In her book Courtney Love: The Queen of Noise, Melissa Rossi reports that in the mid-1990s "Courtney surrounded herself with a coterie of soothsayers, even approaching hipster stargazer Rob Brezsny, who declined to provide his astrological services." Rossi doesn't explain why I declined, but I'll tell you. Courtney wasn't interested in the kind of information I specialize in. She pressed me to tell her whether her romantic future should be with Trent or Billy, and I urged her to talk about the changes she could make in herself and her life to get clear about what she wanted. She implored me to predict her future, and I prodded her to formulate intelligent questions that would help her create a beautiful and interesting future for herself. I bring this up, Aries, because in the coming weeks I hope you will do what I suggested she try back then.

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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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.
Track down people who are impossible to love, and love them defiantly without expecting anything in return.
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.
Once a year, say these words into a mirror: "It's bad luck to be superstitious."
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Taurus actor Pierce Brosnan told Parade, magazine how shocking it was to get fired after playing the role of James Bond for four films. But after the initial pain he felt from being rejected, he eventually got to the point where he could say, "I'm free now. I can do anything I want." What helped him recover was conjuring up the proper attitude. "You've got to be a fighting rooster," he said. That's half of my prescription for you in the coming week, Taurus. Be a charismatic warrior as you push to further your highest ideals and brightest desires. Be a stylishly fierce liberator in charge of designing your own freedom. Be a fighting rooster with the heart of an artist.

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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"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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Do you believe in higher love at first sight? How about instant enlightenment? And what about higher love at first sight that brings instant enlightenment, or instant enlightenment that provokes higher love at first sight? These are themes I suspect you'll soon be flirting with, Gemini. In order to get all of the blessings from the lessons they'll offer, you must dispense with your preconceived notions about what they might entail. You've got to wash your own brain so it's nice and clean and empty of expectations.

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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You're a star--and so am I. I'm a genius--and so are you. Your success encourages my brilliance, and my charisma enhances your power. Your victory doesn't require my defeat, and vice versa. Those are the rules in the New World--quite unlike the rules in the Old World, where zero-sum games are the norm, and only one of us can win each time we play. In the New World, you don't have to play down or apologize for your prowess, because you love it when other people shine. You exult in your own excellence without regarding it as a sign of inherent superiority. As you ripen more and more of your latent aptitude, you inspire the rest of us to claim our own idiosyncratic magnificence.
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Your creed for the last three months of 2008 comes from Nikos Kazantzakis: "By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." Memorize this meme, Cancerian. Imprint it on your subconscious mind. Make it so much a part of you that it breathes as you breathe, and dreams as you dream. Allow it to turn you into a magician whose potent desire is as strong as the longings of ten normal people put together.

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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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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Gleeking is a term that refers to a special kind of projectile spitting. To do it, you've got to practice. It involves pressing your tongue against your submaxillary salivary gland when a pool of drool has accumulated nearby. I recommend this practice for you in the coming week, Leo. It'll be a favorable time for you to be undignified, unpredictable, and even outrageous in expressing yourself. Other suggested practices: telling unruly stories concisely, speaking the truth with picturesque but disciplined extravagance, adding some vivid new slang to your body language, and skipping and hopping or even dancing as you walk. (Here are instructions on how to gleek.)

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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At the heart of the pronoiac way of life is an apparent conundrum: You can have anything you want if you'll just ask for it in an unselfish way. The trick to making this work is to locate where your deepest ambition coincides with the greatest gift you have to give. Figure out exactly how the universe, by providing you with abundance, can improve the lot of everyone whose life you touch. Seek the fulfillment of your fondest desires in such a way that you become a fount of 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. Go here to listen to a podcast of me delivering a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Talk back to those annoying voices in your head, Virgo -- I mean those nagging little chatterers who are second-guessing you ten times a day, who are trying to undermine your faith in what you started in recent weeks. And as you respond to their agitation, do so with poise and grace -- not with defensiveness, not with bitter complaint, but with a quietly aggressive confidence that the lucid intuitions you relied on to launch your new projects were basically sound. The annoying little voices are trying to convince you that you should go back to square one, when in fact you're on the right track but merely need to do some tinkering.

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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Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart—even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections.
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

"New ideas show up disguised innocently as interruptions, contradictions, and embarrassing dilemmas," says motivational speaker Rob Lebow. "Beware of total strangers and friends alike who shower you with comfortable sameness, and remain open to those who make you uneasy, for they are the true messengers of the future." That excellent advice is my birthday present to you, Libra. If you make use of it during the next three weeks, I bet you'll consistently be in the right place at the right time to extract the maximum benefit from your blind dates with destiny.

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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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.

Astrologer Caroline Casey offers an apt metaphor to illustrate how crucial it is for us to hear and read good stories. She notes that if we don’t have enough of the normal, healthy kind of iodine in our bodies, we absorb radioactive iodine, which has entered the food chain through nuclear test explosions conducted in the atmosphere. Similarly, unless we fill ourselves up with stories that invigorate us, we’re more susceptible to sopping up the poisonous, degenerative narratives.
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Robert Downey Jr. is grateful to Burger King for serving him such gross food. After eating a particularly foul meal there in 2003, he told Empire magazine, he was so disgusted that he drove to the beach and hurled all of his drugs into the sea. It was the shock he needed to begin the process of kicking his addiction. In that spirit, Scorpio, I suggest you seek out a similar epiphany -- whether that involves an encounter with greasy, fried cow meat or some other phenomenon that triggers your urge to rise up and purify yourself.

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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"If you bring forth the genius within you," said Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you." Is there any aspect of the genius within you that you're not bringing forth? If so, what can you do to change that?
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

It's a seller's market for you, Sagittarius. If I were you, I wouldn't buy a bunch of new stuff or invest in unripe possibilities. Rather, I'd cash in on the hard work I've been doing for many months now. I'd quit while I was ahead. I'd liquefy assets that might soon decline in their value to me but that are still at the height of their value to other people. In order for you to summon the brisk confidence necessary to pull this off, you'll have to resist greedy temptations to hold on to everything a little while longer.

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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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. Retrain your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Most American companies don't pay any federal income tax. During a recent seven-year period, 1.3 million businesses earned well over a trillion dollars but didn't pony up a penny to the U.S. government. I mention this, Capricorn, because it's now a favorable time, astrologically speaking, for you to seek comparable perks. Look into this, please: Maybe you don't have to keep having your assets drained in ways you've always assumed were inevitable. I'm talking metaphorically as well as literally; I'm referring to emotional and psychic energy as well as actual money. Are there any legal and ethical loopholes you can exploit to free yourself from long-running burdens?

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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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Once upon a time, Brave Aquarius wandered out to the edge of the known universe in search of mind-blowing sensations and foreign titillations and clues to the future. So imagine Brave Aquarius's amazement when the rather attractive ogre who was guarding the rope bridge that crossed over the abyss said, "Stop! You're headed the wrong way! The mind-blowing sensations and foreign titillations and clues to the future you crave are back in the direction you came from. In fact, they are all the way back where you started." What to do? The ogre's advice was counter-intuitive and downright confounding. But Brave Aquarius, being foremost an experimental adventurer, thought, "Hmmm. I guess maybe I'll try what the ogre suggested. What could be more experimental and adventurous than changing my mind?"

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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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.

Blessings will come if you cultivate as much stillness as possible. I'm not just talking about reducing the noise levels, although that's a good first step. Other things you might want to do: Cut way down on your use of the phone; text-message sparingly; surf the Internet 70 percent less than usual; avoid watching TV news altogether; and don't hang around people whose minds zip around like chimps on meth. As for your own monkey mind: See if you can enjoy some periods each day when the monkey gets to lie down in a soft place and watch the wide sky roll by.

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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It's time for the Gratitude Fest. Write thank-you notes to the creatures, both human and otherwise, that have played seminal roles in inspiring you to become yourself. Who have been your guides along the way, both the purposeful teachers and the inadvertent helpers? Who has seen you for who you really are? Who has nudged you in the direction of your fuller destiny and awakened you to your signature truths? Who has loved you very, very well?
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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 a new excerpt from the book. You can also get the podcast on iTunes.