Ernest Hemingway said that his best work was a very short story consisting of six words: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Alan Moore's brief masterpiece of fiction is, I think, just as good: "Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time." Here's another gem, written anonymously: "The last man on earth heard a knock on the door." Your assignment in the coming week, Aries, is to be as pithy as these terse geniuses. Proceed on the assumption that your effectiveness will thrive in direct proportion to your brevity and conciseness. Assume that you will be most likely to get what you want if you use the fewest words and the most minimal actions necessary.

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

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Imagine that you have been relieved of your responsibilities for a given time. They will be taken care of by people you trust. You won't have to work to make money during this grace period, but will be given all you need. Nor will you have to clean your house, wash your clothes, or buy and make your food. Now here's the big question: What will you do now that you are free to do anything you like?
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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.

"Too bad 90 percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation," said Henry Kissinger. I'm tempted to draw a similar conclusion about physicians, cops, lawyers, performance artists, and a host of other professionals with whom I've had direct contact. Whether or not you agree with me, please be very picky in the coming days, Taurus. As you seek out "experts" to help or counsel you, make sure they are at the top of their respective fields. Do background research, get personal references, and try to experience them when their guards are down.

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

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If I ever produce a self-help manual called The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want, it will discuss the following paradoxes:

a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you're not greedy or grasping.

b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you've already achieved them.

c. Whatever you're longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It's not the same as it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. In order to make it yours, then, you will have to modify your ideas about it.

d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn't foresee.

Review your own life and identify experiences that exemplify these four principles.
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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.

Do you realize that you now have a great potential to instigate ringing surprises? Your knack for healing the seemingly unhealable is at a peak, as is your ability to accomplish the impossible, get insight into the incomprehensible, and feel equanimity amidst the uncontrollable. What do you plan to do with all that mojo, Gemini? I suggest that you act like a character in a fairy tale who has been given three wishes. Not two or four, but three.

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

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Review in painstaking detail the history of your life, honoring every moment as if you were conducting a benevolent Judgment Day. Forgive yourself of every mistake except one.

Create a royal crown for yourself out of a shower cap, rubber bands, and light bulbs.

Think of the last place on earth you'd ever want to visit, and visualize yourself having fun there.

Test to see if people are really listening to you by asserting that Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers.

Steal lint from dryers in laundromats and use it to make animal sculptures for someone you admire.

Fantasize you’re the child of divine parents who abandoned you when you were two days old, but who will soon be coming back to reunite with you.

Meditate on how one of the symbols of plenitude in Nepal is a mongoose vomiting jewels.

Once a year on the night before your birthday, say these words into a mirror: “It’s bad luck to be superstitious.”

Start a club whose purpose is to produce an archive of controversial jokes and obscene limericks about beauty, truth, and love.
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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: My mother tells me I'm fat but feeds me pork rinds. My strongest supporter is a person I want to wrap up like a mummy, put in a canoe, and push out into the middle of the lake. My exuberant imagination has taken me hostage, violating its own principles. I'm so completely ambivalent and indecisive about everything that even my addictive nature can't figure out what to be addicted to. I'd embrace my contradictions if I could, but I can't because they've got me surrounded like a pink-haired, cross-dressing SWAT team frothed up on Red Bull. Can you point me in the direction of the exit from this circus-like hell? - Crazy Crab." Dear Crazy: I detect a lot of wit and style in your meditations. Maybe that's the purpose of this limbo you're temporarily lost in: It's an opportunity to build your skill at being lively and feisty and smart no matter what your outer circumstances are.

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

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I was never the class clown. I am not a troubled but devilishly handsome wastrel living on a trust fund. I've never beaten up anyone, have steadfastly not aspired to write like Raymond Carver, and have never played strip Scrabble with a celebrity junkie on a leaky waterbed in a Key West penthouse. There are so many things I am not and will never be, and I'm glad I know about them. It helps me stay focused on exactly who I am. What about you? Who aren't you? Fantasize about all the paths you will never take. Put it in writing.
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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.

I love this excerpt from "The Seeker," a poem by Rilke in his Book of Hours (translated by Robert Bly): "I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song." Here's my own personal variation: "I am circling around love, around the throbbing hum, and I have been circling for thousands of days, and I still don't know if I am a wounded saint, or a rainy dawn, or a creation story." Please compose your own version of this poem, Leo. It's an excellent time to fantasize about what you're circling around and what force of nature you might be.

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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"Is it bad to live without a hell?" poet Pablo Neruda asks in The Book of Questions. Let's add these queries to his: Is it dangerous to live without an enemy? Is it naive to think you can achieve great success without the driving motivation that comes from having ideas you hate? There are thousands of correct answers to these questions. What are yours?

Consider the issue from another angle. Dentists love tooth decay. Treating cavities provides them with a steady source of income. Likewise, exterminators are dependent on termites, lawyers need crimes, and priests are hungry for sinners. Lots of people have symbiotic connections with nasty stuff. In fact, isn't it true that most of us nurture our feelings for the things we love to despise and fear?

What's your favorite poison or adversary? Assume that your exposure to pronoia is changing you in ways that will require you to update your relationship with it. Speculate on how you'll go about this task. The factor most likely to drive us to addiction or illness is a lack of intimate contact with spirit. We all need a daily dose of vastness. Paradoxically, many of us would also benefit from more microscopic vision. Because we're so deprived of divine connection, we're half-dreaming all the time; our unconscious yearning for our eternal source makes our minds wander and saps our energy to dig in and master the gritty details that are right in front of us.
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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.

Your role model is Tilly Trotter, a blind, 74-year-old grandmother who lives in the UK. She took up archery two years ago despite her handicap. Recently she pulled off a rare feat, shooting her arrow so precisely that it split another arrow already lodged in the target. Among archers, this is called a Robin Hood. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, you now have the power to do something similar, Virgo: overcome a disadvantage in order to accomplish a riveting triumph that would be difficult even for those who don't have to deal with a limitation like yours. You're primed to carry out your personal version of a Robin Hood.

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

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The factor most likely to drive us to addiction or illness is a lack of intimate contact with spirit. We all need a daily dose of vastness. Paradoxically, many of us would also benefit from more microscopic vision. Because we're so deprived of divine connection, we're half-dreaming all the time; our unconscious yearning for our eternal source makes our minds wander and saps our energy to dig in and master the gritty details that are right in front of us.
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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.

Here's transpersonal psychologist Roger Walsh, writing in the December 2001 issue of IONS Review: "This is the first time in history that publicly acknowledging that you follow two or more distinct spiritual traditions would not have you burned at the stake, stoned to death, or facing a firing squad. We tend to forget what an extraordinary time this is, that for the first time in history we have the entirety of the world's spiritual and religious traditions available to us, and we can practice them . . . without fear." I advise you to take full advantage of this extraordinary freedom, Libra -- especially now, while you're in a phase of your astrological cycle that's conducive to expanding your spiritual repertoire. Think about adding some ideas and practices and magic from outside your established belief system.

Want to hear more about the hidden factors influencing your life? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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Don't make nasty comments about yourself behind your own back.

Do play soccer in bunny slippers at dawn in a supermarket parking lot with a gang of sadomasochistic stockbrokers who've promised to teach you the Balinese monkey chant.

Don't decorate your thigh with a sloppy tattoo of the devil pushing a lawn mower.

Do wear a t-shirt that says, "Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."

Don't glide into a bar, scout around for the person whose face has the most pain etched in it, and ask that person to come home with you.

Do eat ripe organic strawberries that have been genetically modified and irradiated, and do chain-smoke Marlboros as you peddle your exercise bicycle, and do wander through a garbage dump while listening to Mozart on your iPod.

Don't get hooked on the fantasy that there are only two kinds of people, those who align themselves with the forces of light and those who align themselves with the forces of darkness.

Do start an organization called POMP (Proud Owners of Multiple Personalities), dedicated to erasing negative stereotypes about healthy non-schizophrenics who enjoy being a community of many different selves.

Don't lie on a floor surrounded by wine-stained poetry books, crumpled Matisse prints, abandoned underwear, and half-eaten bowls of corn flakes as you stare up at the ceiling with a mad gaze, muttering gibberish and waving your hands as if swatting away demons.

Do run along the tops of cars during a traffic jam, escaping from bad guys as you make your way to a helicopter that takes you to a spot hovering over an erupting volcano, into which you drop the Buns of Steel video.

Don't put your soul up for auction on the eBay website.

Do write a cookbook filled with recipes you've channeled from dead celebrities.

If you come upon a lamp with a genie in it, don't wish you had a magic wand.
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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 her natal horoscope, Icelandic chanteuse Bjork has the sun, moon, and Neptune in the sign of Scorpio. Here's how she describes what it's like being her: "I have to re-create the universe every morning when I wake up, and kill it in the evening." Sound familiar? That's a pretty good summary of the temperament of your tribe, and especially so right now, as you navigate your way through the astrological House of Resurrection.

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

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Every fundamentalist divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and like him and help him, and those who don't. There is only one right way to interpret the world—according to the ideas the fundamentalist believes to be true—and a million wrong ways.

The fundamental attitude of all fundamentalists is to take everything way too seriously and too personally and too literally. Imagination is a sin and a crime. Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system.

And here's the bad news: Like almost everyone in the world, each of us has our own share of the fundamentalist virus. It may not be as dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists or Christian politicians or CEOs who act as if making a financial profit is the supreme good or scientists who deny the existence of the 96 percent of reality imperceptible to the five senses. Our fundamentalism is not as virulent as theirs.

But still: We are infected, you and I, with fundamentalism. What are we going to do about it?

I say we practice taking everything less seriously and less personally and less literally.
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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.

Most astronomers are irrationally prejudiced against us astrologers. They typically deride our ancient art without ever having read any of the masters whose work articulates the core principles of astrology. It's the equivalent of speaking about the theory of relativity without ever having studied Einstein. Despite their disdain, I don't hate them back. On the contrary, I celebrate their efforts to understand the universe, and I make abundant use of the information they've gleaned. Be like me in the coming week, Sagittarius. Appreciate those who don't appreciate you, especially if they are doing good work that can benefit you and others.

Need a few more whacks applied to your mental blocks? A few more caresses administered to your growing edge? Cruise on over to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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Every act of genius, Carl Jung said, is an act contra naturam: against nature. Indeed, every effort to achieve psychological integration and union with the divine requires a knack for working against the grain. The 18th-century mystic Jacob Boehme recommended the same technique. The great secret to becoming enlightened, he said, is "to walk in all things contrary to the world." Qabalist teacher Paul Foster Case agreed: "The basis of the spiritual approach to life, the foundation of the everyday practice of a person who lives the life of obedience to esoteric law, is the reversal of the more usual ways of thinking, speaking and doing."

Name the ways you already use this approach, and brainstorm about others you might like to try.
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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.

This would be a good week to celebrate failure -- to laugh about the comic horror stories of your past defeats, to gain a new appreciation for the prickly lessons you learned, and to let go of any regret, shame, or anger you might still be lugging around. I'd even recommend that you and your friends stage a Brag About Your Failures party. Try to outdo each other as you render in ignominious detail the things that went wrong, the mistakes you made, and the people who let you down. I think you'll be amazed at how effectively this will dissolve the karma left over from those misadventures -- and help free you from their ghostly clutches.

Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? For more clues, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy designed to keep us well supplied with blessings. What kind of blessings? Palatial homes, attractive lovers, lottery winnings, career success? Maybe. But just as likely: interesting surprises, unexpected challenges, gifts we hardly know what to do with, conundrums that force us to get smarter.

Novelist William Vollman referred to the latter types of blessings when he said that "the most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that's a complicated, tricky problem for you that you don't know how to solve."
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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.

Maybe you've conceived a child at some time in your life. Maybe you never have or never will. Whatever the case, even if you're a man, I invite you to visualize the experience. Imagine that a force of nature has germinated, and that you are carrying another life within you. Try to approximate the uncanny twinge that a pregnant woman senses when her fetus first moves. This exercise will be a simulation of and rehearsal for the psychic quickening you will soon enjoy.

Do you want further explorations of the intriguing twists and turns of your personal evolution? Check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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Have you ever had permission to indulge in a marathon of braggadocio? Have you ever gotten an invitation to bluster on endlessly about your own charms without feeling even a touch of guilt or inhibition? I hereby grant you such a license right now.

When you're ready, carry out the exercise called Brag Therapy. Grab a good listener or a recording device, and boast extravagantly about yourself for at least 20 minutes. Expound in exhaustive detail why you're so wonderful and why the world would be a better place if everyone would just act more like you.

Don't be humble or cautious. Go too far. Heap extreme glory on yourself. Brazenly proclaim the fabulous qualities about you that no one has ever fully articulated or appreciated. Don't forget to extol the prodigious flaws and vices that make you so special.

What does this have to do with pronoia? When you audaciously identify your existing gifts, you set yourself up to become a magnet for even greater abundance. In fact, we recommend that you treat yourself to a Brag Therapy session regularly.

To whet your imagination, read an excerpt from the boast of Eric Baer, a participant in a Brag Therapy session I hosted in Milwaukee. "I have opposable thumbs," Eric exulted. "I can read. I breathe all the way through the night even though I'm asleep. I have access to emporiums where I can choose from 25 different brands of toilet paper. I know how to turn food into energy. I live where knuckleheads run everything and yet nothing ever blows up."
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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 her journals, Sylvia Plath said there are two different ways to be free of desires. The first is when you are "dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world." The second is when you are "so full and rich and have so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of your being." In the past, Pisces, you have had a few encounters with the dead and rotten state. But I believe you are now in a phase when the full and rich condition will prevail. During this grace period, you will not really need anything beyond what you already have. My advice? Start the celebration!

Need more help with your riddles? Crave more support in your efforts to build your courage? Check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination. Talk about the last time you dwelt in kumulipo.
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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.