It's Play Time

With the horoscopes you're reading here, I offer you the first of three weeks' worth of big-picture views of your future in 2014. They're free.

Beginning next week, I will also be offering the first of four weeks' worth of Expanded Audio Horoscopes that explore your long-term destiny in the coming months. They cost money. There'll be more information about them with next week's horoscopes.

Would you like to check to see whether my long-term horoscopes from last January were accurate portrayals of your life in 2013? Check them out here.





Did you read my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia when it first came out? Maybe you don't know that the revised and expanded version of Pronoia is quite different.

The revised and expanded version has over 63,500 new words and 73 new illustrations. That's 55% additional material beyond what the first edition had.

There are 2 extra chapters, 18 completely new pieces, plus 14 new Sacred Advertisements. Many of the original pieces of the book have been revised and expanded, as well. A central piece in the book, "Glory in the Highest," is 9 times longer than it was in the original.

Get it at Amazon or Powells.

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Here's an excerpt from PRONOIA:

Dear Co-Conspirators: Congratulations on having such ambidextrous brains. Due to your ever-growing ability to blend supple rationality with robust intuition, you?re not falling prey to the inane strains of insanity that are going around.

Instead you?re achieving glorious victory after glorious victory over the fearful fantasies that pass for normalcy.

Best of all, you?re increasing your mastery of the art of the paradox; more and more you?re attuned to the amusing fact that when the mythic shifts hit the fan, the apparent opposites turn inside-out and trade places. The rot prepares the way for the splendor. The chaos becomes the source of the rejuvenation. The end of the world mutates into the beginning of the world.

Please accept the thunderous applause of my one hand clapping. The people who take everything personally and seriously may not recognize your ingenious work, but we connoisseurs of the liberated imagination do.

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Here's another excerpt from Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia:

Some visionaries and prophets expect there to be a huge and sudden shift in the world's story sometime in the coming years. A few of them even predict that it will be "in the twinkling of an eye" -- a sudden cascade of events that completely changes everything everywhere.

They paint the scenario in broad, catastrophic strokes, expecting something -- they're not sure what -- that will have the impact of a large meteor strike or nuclear war or pandemic disease or the depletion of the planet's oil reserves. Others harbor a more benign but equally fuzzy expectation, speculating that maybe some higher psychic powers will kick in to the multitudes all at once, or that benevolent extraterrestrials will arrive to solve our energy crisis.

What very few of the prophets do, however, is make a precise prediction about what exactly will happen. Their visions contain no assurances, no specifics. And in my view, that's worse than useless. It fills us with a vague buzz of fear or amorphous sense of hope, but offers no concrete directions about what to do to prevent the dreaded thing or help create the hoped-for thing.

And the fact is, as I see it, they can't possibly know what the Big Shift is -- if, that is, a Big Shift is really looming. The very nature of any Big Shift will be so unexpected, so beyond our imaginations, and so utterly alien to what we understand, that we can't possibly delineate its contours in advance.

I'm reminded of Jung's formula, which is that we don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

This theory can be applied in reverse: If we have not yet grown wiser than our current predicament, then we can't see what the evolved state is beyond the predicament. Our minds are as-yet incapable of embodying the vision that will catapult us beyond the problem we're stuck in.

When the Big Shift comes, whether or not it comes in the twinkling of an eye, it will be something that no one foresaw, let alone described in detail. It will be beyond our comprehension, unlike anything we could have visualized headed our way. (Thirty years ago, did anyone imagine the Internet or the impact it's having?)

And if that's true, then the inescapable conclusion is: There's no use trying to plan ahead for it. It's counterproductive to hold a particular scenario in our mind as the likely development. And it's downright crazy to harbor a chronic sense of dread about an unknowable, unimaginable series of events.

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift is to cultivate mental and emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

* a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

* a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, and worries about the future;

* a trust in empirical evidence over our time-worn beliefs and old habits;

* a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast and tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner's mind fully engaged;

* and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease and teach us.

Everything I just described also happens to be an excellent way to prime yourself for a chronic, low-grade, always-on, simmering-at-low-heat brand of ecstasy -- a state of being more-or-less permanently in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone.






Here's praise for Pronoia:

"I have seen the future of American literature and its name is Rob Brezsny." - Tom Robbins

"With this work -- an instant pop classic -- Rob Brezsny offers a positive, participatory, proactive vision of the workings of our inner and outer universe, which will only give us as much pleasure, love, and ecstasy as we are prepared to accept." - Daniel Pinchbeck

"While it may seem naive to put your faith in optimism these days, Brezsny's new book offers up a convincing argument for leaving cynicism and despair behind. This wild, wise, and subversive book is a must read for those who want to live a more imaginative and free life. Rob Brezsny is a Culture Hero." - Utne Reader

"With Pronoia, renegade wizard Rob Brezsny presents an irreverent manifesto, mixing activism and optimism. It reads like the I Ching on Ecstasy and is as insightful and puzzling as a Zen koan. He puts the 'pro' back in 'protest.'" - Body + Soul

"I dig Rob Brezsny for his powerful yet playful insights, his poetry, and his humor . . . I salute him for his dedication to inspiration."
- Jason Mraz, singer-songwriter

"In *Pronoia,* Brezsny tenderly leads us into the practice of re-imagining the world as a compassionate miracle. He offers a bevy of ideas for tricksters to re-create the universe." - Santa Cruz Sentinel

"Brezsny's Pronoia rotates, something like a Tibetan prayer wheel, around the idea that love underpins being and that it's ours if only we have the courage to take it. If we don't go to this original and endless source, then we inherit the classical hell-on-earth of depression, decay and destruction. Around and around his theme the verbally acrobatic, mystically literate Brezsny lets fly a thousand zingers, each with the feel of having been carved with some poetic effort to express a hard reality instead of a platitude." - San Francisco Chronicle





You can listen to and download over two hours' worth of my music and spoken word stuff: the soundtrack for my book PRONOIA. It's all free.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES


Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news to all of the dogmatic, compulsive cynics in the world, but there is an abundance of good news to report.

Read it and weep, doom-and-gloomers:

5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History

1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer.

2. Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier.

3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.

4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.
Britain Unrest

5. There?s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world.

6. Same-Sex marriage is being legalized at a rapid rate all over the world.

Read the whole article, which has lots more details:

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"The US has stunned the world by overtaking Germany as the world number one in solar power installations. Residential solar is up 45% with strong continuing demand in a record shattering year for the solar industry."


"Margaret Anne Cargill was a philanthropist born into one of the wealthiest families in the world. She gave away more than $200 million during her life, always anonymously, and provided that after her death all her wealth go to charity. In 2011 her assets were liquidated, resulting in a $6 billion donation."


(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They are not advertisements, and I get no kickbacks.)




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