What happens when someone "sells out"? Typically, it refers to a person who overrides her highest artistic standards or her soul's mandates in order to make a bundle of money. But I want to enlarge the definition to encompass any behavior that seeks popular appeal at the expense of authenticity, or any action that sacrifices integrity for the sake of gaining power. I think you have to be especially on guard against this lapse in the coming days, Aries -- not only in yourself but also in those you're close to.

What is the obvious secret you can't quite see? How could you turn your challenges into daily gifts for yourself? For clues to mysteries like these, tune in 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?"
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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.

"I can't live the button-down life," says cartoon character Homer Simpson. "I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles." Born May 10, Homer is unusual for a Taurus. Many of your tribe love the creamy middles but are quite content to live without the terrifying lows, even if that means being deprived of your fair share of dizzying highs. While that may sometimes seem like a boring limitation, I don't expect it to be any time soon. The creamy middles that are looming for you are the lushest, plushest creamy middles I've seen in a long time. Terrifying lows and dizzying highs will be irrelevant.

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow. The waning reveals a different blessing than the waxing. Where are you in the great cycle of your life? For inspiration in figuring it all out, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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In Tibetan Buddhism's "Four Dignities of the Warrior's Path," courage and ferocity are absent. In fact, the qualities regarded as essential for being a warrior have nothing in common with the training regimens of Marines or football players or lobbyists.

The first dignity is often translated in English as meekness, but that word doesn't convey its full meaning. "Relaxed confidence" is a more precise formulation -- a humble feeling of being at home in one's body.

Perkiness, or irrepressible joy, is the second dignity. To develop it, a warrior cultivates the habit of seeing the best in everything and works diligently to avoid the self-indulgence of cynicism.

The third is outrageousness. The warrior who embodies this dignity loves to experiment, is not addicted to strategies that have been successful in the past, and has a passionate objectivity that's free of the irrelevant emotions of hope and fear.

The fourth dignity is inscrutability, or a skill at evading the pigeonholes and simplistic definitions that might limit the warrior's inventiveness while fighting for his or her moral vision.
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The preceding oracle comes from my new book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Spanish painter Francisco Goya created an etching entitled "El Sueno de la Razon Produce Monstruos." Its two possible translations have very different meanings: "The sleep of reason produces monsters" or "The dream of reason produces monsters." The first version suggests that when our reasoning faculties go dormant, we're susceptible to doing dumb and crazy things. The second version implies that if we rely excessively on our reasoning faculty, it acquires a lunatic hubris that devalues our emotions and distorts our imagination. You're more susceptible to the former than the latter right now, Gemini, but it's crucial that you avoid both. A way out of your pain is available if you use your reason just right -- neither too little nor too much.

Whether it's your time to ferment in the shadows or sing in the sun, fresh power to transform yourself is on the way. Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become. For more help in understanding it all, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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Here's one of the Beauty and Truth Laboratory's favorite rules for evaluating the information that comes our way: Assume that it's a blend of truth and falsehood and every shade of half-truth in between. That applies equally to stories in The New York Times and to the raving spiels of the homeless Gulf War vet who hangs out at the local post office.

While I suspect that the Times has a much higher proportion of accurate data, I can never be sure what distortions are embedded in its reports. Its unconscious devotion to pop nihilism means that it routinely ignores vast realms of human experience. And there are odd days when the homeless guy's rants spit out gems of poetic wisdom that give me the chills and change the way I understand the world.

Moral of the story: Useful messages may come from anywhere. I'm more likely to recognize them if I'm simultaneously curious and discriminating.
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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.

Some of your illusions seeped into you before you learned to talk. Others sneaked into you later, while you were busy figuring out how to become yourself. Eventually, you even made conscious choices to adopt certain illusions because they provided you with comfort and consolation. There's no need to be ashamed of this. It's a natural part of being a human being. Having said that, I'm happy to announce that you're entering a phase when you will have the power to shed at least some of your illusions -- especially the ones you consciously chose -- in ways that don't hurt you. To begin the process, declare this intention: "I have the courage to see life as it really is."

You can learn to be lucky. It's not a mystical force you're born with, but a habit you can develop. How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities. For more help, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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To achieve what the Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind," you dispense with all preconceptions and enter each situation as if seeing it for the first time. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," wrote Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, "but in the expert's there are few."

As much as I love beginner's mind, though, I advocate an additional discipline: cultivating a beginner's heart. That means approaching every encounter imbued with a freshly invoked wave of love that is as pure as if you're feeling it for the first time.
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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.

According to a statute in the state of Indiana, you may not use your bare hands to catch a fish from a lake. In Fairbanks, Alaska, you're breaking the law if you let a moose slurp an alcoholic drink. In Flowery Branch, Georgia, you may be arrested if you shout out "Snake!" Arizona doesn't permit you to let a donkey sleep in your bathtub. And yet I've got to say that you Leos could probably get away with all of these acts and more in the coming weeks. The omens suggest that your levels of freedom are extremely high, as is your amount of slack. You'll have clearance to do many things you wouldn't normally be able to do.

Somewhere there's a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that's meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that harbors a revelation only you would know how to exploit. Why not go in search of those things? For inspiration, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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To be the best pronoiac explorer you can be, I suggest you adopt an outlook that combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the "beginner's mind" of Zen Buddhism, the "beginner's heart" of pronoia, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama. Blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.

To pull this off, you'll have to be willing to regularly suspend your brilliant theories about the way the world works. Accept with good humor the possibility that what you've learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that's right in front of you. Be suspicious of your biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. Open your heart as you strip away the interpretations that your emotions might be inclined to impose.

"Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything," wrote my teacher Ann Davies, "we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true."

At the same time, don't turn into a hard-ass, poker-faced robot. Keep your feelings moist and receptive. Remember your natural affection for all of creation. Enjoy the power of tender sympathy as it drives you to probe for the unimaginable revelations of every new moment. "Before we can receive the entire truth about anything," said Ann Davies, "we have to love 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.

I didn't think it was possible, but paranoid visions of doom and gloom have become even more popular in the past few years than ever before. Apocalypse-watching is no longer a fringe hobby reserved for conspiracy fetishists; it has gone mainstream. And yet here I am in the midst of the supposed mayhem, babbling my eccentric ideas about how we are living in the single most wonderful time in the history of civilization. So let me ask you a crucial question, especially if you're one of the millions of normal people who believes that cynicism is a supreme sign of intelligence: Do you really want to be getting your fortune told by a rebel optimist like me? You should know that all my horoscopes are rooted in the hypothesis that expecting the best makes you happier, safer, kinder, wilder, stronger, and smarter. What happens in the coming weeks will, in my opinion, be dramatic proof of that.

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean? Certainly not the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on a mountain of pretty garbage. So which self is it? For guidance, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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Receptivity is not a passive state. Nor is it a blank emptiness, waiting around for whatever happens to come along. In urging you to cultivate receptivity, I don't mean you should become a lazy do-nothing bereft of goals, reacting blindly to whatever life throws in front of you.

Receptivity is a robust readiness to be surprised and moved, a vigorous intention to be awake to everything you can't control. When you're receptive in the pronoiac style, you have strong ideas and a powerful will and an eagerness to disseminate your unique blessings, but you're also animated by the humble certainty that you have a lot to learn.
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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.

The bad news is that climate change is really underway. That's why Purbasha Island in the Bay of Bengal has sunk beneath the waves, swallowed up by rising sea levels and shifts in monsoon patterns. The good news is that its disappearance has ended a dispute between India and Bangladesh, both of which claimed it as their own. There's nothing left to fight over. I foresee a metaphorically comparable scenario coming to your life, Libra: an act of nature that will render a conflict irrelevant.

Take inventory of the extent that "No" dominates your life. Notice how often you say or think: 1. "That's not right." 2. "I don't like that." 3. "I don't agree with that." 4. "They don't like me." 5. "I'm not very good." 6. "That should be different from what it is." For help in retraining yourself to say "Yes!" at least 51% of the time, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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Most people associate innocence with naivete. Conventional wisdom regards it as belonging to children and fools and rookies who lack the sophistication or experience to know the tough truths about life.

But the Beauty and Truth Lab recognizes a different kind of innocence. It's based on an understanding that the world is always changing, and therefore deserves to be seen fresh every day. This alternative brand of innocence is fueled by an aggressive determination to keep clearing one's imagination of all preconceptions.

"Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good," wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves. "Innocence is knowing everything and still being attracted to the 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.

Some experts say methamphetamine is more addictive than any other drug. Here's one reason why, according to "Mothers Against Methamphetamines" founder Dr. Mary Holley: "The effect of an IV hit of methamphetamine is the equivalent of 10 orgasms all on top of each other lasting for 30 minutes to an hour, with a feeling of arousal that lasts for another day and a half." At least that's what it's like in the early stages of using the drug. After a while, hell sets in and the body is no longer happy. Luckily, you Scorpios won't be tempted to fall victim to meth splurges any time soon. Without relying on anything more than your natural powers, your capacity for experiencing erotic pleasure will be substantial.

How's your fight for freedom going? Are you making progress in liberating yourself from your unconscious obsessions, bad habits, and conditioned responses? For assistance and inspiration, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology." So proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. Note well that he used the adjective "joyous" to describe distrust, not "cynical" or "grumbling" or "sour." The key to remaining vital and strong while questioning every so-called absolute is to cultivate a cheerful, buoyant mood as you do 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.

Your eyes can discriminate between about 500 various shades of gray. Let's hope your moral compass is as precise in its power to distinguish subtle differences. Why? Because there will be no easy black-versus-white decisions to make in the near future; no simple, foolproof way to determine the distinctions between good and bad. I recommend that for now you give up hope of achieving utter certainty, and instead celebrate the refined pleasures of nuanced, complicated truth.

Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day. For inspiration in practicing this approach, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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Here are three of our deepest spiritual aspirations, which we invite you to steal for your own use: 1. to develop the capacity to thrive in the midst of raging contradictions; 2. to be discerning as we protect ourselves from people's flaws while at the same time being generous as we celebrate their beauty; 3. to refrain from dividing the world into two groups, those who help and agree with us and those who don't.
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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.

These days you have an extraordinary capacity to perform magic. And when I use that word "magic," I mean it in a very specific sense: causing practical changes to occur in accordance with your most noble and beautiful desires. I'm not talking about the kind of "magic" that helps you gratify mediocre wishes or tawdry fantasies. I'm not saying you should go on an acquisitive binge as you gather up booty and bragging points. Rather I'm letting you know that you have the power to create inspiring transformations in the way your life works.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." So begins Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield. I'd like to inspire you to write a story of your own that begins like that. For help, tune into your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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Visualize yourself being able to recognize the raw truth about the people you care about. Imagine that you can see how they already embody the beauty their souls' codes have promised as well as how they still fall short of embodying that beauty.

Picture yourself being able to make them feel appreciated even as you inspire them to risk changes that will activate more of their souls' codes.
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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.

Do you want to know where all the power lies for you right now? It's nowhere. Do you want to know what the nature of that power is? It's nothing. But before you jump to conclusions about the meaning of what I just said, read this passage from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell: "We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable."

I invite you to keep a running list of all the ways life delights you and helps you and energizes you. Describe everyday miracles you take for granted . . . the uncanny powers you possess . . . the small joys that occur so routinely you forget how much they mean to you . . . the steady flow of benefits bestowed on you by people you know and don't know. What works for you? What makes you feel at home in the world? For inspiration in this noble effort, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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.

A Pisces woman I know was harried by ant swarms invading her kitchen. She could have run out to the drug store and brought home loads of poisonous little ant hotels. Instead, she gave her imagination the go-ahead to brainstorm. Soon she'd come up with a solution. She scooped up a host of ants and threw them in a blender with the other ingredients of her smoothie, then drank it all down. The next day, all the ants had departed, as if scared off by the Great Devourer. I suggest you learn from her example, both in the sense of being open to outlandish possibilities and in the sense of finding alternate ways to deal with adversaries.

All of creation loves you very much. Even now, people you know and people you don't know are collaborating to make sure you have all you need to make your next smart move. But are you willing to start loving life back with an equal intensity? The adoration it offers you has not exactly been unrequited, but there is room for you to be more demonstrative. For help in cultivating this approach, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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The dangers of excessive politeness are perfectly exemplified in the medieval legend of Parzival, Arthur's purest knight. His quest for the Holy Grail leads him to a castle where he is welcomed by a wounded lord. At dinner, a mysterious bowl captivates Parzival's attention. He's dying to know more about it, but he holds his tongue. His training as a knight has taught him that it's uncourteous to express too much curiosity.

Tragically, he doesn't realize that he has arrived at the very place where his quest could be satisfied. The wounded lord is actually the Fisher King, the marvelous bowl is the Grail, and he is being presented with a magical test. The test consists of a simple task: to ask about the bowl. Because Parzival fails to do so, the king does not reveal the secret and does not give him the Grail.

The next morning, Parzival wakes up to find the castle empty, and he leaves having missed the very opportunity he wanted most.
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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.