"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted," wrote Leo author Aldous Huxley. That's the bad news. The good news is that in the coming weeks you are less likely to take things for granted than you have been in a long time. Happily, it's not because your familiar pleasures and sources of stability are in jeopardy. Rather, it's because you have become more deeply connected to the core of your life energy. You have a vivid appreciation of what sustains you. Your assignment: Be alert for the eternal as it wells up out of the mundane.

*

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.

*

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
*
Some religious traditions teach the doctrine, "Kill off your longings." In their view, attachment to desire is at the root of human suffering. But the religion of materialism takes the opposite tack, asserting that the meaning of life is to be found in indulging desires. Its creed is, "Feed your cravings like a French foie gras farmer cramming eight pounds of maize down a goose's gullet every day."

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we walk a middle path. We believe there are both degrading desires that enslave you and sacred desires that liberate you.

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that all desires have a sacred origin, no matter how odd they may seem. Frustration and ignorance may contort them into distorted caricatures, but it is always possible to locate the divine source from which they arose. In describing one of his addictive patients, Jung said: "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

Psychotherapist James Hillman echoes the theme: "Psychology regards all symptoms to be expressing the right thing in the wrong way." A preoccupation with porn or romance novels, for instance, may come to dominate a passionate person whose quest for love has degenerated into an obsession with images of love. "Follow the lead of your symptoms," Hillman suggests, "for there's usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul."

To hear or read the rest of this essay "What If Your Desires Are Holy," go here.