In old Christian and Islamic lore, the dove was a symbol of the holy spirit. The bird was considered so pure and sacred that the devil, who was an expert shapeshifter, could not take on its form. The dove had a different meaning in other traditions, however. Among the ancient Greeks, it had a special relationship with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Rome, its eggs were regarded as aphrodisiacs. Drawing on all these meanings, I'm nominating the dove to be your power animal in the coming week. You will have an excellent chance to intensify your connection with divine truths through the power of love and eros -- and vice versa.

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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Cancer cells are constantly developing in our bodies. Luckily, our immune systems routinely kill them off. Similarly, our minds always harbor pockets of crazy-making misconceptions and faulty imprints. They usually don't rise up and render us insane thanks to the psychic versions of our immune systems.

How can you stay strong in your ability to fight off sickness and madness? You know the drill: Eat healthy food, sleep well, get physical exercise, minimize stress, give and receive love. But as an aspiring pronoiac, you have at your disposal other actions that can provide powerful boosts to your immune system. Here are examples:

Scheme to put yourself in the path of beautiful landscapes, buildings, art, and creatures.

Exercise your imagination regularly. Get in the habit of feeding your mind's eye images that fill you with wonder and vitality.

Eliminate uhs, you knows, I means, and other junk words from your speech. Avoid saying things you don't really mean and haven't thought out. Stop yourself when tempted to make scornful assertions about people.

Every night before you fall asleep, review the day's activities in your mind's eye. As if watching a movie about yourself, try to be calmly objective as you observe your memories from the previous 16 hours. Be especially alert for moments when you strayed from your purpose and didn't live up to your highest standards.

With a companion, sit in front of a turned-off TV as you make up a pronoiac story that features tricky benevolence, scintillating harmony, and amusing redemption. Speak this tale aloud or write it down.

Take on an additional job title, beautifier. Put it on your business card and do something every day to cultivate your skill. If you're a people person, bring grace and intrigue into your conversations; ask unexpected questions that provoke original thoughts. If you're an artist, leave samples of your finest work in public places. If you're a psychologist or sociologist, point out the institutions and relationships that are working really well. Whatever you do best, be alert for how you can refine it and offer it up to those who'll benefit from it.

If you're going through a phase when you feel you have nothing especially beautiful to offer, or if you think it would be self-indulgent to inject your own aesthetic into shared environments, turn for help to great artists and thinkers. Sneak O'Keeffe or Chagall prints onto unadorned walls in public places, for instance. Memorize poems by Rilke and Hafiz, and slip them into your conversations when appropriate. Program your cell phone so that its ring is Vivaldi's Stabat Mater in C Minor. Scrawl passages from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk on the walls of public lavatories.
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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 next assignment is to deepen and refine your relationship with your temptations. That doesn't mean you should shed all caution and simply give in to them. Rather, I'm suggesting you escape the bind that makes you feel like you have to either ruthlessly repress your complicated longings or else thoroughly express them. Is there an in-between position you can find? A way you can appreciate the mysterious gift that the temptations confer and not be miserably obsessed by them? A perspective in which you're neither tormented by guilt nor driven to compromise your integrity?

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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What if the Creator is like Rainer Maria Rilke's God, "like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence"? What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual? What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to deepen your perceptions and change the way you think about everything? Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.
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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.

You're a bit like a professional jet pilot who is operating the pirate ship ride at an amusement park. You have resemblances to a top chef who's shopping for gourmet ingredients in a seedy convenience store. In other words, Gemini, you may feel slightly off-kilter or dispossessed, even though you have a lot going for you. Here's the best possible thing you could do while you wait for the fates to show you how to make a correction: Make it your intention to feel centered, poised, and at peace exactly as you are right now.

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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Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training 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. Are you interested in becoming a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss? 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.
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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.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is currently enough food available to feed everyone on the planet. The problem is, it's not distributed efficiently. Some people get far more food than they need, and even waste a lot of it, while less fortunate folks go hungry. I invite you to think about whether you might have a metaphorically comparable situation in your own life, Cancerian. Is there a part of your psyche that's well-nurtured but a different part that receives meager shares of love and support? Are you overstuffed in one way but starved in another? The coming weeks would be an excellent time to correct such an imbalance. (More on food.)

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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Rainer Maria Rilke: "For one human being to love another is the most difficult task of all. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation."
Teilhard de Chardin: "Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire."
Leo Tolstoy: "Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."
Blaise Pascal: "If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."
Emily Dickinson: "Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself."
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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.

This horoscope is not an advertisement for ceremonial shovels. I am receiving no payment from a ceremonial shovel company for suggesting that you procure a customized engraved gold digging tool for your own personal use. And I will feel fine if you don't actually get a real one, but instead merely imagine yourself wielding a pretend version. The fact is, Leo, the coming weeks will be an excellent time to do a groundbreaking ritual: to dig up the first scoop of metaphorical dirt in the place where you will build your future dream house, masterpiece, or labor of love.

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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The Mystic Chaos Wizard Helper says: Close one eye. Tap your forehead twice with your left palm. Think of a memory in which you found something you'd lost. Lick your lips and murmur the words "Love Whisperer." Insert your middle finger in the "Delight-O-Meter" slot. Keep your finger there until the "Passion Lamp" turns on. Flash. Flash. Flash. Thank you. Now write the first thing that comes into your heart's mind.
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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 don't think you're fully aware of the game you've been immersed in. You may even be in denial that you're playing it. If I'm right about this, please make it a priority to acknowledge what's going on and identify the exact nature of the game. You can't afford to be innocent about the subterranean forces that are in motion. It's especially important not to be too nice and polite to see the complicated truth. Please note: There's no need to be a cynical shark -- that would be as inappropriate a response as being a sweet little lamb. But you should definitely activate your jungle senses.

"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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ARGUMENTS WITH GOD is the only organization on the planet that specializes in the art of debating with the Creator. Our trained Prayer Warriors are standing by, ready to deliver the protests and complaints that you want to convey. Send your mad, rebellious, poignant appeals to Truthrooster@gmail.com, and we will relay them directly to the Cosmic Trickster with persuasive eloquence. Write your first draft.
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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.

On Reddit.com, someone asked members of the community the following: What is your best unanswerable question? Among the more serious offerings were "What is love?", "What is magic?", "Why is there something as opposed to nothing?", and "What is the meaning of life?" Then there were more avant-garde possibilities: "Where do squirrels go during hurricanes?", "Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?", and "If I asked you to sleep with me, would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?" After evaluating the current astrological omens, Libra, I urge you to pose your own best riddle -- a query that will provide maximum stimulation as you meditate on it during the next four months.

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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Even if you don't call yourself an artist, you have the potential to be a dynamic creator who is always hatching new plans, coming up with fresh ideas, and shifting your approach to everything you do as you adjust to life's ceaseless invitation to change.

It's to this part of you -- the restless, inventive spirit -- that I address the following: Unleash yourself! Don't be satisfied with the world the way it is; don't sit back passively and blankly complain about the dead weight of the mediocre status quo. Instead, call on your curiosity and charisma and expressiveness and lust for life as you tinker with and rebuild everything you see so that it's in greater harmony with the laws of love and more hospitable to your soul's code.
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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.

An environmental organization in New Zealand found that the local fishing industry wastes about 70 percent of its haul. In contrast, Iceland manages to use 96 percent of every fish caught. For example, New Zealand companies throw away most of the liver, roe, and heads of the fish, while Iceland has come up with ways to take advantage of all that stuff. Judging from your current astrological omens, Scorpio, I conclude that it's crucial for you to take your cue from Iceland rather than New Zealand in the coming weeks. Be inventive, efficient, and thorough in harnessing the power of all your raw materials.

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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When the spell is broken, you will be able to tap into resources you've been cut off from. When the spell is broken, you will finally notice the big, beautiful secrets that have been lying in plain sight. What is that spell? Can you break it yourself?
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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.

"They will say you are on the wrong road," said poet Antonio Porchia, "if it is your own." I suspect you may have to deal with wrong-headed badgering like that in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. In fact, you could experience a surge of discouraging words and bad advice that tries to shoo you away from the path with heart. Some of the push may come from enemies, some from friends or loved ones, and some from deluded little voices in your own head. I hope you won't be demoralized by the onslaught, but will instead respond like a brave hero who uses adversity as a motivating force.

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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In the early years of Christianity, there were hundreds of books interpreting the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. But by 325 A.D., a group backed by the political and military might of the Roman Empire had determined which few of the stories about Christ would thereafter be considered the canonical New Testament, and which would be regarded as heretical bilge.

No better evidence exists for the saying, "History is a tale told by the victors." Keep this in mind as you strategize your way through your personal War of the Stories. Your account of events may have more truth in it than everyone else's conflicting tales, but that won't carry much weight unless you obtain the power to enforce your version.
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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'm sure you've got thousands of practical details to attend to. Your schedule may be as busy as it has been in months. But I hope you will find time to do what I consider essential to your well-being, and that is to wander and wonder. In fact, let's make that your motto: to wander and wonder. Even if it's just for a few stolen moments between your serious appointments, allow yourself to meander off into the unknown and marvel at all the curious things you find. Be on the lookout for high strangeness that thrills your imagination, for exotic pleasures that titillate your lust for novelty, and for fertile chaos that blows your mind in all the right ways.

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 response to our culture's ever-rising levels of noise and frenzy, rites of purification have become more popular. Many people now recognize the value of taking periodic retreats. Withdrawing from their usual compulsions, they go on fasts, avoid mass media, practice celibacy, or even abstain from speaking. While we applaud cleansing ceremonies like this, we recommend balancing them with periodic outbreaks of an equal and opposite custom: the Bliss Blitz.
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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.

James Joyce was a great novelist but not much of a fighter. He picked a more imposing and athletic buddy to go drinking with, though: Ernest Hemingway. If the two men encountered any alcohol-induced trouble, Joyce would slink behind his friend and yell, "Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!" I don't anticipate that you'll be in the vicinity of any bar scuffles in the coming week, Aquarius. But I do think you would benefit from having a potent and persuasive ally on your side. It's time to add some heft and clout to your arsenal of resources.

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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Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Firenze Matisse traveled to Antarctica. On the first day, the guide took him and his group to a remote area and left them alone for an hour to commune with the pristine air and unearthly stillness. After a while, a penguin ambled up and launched into a ceremonial display of squawks and stretches. Firenze responded with recitals of his favorite memorized poems, imagining he was "engaged in a conversation with eternity." Halfway through his inspired performance of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Please Call Me by My True Names," the penguin sent a stream of green projectile vomit cascading against his chest, and shuffled away.

Though Firenze initially felt deflated by eternity's surprise, no harm was done. He soon came to see it as a first-class cosmic joke, and looked forward to exploiting its value as an amusing story with which to regale his friends back home.

Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Michael Logan was the first person to hear Firenze's tale upon his return from Antarctica. "You might want to consider this, Firenze," Michael mused after taking it all in. "Penguins nurture their offspring by chewing food—mixing it up with all God's enzymes—and then vomiting it into the mouths of the penguin babies. Perhaps you weren't the butt of a cosmic joke or some Linda Blair-esque bad review, but in fact the recipient of a very precious gift of love. Who knows?"

Now Firenze has two punch lines for his tale of redemptive pronoia.
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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.

Is it possible that you have been too receptive and empathetic for your own good lately? I mean, I love how attuned you are to the ebb and flow of subtle energies -- it's one of your most winsome and powerful qualities -- but I fear you may be going too far. As heroic as it might seem to be the most sensitive and responsive person in a ten-mile radius, I'd rather see you work on being more self-contained right now. That's why, for a limited time only, I'm recommending that you turn the full force of your touchy-feely solicitude on yourself.

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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The 17th-century surgeon Wilhelm Hilden had an interesting theory about healing. He developed a medicinal salve that he applied not to the wound itself but rather to the weapon that inflicted it. Though today we may sneer at such foolishness, the fact is that Hilden's approach has great potential if used for psychic wounds. Jesus understood this when he articulated the revolutionary formula, "Love your enemy." More than any other action, this strategy has the power to cure you of the distortions your enemy has unleashed in you. Try it out.
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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.