The poet Stephen Mallarme wrote the following in a letter to a friend: "I don't know which of my internal climates I should explore in order to find you and meet you." I love that passage. It alludes to one of the central facts about the nature of reality: The quality of your consciousness is crucial in determining whether you'll be able to attract the resources that are essential to your dreams coming true. In order to get what you want, you have to work on yourself at least as hard as you work on the world around you. This is always true, of course, but it's especially true for you now, Aries.

What better adventure is there than understanding your unique destiny? For more hints, listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

Is there anything in your life that you don't really want but nevertheless find it hard to part with? A situation or experience that gives you a perverse sense of comfort because of its familiarity, even though it has a steep emotional cost and doesn't serve your higher dreams? If so, the coming week will be an excellent time to change your relationship with it. You will make dramatic progress if you brainstorm about how you could break up the stagnant energy that keeps you entranced and entrapped.

Got enough clues to chew on? If you need more, check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

One of my New Age friends says she has it on good authority that the Seven Lords of Time will reconvene in their Himalayan sanctuary on December 21, 2012 and reinvent the nature of time, as they last did back in 3114 BC. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it is, I say "hallelujah!" We would all benefit from some big-time reinvention of time. But that happy event, even if it actually does come to pass, is still more than three years away. What to do in the meantime? Luckily, you Geminis now have major personal power to do some time reinvention of your own. To get the meditations rolling, ask yourself what three things you could do to stop fighting time and start loving it better.

For more help in understanding your relationship with the game of life, tune in to 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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

Soup is your metaphor for the week, Cancerian. Symbolically speaking, it's the key to your personal power and a model for the approach you should take in everything you do. On the most basic level, you might want to eat some soup every day. That will make potent suggestions to your subconscious mind about how to mix lots of ingredients together so that their value and beauty as a totality are more than the sum of their parts. Not just in the kitchen, but in every area of your life, blend many little miscellaneous things into one big interesting thing.

Want more help in exploring your Soul's Code? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

Change your password. Take a different way home. Ask a question you've never asked. Dream up a new nickname for yourself. Choose a new lucky number. Change the way you tell the story about an important event in your past. Make it a little more difficult for people to have you pegged. Eat a type of food you've never tried. Do the research necessary to discover why one of your opinions may be wrong. Add a new step to your grooming ritual. Feel appreciation for a person whose charms you've become numb to. Surprise yourself at least once a day.

It's possible my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for you could give you additional help in figuring out what's going on.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

One of the best modern Turkish poets was Seyfettin Bascillar, who worked as a meat inspector in New Jersey for many years before his death in 2002. Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz lived in Berkeley, California for over four decades while writing his books in Polish, his native tongue. Iceland's great poet of the 20th century, Stephan G. Stephansson, lived in Canada most of his life but always wrote in Icelandic. These people remind me of what you're going through: striving to do what comes natural and authentic in a situation very different from the place where you first learned to be natural and authentic. The interesting fact of the matter is that this feeling of displacement could very well be key to your success.

Want to hear more about the subconscious factors and hidden forces that are influencing your life? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

The sun shines brighter on my new home. The old place had resemblances to a cave and was surrounded by tall trees. My new space has many broad windows and soaks up the solar radiance from dawn to dusk. As you might expect, my 15 plants need to drink a lot more than they used to. The watering ritual at the old house used to come once a week, but now it's every other day. According to my reading of the astrological omens, a comparable shift is occurring in your rhythm, Libra. Metaphorically speaking, more heat and light are coming your way.

To further explore the ripening challenges and blessings in your life, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

Amazingly enough, the good deeds you do in the next 21 days could alone qualify you for a permanent exemption from hell. It seems God has cooked up some imminent tests that will give you a chance to garner some ridiculously sublime karma. What's that you say? You don't believe in either God or hell? Well then, interpret the opportunity this way: The good deeds you perform in the coming three weeks could practically ensure that the sins you've committed thus far in your life will not stain the world or be passed on as IOUs to the next generation.

Need more whacks applied to your mental blocks? More caresses bestowed upon your growing edge? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

In 1968, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn finished his book The Gulag Archipelago, a scorching indictment of the oppression that he and his countrymen suffered under the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. Banned for years, it was never formally published in his home country until 1989. Even after that, the new Russian government tried to control the teaching of history by suppressing texts like Solzhenitsyn's. This year, all that changed. The Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools. At last, the truth is officially available. (Maybe one day the equivalent will happen in the U.S., with alternate histories by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and James Loewen finding their way into the curriculum.) I celebrate this breakthrough as a symbol of the events that are about to unfold in your personal life: the long-lost truth finally revealed.

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

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

John, a colleague of mine, is a skillful psychotherapist. His father is in a similar occupation, psychoanalysis. If you ask John whether his dad gave him a good understanding of the human psyche while he was growing up, John quotes the old maxim: "The shoemaker's son has no shoes." Is there any comparable theme in your own life, Capricorn? Some talent or knowledge or knack that should have been but was not a part of your inheritance; a natural gift you were somehow cheated out of in your early environment? If so, the coming weeks will be an excellent time to start recovering from your loss and getting the good stuff you have coming to you.

Do you want to take a further look at your ever-evolving destiny? Check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

Let's imagine that an independent filmmaker has been following you around, gathering footage for a movie based on the story of your life. This week he or she would face a dilemma. That's because unexpected new sub-plots may arise, veering off in directions that seem to be far afield from the core themes. The acting of the central players won't be bad or unskillful, but it might be out of character with what they've done before. And there could be anomalous intrusions that impinge on the main scenes, like a bug landing on your nose during an intense conversation. Yet I can't help wondering if this chapter of the tale won't be intriguing for just these reasons.

Need more help deciphering your riddles and enigmas? Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.

"Tenderness and rot / share a border," writes the U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan in one of her poems. "And rot is an / aggressive neighbor / whose iridescence / keeps creeping over." Your job in the coming week, Pisces, is to reinforce that border -- with a triple-thick wall, if necessary -- so that the rot cannot possibly ooze over and infect tenderness. It is especially important right now that the sweet, deep intimacy you dole out and stimulate will not get corrupted by falseness or sentimentality. I urge you to stir up the smartest affection you have ever created.

No one knows you better than you do, but maybe I can help you dig up even more self-knowledge. Listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 the revised and expanded edition of my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. You can order it at Amazon.