Some people would like the world better if it didn't have oddballs, freaks, black sheep, misfits, and crackpots. Personally, I'm very much in favor of these types, and celebrate the entertaining diversity they add to the world. I hope you share my attitude, Aries, because you're going to have to be in intimate relationship with your own inner weirdo in the coming week. If you're prejudiced against people who don't act normal, you'll have trouble dealing with the unusual urges and needs that will be welling up in you. But if you've developed an appreciation for anomalous behavior, you'll be able to love yourself just right.

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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Discordianism is one of the rare religions that takes account of Ralph Abraham’s assertion that heart physiologists find more chaos in the healthy heart than in the sick heart. Here’s a sampling of Discordian tenets. 1. Everyone is a saint, especially you. 2. Meditation consists primarily of cruising around looking for good luck. 3. Eating hot dog buns is prohibited, except on Friday, when it’s compulsory. 4. When you’re stuck in a rut, you must speak in tongues, handle snakes, and experience phantasmagoria. 5. Your guardian angel loves you better when your room is a mess. 6. Bowling alleys are sacred; you must protect them from desecration. 7. The Goddess will solve all your problems if you solve all hers.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

After studying the astrological omens, I had a psychic vision of you jumping up and down, screaming with joy as if you'd won the lottery. That doesn't necessarily mean you will actually win the lottery, though. My visions are usually symbolic, not literal. So what does it mean? It could prophesy the imminent arrival of a good surprise. It may signify that your physical vitality will be exceptional, or maybe you will be visited by an exhilarating revelation about the future. To get yourself in the proper spirit, why not jump up and down and scream for joy right now? Then keep doing it at least twice a day until the breakthrough actually occurs.

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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Tantric sex practitioners say an artful lover never makes love the same way twice.

Similarly, chanteuse Billie Holiday believed a good singer should never sing a song the same way twice. If you use all the same phrasing and melody, she said, you’re failing your art.

The only Zen master we know--whose name we can’t tell you because she changes it every week, and we haven’t heard the latest one--likes to quote the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has the last word: "Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

After my psychic reading in Santa Rosa, I waited in the parking lot for a friend to pick me up. To entertain myself, I watched a robin as it pecked at a small patch of grass nearby. I applauded when it snagged a fat worm for its meal. Minutes later, I cheered and whistled as it found a second worm. When the bird subsequently plucked up yet another reddish-brown wriggler, I yelled "Bravo! Bravo!" Still it continued to hunt. My mood turned. "Aren't you getting greedy?" I said to the robin. It rummaged around fruitlessly for a while, no longer in tune (or so I imagined) with the grace of the cosmos. The moral of the story, in accordance with your current astrological omens: Be alert for the unexpected abundance packed into a seemingly modest space or situation, but don't try to keep milking that bounty beyond what you need.

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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A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship with another human being is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don’t ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can single-handedly sink the most promising alliances. To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

There's more help available to you right now than you realize. You may have to cure yourself of an illusion in order to connect with it, however. What's the illusion? I suspect it's a misguided belief that you never have enough help! Here's another mini-shocker, Cancerian: You've been making a certain process more difficult than it has to be. If and when you cure yourself of an illusion, everything could very well snap into place and the process will unfold with relative ease. What's the illusion? I suspect it's your (unconscious?) belief that success is more valuable if it's hard and complicated.

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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"I’ve been practicing radical authenticity lately," my friend Brandon told me. "I’m revealing the blunt truth about unmentionable subjects to everyone I know. It’s been pretty hellish—no one likes having the social masks stripped away—but it’s been ultimately rewarding."

"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I’m curious as to why you imply they’re all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn’t you also express the raw truth about what’s right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn’t you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"

Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don’t. As a budding lover of life, you have a mandate to be honest in both ways.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

It's a perfect moment for you to try the kind of money mojo that worked for one of my readers, Tamara L. of Las Vegas. Here's her testimony: "I never believed in any of this mystic mumbo-jumbo before. But I was desperate. I was paying the price after indulging in the sick pleasure of telling my boss to go to hell. I couldn't pay my bills. What did I have to lose? I took Rob Brezsny's advice and did a financial ritual. I wrote 'I hereby purify my money karma' on a dollar bill, then burned it in the flame of a green candle while wearing a hat made out of the Wall Street Journal and chanting the magic spell 'Money is my servant, not my god.' Within days, I won big at the casino."

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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"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. Think 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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

Surprise! You're not as fragile as you imagine. Now and then -- like the phase you're going through this September, for instance -- your health thrives if you push and stretch and test yourself harder than usual. So for the time being, Virgo, I urge you to proceed on the assumption that the most likely way to feel your best is to try things you've previously considered to be beyond your capacity.

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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Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day [put date here] that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

On his Bad News Hughes blog, Patrick Hughes warned his readers never to use a mini-vacuum cleaner to suck up the contents of an ashtray. Speaking from experience, he said the rapid intake of air could reignite waning embers and create a fiery mess. I suggest you make that your metaphor of the week, Libra. It's a good time to clean the hell out of everything in your life and throw away all the stuff that's dead to you. But make sure that whatever you dispose of doesn't contain some smoldering remains that could blow up in your face. (P.S. I'm not predicting things will blow up, but rather advising you what to do so that they don't blow up.)

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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Like all of us, you have desires for things that you don’t really need and aren’t good for you. But you shouldn’t disparage yourself for having them, nor should you conclude that every desire is tainted. Rather, think of your misguided longings as the bumbling, amateur expressions of a faculty that will one day be far more expert. They’re how you practice as you work toward the goal of becoming a master of desire. It may take a while, but eventually you will get the hang of wanting things that are really good for you, and good for everyone else, too.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

It's Let It Go Week, Scorpio -- also known as Just Drop It Week. This is a fertile moment in your astrological cycle, a time when you'll be rewarded with a creative influx if you surrender your tight grip, give up your obsessive hold, and stop clinging to your hardened expectations. So I urge you to summon your most brazen vigor and get yourself as completely unstuck as you dare. And please keep in mind that this should be relaxing fun, not a worrisome ordeal.

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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Plant orchids on a strip-mined hill.
Imagine you have a guardian angel who looks like Malcolm X.
Teach an animal to dance.
Hire a puppet troupe to reenact your life story using marionettes in Renaissance costumes.
Make believe you are the ocean king or thunder queen.
Improvise a fresh bedtime story for someone you love.
Put on an inflatable sumo wrestler costume and play a bagpipe as badly as possible.
Watch TV with your third eye.
Sip holy water blessed by a smart teenage girl.
Bear in mind that you are the Chosen One, and so is everyone else.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

Once a year I hike into the hills above San Anselmo, CA and perform a concert for the trees, birds, insects, and sun. If clouds happen to show up that day, I include them as part of my audience. The show typically consists of 80-minutes' worth of a cappella songs and ecstatic poems, along with my "Dionysian sermons" and "primordial gossip." None of my listeners ever express anything resembling applause, but that's fine. For me, it's an exercise in giving without strings attached. I provide the gift simply because it makes me feel good to be generous, not because I have expectations about how the gift will be used. I recommend that you find an equivalent approach to bestowing blessings in the coming week.

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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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

Writing in the magazine sub-TERRAIN, John More makes the following declaration: "Captains of industry, great generals, artists of genius, even politicians, are often just people who have discovered that alcohol can enable them to make economic, tactical, creative, or political decisions whose implications would paralyze a sober individual." Your assignment, Capricorn, is to find an alcohol-free way to make such a decision. It's time for you to summon visionary courage from your soul, not from a bottle, as you catalyze complex blessings that will ripple through your future for a long time.

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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A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There’ll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe. But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? What if your day-to-day decisions will actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we’re living through? And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of the memories of the person you were back in this era? These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. Which is why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

To get a read on how democracy and human rights are faring on the planet, check out the research of an organization called Freedom House (freedomhouse.org). In its most-recent annual report, it declared that 90 countries are free. They represent 47 percent of the world's population. Fifty-eight countries, accounting for another 30 percent of the human swarm, are "partly free." Then there are the "not free" nations: 45 of them, with 23 percent of the Earth's inhabitants. (Half of the "not free" people are in China.) It so happens that your personal degree of freedom, Aquarius, almost matches the world's. You're 46 percent completely free, 35 percent partly free, and 19 percent not free. The good news is that the coming weeks will be an excellent time to reduce that 19 percent.

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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In The Book of Embraces, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes, "The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking,' to define language that speaks the truth." Describe a time when you pulled off the feat of thinking with your heart and feeling with your head.
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.

Your funny bone isn't a bone at all; it's actually your ulnar nerve. A firefly is a beetle, not a fly. A lead pencil has graphite in it, but no lead. A cucumber is technically a fruit, not a vegetable. Is there anything in your life that might be mislabeled like these things? Anything that's different from what it's alleged to be? Now is an excellent time to penetrate to the truth below the prevailing assumptions.

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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When you’re an aspiring master of pronoia, you see the cracks in the facades as opportunities; inspiration erupts as you careen over bumps in the road; you love the enticing magic that flows from situations that other people regard as rough or crooked. "That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal," wrote poet Charles Baudelaire, "from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment—is an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering an excerpt from the book.