pains that are killing off bad old habits as fast as they're creating interesting new ones. This is one of those times when you should be proud to wear a badge that says "hurts so good."

Want to explore the coming week even further? Dig deeper? Push harder? Consider tuning in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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While you and I are together here:

Your favorite phrase is flux gusto

The colors of your soul are sable, vermilion, ivory, and jade

Your magic talisman is a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth

Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change

Your soil of destiny is peat moss

Your mythic symbol is a treasure chest dislodged from its hiding place in the earth by a flood

Your lucky number is 13 to the 13th power

Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics

A clutch of frog eggs from an unpolluted river is your auspicious hair-care product

The anonymous celebrity with whom you have most in common is the jester who followed Buddha around and kept him loose

The question that perks you up when your routine becomes too rote is this: What possesses the bar-tailed godwit to migrate annually from Alaska to New Zealand by hitching rides on gale-force winds?
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Here's the bad news. Sometimes your perfectionism verges on being a sophisticated death trip--a manic compulsion to trap life inside a tight little cell where no change is allowed. Here's the good news: You now have the power to strip away the pathological part of your perfectionism and liberate the healthy core of it. Please swear to me that you'll figure out how to be more fluid and playful with your zeal for excellence. Spend less time running your mind in vicious circles and more time running your mind in upward spirals.

Need more help with your riddles? Crave more support in your efforts to build your courage? Check out you EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Material in the "Free Will Astrology" horoscopes may be too intense and controversial for some readers. It contains graphic scenes of peace, love, joy, passion, reverence, splendor, and understanding. Within these pages, there is a severe dearth of references to alcoholism, suicide, prostitution, bigotry, lawsuits, greed, explosions, child abuse, terrorism, embezzlement, plane crashes, extortion, medical malpractice, betrayal, armed robbery, heart disease, rape, arson, and torture.

Therefore, you should proceed with caution if you are a jaded hipster who is suspicious of feeling healthy and happy. Ask yourself: "Am I ready to stop equating cynicism with insight? Do I dare take the risk that exposing myself to uplifting entertainment might dull my intelligence?" If you doubt your ability to handle relaxing breakthroughs, you should avoid reading the "Free Will Astrology" horoscopes.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

There are three kinds of darkness: (1) pathology and evil; (2) the mysterious unknown; (3) the shadowy, unripe parts of our psyches that are on their way to becoming more interesting and useful but are still awkward and inarticulate. I believe that you can help prevent outbreaks of the first kind of darkness by developing a closer personal relationship with the second and third types. This would be a good time for you to do just that, Libra.

No one knows you better than you do. But maybe you'll be inspired to dig up even more self-knowledge in the coming week if you tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It's the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It's a mode of retraining your senses and intellect so you're able to perceive that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.

PROCEDURE: Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Scorpio actor Leonardo DiCaprio is not a big fan of locking lips. "When you think about it, kissing is pretty disgusting," he told Britain's Eva magazine. "The human mouth is one of the dirtiest things on this planet. There's so much bacteria, slime, and trapped food." I hope that you will not only ignore DiCaprio's opinion in the coming months, but that you will launch a campaign to increase your commitment to kissing and all related pursuits. In my opinion, the potentials inherent in 2007 should inspire you to raise your mastery of the oral arts to a very high level. And it starts now.

What greater adventure is there than exploring the enigmas of your unique destiny? For more hints about the week ahead, listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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"The secret of life," said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, "is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is--it must be something you cannot possibly do." What is that task for you?
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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 Barnes & Noble.

"The thing that makes you exceptional is inevitably that which must also make you lonely," said playwright Lorraine Hansberry. I agree. That's why my exuberant advice for you this week is also cautionary. According to my reading of the omens, in 2007 you will have unprecedented opportunities to cultivate and express the special talents that make you so unique. To get to the root of them, though, you'll have to be willing to get less of the approval and appreciation you'd ideally like to have. You may not have to be relentlessly solitary, but you will have to be vigorously independent.

Got enough clues to chew on for a while? If you need more, give yourself the luxury of your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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With luck and persistence, you will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time--not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself; crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths; outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with boisterous empathy; generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you; and a lust for justice that's leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Harper's Index says the U.S. government spends more than twice as much on military defense than do Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran combined. The aggregate population of those four countries, on the other hand, is five times larger than America's 300 million people. One might reasonably conclude, therefore, that while the U.S. has a right to safeguard itself, its glut of weaponry is absurdly extreme. I'm not definitively asserting, Capricorn, that you, too, are over-invested in defending and protecting your interests, but the astrological omens suggest it's a possibility. Please look into it. In any case, consider freeing up some of your contracted, fearful energy and directing it toward more pleasurable and constructive goals.

How much do you want to know about your destiny in the coming week? How far do you dare to go? For more insight into your intriguing fate, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you’ve been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect. The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, that continually detonates nuclear reactions in order to convert its body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

You can walk! Your legs work wonderfully well. Your heart circulates your blood all the way down to replenish the energy of the muscles in your feet and calves and thighs, and when the blood has delivered its blessings, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This wondrous mystery recurs over and over again without stopping every hour of your life.

You can smell aromas and you can hear sounds and you can taste tastes, many of which are quite enjoyable. You can think! You can feel feelings and visualize images of things that don't even exist. You’re in possession of the extraordinary power of self-awareness. Do you realize how far-fetched that stupendous ability is? You not only know that you are you. You also know that you know that you know you are you.

Each of the 50 trillion cells in your body can be considered a sentient being in its own right, and they all act together as a community, performing an ongoing act of prodigious collaboration.

By some improbable series of coincidences or long-term divine plan, language has come into existence. Millions of people have collaborated for many centuries to cultivate a system for communication that you understand very well. Speaking and reading and writing give you great pleasure and a tremendous sense of potency.

Do you remember when you were born, by the way? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked very hard on your behalf. No less miraculous is the fact that you have continued to grow since then, with millions of new cells being born within you all the time to replace the old ones that are dying. It's just like magic.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

Some Christians believe Jesus will come back to fix this corrupt world. Certain Jewish sects propose that the messiah will soon appear on earth for the first time. Among Muslims, many predict the legendary 12th Imam will return and bring salvation to humanity. In India, devotees of Vishnu expect the avatar Kalki to arrive on the scene and carry out a miraculous redemption. Even the Buddhists prophesy Maitreya, the chosen one who'll establish universal peace. Personally, I suspect that the whole point of our spectacularly confounding moment in history is that each of us must become our own savior. The coming year will be an excellent time, Aquarius, for you to master the art of doing just that: being your own savior. And it all starts now. (P.S. You can perform a great service by being a role model for those who haven't yet figured out how to be their own saviors.)

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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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.
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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 Barnes & Noble.

In Cracker's hit song "Where Have Those Days Gone," singer David Lowery recounts a road trip he made through his old haunts in California. "In Mendocino County, I thought I saw Thomas Pynchon at the end of the bar," he croons. "No, that's just Rob Brezsny writing his astrology column." While in the past I've been confused with David Duchovny, Peter Coyote, and Ry Cooder, this marks the first time I've been mistaken for the great novelist Pynchon. Thanks, David. Now it's time for you Pisceans to find out what celebrity you resemble. The omens say it's perfect moment for you to identify with a hero, role model, or famous mover and shaker. To do so might help free your self-image from the unheroic confines it has gotten stuck in. Go here to investigate: http://tinyurl.com/c4x23.

Want more clues? Need further insight? For more evocative questions and pithy suggestions about your destiny in the coming week, check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Six miles from Maui is a Hawaiian island that tourists never visit—Kaho'olawe. The U.S. Navy seized it in 1941 and used it as a target range for decades. After years of protests by Native Hawaiians, the Navy finally stopped bombing and began a clean-up campaign. In November, 2003, it formally turned control of the island over to the rightful owners.

"You can get a feel on Kaho'olawe of what it was like to live on Hawaii at the time of our ancestors," says Native Hawaiian Davianna McGregor. "We can practice our traditions there without it being a tourist attraction. It's one place we can go to be in communion with our natural life forces."
Each of us has a personal version of Kaho'olawe: a part of our psyche that has been stolen or colonized by hostile forces. To grow bolder in exploring pronoia, you'll need to take back yours.
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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 Barnes & Noble.