Know (and Love) What You're Fighting For

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

Below are some excerpts.

KNOW WHAT YOU'RE FIGHTING FOR

Activist and author Naomi Klein tells a story about the time she traveled to Australia at the request of Aboriginal elders. They wanted her to know about their struggle to prevent white people from dumping radioactive wastes on their land.

Her hosts brought her to their beloved wilderness, where they camped under the stars. They showed her "secret sources of fresh water, plants used for bush medicines, hidden eucalyptus-lined rivers where the kangaroos come to drink."
After three days, Klein grew restless. When were they going to get down to business?

"Before you can fight," she was told, "you have to know what you are fighting for."





THE BALANCE BETWEEN CYNICISM AND OPTIMISM

"I've found a nice balance," writes EarthMover, one of my readers, "between living like someone who has overdosed on delusional optimism and someone who thinks everything and everyone sucks. I can see things as they really are instead of through either rose-colored glasses or crap-colored glasses.

"That means I can cultivate true objectivity, not the fake cynical kind. I free myself from negative emotional biases that used to cloud my ability to see the partially hidden beauty all around me.

"At the same time, I'm not addicted to the idea that I should be eternally happy and blithe and sweet. When the dark moods descend on me, I trust them. I know they are openings into equally sacred perceptions and insights."





IS THE WORLD DANGEROUS, OR ARE YOU SURROUNDED BY HELPERS?

Is the world a dangerous, chaotic place with no inherent purpose, running on automatic like a malfunctioning machine and fundamentally inimical to your happiness?

Or are you surrounded by helpers in a friendly universe that gives you challenges in order to make you smarter and wilder and kinder?
Trick questions! The answers may depend, at least to some degree, on what you believe is true.

I invite you to formulate a series of experiments that will allow you to objectively test the hypothesis that the universe is conspiring to help you.





TO BE HOPEFUL IN BAD TIMES IS NOT FOOLISHLY ROMANTIC

Howard Zinn said: "Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.

"We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

"If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places ? and there are so many ? where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

"And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

- Howard Zinn, from "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."





"That in a person which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness."

- Antonio Porchia





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

INTERVIEWER: You confuse me in the way that you praise rational thought and the scientific method, yet reserve the right to believe in astrology, angels, miracles, and other woo-woo.

ROB BREZSNY: Thousands of amazing, inexplicable, and even supernatural events occur every day. And yet most are unreported by the media. The few that are cited are ridiculed.

Why? Here's one possible reason: The people most likely to believe in wonders and marvels may be superstitious, uneducated, or prone to having a blind, literalist faith in their religions' myths. Those who are least likely to believe in wonders and marvels are skilled at analytical thought, well-educated, and yet prone to having a blind, literalist faith in the ideology of materialism, which dogmatically asserts that the universe consists entirely of things that can be perceived by the five human senses or detected by instruments that scientists have thus far invented.

The media is largely composed of people from the second group. It's virtually impossible for them to admit to the possibility of events that elude the rational mind's explanations, let alone experience them. If anyone from this group manages to escape peer pressure and cultivate a receptivity to the miraculous, it's because they have successfully fought against being demoralized by the unsophisticated way wonders and marvels are framed by the first group.

I try to be immune to the double-barreled ignorance. When I behold astonishing synchronicities and numinous breakthroughs that seem to violate natural law, I'm willing to consider the possibility that my understanding of natural law is too narrow. And yet I also refrain from lapsing into irrational gullibility; I actively seek mundane explanations for apparent miracles.





MAGIC SECRET

"The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words," said Terence McKenna, "and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish."

Here's my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your use of language.

Do you want to move and breathe amidst infertile chaos where nothing makes sense and no one really loves anyone? Then speak with unconscious carelessness, expressing yourself lazily. Constantly materialize and entertain angry thoughts in the privacy of your own imagination, beaming silent curses out into eternity.

Or would you prefer to live in a realm that's rich with fluid epiphanies and intriguing coincidences and mysterious harmonies? Then be discerning and inventive in how you speak, primed to name the unexpected codes that are always being born right in front of your eyes. Turn your imagination into an ebullient laboratory where the somethings you create out of nothings are tinctured with the secret light you see in your dreams of invisible fire.

P.S. "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words," wrote Philip K. Dick in his essay, "How to Build A Universe That Won't Fall Apart in Two Days."

Listen to "Magic Secret".





"The degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic."

- novelist Lisa Alther

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

- F. Scott Ftizgerald





OUR BODIES ARE WILD

Gary Snyder says: "Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting -- are universal responses of this mammal body.
.
"The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own.
.
"Sensation and perception do not exactly come from outside, and unremitting thought and image-flow are not exactly outside. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than ?you? can keep track of -- thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden.
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"The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches -- the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.
.
"The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out (and sometimes making expansionist plots), and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild."
.
- Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Sea World announced it will stop breeding killer whales in captivity.

LGBT-rights activists in Oklahoma contributed to the defeat of all 27 "slate of hate" bills in the Oklahoma legislature.

The Portland, Oregon city council unanimously authorized the City Attorney to sue Monsanto for contaminating its waterways with PCBs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines to help clamp down on the over-prescription of opioid painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicodin that kill 40 people a day in the U.S.

President Obama blocked oil drilling in the Atlantic and appointed Raffi-Freedman-Gurspan the first transgender person to be White House LGBT liaison.

District Attorney Tim McGinty lost re-election in Ohio after ignoring the police murder of Tamir Rice. Cook County, Illinois' State's Attorney Anita Alvarez lost her election over the cover-up of the police murder of Laquan McDonald.





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

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."

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COMIC INTROSPECTION. Being fully aware of your own foibles while still loving yourself tenderly and maintaining confidence in your ability to give your specific genius to the world. To paraphrase Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral: following the Byzantine ploys of your ego with compassion and humor as it tries to make itself the center of everything, even the center of its own suffering and struggle.

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NOT HAVING TO BE RIGHT. Fostering an ability, even a willingness, to be proven wrong about one of your initial perceptions or pet theories; having an eagerness to gather information that may change your mind about something you have fervently believed; cultivating a tendency to enjoy being corrected, especially about ideas that are negative or hostile.

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RELENTLESS UNPRETENTIOUSNESS. Possessing a strong determination to not take yourself too seriously, not take your cherished beliefs too literally, and not take other people's ideas about you too personally.

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JOYFUL POIGNANCE. Feeling buoyantly joyful about the beauty and mystery of life while remaining aware of the sadness, injustices, wounds, and future fears that form the challenges in an examined life.

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- More healthy states of mind are listed in "The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism"





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"The most powerful starting point for any endeavor is not the question 'What do I want?', but 'What does Life (God, Consciousness) want from me? How do I serve the whole?'"

- Eckhart Tolle

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"From a Sufi perspective, the whole universe is a phenomenon of desire. The Divine desire pervades all things and beings, empowering each according to its capacity. For the mystic, the truest education is the education of desire. By means of this education the indwelling Divine desire is liberated from the constraints of the ego and becomes a force for the transfiguration of the world."

- Pir Zia Inayat-Khan





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UNSOLVED PROBLEMS ARE GREAT TEACHERS

"There is nothing you can learn from as much as a problem you cannot fully solve. Unsolved problems can be some of the greatest tormentors, but also the greatest teachers. Unsolved problems keep the mind hungry and the eyes open.

"Small-minded people have found premature, final answers to great unresolved questions. Absolutisms and fundamentalisms abound for those who do not have the inner strength to live with unsolved problems.

"Many of the greatest discoveries and epiphanies have occurred as partial solutions to problems never fully solved. The ego, of course, desires closure, but some life problems are only closed with the coffin lid. Our desire to pursue unresolved problems is a major part of what keeps us alive and searching.

"One of the greatest life skills and signs of maturity is the ability to live with ambivalence, ambiguity and unresolved problems. As Deng Ming Dao says, 'Never underestimate the power of a partial solution.' It takes wisdom, courage and inner strength to live with unresolved problems and to resist trying to close them prematurely."

"Take another look at the unsolved problems you live with and recognize their inestimable value to your soul. Allow your desire to solve them to draw you into the misty labyrinth of life. And as you wind your way though the twists and turns, pause to appreciate some of the partial solutions, and remember that the journey is the destination."

- Jonathan Zap

Check out Jonathan Zap's online do-it-yourself oracle:.





DREAMING TRUE

According to biologist Francis Crick, our nightly dreams consist of nothing more than hallucinations produced as the brain flushes out metabolic wastes.

Of the many arguments that can be mustered against this odd theory, none is more forceful than the life of Harriet Tubman. After escaping from slavery in 1849, she helped organize the Underground Railroad and personally led 300 slaves to freedom.

Few history books choose to convey the fact that she sometimes relied on her dreams to provide specific information about where to find safe houses, helpers, and passages through dangerous territory. Robert Moss tells the whole story in his book Dreaming True.





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


I resolve not to automatically assume that negative feelings are more profound and authentic than positive ones, or that cynical opinions are smarter and more accurate than the optimistic kind.

And you?





RADICAL CURIOSITY. Characterized by the following traits: an enthusiasm for the mystery embedded in the mundane; a preference for questions over answers; an aversion to stereotyping, generalizations, and jumping to conclusions; a belief that people are unsolvable puzzles; an inclination to be unafraid of both change and absence of change; a strong drive to avoid boredom; a lack of interest in possessing or dominating what you are curious about.

WILD DISCIPLINE. Possessing a talent for creating a kind of organization that's liberating; knowing how to introduce limitations into a situation in such a way that everyone involved is empowered to express his or her unique genius; having an ability to discern hidden order within a seemingly chaotic mess.

VISIONS OF THRILLING EXPLOITS. Experiencing an eruption of intuition that clearly reveals you will attempt a certain adventure in the future, as when you spy a particular mountain for the first time and know you'll climb it one day.

UNTWEAKABILITY. Having a composed, blame-?free readiness to correct false impressions when your actions have been misunderstood and have led to awkward consequences.

More healthy states of mind.





"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M.D. Herter Norton

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"Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable, and noble kind of love."

- Delmore Schwartz





"A writer -- and, I believe, generally all persons -- must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource," said author Jorge Luis Borges. "All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

I agree that this advice isn't useful just for writers, but for everyone.





"The great lessons from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred. To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous."

- Abraham H. Maslow

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"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

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"If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion."

- Lin-Chi, translated by Thomas Cleary

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"We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in a storm of grief and planted itself again."

- Deena Metzger, *Prayers for a Thousand Years,* edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon





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


YOU ARE ALWAYS IN LOVE

You have always been in love. You will always be in love. In fact, it is impossible for you NOT to be in love. You'd be unable to get out of bed each morning unless there were someone or something that roused your heart and stirred your passionate imagination.

So please admit that you are alive because of love; that you are MADE of love.

I invite you to write a list of the five things you love most, and devote some time in the coming days to expressing your appreciation.





DROP YOUR RIGID IDENTITIES

Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell believes you can achieve optimum physical health if you're devoted to shedding outworn self-images. He says, "You have one central lesson to learn to continuously drop all your rigid identities. Personal history may be your greatest danger."

Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, agrees. Raised as a male, she later became a female, but ultimately renounced gender altogether. "I love being without an identity," she says. "It gives me a lot of room to play around."

What identities might be healthy for you to lose? Describe all the fun you'd have if you were free of them.





GETTING EVERYTHING YOU WANT

If I ever produce a self-help manual called *The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want,* it will discuss the following paradoxes:

a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you're not greedy or grasping.

b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you have already achieved them.

c. Whatever you're longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It's different from what it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. To make it yours, then, you'll have to modify your ideas about it.

d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn't foresee.

Any others you can think of?





YOU'RE SMARTER THAN YOU KNOW

How does it make you feel when I urge you to confess profound secrets to people who are not particularly interested? Does it make you want to:

a. cultivate a healthy erotic desire for a person you'd normally never be attracted to in a million years;

b. stop helping your friends glamorize their pain;

c. imitate a hurricane in the act of extinguishing a forest fire;

d. visualize Buddha or Mother Teresa at the moment of orgasm;

e. steal something that's already yours.

The right answer, of course, is any answer you thought was correct. Congratulations. You're even smarter than you knew.





"You've probably heard the rumor that 'Life is suffering' is Buddhism's first principle, the Buddha's first noble truth. It's a rumor with good credentials, spread by well-respected academics and Dharma teachers alike, but a rumor nonetheless.

"The truth about the noble truths is far more interesting. The Buddha taught four truths ? not one ? about life: 1. There is suffering. 2. There is a cause for suffering. 3. There is an end of suffering. 4. There is a path of practice that puts an end to suffering.

"These truths, taken as a whole, are far from pessimistic. They're a practical, problem-solving approach ? the way a doctor approaches an illness, or a mechanic a faulty engine. You identify a problem and look for its cause. You then put an end to the problem by eliminating the cause."

- Thanissaro Bhikkhu




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

HOW TO BE YOUR OWN PROPHET

I suspect that none of us has the capacity to foretell the future of the human race. No one -- not psychics, not doomsayers, not intelligent optimists, indigenous shamans, no one.

There is a strong case to be made that this is the worst of times, and an equally strong case that this is the best of times; a strong case that everything will collapse into a miserable dystopia and a strong case that we are on the verge of a golden age. It?s impossible to know in any ?objective way? which is ?truer.?

Anyone who asserts they do know is just cherry-picking evidence that rationalizes their emotional bent. The variables are chaotic and abundant and beyond our ken.

In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to create a golden age.

P.S. The best way to prepare for the unpredictable 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.





LOVE IS BEING STUPID TOGETHER?

"Love is being stupid together," said French poet Paul Val?ry. While there's a grain of truth to that, it's too corny and decadent for my tastes.

I prefer to focus on a more interesting truth, which is this: Real love is being smart together. If you weave your destiny together with another's, he or she should catalyze your sleeping potentials, sharpen your perceptions, and boost both your emotional and analytical intelligence. Your relationship becomes a crucible in which you deepen your understanding of the way the world works.

Think of an example of your closest approach to this model in your own life. Then formulate a vow in which you promise you'll do what's necessary to more fully embody the principle "Love is being smart together."





THE END OF APOCALYPSE

Many people alive today are convinced that our civilization is in a dark age, cut off from divine favor, and on the verge of collapse. But it's healthy to note that similar beliefs have been common throughout history.

As far back as 2800 BC, an unknown prophet wrote on an Assyrian clay tablet, "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end." In the seventh century BC, many Romans believed Rome would suffer a cataclysm in 634 BC.

Around 300 BC, Hindus were convinced they lived in an "unfortunate time" known as the Kali Yuga?the lowest point in the great cosmic cycle. In 426 AD, the Christian writer Augustine mourned that this evil world was in its last days. According to the Lotharingian panic-mongers who lived more than a 1,000 years ago, human life on earth would end on March 25, 970.

Astrologers in 16th-century London calculated that the city would be destroyed by a great flood on February 1, 1524. American minister William Miller proclaimed the planet's "purification by fire" would occur in 1844. Anglican minister Michael Baxter assured his followers that the Battle of Armageddon would take place in 1868. The Jehovah's Witnesses anticipated the End of Days in 1910, then 1914, then 1918, then 1925. John Ballou Newbrough ("America's Greatest Prophet") promised mass annihilation and global anarchy for 1947.

The website "A Brief History of the Apocalypse" lists over 200 visions of doom that have spilled from the hysterical imaginations of various prophets in the last two millennia.

Our age may have more of these doomsayers per capita than previous eras, although the proportion of religious extremists among them has declined as more scientists, journalists, and storytellers have taken up the singing of humanity's predicted swan song.

In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard says, "It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree."

Walt Whitman:
?There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.?

I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.





IMAGINE TRANSFORMATION

"You gotta remember, and I?m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter the hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible.

"Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia. My young people?s vocabulary . . . their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don?t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse.

"Do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn?t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?"

- Junot D?az, "Art, Race and Capitalism"





YOU'RE A LUCKY, PLUCKY GENIUS

You are constitutionally incapable of adapting nicely to the sour and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." You're too amazingly, blazingly insane for that.

You're too crazy smart to lust after the stupidest secrets of the game of life. You're too seriously delirious to wander sobbing through the sterile, perfumed labyrinth looking in vain for the most ultra-perfect mirror. Thank the Goddess that you are a fiercely tender throb of sublimely berserk abracadabra.

You'll never get crammed in a neat little niche in the middle of the road at the end of a nightmare. You refuse to allow your soul's bones to get ground down into dust and used to fertilize the killing fields that proudly dot the ice cream empire of monumentally demeaning luxuries.

You're too brilliantly cracked for that. You're too ingeniously whacked. You're too ineffably godsmacked.

(This is an excerpt from a longer piece. Read the rest here.)





SACRED ADVERTISEMENT

This perfect moment is brought to you by those pine trees whose seeds are so tightly compacted within their protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free them and allow them to sprout.





WHERE THE SPIRITUAL MEETS THE PRACTICAL

"How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth? How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity? How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?"

~ Starhawk





RECEPTIVITY REMEDIES

Alert, relaxed listening is the radical act at the heart of our pronoiac practice.

Curiosity is our primal state of awareness.

Wise innocence is a trick we aspire to master.

Open-hearted skepticism is the light in our eyes.

READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE.





YOU ARE ALWAYS IN LOVE

You have always been in love. You will always be in love. In fact, it is impossible for you NOT to be in love. You'd be unable to get out of bed each morning unless there were someone or something that roused your heart and stirred your passionate imagination.

So please admit that you are alive because of love; that you are MADE of love.

I invite you to write a list of the five things you love most, and devote some time in the coming days to expressing your appreciation.





Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell believes you can achieve optimum physical health if you're devoted to shedding outworn self-images. He says, "You have one central lesson to learn to continuously drop all your rigid identities. Personal history may be your greatest danger."

Kate Bornstein, author of *Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,* agrees. Raised as a male, she later became a female, but ultimately renounced gender altogether. "I love being without an identity," she says. "It gives me a lot of room to play around."

What identities might be healthy for you to lose? Describe all the fun you'd have if you were free of them.





If I ever produce a self-help manual called *The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want,* it will discuss the following paradoxes:

a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you're not greedy or grasping.

b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you have already achieved them.

c. Whatever you're longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It's different from what it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. To make it yours, then, you'll have to modify your ideas about it.

d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn't foresee.

Any others you can think if?





How does it make you feel when I urge you to confess profound secrets to people who are not particularly interested? Does it make you want to:

a. cultivate a healthy erotic desire for a person you'd normally never be attracted to in a million years;

b. stop helping your friends glamorize their pain;

c. imitate a hurricane in the act of extinguishing a forest fire;

d. visualize Buddha or Mother Teresa at the moment of orgasm;

e. steal something that's already yours.

The right answer, of course, is any answer you thought was correct. Congratulations. You're even smarter than you knew.





"You've probably heard the rumor that 'Life is suffering' is Buddhism's first principle, the Buddha's first noble truth. It's a rumor with good credentials, spread by well-respected academics and Dharma teachers alike, but a rumor nonetheless.

"The truth about the noble truths is far more interesting. The Buddha taught four truths ? not one ? about life: 1. There is suffering. 2. There is a cause for suffering. 3. There is an end of suffering. 4. There is a path of practice that puts an end to suffering.

"These truths, taken as a whole, are far from pessimistic. They're a practical, problem-solving approach ? the way a doctor approaches an illness, or a mechanic a faulty engine. You identify a problem and look for its cause. You then put an end to the problem by eliminating the cause."

- Thanissaro Bhikkhu





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

How Brazilian Women Are Using Graffiti to End the Cycle of Domestic Violence. From street art to law reform, women across Brazil are taking a stand against gender-based violence.

Boston Reduces Veteran Homelessness by 85%, Housing 533 Vets in 18 Months.

Largest Desalination Plant in Western Hemisphere Opens in Thirsty California.





HISTORY OF PRONOIA

My book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings is the only tome that has ever been written about the subject of pronoia. But other authors have worked a bit with the concept.

In his novella Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, J.D. Salinger wrote about pronoia without using the term. "Oh, God," one of his characters says, "if I?m anything by a clinical name, I?m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.?

The actual term "pronoia" was coined in 1976 by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who defined it as "the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf."

Another early contributor to the concept was psychologist Fraser Clark, founder of the Zippies. In the 1990s he referred to pronoia as "the sneaking hunch that others are conspiring behind your back to help you." Once you have contracted this benevolent virus, he said, the symptoms include "sudden attacks of optimism and outbreaks of goodwill."

Neither Terence McKenna or Robert Anton Wilson ever invoked the word "pronoia" as far as I know, but they both added nuance to the concept. McKenna said, "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy."

Wilson offered advice about the proper way to rehearse a devotion to pronoia: "You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."

Without using the term "pronoia," Paulo Cuelho added to its meaning: "Know what you want and all the universe conspires to help you achieve it."





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


ELATIONSHIP LOVE SPELLS FOR BEAUTY & TRUTH LAB ALLIES

The Beauty and Truth Lab's rapturists have formulated a batch of personal ads for you to borrow. If you're a Crafty Optimist or Mystical Activist or Ceremonial Teaser who aspires to put the elation back in relationship, check them out here.





"Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else's puzzle." So wrote Lawrence Kushner in his book, *Honey from the Rock.*

In other words, you have in your possession certain clues to your loved ones' destinies -- secrets they haven't discovered themselves.

Wouldn't you love to hand over those clues -- to make a gift of the puzzle pieces that are most needed by the people you care about?

Search your depths for insights you've never communicated. Tell truths you haven't found a way to express before now. More than you know, you have the power to mobilize your companions' dreams.





You understand that you can never own love, right? No matter how much someone adores you today, no matter how much you adore someone, you can't force that unique state of grace to keep its shape forever. It will inevitably evolve or mutate, perhaps into a different version of tender caring, but maybe not.

From there it will continue to change, into either yet another version of interesting affection, or who knows what else?

Are you making any progress in getting the hang of this tricky wisdom?





I invite you to act like a person who's in love. Even if you're not currently in the throes of passion for a special someone, pretend you are. Everywhere you go, exude that charismatic blend of shell-shocked contentment and blissful turmoil that comes over you when you're infatuated. Let everyone you meet soak up the delicious wisdom you exude. Dispense free blessings and extra slack like a rich saint high on natural endorphins.





Imagine that the merger of you and your best ally has created a third thing that hovers near you, protecting and guiding the two of you. Call this third thing an angel. Or call it the soul of your connection or the inspirational force of your relationship. Or call it the special work the two of you can accomplish together. And let this magical presence be the third point of your love triangle.





"For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."
- James Hillman





Gertrude Stein defined love as "the skillful audacity required to share an inner life." It suggests that expressing the truth about who you are is not something that amateurs do very well. Practice and ingenuity are required.

It also implies that courage is an essential element of successful intimacy. You've got to be adventurous if you want to weave your life together with another's.





"You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you."

- George Bernard Shaw





Whenever I write about romance and togetherness, I attract a storm of complaints from readers who are solitary. "How dare you imply that everyone has or should have a partner!?" is a typical protest. "I'm quite content being alone!" is another.

Let it be known that I do not believe your happiness depends on having a spouse or lover. What I do suspect, though, is that your soul needs some sacred relationship in order to thrive, whether it's with a good friend, a beloved animal, a beautiful patch of earth, the Divine Wow, or anything that's not you.

Whenever I invite you to seek deeper, wilder communion, feel free to interpret it as a call to explore any kind of intimacy that draws you closer to the secret heart of the world.





"The Orgasmic Roots of Pronoia" is one of the few NC-17-rated pieces in my book. Here's a link.

NSFW! PROCEED WITH CAUTION! This material has graphic references to love, lust, tenderness, bliss, and rapture.





Dear Readers,

I've gathered together all the Free Will Astrology horoscopes that address the far-reaching themes of your destiny in the coming months. Read a compendium of your written horoscopes for 2016.

In addition to these, I've created three-part, in-depth EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES about Your Long-Range Future. They go even further in exploring your prospects and challenges in 2016.

Who do you want to become in the coming months? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? How can you exert your free will to create adventures that'll bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports,GO HERE.

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then access the horoscopes by clicking on "Long Range Prediction." (Choose from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.

Each of the three-part reports is seven to nine minutes long. The cost is $6 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

P.S. You can also listen to an Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week.





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

"Don't be concerned about being disloyal to your pain by being joyous."

- Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

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"I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman

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"I don?t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.'"

- Susan Sontag

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"Magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen."

- W. Somerset Maugham

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"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation."

- Andre Gide

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"My idolatry: I?ve lusted after goodness. Wanting it here, now, absolutely, increasingly."

- Susan Sontag

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"Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."

- Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

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"To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence."

? Hermann Hesse

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"I like to cry. After I cry hard it?s like it?s morning again and I?m starting the day over."

- Ray Bradbury





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


CLOWN CHAKRA

Dionysian scientists at the Crazy Wisdom Institute of Applied Surpiseology have discovered the existence of the Clown Chakra. Located between the Gut and Sex Chakras, it houses the sense of humor and determines one's capacity for spiritually cleansing laughter.

Sadly, it's largely shut down in many people, resulting in the current global epidemic of taking things too damn seriously.

(P.S. I have embedded a subliminal prompt within this message that is designed to awaken and arouse any part of your own clown chakra that may be dormant.)





MAKE THE INVISIBLE DARK FORCE BEAUTIFUL

Make the invisible dark force beautiful. Create a song out of your moans. Brag about your wounds. Dance reverently on the graves of your enemies. Sneak a gift to your bad self. Dissolve the ties that bind you to hollow intelligence.

Train yourself in the art of unpredictability. Play forever in time's blessing. Lift up your heart unto the wild sun. Distribute your favors to the little ones who can never pay you back. Fall out of love with fear. Make beautiful messes in the midst of ugly messes.

Anything I missed?





LOVING THE CHANGES?

Whether you're a fan of a monotheistic God or a pluralistic
Goddess, you've undoubtedly noticed a deeply rooted quirk about
the Divine Temperament: an extreme fondness for change. The
Creator really likes to keep things moving right along.

Earlier in my life, I bore a grudge against this incorrigible
inclination. But after repeatedly having my karma crumpled for
resisting it, I realized I'd better get used to it. In recent years,
I've come a long way in retraining myself to be cheerfully
cooperative with the primal flux.

As a reward, the Cackling Goddess (my current favorite name for
the Sublime Mystery) has blessed me with a relentless series of opportunities to prove how well I've learned my lesson. She just keeps throwing changes my way, daring me to adjust with as much skill and grace as I can muster.

And you?





VOWS

I invite you to speak these vows out loud:

"As long as I live, I vow to die and be reborn, die and be reborn, die and be reborn, over and over again, forever reinventing myself.

"I promise to be stronger than hate, wetter than water, deeper than the abyss, and wilder than the sun.

"I pledge to remember that I am not only a sweating, half-asleep, excitable, bumbling jumble of desires, but that I am also an immortal four-dimensional messiah in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation.

"I vow to love and honor my highs and my lows my yeses and noes, my give and my take, the life I wish I had and the life I actually have.

"I promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow my devotion to the truth, fuel my commitment to beauty, refine my emotions, hone my dreams, wrestle with my shadow, purge my ignorance, and soften my heart -- even as I always accept myself for exactly who I am, with all of my so-called foibles and wobbles."





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


UNLEASH YOURSELF

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.





GREAT AWAKENING

Civilization may be unraveling in a lot of areas; some of its structures may be collapsing; but it is also in the midst of a tremendous upheaval of creativity -- a flood of innovation and genius and love pouring out of millions upon millions of people -- a Great Awakening that is far louder and stronger and more interesting than the sleepy resignation and corrosive maliciousness and ignominious decline that the media prefers to focus on.





YOUR HOLIEST DESIRE

I invite you to devote five minutes to visualizing the fulfillment of your holiest desire, followed by five minutes of visualizing the fulfillment of a loved one's holiest desire.





YOUR ILLUSIONS

Some of your illusions seeped into you before you learned to talk. Others sneaked into you later, while you were busy figuring out how to become yourself. Eventually, you even made conscious choices to adopt certain illusions because they provided you with comfort and consolation.

There's no need to be ashamed of this. It's a natural part of being a human being.

Now here's the good news: You have the power to shed at least some of your illusions in ways that don't shatter your foundations.

To begin the process, declare this intention at noon every Sunday for the next six months: "I am calling on all the power I have at my disposal, both conscious and unconscious, to dissolve my illusions."





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Eleven Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year For Humanity:

1. We got a lot closer to global, universal education

2. Extreme poverty dropped below 10%  --  the lowest rate ever

3. More people got connected to the internet than ever before

4. Millions of people gained access to finance for the first time

5. AIDS deaths came down for the 15th year in a row

6. Malaria death rates are at an all time low

7. Polio is about to be eradicated forever

8. Fewer people went hungry this year than ever before

9. More people have access to clean water

10. Child mortality plunged for the 43rd year in a row

11. We reached a tipping point in the fight against climate change

Read more.





THE BEST THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2015

Slate has created a compendium of the best things that happened each day in 2015. Here are ten of the best:

1. Nigeria bans female genital mutilation.
2. HIV protection is effective in African women.
3. Hunger has become much less severe in the past 15 years.
4. States? juvenile prison populations drop.
5. Homelessness declined 11 percent in the U.S. from 2010 to 2015.
6. Reforestation effort in Ecuador breaks world record.
7. Africa has its first polio-free year.
8. New Ebola vaccine is highly effective.
9. Energy storage technology, which is crucial for solar power, is making great progress.
10. People taking pre-exposure prophylaxis are staying HIV-free

See the best events of the other 355 days.

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SIX HOPEFUL BREAKTHROUGHS IN 2015

From the brilliant Yes! magazine:

1. The world set ambitious goals for climate stabilization, and real leadership came from the grassroots.

2. Black Lives Matters changed hearts, minds, and policing practices.

3. Bernie Sanders forced inequality and the power of Wall Street into the national debate.

4. The politics of scapegoating ran short of scapegoats.

5. Americans reassessed the U.S. role abroad.

6. The United States began a turn away from a prison state.

Read more.

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AN ABUNDANCE OF GOOD NEWS

"There are fewer wars. Inter-state war has virtually disappeared. More countries around the world are democratic; more provide basic services like health care, clean water, and immunizations to their citizens; most adhere to a basic set of global rules and norms, participate in international institutions, and are integrated into an interdependent global economy."

Read more.

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THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GETTING BETTER, DESPITE WHAT THE MEDIA WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE

"The news is a systematically misleading way to understand the world," Steven Pinker says.

"Wars are far less common and deadly than in the recent past, terrorism is rare, and the European refugee crisis is nothing new.

"In the past five years alone, conflicts have ended in Chad, Peru, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, India, and Angola, and if peace talks currently underway in Colombia are a success, war will have vanished from the Western hemisphere.

"Attacks of the kind that killed civilians in Paris, Ankara, California, Beirut and Garissa in Kenya this year are big news because they are rare.

"Rampage shootings generate a huge amount of media publicity but account for a relatively tiny number of deaths."

Read more.

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THE U.S. IS SAFER THAN ANY MAJOR POWER HAS EVER BEEN

"When Americans look out at the world, they see a swarm of threats. China seems resurgent and ambitious. Russia is aggressive. Iran menaces our allies. Middle East nations we once relied on are collapsing in flames. Latin American leaders sound steadily more anti-Yankee. Terror groups capture territory and commit horrific atrocities. We fight Ebola with one hand while fending off Central American children with the other.

"In fact, this world of threats is an illusion. The United States has no potent enemies. We are not only safe, but safer than any big power has been in all of modern history."

Read more.

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OVERREACTION TO TERRORISM IS MUCH MORE DANGEROUS THAN TERRORISM

"Why do otherwise intelligent people keep saying silly things, like, 'We are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime.'?

"Overreaction to terrorism is the true threat"

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SOURCES OF UNDER-REPORTED GOOD NEWS

Uplifting News

Good News Network





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

your debts forgiven

your wounds healed

your apologies accepted

your generosity expanded

your love educated

your desires clarified

your uniqueness unleashed

your untold stories heard

your insight heightened

your load lightened

your wildness rejuvenated

your leaks plugged

your courage stoked

your fears dissolved

your imagination fed

your creativity uncorked





In 2016, I invite you to have an improbable quest playing at the edge of your imagination: a heroic task that provokes deep thoughts and noble passions even if it incites smoldering torment . . . an extravagant dream that's a bit farfetched but not entirely insane . . . a goal that stretches your possibilities and opens your mind . . . a wild hope whose pursuit makes you smarter and stronger even if you never fully accomplish it.





Every January 1, many people make New Year's resolutions, promising to embark on programs of self-improvement. But your assignment now, should you choose to accept it, is to create a list of ANTI-resolutions.

Here are some questions to guide you:

1. What outlandish urges and controversial tendencies do you promise to cultivate in the coming months?

2. What nagging irritations will you ignore and avoid with even greater ingenuity?

3. What problems do you promise to exploit in order to have even more fun as you make the status quo accountable for its corruption?

4. What boring rules and traditions will you thumb your nose at, paving the way for exciting encounters with strange attractors?





Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating.

Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter.

Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good.





One of the b