Re-consecrate and Regenerate Your Imagination

My most recent book is
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It's also available here.

Below is an excerpt. It's from the piece called "Subterranean Pronoia Therapy."

1. "We are attracted to people who express the qualities we deny or repress in ourselves," says creativity expert Shakti Gawain. Using this idea as your hypothesis, take an inventory of the people you're most drawn to. Ask yourself whether they have talents and dreams that you wish could come alive in you. If you find this to be the case, consider the possibility that it's time to claim those talents or dreams as your own.

2. All of us are eminently fallible nobodies. We're crammed with delusions and base emotions. We give ourselves more slack than we give anyone else, and we're brilliant at justifying our irrational biases with seemingly logical explanations. Yet it's equally true that every one of us is a magnificently enigmatic creation unlike any other in the history of the world. We're stars with vast potential, gods and goddesses in the making.

Dramatize this paradox. Tomorrow, buy and wear ugly, threadbare clothes from the same thrift store where you got your hand puppet. Eat the cheapest junk food possible and do the most menial tasks you can find.

The next day, attire yourself in your best clothes, wear a crown or diadem, and treat yourself to an expensive gourmet meal. Enjoy a massage, a pedicure, and other luxuries that require people to wait on you.

On the third day, switch back and forth between the previous two days' modes every couple of hours. As you do, cultivate a passionate indifference to the question of whether you are ultimately an unimportant nobody or a captivating hero.

3. "Don't eat any food that's incapable of rotting," says Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. In other words, highly processed foods with a long shelf life don't contribute to your optimum vitality.

I'd like to expand this rule to make it an all-purpose guideline for life. Try out this hypothesis: If you're involved with any person or situation that never decays, or if there is some part of you that never decays, that's highly suspicious and may be a problem. Like growth, rot is a natural phenomenon. Indeed, every advancement requires or brings the disintegration of whatever it replaces. You can't grow if you don't rot. The "perfection" of stasis can be hazardous to your health.

What's ripe to rot in your world?

4. Some of my readers complain when I draw inspiration from a public figure they consider a bad person. Once I cited philosopher Bertrand Russell, and a woman from Austin went ballistic: "Russell was a terrible father! How dare you give him any credence?" Another time I invoked the wisdom of ex-U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt. "What possessed you to quote such a militaristic bully?" wrote an outraged emailer. Here's how I respond to these grumbles: If I refused to learn from people unless I agreed with everything they had ever said and done, I would never learn from anyone.

What about you? Have you set up your life so that everyone is either on or off your good list? If so, try something new: Cultivate a capacity to derive help and insight from people who aren't perfect.

Here are examples of some of the other people from whom I have drawn important teachings and inspiration despite their sins:

Dr. Seuss had an affair with another woman while his wife was suffering from cancer, and his wife subsequently committed suicide.

Einstein cheated on his wife and treated her horrendously.

William Blake lived in absolute filth.

Edgar Allan Poe married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 26.

One biographer of Carl Jung said Jung was a racist, an anti-Semite, and a misogynist.

Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his wife.

5. "Empathy is the most radical of human emotions," says activist Gloria Steinem.

What does she mean by "radical"? The word implies audacity, fierceness, and extreme courage. It connotes a revolt against the status quo, a transcendence of what's normal and habitual.

6. Poet Paul Eluard frequently fantasized and wrote about his dream woman, but he never actually found her. "The cards have predicted that I would meet her but not recognize her," he said. So he contented himself with being in love with love.

I think he made a sound decision that many of us should consider emulating. It's a losing proposition to wait around hoping for a dream lover to show up in our lives, since no one can ever match the idealized image we carry around in our imagination.

And even if there were such a thing as a perfect mate, we would probably not recognize that person, as Eluard said, because they'd be so different from our fantasies.





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DAILY HOROSCOPES

RealAstrology.com

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