I love it when you forget all your troubles and get lost in thoughts about your friends' problems. I love it when you place your entire focus on the heat steaming from your cup of coffee or on the sun reflecting on a puddle or on the mysterious expression gracing the face of a stranger. In fact I love it whenever you prove how much you love being here on earth by taking your attention off yourself, and giving it to everything else. The coming week will be a perfect time to specialize in this consummate art.

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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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 Powells.

Hunters recently killed a 50-ton whale off the coast of Alaska. While cutting it apart back on shore, they found a metal projectile lodged in its blubber from an older attack. Later research revealed it had been manufactured around 1890. That means the whale was at least 115 years old, and had been carrying around the projectile for over a century. I bring this to your attention, Taurus, in the hope that it will inspire you to meditate on your own ancient wound. When you pass on to the next world many years from now, I'd hate for you to still be infected with the hurt that befell you in your youth. It's an ideal time to take aggressive corrective action. Heal it!

Want to explore the coming week even further? Dig deeper? Push harder? Consider tuning in 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 Powells.

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," wrote novelist Philip K. Dick. I urge you to apply that benchmark to your own experience in the coming week, Gemini. You can generate a lot of creative energy by figuring out what is objectively true about your circumstances and what is merely illusion that's propped up by misperceptions and misunderstandings. You've got tremendous power to strip away the fantasies, both positive and negative, that are preventing you from living with 100 percent of your intelligence in the real world.

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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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 Powells.

Wealthy playboy Lapo Elkann is one of Italy's most eligible bachelors. But he told W magazine that if he ever decides to tie the knot, he would choose an Israeli woman. "For them, every day is a beautiful day," he said. "Because when you are in a climate of war, you take nothing for granted." Your next assignment, Cancerian, is not to put yourself in a battle zone, but rather to cultivate love with the same intense ingenuity and inexhaustible resourcefulness you might if you were living in a battle zone.

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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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 Powells.

Stories interest me more than beliefs. I'd rather hear you regale me with tales of your travels than listen to you recite your dogmas. Filmmaker Ken Burns agrees with me. He's worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories. "We are experiencing the death of narrative," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." Your assignment, Leo, is to help reverse this soul-damaging trend. Spout fewer opinions and tell more stories. Encourage others to do the same.

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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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 Powells.

"Dear Rob: I have eight distinctly different voices in my head. There's a hurt, oddly puffed-up voice that complains about everyone who has ever done me wrong. There's an hysterical voice that nags me with the thought that nothing I could ever do or say will make any difference to anyone, so why bother. Then there's the still, small voice. It has more gravity and feels more honest. It gives me useful instructions about specific things I could do to live a more meaningful life. The only trouble is, the other voices always blabber so loud I tend to neglect the only one that's actually helpful. Any advice? - Drowned Out." Dear Drowned: Set aside five minutes each morning and five minutes before bed. Whisper "Shut up, all the rest of you!", and then listen reverently to the still, small voice.

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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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 Powells.

"Weirdness is humanity's way of overcoming the ever-increasing pressure to live nine-to-five lives," says Bob Rickard, founder of Fortean Times, a magazine that reports on anomalous events. "We need craziness, it's that simple." I second that emotion, Libra -- especially for you right now. You don't realize how much juicy psychic material you've been repressing as a result of sticking to dry duty and routine. In order to recover lost secrets from your fertile depths, you're going to have to specialize for now in the mysterious, the curious, and the uncanny. It will help if you put yourself in situations that are outside your understanding.

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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"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 Powells.

The sharks in German aquariums weren't reproducing fast enough. Their keepers hired scientists to come up with the shark equivalent of aphrodisiacs. The most successful inducement to love was music -- especially Justin Timberlake's "Rock Your Body," Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry," and Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It." I suggest you play tunes like those for you and your chosen ones, Scorpio. It's an excellent time to coax out more of the tender, romantic sides of your inner shark, as well as the inner shark of anyone you're attracted to.

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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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 Powells.

In the nick of time, a wild card will appear. It will reverse the meaning of a series of events that seemed to be railroading you towards an unhappy ending. What will be the nature of that wild card? Maybe some missing evidence will trickle in, bringing the big picture into a rosier focus. Maybe you will realize how valuable your problem has actually been. And perhaps the wild card will be a divine intervention that shatters a mental block, thereby correcting a misapprehension you'd been under. In any case, Sagittarius, there will be an unexpected twist at the last turn of the plot, and it will lead you to at least a semi-happy ending.

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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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 Powells.

A marathon séance took place at the Burning Man festival last August. Top psychics managed to channel floods of data from dead celebrities. Among the fascinating revelations they retrieved: Princess Diana would like Gwyneth Paltrow to play her in a movie about her life; John Lennon would have preferred it if the Beatles' song "All You Need Is Love" was not used in a TV commercial for diapers; Ronald Reagan regrets having invaded the tiny nation of Grenada in 1983; and Nostradamus neglected to mention in his quatrains that in mid-November of 2007, Capricorns will enter a phase when they're likely to get a lot of useful information from what's seemingly dead and gone and past.

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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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 Powells.

On September 13, 1759, a small contingent of British troops took less than an hour to rout a few thousand French troops in a battle near Quebec City. It was a turning point in the history of North America, leading to events that ensured English speakers would dominate the continent. I foresee a comparable pivot just ahead for you, Aquarius. Seemingly small events that last a short time will yield momentous consequences. To help guarantee that they unfold in your favor, be like the British troops were back then: well-prepared, highly disciplined, and very lucky.

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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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 Powells.

If you chew coca leaves, you get a mild buzz, comparable to coffee, because your body metabolizes only tiny amounts of the plant's alkaloids. But in cocaine, which is made from processed coca leaves, those same alkaloids are highly concentrated. Snorting or smoking the stuff gives your bloodstream a potent blast. Bolivia's president Evo Morales wants the world to know the difference between the two. "The coca leaf is not cocaine," he says. He pledges to completely legalize coca in his country, citing its traditional uses as a food and medicine predating the European invasion. Is there a comparable scenario in your life, Pisces? Something that's bad for you when done to excess, but good for you in its understated natural state? It's a favorable time to commit yourself to its healthy use.

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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"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 Powells.