Your immediate future is too good to be true. Or at least that's what you, with your famous self-doubt, might be inclined to believe if I told you the truth about the favorable developments that are in the works. Therefore, I have come up with some fake anxieties to keep your worry reflex engaged so it won't sabotage the real goodies. Beware of dirty limericks and invisible ladders and upside-down rainbows and psychic bunny rabbits. Be on guard against accountants wearing boxing gloves and clowns singing Broadway show tunes in runaway shopping carts and celebrities telling you classified secrets in your dreams.

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How are you going to change what needs to be changed and accept what needs to be accepted? To get some support from me, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy that's guaranteed to keep you well supplied with blessings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To hear or read the rest of the essay "Shadow Blessings,"go here.