Think with Your Heart and Feel with Your Head

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


Below are excerpts.

I invite you to become an exhilarationist, which is the opposite of a terrorist: Conspire to unleash blessings on unsuspecting recipients, inspiring them to feel good. Give anonymous gifts or provide some beauty or healing to people who can't do you any favors in return.
Before bringing your work as a exhilarationist to strangers, you might want to practice with two close companions.

Offer them each a gift that fires up their ambitions. It should not be a practical necessity or consumer fetish, but rather a provocative tool or toy.

Give them an imaginative boon they've been hesitant to ask for, a beautiful thing that expands their self-image, a surprising intervention that says, "I love the way you move me."





We're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than your fiftieth cousin.

With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and, owing to the wind's circulation, every year you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. (Source: Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life)

Right now you may be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra.

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Your body contains about four octillion atoms. That's four with 27 zeroes after it. Believe it or not, 200 billion of that total were once inside the body of Martin Luther King, Jr. For that matter, an average of 200 billion atoms of everyone who has ever lived and died is part of you. I am not making this up.

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told *The Washington Post* the following fun facts: "There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than cups of water in all the world's oceans. This means that some molecules in every cup of water you drink passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Abe Lincoln, or any other historical person of your choosing."





"The Way of Abundance is all too often misconstrued as a shallow sense of 'getting what one wants,' 'eliminating the negative,' or 'being free from pain.' Even the often-touted 'manifesting your dreams,' offers a psychological disposition that generally remains fixated around manifestation as 'the project of me.'

"But the 'project of me' can never be enough, for it does not meet 'the other,' and real living involves meeting. The touch and contact with all of life, the full freedom of non-separation, the completeness of full relationship, and the radiance of compassionate ecstasy is what we are inherently hungry for."

- Rick Jarow, Alchemy of Abundance





If you're afraid you're running out of good ideas, start writing a booklet entitled, "My Inexhaustible Supply of Good Ideas."





Below are more excerpts from Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Plato long ago recognized that besides eating, sleeping, breathing, and having sex, every creature has an instinctual need to periodically leap up into the air for no other reason than because it feels so good.

Seeing as how you have probably not been attending to this need for a very long time, and seeing as how it's essential to creating the mood that will lead to the best decision-making, I encourage you now to do just that.





ANTI-INSTRUCTIONS

Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos
Refuse the gifts that infringe on your freedom
Shun sacred places that fill you with boredom
Keep in mind it's bad luck to be superstitious
The official story's always fictitious
Pump up your karma with idiot laughter
The promised land's here, not in some hereafter

We are searching for the answers
so we can destroy them and dream up better questions

Use your third eye to watch TV
Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees
Think with your heart and feel with your head
Spit a mouthful of beer as far as you can
Kick your own ass and wash your own brain.
Make fun of your fears and heal your own pain
Play games with no rules, save your own life
Push your own buttons and be your own wife

We are searching for the answers
so we can destroy them and dream up better questions

Plunge butcher knives into accordions
Forgive yourself of all your mistakes except one
Commit funny crimes that don't break any laws
Shock yourself with how beautiful you are.
Tell jokes to clowns and cook feasts for chefs
Sing songs to the birds, and kill your own death
Mangle your anger, transform it to pleasure
Change your name, steal your own treasure

Go wash some water
Mock your own hypocrisy

Go burn some fire
Brag about your perplexity

Go wash some water
Advertise your secrecy

Go burn some fire
Overthrow reality





"May I feel all I need to feel in order to heal; may I heal all I need to heal in order to feel."

- Marguerite Rigoglioso





Proposed experiment: See if you can discover what has been hidden from you. Peel off the disguises. Outwit the hype. Forgive but also work around the fear that drives the deceptions and delusions. Penetrate to the raw truth that is buried beneath the official story and the sincere propaganda. And be alert for the forgotten treasure, lost keys, missing links, or magic elixir.

To help you achieve success in these endeavors, keep in mind the advice of inventor George Washington Carver: "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough."





"We should not think of our past as definitely settled, for we are not a stone or a tree," wrote poet Czeslaw Milosz. "My past changes every minute according to the meaning given it now, in this moment.?

So, yes, you have the power to re-vision and reinterpret your past. Keep the following question in mind as you go about your work: "How can I recreate my history so as to make my willpower stronger, my love of life more intense, and my future more interesting?"





I published the original version of Pronoia in 2005. For my next big writing project, I might have chosen to write a sequel. But instead I opted to fatten up the first edition.

The Revised and Expanded edition of Pronoia, which came out four years later, is MUCH fatter. It has 55% brand new extra material, or 92 more pages and 63,000 additional words -- the size of a whole new book.

There are 17 totally new pieces. It also has amplified and intensified versions of many of the central pieces of the original book, including "This Is a Perfect Moment," "Glory in the Highest," "World Kiss," and "I Me Wed," the ceremony for you to use if you want to marry yourself.

I got especially pumped up and carried away while revising "Glory in the Highest," which is a manifesto celebrating the everyday miracles we take for granted, the uncanny powers we possess, the small joys that occur so routinely we forget how much they mean to us, and the steady flow of benefits bestowed on us by people we know and don?t know.

In the new edition of the book, "Glory in the Highest" is eight times longer than in the original. Read it: http://bit.ly/GloryGloryGlory. Hear a short version of it: bit.ly/highestglory

The Revised and Expanded edition of Pronoia also has 14 brand new Sacred Advertisements. Don't worry -- if you're new to Pronoia -- the Sacred Ads aren't real ads. Here's an example:

"This perfect moment is brought to you by the imaginary lightning bolts you can shoot out the ends of your fingers anytime you want to."

Like the 2005 edition, the revised and expanded Pronoia has an abundance of space for you to write and scrawl and draw your responses to what you read. It's designed to make you my collaborator as we conspire together to incite the Great Awakening.

P.S. The following prophecy is even truer today than it was when I first made it a couple of years ago: 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.





Below are excerpts from Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

The people I trust the most are those who are always tenderly wrestling and negotiating with their own shadows, making preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil, fighting the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on those around them.

I aspire to be like that, which is why I regularly kick my own ass.


(For a demonstration of how to kick your own ass, go here -- about three minutes in.)





What thought or trick do you use to help liberate yourself from unnecessary suffering?

What joke do you play on yourself when you're taking yourself too seriously?

How do you compassionately bust yourself when you realize you've been indulging in hypocritical behavior?





"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."

- Elizabeth Gilbert





Please bring strange things.

Please come bringing new things.

Let very old things come into your hands.

Let what you do not know come into your eyes.

Let desert sand harden your feet.

Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.

Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.

Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.

May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.

May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.

May your soul be at home where there are no houses.

Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.

Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

- Ursula K. Le Guin





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

List of things to do:

1. Expect nothing, but ask for everything.

2. Gently but gleefully smash an unnecessary personal taboo.

3. Jump for joy and click our heels together in a place that has always felt oppressive.

4. Buck tradition with wit and compassion, not wrath and cynicism.

5. Refuse to occupy the old niches, especially the ones we've trapped ourselves in for the sake of peace and harmony.

6. Carry two gifts with us at all times in case we run into any fresh beauties who aren't lost in their own heads.





"To overcome our neural bias for negativity, we must repetitiously and consciously generate as many positive thoughts as we can."
http://tinyurl.com/d3jhcxh

The article never advises us to refrain from saying no when discernment and boundary-making are necessary. It argues that we have a neural bias, a built-in biological predilection for negativity, that may have served our distant ancestors but is now a deep handicap.





Hypotheses: All of creation is set up to liberate us from our suffering and teach us how to love intelligently. Life always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it -- although not necessarily what we want.

Hypothesis: If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.

Hypothesis: Life is a sublime mystery designed to eventually grow us all into strong, supple messiahs. (It may take a while.)

Hypothesis. Pop-nihilism is a prominent modern philosophy. Many journalists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, talk-show hosts, musicians, politicians, and pundits act as if breakdown is far more common and far more interesting than breakthrough; that painful twists outnumber redemptive transformations by a wide margin, and are profoundly more entertaining as well.


More like this: "The Honey and Vinegar Tasters"





"Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style."

- Rebecca Solnit





"Scientific American" chimes in on the power of pronoiac thinking: "Your thoughts can release abilities beyond normal limits. Better vision, stronger muscles -- expectations can have surprising effects." Excerpts:

"Thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our cognitive and physical limits.

?People have significant psychological resources to improve their well-being and performance, but these resources often go unused and could be better harnessed.? The mind and body are not separate; our thoughts have remarkable control over our bodies; and our mindsets are capable of improving our brains? performance.


"If mindsets can change us, maybe we can deliberately choose our mindsets to improve our abilities. We can choose to adopt a mindset that improves creativity, for instance. People who think of categories as flexible and actively focus on the novel aspects of the environment become more creative."

More . . .





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

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

You are too crazy smart to try and master the stupidest secrets in the game of life. You are 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 will 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 demeaning luxuries. You are too robust and unruly and rapturous for any of that.

Now please speak the following affirmations out loud:

"I am a genius."

"I am a lucky plucky genius."

"I am a lucky plucky good-sucking genius."

- Read more.





In order to live, you?ve got to be a demolisher. You take plants and animals that were once alive and rip them apart with your teeth, then disintegrate them in your digestive system.

The inside of your body is always nurturing a slow fire, burning up the oxygen you suck into your lungs.

You didn?t actually cut down the trees used to make your house and furniture, but you colluded with their demise.

Then there?s the psychological liquidation you?ve done: killing off old beliefs you?ve outgrown, for instance.

I?m not trying to make you feel guilty -- just pointing out that you have a lot of experience with positive expressions of destruction.

Can you think of other forms this magic takes? As an aspiring master of pronoia, it?s one of your specialties -- a talent you have a duty to wield with energetic grace.





"In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin like old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can.

"The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms."

- Clarissa Pinkola Est?s





Scientific American chimes in on the power of pronoiac thinking: "Your thoughts can release abilities beyond normal limits. Better vision, stronger muscles -- expectations can have surprising effects."

More excerpts:

"Thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our cognitive and physical limits."

?People have significant psychological resources to improve their well-being and performance, but these resources often go unused and could be better harnessed.? The mind and body are not separate; our thoughts have remarkable control over our bodies; and our mindsets are capable of improving our brains? performance."

"If mindsets can change us, maybe we can deliberately choose our mindsets to improve our abilities. We can choose to adopt a mindset that improves creativity, for instance. People who think of categories as flexible and actively focus on the novel aspects of the environment become more creative.

Read more . . .





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

- Susan Sontag





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Green sea turtles of Florida and the Pacific coast of Mexico are no longer an endangered species. Officials hailed decades of conservation work for saving the long-imperiled creatures.
More . . .

in 1981, a pediatrician saved the life of a 3.2-pound premature baby boy by working around the clock to beat the odds & stabilize him. In 2011, the pediatrician was pinned inside a burning vehicle after a car collision, but was saved by the premature baby, who had grown up to become a paramedic.
More . . .

Romanian woman saves victims of sex trafficking, gives them shelter, counseling and an education.





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


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.





My horoscopes are not rooted in or justified by any belief system, doctrine, fairy tale, authoritative teacher, elaborate secret joke, mystical wishing, well-rationalized bias, or rebellion against science. My horoscopes are fueled by poetry and in service to the liberated imagination.





Thursday, April 21 is Dare to Be Boring Day! We all deserve a break from the oppressive demands to appear smart and to be entertaining. On Dare to Be Boring Day, it is socially unacceptable to demonstrate your wit and verve. Long?winded, rambling monologues full of obscure details are mandatory. The more clich?s and buzzwords you use, the better.

Tell worn-out stories your friends have already heard many times. Flesh out your disjointed sentences with awkward silences. Discuss at length your plans for switching laundry detergents, the collection of matchbooks you had as a child, and the time you almost traveled to the Wal-Mart in another town, but didn't.





Your opinion, please: When you are waging a righteous battle, is it better to be constantly feeding off your anger about the situation you're trying to change?

Or are you more likely to be an effective fighter if you're relatively clear and calm, holding a vision of the new reality you want to create?
Or neither? Other choices? Your thoughts?

Write to Truthrooster@gmail.com.





What Jesus Christ really taught: "For I was hungry, and you didn't feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn't give me anything to drink. I was a stranger, and you didn't invite me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me no clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn't visit me.

"Then they will reply, 'Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?' And he will answer, 'I assure you, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.'"

- Matthew 25:42-45





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

John Keats wrote that "if something is not beautiful, it is probably not true." I celebrate that hypothesis in my book.

I further propose that the universe is inherently friendly to human beings; that all of creation is set up to liberate us from our suffering and teach us how to love intelligently; and that life always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it (although not necessarily what we want).

Dogmatic cynics are often so mad about my book's title that they can't bring themselves to explore the inside. Why bother to actually read about such a preposterous idea? They accuse me of intellectual dishonesty, disingenuous Pollyannaism, or New Age delusion.

If they do manage to read even a few pages, they find that the blessings I reference in the title are not materialistic fetishes like luxurious vacation homes, high status, and a perfect physique.

I'm more interested in fascinating surprises, dizzying adventures, challenging gifts we hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that compel us to get smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

I also enjoy exposing secret miracles, like the way the sun continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into heat, light, and energy for our personal use.

But I don't take the cynics' fury personally. When I suggest that life is a sublime mystery designed to grow us all into strong, supple messiahs, I understand that's the equivalent, for them, of denying the Holocaust. They're addicted to a formulation that's the opposite of Keats': If something is not ugly, it is probably not true.

Modern storytellers are at the vanguard of promoting this doctrine, which I refer to as pop nihilism. Many journalists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, talk-show hosts, musicians, and pundits act as if breakdown is far more common and far more interesting than breakthrough; that painful twists outnumber redemptive transformations by a wide margin, and are profoundly more entertaining as well.

Earlier in my life, I, too, worshiped the religion of pop nihilism. In the 1980s, for example, I launched a crusade against what I called "the global genocide of the imagination." I railed against the "entertainment criminals" who barrage us with floods of fake information and inane ugliness, decimating and paralyzing our image-making faculties. For years, much of my creative work was stoked by my rage against the machine for its soulless crimes of injustice and greed and rapaciousness and cruelty.

But as the crazy wisdom of pronoia overtook me in the late 1990s, I gradually weaned myself from the gratuitous gratification that wrath offered. Against the grain, I experimented with strategies for motivating myself through crafty joy and purified desire and the longing for freedom. I played with ideas that helped me shed the habit of seeing the worst in everything and everyone. In its place I built a new habit of looking for the best.

But I never formally renounced my affiliation with the religion of cynicism. I didn't become a fundamentalist apostate preaching the doctrine of fanatical optimism. In the back of my wild heart, I knew I couldn't thrive without at least a tincture of the ferocity and outrage that had driven so much of my earlier self-expression.

Even at the height of my infatuation with the beautiful truths that swarmed into me while writing Pronoia, I nurtured a relationship with the awful truths. And I didn't hide that from my readers.

Yes, I did purposely go overboard in championing the cause of liberation and pleasure and ingenuity and integrity and renewal and harmony and love. The book's destiny was, after all, to serve as a counterbalance to the trendy predominance of bad news and paranoid attitudes. It was meant to be an antidote for the pandemic of snark.

But I made sure that Pronoia also contained numerous "Homeopathic Medicine Spells," talismans that cram long lists of the world's evils inside ritually consecrated mandalas. These spells diffuse the hypnotizing lure of doom and gloom by acknowledging the horror with a sardonic wink.

Pronoia also has many variations on a theme captured in William Vollman's testimony: "The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that?s a complicated, tricky problem that you don?t know how to solve."

Furthermore, the book stops far short of calling for the totalitarian imposition of good cheer. I say I can tolerate the news media filling up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration, misery and destruction. All I seek is equal time for stories that inspire us to adore life instead of fearing it. And I'd gladly accept 25 percent. Even 10 percent.

So Pronoia hints at a paradoxical philosophy more complex than a naive quest for beauty and benevolence. It welcomes in a taste of darkness, acknowledging the shadows in the big picture.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS ESSAY,GO HERE.





"I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place."

? Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, March 1886





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?





"People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

- Charles Fort





Maxim's "Hot 100" is the magazine's list of the planet's sexiest women. Sports Illustrated has its yearly Swimsuit Issue, which presents a bevy of twenty-something women dressed in skimpy bikinis. Esquire's regular feature "Women We Love" is a gathering of skinny young celebrities. Now here are some of my current favorite beauties.

The images are from photographer Katarzyna Majak's assemblage of witches and healers of Poland.





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

Conventional wisdom implies that the best problems are those that place you under duress. There's supposedly no gain without pain. Stress is allegedly an incomparable spur for calling on resources that have been previously unavailable or dormant. Nietzsche's aphorism, "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger," has achieved the status of a maxim.

There's a bit of truth in that perspective. But it's clear that stress also accompanies many mediocre problems that have little power to make us smarter. Pain frequently generates no gain. We're all prone to become habituated, even addicted, to nagging vexations that go on and on without rousing any of our sleeping genius.

There is, furthermore, another class of difficulty -- let's call it the delightful dilemma -- that neither feeds on angst nor generates it. On the contrary, it's fun and invigorating, and usually blooms when you're feeling a profound sense of being at home in the world. The problem of writing my books is a good example. I have abundant fun handling the perplexing challenges with which they confront me.

Imagine a life in which at least half of your quandaries match this profile. Act as if you're most likely to attract useful problems when joy is your predominant mood. Consider the possibility that being in unsettling circumstances may shrink your capacity to dream up the riddles you need most; that maybe it's hard to ask the best questions when you're preoccupied fighting rearguard battles against boring or demeaning annoyances that have plagued you for many moons.

Prediction: As an aspiring lover of pronoia, you will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't require pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you're forced to do so by fate's kicks in the ass.





"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."

? Elizabeth Gilbert





Relationship" is a dull term for something so interesting. Try "link-flash" instead. Rather than calling people your "friend" or "partner," call them your "accomplice," your "freestyle," or your "lightning."

Boring terms like "significant other," "boyfriend," "girlfriend," & "spouse" could be retired, too. Try "lushbuddy," "heartbeat," or "jelly roll."

Feel free to coin your own surgecrafts and questbursts. Post them here!





"I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me."

? Wendell Berry, "Woods"





Some readers became enraged when I quoted William S. Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda. "Terrible men!" they said. Other readers were miffed because I quoted the evangelical pastor Rick Warren in a horoscope.

Here's how I respond to these grumbles: If I refused to learn from people unless I agreed with everything they had ever said and done, I would never learn from anyone.

Furthermore, I don't necessarily agree with every nuance of every quote I cite. They may teach me, rile me up, and provoke me to think, but that doesn't mean I endorse them 100 percent. What's more likely is that I question some aspect of their thought.

What about you? Have you set up your life so that everyone is either on or off your good list? If so, consider the possibility of cultivating a capacity to derive insight from people who aren't perfect. Have fun learning from people you partially agree with and partially disagree with.

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

Gertrude Stein thought she was as important a writer as Shakespeare and Homer.

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

Einstein cheated on his wife and treated her horrendously.

William Blake lived in absolute filth.

Early feminist author George Sand cheated on her husband.

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

Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his wife.

The painter Peter Paul Rubens married a 16-year-old female when he was 53.





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

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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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."
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- 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 commitmen