Give the Gift You Were Never Given

My book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia is available at Amazon and Powells.

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

1. Declare amnesty for the part of you that you don't love very well. Forgive that poor sucker. Hold its hand and take it out to dinner and a movie. Tactfully offer it a chance to make amends for the dumb things it has done.

And then do a dramatic reading of this proclamation by the playwright Theodore Rubin: "I must learn to love the fool in me -- the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool."

2. The greatest gift you can give might be the gift that you yourself were never given. Give that gift.

The most valuable service you have to offer your fellow humans may be the service you have always wished were performed for you. Offer that service.

An experience that wounded you could move you to help people who've been similarly wounded. Heal yourself by healing others.

3. No matter how holy and good, everyone in the world has a portion of the world's sickness inside them. It's known by many names: neurosis, shadow, demon, devil. Many people try to deny that it inhabits them. Others acknowledge its power so readily that they allow themselves to be overwhelmed and distorted by it.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we take a position between those two positions. We accept the fact that the evil is part of us, but treat it with compassionate amusement and flexible vigilance. Our stance is partly that of loving parents and partly that of warriors.

Once you make a commitment to explore the mysteries of pronoia, your shadow will try to play tricks on you that it has never tried before. How will you respond? We recommend an aggressive, tender, improvisational approach. Be ready for anything. Avoid both blithe excesses of tolerance and grave fundamentalism.

4. Philosopher William James proposed that if our culture ever hoped to shed the deeply ingrained habit of going to war, we'd have to create a moral equivalent. It's not enough to preach the value of peace, he said. We have to find other ways to channel our aggressive instincts in order to accomplish what war does, like stimulate political unity and build civic virtue.

Astrology provides a complementary perspective. Each of us has the warrior energy of the planet Mars in our psychological makeup. We can't simply repress it, but must find a positive way to express it. How might you go about this project?

5. In his book *The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World,* psychologist James Hillman writes: "The question of evil refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness."

What would you have to do in order to triumph over this kind of evil in yourself?

6. "The problem, if you love it, is as beautiful as the sunset," wrote J. Krishnamurti. "The obstacle is the path," says the Zen proverb. What frustrating puzzle do you love the best?





EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2015 and beyond.

Who do you want to become? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do?

How can you exert your free will to create the adventures that will bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

To listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE during the coming months, register and/or sign in here.

After you log in through the main page, click on the link "Long Term Forecast for Second Half of 2015."

The horoscopes cost $6 apiece. Discounts are available for multiple purchases.

They're available on your tablets and smart phones as well as your computers.

You can also listen to your short-term forecast for the coming week by clicking on "This week (July 7, 2015)."

What will be the story of your life in the second half of 2015 and beyond? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?




Whether or not you want to listen to my Big Picture audio reports for the rest of 2015 and beyond, you may be interested in reviewing the long-term horoscopes I wrote for you earlier this year. To see them, go here.





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


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.





What are the three miracles
that are most likely
to happen to you?





"If everything seems under control," said auto racer Mario Andretti, "you're probably not moving fast enough."

I second that emotion. It applies to the entire human race, which is swirling through evolutionary tipping points at an accelerating speed.
But it's doubly apropos for you spiritual freedom fighters and renegade bodhisattvas, because you're the vanguard shock troops fighting to merge heaven with earth.

For your edification and amusement, I will add three corollaries to Andretti's wisdom:

1. If you're not pretty much always half-confused, most likely you're not thinking deeply enough.

2. If you're not feeling forever amazed, maybe you're not seeing wildly enough.

3. The truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and outrageously abundant.

How might you go about using these tricks to marinate yourself in a gentle state of ecstasy pretty much all the time?





"Malefic ecstasy" or "pestilent ecstasy" is the feeling of intense pleasure that some people get as they think about and dwell on and talk about negative events. It explains why they go into a rage whenever I present evidence that although the world may be a realm where much suffering occurs, it is also a paradise full of blessings. They don't want their malefic ecstasy to be diluted.

I'm with poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "Earth's crammed with heaven."

P.S. My spiritual teachers say that being alive on this planet is the highest honor and privilege. It's an invitation to work wonders and perform miracles that aren't possible in any nirvana, promised land, or afterlife.





I'd love to hear you riff on how it feels and what it's like for you to be the astrological sign that you are. Send your testimony to me at Truthrooster@gmail.com

Here are some examples: readers' thoughts on "How to Be a Sagittarius."

"Know how to have fun even when life sucks." -Mandy O.

"Embrace optimism for both its beauty and its tactical advantages." -Sam Austin, Staten Island.

"Paint a self-portrait with your nipples." -Marsha Coupe, Carmel, CA.

"Be a pompous ass, then laugh at yourself for being a pompous ass." -Peter Yates-Hodshon and Mare Hodshon-Yates, Tucson.

"Give names like 'Stinky' and 'Cubby' to your fears." -Joanne Helfrid, Upper Darby, PA.

"The best way to be like me, is not try to be like me at all, but to be true to yourself." -Catherine King, Greenfield, MA.

*

Here's an example of a Gemini who told me how she went about being the best Gemini he could possibly be:

"Be amazed with and in awe of yourself. And try to keep doing new things to justify your amazement and awe. Be like the Native American heyoka who rode his horse backward, wearing only an apron in a blizzard, with sweat running down his chest. Talk to yourself; people can join in if they want to. Have a large papier mach? ego; redecorate it often. Be like Grandmother Spider who created the world by imagining it. Be like Pygmalion and fall in love with your creation. Never imitate. Be a tricky, sticky tickler. No one will ever solve the Sphinx's precious riddle if she doesn't know the answer herself."
- Shimmering Elf




Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


MAYBE IMAGINARY FRIENDS AREN'T ACTUALLY IMAGINARY

I have imaginary friends who help me. And yes, they sometimes even give me ideas for horoscopes. Are you OK with that? Among the many other perks my secret buddies provide, they show me where my phone and keys are when I've misplaced them -- a prime sign of their practical value.

What's your current status in regards to imaginary friends? Do you even have any? I invite you to seek them out and put them to work. In fact, I encourage you to do anything that might attract the input of undiscovered allies, behind-the-scenes collaborators, mysterious guidance, and divine assistance.

P.S. July 2 is Take Your Imaginary Friend to Work Day.





MAKING A HABIT OF WAKING UP

Many of us are essentially asleep, even as we walk around in broad daylight. We're so focused on the restless narratives and repetitive fantasies unfurling in our heads that we only dimly perceive the larger story raging in all of its chaotic beauty around us.

To have any hope of permanently breaking out of our fuzzy trance, we require regular shocks. A single jolt might cause us to briefly come to attention and see the miracle of creation for what it is, but once the red alert has passed, we relax back into our fixation on the dreamy tales our mind never stops telling us.

In the course of its conspiracy to shower us with blessings, life does its best to provide us with a steady flow of healing shocks. But because it tends to err on the side of tenderness, its prods may be too gentle, allowing us to ignore them. Gradually, life will up the ante, trying to find the right mix of toughness and love, as it encourages us to WAKE UP!

But our addiction to the phantasmagoria is tenacious. The stream-of-conscious narratives and ever-bubbling fantasies, even when they're racked with torment and terror, are perversely entertaining. And so we may avoid responding to the kind shocks for so long that life finally has to resort to stronger medicine. Then we might get sick or lose our job or muck up our closest relationship.

It doesn't have to be that way. We could cultivate in ourselves a sixth sense for the wake-up calls life sends us. We might develop a knack for responding with agile grace to the early, gentler ones so that we wouldn't have to be visited by the more stringent measures.

There's also another possibility: With hungry intent, we could seek out and hunt down invigorating jolts. We wouldn't wait to have our asses kicked, but would kick our own asses -- over and over again, with a creative ingenuity.

Who knows? We might even master the art of inducing shocks that feel really good.

Listen to the podcast of this mini-essay.





"Ondinnonk" is an Iroquois word with two related meanings: 1. a secret wish of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams; 2. the spiritual part of our nature that longs to do good deeds.

How's your ondinnonk doing?





We are dissident bodhisattvas rebelling against all those forces that feed fear and ignore love.

We are spiritual freedom fighters rising up to protect nature and foment peace and demand justice.

We are subversive mystics stoking the cool blue fires of poetry and lobbying for the liberated imagination.

We are militant ecstatics invoking the transformative powers of pleasure to sanctify and beautify our one and only Earth.

We are mutinous purveyors of grace who redistribute the wealth so that all creatures may have the means to thrive.





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


So it turns out that the "blemish" is actually essential to the beauty. The "deviation" is at the core of the strength. The "wrong turn" was crucial to you getting you back on the path with heart.





A SECOND KIND OF HEALING

The primary meaning of the word "healing" is "to cure what's diseased or broken." Medical practitioners focus on sick people. Philanthropists donate their money and social workers contribute their time to helping the underprivileged. Psychotherapists wrestle with their clients' traumas and neuroses.

I'm in awe of them all. The level of one's spiritual wisdom, I believe, is more accurately measured by helping people in need than by meditation skills, shamanic shapeshifting, supernatural powers, or esoteric knowledge.

But I also believe in a second kind of healing that is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what's merely sufficient to a sublime state.

Using this definition, describe two acts of healing: one you would enjoy performing on yourself and another you'd like to provide for someone you love.




HOW PRONOIA WORKS

There was once a poor farmer who could afford to own just one horse. He cared well for the animal, but one summer night it escaped through a weak fence and ran away.

When his neighbors discovered what had happened, they visited to offer their condolences. "What bad luck!" they exclaimed. The farmer replied, "Maybe. Maybe not."

A week later, the fugitive horse sauntered back to the homestead, accompanied by six wild horses. The farmer and his son managed to corral them all. Again the neighbors descended.

"What great luck!" they exclaimed. "Maybe," the farmer replied. "Maybe not."

Soon the farmer's son began the work of taming the new arrivals. While attempting to ride the roan stallion, he was thrown to the ground and half-?trampled. His leg was badly broken. The neighbors came to investigate. "What terrible luck!" they exclaimed.

The farmer replied, "Maybe. Maybe not."

The next day, soldiers visited the farmer's village. Strife had recently broken out between two warlords, and one of them had come to conscript all the local young men. Though every other son was commandeered, the farmer's boy was exempted because of his injury. The neighbors gathered again.

"What fantastic luck!" they exclaimed. "Maybe," the farmer said. "Maybe not."

(Source: an old Taoist folk tale)





If you do not give birth to the brilliance within you, it will destroy you. If you give birth to the brilliance within you, it will free you.





"A huge amount of freedom comes when you take nothing personally."
? Don Miguel Ruiz





It's my birthday week. I celebrate for eight consecutive days, including the hidden "Funday" that's between Thursday and Friday. I encourage you to do the same when your birthday comes around.

To mark my personal festival, I welcome your birthday blessings, good wishes, and compassionate critiques.

If you are inclined to send me gifts, I welcome them at P.O. Box 150628, San Rafael, CA 94915. Email blessings go here: Truthrooster@gmail.com.




Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

Here's a motto worth trying: "I refuse to dehumanize anyone, even those who dehumanize me." Aside from the ripples of delight that might send through the collective unconscious, it provides a great selfish benefit. Feeling even low levels of contempt and disdain tends to shut down your intuition, so if you instead practice being tolerant of people who are intolerant of you, you just may find yourself getting smarter.





Even if the voices in your head aren't real, they still might have good ideas.





The Greek god Dionysus did not, in fact, encourage people to get sloppy drunk, lose control, and do stupid things. His preference was that they free themselves from their inhibitions by imbibing moderate amounts of alcohol. With this medicinal spur, they might get unstuck from their worn-out old behavior patterns and invite refreshing doses of wildness into their lives. Healing was the intention, not craziness and frenzy.

It is true that if someone was not willing to escape their rigidity -- if they clung to their hidebound attitudes and refused to open up to the call of self-transformation -- Dionysus might lure them into reckless inebriation.





1. Help from the Princess of Cups
2. Unexpected celebration
3. You meet an alchemist
4. Warm wind on your special day
5. Waves of joyous chanting
6. Inspiration dissipates fear
7. Song of the healers
8. Message written in disappearing ink reappears
9. A wild dream within a safe dream
10. Time's gifts finally harvested
11. The valuable illusions of youth
12. Clarity in all of its splendor
13. Blue moonlight on the green earth
14. A whisper in the dark with a crucial clue
15. Are your ready for your close-up?
16. Meeting the guest on an island you love
17. A lily on your doorstep
18. A hidden cocoon
19. A heart surprised by sweet learning
20. What light reaches the ocean's floor
21. A ringing bell announces your victory
22. What comes next?
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.

Tell me what comes next at Truthrooster@gmail.com





"When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren?t pessimistic, you don?t understand data.

"But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren?t optimistic, you haven?t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world."

- author, green business leader and activist Paul Hawken





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


THE GREATEST GIFT YOU CAN GIVE

The greatest gift you can give might be the gift that you yourself were never given. Give that gift.

The most valuable service you have to offer your fellow humans may be the service you have always wished were performed for you. Offer that service.

An experience that wounded you could move you to help people who've been similarly wounded. Heal yourself by healing others.





IT'S ALWAYS THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

It's always the beginning of the world.

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.





SHADOW BLESSINGS

(Listen to this piece.)

Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy that's guaranteed to keep you well supplied with blessings.

What kind of blessings? Ten million dollars, a gorgeous physique, a perfect marriage, a luxurious home, and high status?

Maybe. But it's just as likely that the blessings will be interesting surprises, dizzying adventures, gifts you hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that dare you to get smarter.

Novelist William Vollman referred to these types of blessings when he said that "the most important and enjoyable thing in life is grappling with a complicated, tricky problem that you don't know how to solve."

Sculptor Henry Moore had a similar idea. He said, "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."

So in other words, pronoia does not guarantee that you will forevermore be free of all difficult experiences.

It doesn't ask you to pretend that everything is sweet and harmonious all the time.

On the contrary, when you embody the spirit of pronoia, you build your optimism by loving your challenges, not repressing them.

You know that your problems are gifts from the Goddess that are designed to make you smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

You welcome each fresh puzzle as a potential source of your future bliss, as an exciting teaching that will usher you to your next breakthrough.

Now here's a spell to commit pronoia. I invite you to say it with me.

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;

Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within me;

Opening to my loss and pain and ignorance,
I remember who I am and what I'm here for.

Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me

and becomes itself transformed
into the blessing it always was.

Listen to this piece here.





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


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

+

"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?"

+

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur," said Leo Tolstoy. I agree. It's rare for us to undergo rapid, dramatic transformations in short periods of time. That's why it's delusional to be forever pining for some big magic intervention that will fix everything. The best way to alter our course is slowly and gradually, by conscientiously revamping our responses to the small daily details.





"The lesson that life constantly enforces is 'Look underfoot.' You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world."
- naturalist John Burroughs





There is only One Being: the Living Intelligent Consciousness That Pervades Every Cubic Inch of the Universe. Every seemingly separate thing, from earthworm to human being to star, is a cell in the body of this One and Only Great One.

All of us cells feel pain as long as we have forgotten we are part of the One. But the forgetting was an essential rule that the One set up to begin the master game. Because of our illusion that each of us is alone and separate, we are under the impression that we must become distinctive and unique. As we work to create ourselves, adding intricate modifications to what we started out as, we give joy to The One, expanding and deepening the meaning of the master game.

At the point when the sense of isolation is greatest in each cell -- which is also the point when each cell experiences its uniqueness with maximum acuity -- the pain of separation triggers the longing to remember where we came from. Gradually, each of us figures out how to return home and reunite consciously with the One. But something fundamental in us has changed since we first fell under the spell of separateness. We have added the beauty of our individuality, our gift to The One.






I get many requests from people who are going through challenging times in their lives and would like my personal advice. I wish I could respond to these inquiries, because they are often profound and well-thought-out, demonstrating an ability to define the problems at hand with lucid insight.

Unfortunately, I can't respond. My various lines of work are too demanding to add any other tasks to my life, no matter how interesting they might be. But I've developed a general response to those people who seek my personal input. I'm offering it below.

+

I'm honored that you regard me as someone who might be able to provide answers or solace, but I don't think it would be responsible for me to fling advice your way without knowing more about the complexities of your problem. And I'm afraid I can't give the time necessary to explore those complexities.

The only thing I'll suggest, as you seek to clarify your situation, is for you to arrange to go on a retreat. During that time of withdrawal from the world's everyday madness, I urge you to avoid all media and to be as silent and relaxed as it's possible for you to be.

During the first part of your retreat, spend hours visualizing in your mind's eye the entire story of your life, from the earliest memory to the present moment.

During the second phase of your retreat, begin your meditations by establishing contact with the highest source of wisdom and love within you. You can call this source God or Goddess or your Guardian Angel or Higher Self. Spend luxurious time in dialogue with this source, making sure to ask these questions:

1. "What is it I want more than anything else?"

2. "What is the best way to serve the mission I came to Earth to carry out? What are the very best gifts I have to offer other humans?"

3. "What path will allow me to ultimately learn the most about wise love?"

4. "How do I need to change in order to get what I want, carry out my life's mission, and learn about wise love? What influences and attitudes do I need to eliminate?"

During the third phase of the process, write out a mission statement: what you want to accomplish by the time you die many years hence. Then create a master plan of the actions you will take in order to make that mission statement come true. Include three actions you will take in the next month to get more serious about accomplishing your mission.

During the fourth phase, visualize the following scenarios in lush detail: that God/Goddess loves you, that the entire universe is conspiring to give you the lessons and blessings and kicks in the ass and liberations you need exactly when you need them, and that you are ready to welcome that love and guidance with all your heart.

P.S. I'm a big believer in trusting your intuition. Even if it doesn't lead you to what your ego thinks is a successful outcome, your intuition will always guide you to the experiences that your soul needs.





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

Below is an excerpt.

"Nothing's going right in my life. I feel anxious and paranoid all the time. My relationships are a mess. Plus the whole world's going to hell!"

In my line of work, people make confessions like that to me.

My first response is usually something like this: "Do you habitually gobble junk food near bedtime, steal a paltry five hours of sleep per night, gulp two cups of coffee and no breakfast in the morning, then bolt to a workplace where you get no sunlight or exercise and sit in an uncomfortable chair?"

They often reply, "You must be psychic! How did you know?!"

My point is that many psychological troubles stem from our chronic failure to take good care of our physical needs.

Can you think of three things you can do to promote pronoia in yourself by taking better care of your body?





In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests that we all need to periodically go cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds. Make sure, she says, that at least one part of you always remains untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine. Be adamant in your determination to stay intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about your life.

At the same time, though, Estes believes you need to keep your unusual urges clear and ordered. Discipline your wildness, in other words, and don't let it degenerate into careless disorder.





Homework: Write essays on one or more of these topics:

1. ?How I Used My Nightmares to Become Smart and Strong?

2. ?How I Exploited My Problems to Become a Spiritual Freedom Fighter?

3. ?How I Fed and Fed and Fed My Monsters Until They Ate Themselves to Death?

4. ?How I Turned Envy, Frustration, and Smoldering Anger into Generosity, Compassion, and Fiery Success?

5. ?Why Perfection Sux?


-from my book, The Televisionary Oracle





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


Even now, secret allies are cooking up mysteries that will excite you and incite you for years to come.

Even now, the Earth, moon, and sun are collaborating to make sure you have all you need to make your next smart move.

But here's the loaded question: 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.

Half of the art of pronoia is about being improvisationally receptive to life's elaborate scheme to shower you with blessings. The other half is about learning to be a co-conspirator who assists life in doling out blessings?to help everyone else get exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.

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.

P.S. All of creation loves you very much.




Think about your relationship to human beings who haven't been born yet. What might you create for them to use? How can you make your life a gift to the future? Can you not only help preserve the wonders we live amidst, but actually enhance them? Keep in mind this thought from Lewis Carroll: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward."





"Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves.

"The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.

"Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation"





?I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry. Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry. I live in the question. People have so many positions, and usually the evidence is not strong enough for them really to be so confident in those conclusions. There are just a lot of things that are not certain.?

- Jerry Brown, quoted in "The Atlantic"




A life-long dream of mine came true back in 2010, and I didn't even know it was a life-long dream until it happened. It struck unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon in April.

My daughter Zoe called on the phone from her college dorm room, wanting to discuss an essay she'd been assigned to read for her poetry class. She really liked it, but there were some points she wanted to understand better, and she thought my input might help. The essay was the "Surrealistic Manifesto," formulated in 1924 by the writer Andr? Breton. Years ago, it was a crucial document in my own development as a young poet. The opportunity to share its heady brew with the beloved child I used to push on a swing was startling and blissful.

It was Zoe's birthday recently. She just finished her first year in the MFA Poetry program at Columbia University, and is well on her way to being an accomplished writer and provocative poet. She is also an intriguing and generous human being with impeccable integrity and enormous emotional intelligence. She has inspired me to live up to my ideals and share my wealth.

I don't throw the word "joy" around lightly, but Zoe's presence in my life is a fount of joy and a source of continuous blessings.

Zoe's journalism for the East Bay Express

Zoe's journalism for radio station KALW.




Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


Are you willing to 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, never demeaning the present by comparing it to an idealized past or future?





Readers of my horoscope column "Free Will Astrology" are sometimes surprised when I say I only believe in astrology about 80 percent. "You're a quack?!" they cry. Not at all, I explain. I've been a passionate student of the ancient art for years. About the time my over-educated young brain was on the verge of desertification, crazy wisdom showed up in the guise of astrology, moistening my soul just in time to save it.

"But what about the other 20 percent?" they press on. "Are you saying your horoscopes are only partially true?"

I assure them that my doubt proves my love. By cultivating a tender, cheerful skepticism, I inoculate myself against the virus of fanaticism. This ensures that astrology will be a supple tool in my hands, an adaptable art form, and not a rigid, explain-it-all dogma that over-literalizes and distorts the mysteries it seeks to illuminate.

Read the rest of this essay.





Ken Burns says one of the things that alarms him most at this moment in culture is that so many people are eager to express their opinions and so few are interested in telling stories.





How can we influence people to stop their extermination of nature? How can we motivate people to stop committing genocide against animal species? [Choose Method A or Method B or a blend of both.]

Method A.

1. Nag people with scientific data that shocks them into acknowledging how much harm human activity is inflicting.

2. Shame them about the sin of bequeathing their descendants a damaged, impoverished planet.

3. Badger them to dissolve the unethical greed that leads them to consume so many of the earth's resources and produce too much waste.

4. Criticize them for being too stubborn and ignorant to change their destructive habits.

5. Goad them with financial incentives to do the right thing even if they don't want to do the right thing.

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Method B.

6. Express smart love for the interconnected web of life.

7. Celebrate the fact that there are other forms of consciousness and intelligence besides just the human kind.

8. Embody the hypothesis that spending time in wild places enhances one's mental hygiene and physical health.

9. Value the feminine as much as the masculine.

10. Cultivate the art of empathy, and demonstrate how to make it work in everything you do.

11. Show what it means to think with your heart and feel with your head.

12. Stay in close touch with the Mysterium, the other real world that is the root of the material world.

13. Vow to bring the I-Thou dynamic to bear on all your relationships.

14. Be as curious about intimacy as you are about power.





THE BLESSINGS OF CHANGE, from the book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia

One of life's great bounties is its changeableness, which ensures that boredom will never last very long. You may underestimate the intensity of your longing for continual transformation, but the universe doesn't. That's why it provides you with the boundless entertainment of your ever-shifting story. That's why it is always revising the challenges it sends your way, providing your curious soul with a rich variety of unpredictable teachings.

Neuroscientists have turned up evidence that suggests you love this aspect of the universe's behavior. They say that you are literally addicted to learning. At the moment when you grasp a lesson you've been grappling with, your brain experiences a rush of a natural opium-like chemical, boosting your pleasure levels. You crave this experience. You thrive on it.

So the universe is built in such a way as to discourage boredom. It does this not just by generating an endless stream of interesting novelty, and not only by giving you an instinctive lust to keep learning, but also by making available an abundance of ways to break free of your habitual thoughts. You can go to school, travel, read, listen to experts, converse with people who think differently from you, and absorb the works of creative artists. You can replenish and stretch your mind through exercise, sex, psychotherapy, spiritual practices, and self-expression. You can take drugs and medicines that alter your perspectives.

And here's the best part of this excellent news: Every method that exists for expanding your consciousness is more lavishly available right now than it has been at any previous time in history.

Never before have there been so many schools, educational programs, workshops, and enrichment courses. Virtually any subject or skill you want to study, you can. You don't even have to leave your home to do it. The number of online classes is steadily mounting.

Travel is easier and faster than ever before. A few days from now, you could be white-water rafting along the Franklin River in Tasmania, or riding on "the train at the end of the world" in Tierra del Fuego, or observing Golden Bamboo lemurs in the rainforest of southeastern Madagascar. If you're on a budget, you can jet to exotic locales for free as an air courier, or you can travel cheaply as an eco-tourist, enjoying the natural pleasures of distant climes without demanding luxurious accommodations or expensive night life.

Let's talk about the Internet's role in helping the universe discourage boredom. Remember, it's still very early in the evolution of this budding global brain. But already it provides you with instant access to a substantial amount of all the information, images, and music ever created. And in another few years, the sheer entirety of the human mind's riches will be spread before you like a gargantuan feast. It's not yet true that every book ever written and every song ever recorded and every film ever made are accessible online, but it will be true sooner rather than later.

Today, without leaving your chair or spending any money, you can enjoy Kandinsky's painting "Improvisation No. 30" or archives of the Krazy Kat comic strips. You can listen to a Vivaldi concerto or a Black Sabbath heavy metal anthem, and you can read the history of the Peloponnesian War or the myths of the Tlingit Indians. You can hear Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech or watch a short film of the Three Stooges throwing pies in the faces of high society matrons or pore over every poem Emily Dickinson ever wrote.

For many of us, few freshly minted glories are more glorious than the Internet's prodigious gift of song. Thanks to the magic of electronic file transfer, there has never before been so much great music available, and from so many different cultures and genres, and so cheaply.

Enhancing this blessing has been the recent revolution in recording technology, which has made it possible for musicians all over the world to record their compositions at low cost. We not only have much better access to all kinds of music, but have far more new music to enjoy as well.

One further development has pushed our relationship with music into the realm of crazy goodness: portable MP3 players that allow us to listen to the burgeoning abundance of tunes anywhere and anytime we want . . . .

READ THE REST OF THIS ESSAY





"Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act."
- Ram Dass





"Make visible what, without you, might have never been seen."
- Robert Bresson





The poet Kabir says:

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
.
- Kabir, translated and rendered by Robert Bly





Research shows:

1. Exercising compassion stimulates the same pleasure centers associated with the drive for food, water and sex.

2. Practicing compassion with intention has a positive physiological effect on the body. It can lower blood pressure, boost your immune response and increase your calmness.

3. Not only are we hard-wired to be kind, but it is essential for the survival of our species.

4. Recognizing common fears or vulnerabilities rather than differences -- be it with a difficult friend, an abrasive colleague or a noisy neighbor -- calms the nervous system, boosting feelings of contentment and self worth.

Read more.







There is only One Being: the Living Intelligent Consciousness That Pervades Every Cubic Inch of the Universe. Every seemingly separate thing, from earthworm to human being to star, is a cell in the body of this One and Only Great One.

All of us cells feel pain as long as we have forgotten we are part of the One. But the forgetting was an essential rule that the One set up to begin the master game. Because of our illusion that each of us is alone and separate, we are under the impression that we must become distinctive and unique. As we work to create ourselves, adding intricate modifications to what we started out as, we give joy to The One, expanding and deepening the meaning of the master game.

At the point when the sense of isolation is greatest in each cell -- which is also the point when each cell experiences its uniqueness with maximum acuity -- the pain of separation triggers the longing to remember where we came from. Gradually, each of us figures out how to return home and reunite consciously with the One. But something fundamental in us has changed since we first fell under the spell of separateness. We have added the beauty of our individuality, our gift to The One.





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

Here are practical ways I carry on the work of championing and embodying the Divine Feminine:

I regard relationship as a crucible for spiritual work.

I think of the practical expression of kindness and compassion and ethical behavior as an essential spiritual practice.

I assume that a crucial element of spiritual practice is the consciousness and compassion we bring to the sometimes chaotic and messy details of being human beings.

I proceed as if loving and caring for animals and plants and the Earth is the test of our spiritual intentions.

I regard play and fun and humor as not diversions from "serious" spiritual work, but rather being at the center of it.

There are more, but I'll stop for now. What about you? What are the practical ways you carry on the work of loving Goddess?




"You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in."
- Eliezer Yudkowsky




Some people put their faith in religion or science or political ideologies. English novelist J.G. Ballard placed his faith elsewhere: in the imagination. "I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world," he wrote, "to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen."

How do you use the power of imagination to remake the world?





"The criteria for success: you are free, you live in the present moment, you are useful to the people around you, and you feel love for all humanity."

- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar





"May a good vision catch me
May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me
May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me
May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me.
May I awaken into the story that surrounds,
May I awaken into the beautiful story.
May the wondrous story find me;
May the wildness that makes beauty arise between two lovers
arise beautifully between my body and the body of this land,
between my flesh and the flesh of this earth,
here and now,
on this day,
May I taste something sacred."

- David Abram (Writer/Activist/Ecologist)





"Modern post-industrial societies tend to produce un-sane populations -- multitudes of people who are unbalanced in their adaptation to the destructive stress of daily existence. One of the symptoms of this un-sanity is the loss of contact between the waking ego and the depths of the self, a contact that requires involvement in dream experiences and information.

"Cultures generally resist change, and modern materialist societies are no different in this respect. Devaluation of dreaming and other spiritually efficacious experiences is part of the foundation of 'false consciousness' required by capitalist/materialist political economies.

"Materialist cultures require that the focus of awareness be upon the material conditions of life and away from involvement with the inner being which is the only road to spiritual maturation."

- Charles D. Laughlin, Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

The surprisingly simple way Utah solved chronic homelessness and saved millions.

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The owner of a credit card processing business in Seattle is raising his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 by cutting his own salary. "The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it?s absurd," he said.

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"Empathy isn?t just something that happens to us -- a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain -- it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.

"Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn?t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own.
- Leslie Jamison,

The Empathy Exams





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.


Here's a thought experiment you could try for the next 24 hours: Every time a negative or fearful thought rises up, substitute a thought, imagination, or memory that energizes you and makes you feel genuinely good.

It's only for one day. You can do it!




I invite you to say the following, and see how it feels:

Everyone is my teacher.

Everywhere I go, I am a student.

Every person I meet is in some way my superior.

I vow to shut up and listen on a frequent and regular basis.





"Having very broad and abstract goals may maintain and exacerbate depression. Goals that are not specific are more ambiguous and, therefore, harder to visualize. If goals are hard to visualize it may result in reduced expectation of realizing them which in turn results in lower motivation to try and achieve them."

- Researchers at the institute of Health, Psychology, and Society





From The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism, a list of positive emotions and states of being:

COMPASSIONATE DISCRIMINATION. Having astute judgment without being scornfully judgmental; seeing difficult truths about a situation or person without closing your heart or feeling superior. In the words of Alan Jones: having the ability "to smell a rat without allowing your ability to discern deception sour your vision of the glory and joy that is everyone's birthright."

INGENIOUS INTIMACY. Having an ability to consistently create deep connections with other human beings, and to use the lush, reverential excitement stimulated by such exchanges to further deepen the connections. A well-crafted talent for dissolving your sense of separateness and enjoying the innocent exultation that erupts in the wake of the dissolution.

SONGBIRD-IN?A-TREE. The cultivated awareness that daily life presents countless opportunities to be buoyed by moments of ordinary extraordinary beauty, and that these moments are most available if you perceive with your senses and not with your internal turmoil.

More from The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism, a list of positive emotions and states of being.





Each one of us is a blend of life and death. In the most literal sense, our bodies always contain old cells that are dying and new cells that are emerging as replacements.

From a more metaphorical perspective, our familiar ways of seeing and thinking and feeling are constantly atrophying, even as fresh modes emerge. Both losing and winning are woven into every day; sinking down and rising up; shrinking and expanding.

In any given phase of our lives, one or the other polarity is often more pronounced. But sometimes they are evenly balanced; the Seasons of Rot and of Regeneration happen at the same time.

Where are you at in the cycle right now?





"In the end, we'll all become stories."

- Margaret Atwood




I invite you to say this, or something like this: "I pledge to wake myself up, never hold back, have nothing to lose, go all the way, kiss the stormy sky, be the hero of my own story, ask for everything I need and give everything I have, take myself to the river when it's time to go to the river, and take myself to the mountaintop when it's time to go to the mountaintop."





How's your fight for freedom going? Are you making progress in liberating yourself from your unconscious obsessions, bad habits, and conditioned responses? Do you find that you're getting more skillful at minimizing your suffering? Are you turning out to be the hero of your own life?





I hereby appoint you a dissident bodhisattva in charge of overthrowing the sour and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality," and replacing it with an authentic reality built on the principles of insurrectionary beauty, ingenious love, reverent justice, rigorous equality, and rowdy bliss.

Any other principles you want to add?




I have an essay in a new book called Pluto: New Horizons for a Lost Horizon: Astronomy, Astrology, and Mythology

It's edited by one of my mentors, Richard Grossinger -- a person I consider one of the five smartest people in the world. It's published by North Atlantic Books, the visionary publisher that has published my last three books.

My essay is about the astrological, pychoological, and mythopoetic meaning of Pluto. Here's an excerpt:

Scientists no doubt had sound. rational reasons to exile Pluto from the traditional solar system and transfer its realm to the Kuiper Belt with the other dwarf worlds, but they were also under the influence of deeply unconscious forces too. The expulsion of Pluto marked a symbolic turning point in the triumphalism and triumph of scientism, the ascendency of a mode of thinking that values only what's visible, measurable, and categorizable. But Pluto is more than the rocky planetoid representing it: Pluto is an essential phase of human consciousness.

It is no accident that the ostracism comes at a time when the Plutonian realm itself is being devalued and rendered inessential. The overall downgrading of Pluto is a milestone in the modern attempt to depreciate the soul's mode of awareness and make it subsidiary to the deductive mind. To banish Pluto is to deny that living in the soul has any value to us.





?A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness ... will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions."

- Andrew Harvey





Below are more excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

Here are some ways to get more respect:

1. Do your best in every single thing you do -- whether it's communicating precisely or upholding the highest possible standards at your job or taking excellent care of yourself.

2. Maintain impeccable levels of integrity in everything you do -- whether it's being scrupulously honest or thoroughly fair-minded or fiercely kind.

3. On the other hand, don't try so compulsively hard to do your best and cultivate integrity that you get self-conscious and obstruct the flow of your natural intelligence.

4. Make it your goal that