Expressing Gratitude Makes You Smarter

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GRATITUDE FEST



Would you like to make yourself smarter and more beautiful? Are you interested in increasing your capacity for ecstasy and improving your health? Consider the possibility of celebrating regular Gratitude Fests. During these orgies of appreciation, you could confer praise and respect on the creatures, both human and otherwise, that have played seminal roles in inspiring you to become yourself. You would devote yourself to invoking and expressing thanks.



Who teaches and helps you? Who sees you for who you really are? Who nudges you in the direction of your fuller destiny and awakens you to your signature truths? Who loves you brilliantly?











TAKE TIME TO BE THE FLOWERS



"Take time to stop and smell the flowers," says an old homily. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD and lived to age 102, had a different approach. "Take the time to stop and be the flowers," he said.



That's my advice to you. Don't just set aside a few stolen moments to sniff the snapdragons, taste the rain, chase the wind, watch the hummingbirds, and listen to a friend. Use your imagination to actually be the snapdragons and rain and wind and hummingbirds and friend. Don't just behold the Other; become the Other.











SHEDDING OUTWORN SELF-IMAGES



Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell explores the relationship between mind and body. He thinks you can achieve optimal physical health if you're devoted to shedding outworn self-images. In his book "The Shaman's Body," 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 boy, she later became a woman, 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 would be healthy, even ecstatic, for you to lose? Describe the fun you'd have if you were free of them.











THE REALLY IMPORTANT KIND OF FREEDOM



"The really important kind of freedom," said David Foster Wallace, "involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."



Is that an interesting kind of freedom to you? Can you imagine any scenario in which practicing it would crack you open and pour you into an ecstatic state?











ECSTASY OF THE INVISIBLE



Many life processes unfold outside of your conscious awareness: your body digesting your food and circulating your blood; trees using carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight to synthesize their nourishment; microorganisms in the soil beneath your feet endlessly toiling to create humus. You don't perceive any of these things directly; they're invisible to you.



Tune in to this vitalizing alchemy. Use your X-ray vision and sub-sonic hearing and psychic smelling. See if you can absorb by osmosis some of the euphoria of the trees as they soak in the sunlight from above and water from below.











THE JOY OF INTEGRITY



"Picture the Grand Canyon," says Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. "Every hundred years, a child comes by and throws a mustard seed into it. In the time it takes to fill the hole in the earth with mustard seeds, one maha­kal­pa will have passed. To perfect the virtuous heart—the joy of integrity—takes a thousand mahakalpas."



If that's true, then you've still got a lot of work to do. The good news is that civilization is in the midst of a critical turning point that could tremendously expedite your ripening. So you could make unusually great progress toward the goal of perfecting the virtuous heart in the next 40 years.



For best results, meditate often on the phrase "the joy of integrity." Get familiar with the pleasurable emotion that comes from acting with impeccability. And try out this idea from Gandhi: Integrity is the royal road to your inner freedom.



P.S. Oddly enough, the work of perfecting the virtuous heart is very effective in helping you master the art of cultivating everyday ecstasy. Meditate on the connection.











THE OPPOSITE OF WHO YOU ARE



"Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are," suggests psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book *Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention*. This advice is one of his ideas about how to get into attunement with the Tao, also known as being in the zone.



How would you go about being the opposite of who you are? Try it and see if it drives you into a state of euphoria.











SERPENT AND MESSIAH



In the Western Hermetic version of the Qabala, every Hebrew letter is paired with a number, and so every word is also a number derived from the addition of its letters. Gematria is the practice of finding hidden resonance between words that have similar numerical values. Of the many poetic truths revealed through this art, one of my favorites is this: The Hebrew words for both "serpent" and "messiah" add up to 358.



Let's suppose this can be interpreted to mean that the snaky potency of your reproductive drive is potentially the source of your salvation. What implications might that have for how you cultivate the art of ecstasy?











COME DANCE WITH US IN THE LIGHT



Check out this excerpt from "Those Who Do Not Dance," by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral: "God asked from on high, / 'How do I come down from this blueness?' / We told Him: / come dance with us in the light."



I love this passage because it reminds me that nothing is ever set in stone; everything is always up for grabs. Even God needs to be open to change and eager for fresh truths. Furthermore, even we puny humans may on occasion need to be God's teacher and helper.



Likewise, we can never be sure about what lowly or unexpected sources might bring us the influences we require.



What do Mistral's words mean to you? Imagine you're the "God" referenced in the poem. What blueness are you ready to come down from, and who might invite you to dance in their light?











CACKLING WHACKS OF JIBBER-JABBER



Confounding lessons and delightful shocks have been increasing in frequency during the recent past and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. In light of that fact, you may want to find some new ways to express your amazement. Clichés like "Jesus H. Christ!" or "WTF?!" may not be sufficient to capture the full impact of the aha! moments.



To get you launched in the right direction, I'll suggest a few fresh exclamations. They're not designed to become tried-and-true replacements for the lazy phrases you're using now, but are rather meant to jog your imagination and inspire you to conjure up a constantly changing variety of ever-fresh invocations. Now see how these roll off your tongue: "Great Odin's raven!" "Radical lymphocytes!" "Cackling whacks of jibber-jabber!" "Frosty heat waves!" "Panoramic serpentine!"











EXPERIMENT: 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, simulate that state.



Everywhere you go, exude the 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. Wield compassion like a performance artist who exults in carving up pessimism and cynicism.



Dispense free blessings and extra slack like a rich saint high on natural endorphins.



Without straining, direct your perceptions to discern the most noble and attractive qualities in each creature you encounter.











WORLD KISS (Hear this as a song)



All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.



If we want to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be, if we want to give back as many blessings as we are given, we've got to be in love with every single part of the Goddess's extravagant masterpiece.



So how could we possibly be mere heterosexuals? Why would we ever squeeze ourselves into the narrow constraints of homosexuality or bisexuality?



If we want to commune with the world the way the Goddess does, we've got to be Pantheosexuals -- experts in the art of Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess Diddling. Anything less than that is an obscene limitation.



With this in mind, I invite you to perform the ritual of the World Kiss. To do the World Kiss, conjure up your most expansive feelings of tenderness -- like what you might experience when you're infatuated with a lover or when you gaze into the eyes of your newborn baby for the first time -- and then blow kisses to all of creation.



Blow kisses to the oak trees and sparrows and elephants and weeds. Blow kisses to the wind and rain and rocks and machines. Blow kisses to the gardens and jails, the cars and toys, the politicians and saints, the girls and the boys and every gender in between.



And with each World Kiss you bestow, keep uppermost in your emotions a mood of blasphemous reverence and orgiastic compassion. And remember that it's not enough simply to perform the outer gesture; you've got to have a heart-on in each of your seven chakras.



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The poet Rilke said: "For one human being to love another is the most difficult task, the ultimate, the last test and proof. It's the work for which all other work is mere preparation."



Teilhard de Chardin said: "Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire."



Leo Tolstoy: "Everything I understand, I understand only because I love."



Blaise Pascal: "If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."



Emily Dickinson: "Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself."



And you and I say: "Because we love, ruby-throated hummingbirds sip from plum flowers and the moon sings its silver fragrance to the swans and volcanoes and fields of wheat. Because we love, wild grapevines coil around the roots of the mountain, and mangoes ripen in the smoke of forest fires. Because we love, everything alive swims in an eternal river that glides through our dreams all night long."



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I'm blowing World Kisses right now, as I sit in the garden in front of my house and write down these words. I'm blowing World Kisses to the dirt below me and the hyacinths brushing my elbows.



I'm blowing World Kisses to the persimmon tree sheltering the front door and to the neighbor's calico cat gazing up at a phantom in the branches.



I'm blowing World Kisses to the ants snaking along the cracked sidewalk across the street and to the Anise Swallowtail butterfly perched on the tip of the antenna of my dark green Honda Accord.



My World Kisses fly further, reaching where I can't go right now. I'm blowing World Kisses to you, wherever you are, and to everyone you love and to everyone you hate.



I'm blowing World Kisses to all the convenience store clerks in the world. I'm blowing World Kisses to the Norwegian widower working as a welder on an offshore oil rig near Nigeria, and to the poet playing cards with her nine-year-old granddaughter in the bus station in Quezaltenango, Guatemala, and to the head cook at the Hotel de la Sure in Esch-sur-Sure, Luxembourg.



I'm blowing World Kisses to all the wolverines near Sioux Lookout, Ontario, and all the Chihuahuan Ravens in Nebraska, and all the Komodo dragons on the Indonesian island of Gili Motang.



I'm not afraid of running out of love. The more I give, the more I have to give.



I'm blowing World Kisses to what some people (not me) call inanimate objects: to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and to Picasso's Guernica in the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, and to the rolls of blue Saxony Plush carpet in the Carpeteria store on West Charleston Boulevard in Las Vegas.



I'm blowing World Kisses to all the stone walls in Ireland, and to the tornado outside the city of Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, and to the 15-year-old backhoe rusting in a junkyard in Montevideo, Uruguay.



I'm blowing World Kisses to the woman who broke my heart, and to the friend who betrayed my trust, and to the rich old white male politicians in Washington who hate everything I stand for.



On you and me and all of everything, I bestow my ripest blessings, and declare that since my atoms and your atoms were ripped asunder at the Big Bang, I have fantasized of our rapturous reunion.



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Sacred Advertisement



"World Kiss" is brought to you by the ecstatic state of mind that the poet Daniel Ladinsky enjoyed when he said:



One regret, dear world,

that I am determined not to have

when I am lying on my death bed

is that I did not kiss you enough!











Below are excerpts from my book

Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It's available at Amazon and Powells.





We call our organization the Beauty and Truth Lab and not the Beauty and Truth Think Tank because we want to put our ideas to the test -- to apply them in unpredictable situations beyond our control and see whether they're useful to people who aren't necessarily steeped in the mystique of pronoia, as discussed in the book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.



One way we've gone about that is to encourage the public to testify and ask questions about their practical experiences with pronoia. Below is a taste of the exchanges that have unfolded.





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I read about the concept of "pronoia" in your book. Here's my question: Does pronoia make you feel like you're falling in love? Not just with a person but with life itself? And can that be scary?



Is it possible that you might feel a chord of gorgeous terror resound in your gut when you entertain the thought that every person and even every animal and plant and rock in the world is ganging up to make your life interesting -- almost more brilliantly interesting than you can bear?



Does pronoia threaten to cause all perceptions, all sensations, all interactions to verge on being orgasmic?



I've been heading in this direction lately and it's freaking me out. Can extreme happiness be dangerous to my well-being? —Butchtastic



Dear Butchtastic: First thing we'll say is that while pronoia inevitably feeds the soul, it doesn't necessarily further the agendas of the ego. The anxiety that's welling up may be the result of your old self-image clinging to the shrunken expectations it had gotten used to thinking of as essential to its identity.



The second thing is that when people invite pronoia to take over their perceptual filters, they often feel as if they're falling in love with a Scary Yet Friendly Vastness that kicks their butts until they wake up to the secret beauty they've been ignoring.





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I was lying in my bed basking in a sunbeam this morning, too comfortable to get up and take my Prozac, when I thought, Hey, what if I'm not, you know, emotionally challenged? What if I'm just lazy? Maybe if I worked harder at cultivating happiness, I'd just sort of outgrow my depression -- you know, render it irrelevant. Do you have an opinion about this theory? —Slothful Slack Seeker



Dear Slothful: We'd have to know more about your personal history to evaluate whether laziness is the cause of your depression.



We do know this, though: Many people are extremely lax about their pursuit of happiness.



Here's our question to you: What tricks would you have to play on yourself in order to get more aggressive about mastering the art of feeling really good?





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I've wrestled all my life with fear. But lately it's been even worse than usual. My personal demons seem to be winning, or at least getting the better of the fight. I think it's related to the fact that when I caught wind of the idea of pronoia, I started working hard to lose all my illusions. Now I'm thinking maybe that was a mistake. Perhaps I needed my illusions to keep the demons at bay? —Crybaby



Dear Crybaby: Hang on. This is the toughest part of your struggle. It may seem that the illusions you dissolved were the main barriers safeguarding you from your demons. But what's more likely is that those illusions were food for your demons. Very soon now the demons will have devoured the last of their fuel and will start to starve. If they don't die off, they will at least fly away in search of other nourishment.





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Dear Flow-Meisters: If you were, like me, setting out on a 10-year project to become a beautiful truth-teller, having the simple goal of actually expressing the things that Everyone Ought to Say But Doesn't, what would you do? Other than to bother your favorite truth-tellers for advice, of course! —Aspiring Fount of Truth



Dear Aspiring Fount: One of the best ways to increase your mastery is to regularly tell yourself the truth about yourself with kick-ass kindness.





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: You must be kidding with your Pollyanna crap. Either that or you're lying to get gullible people to love you and give you money.



The truth is, life is not in the least bit kind. It's a brutal struggle for survival -- at best. We are, sadly, animals who are stuck being conscious of our own mortality, forever stalked by death, and trying to avoid both that knowledge and the inevitable appearance of the grim reaper. Wake up and see the sickness and misery that life on this planet really is. —Your Good Cheer Makes Me Puke



Dear Puker: It's true that the Beauty and Truth Lab errs on the side of optimism, but only because so many so-called experts and leaders err on the side of cynicism. Our calling is to overcompensate for the relentless propaganda that creates the false impression that ugliness rules the world.



By the way, when we urge people to more fully appreciate the multitude of blessings they take for granted, it's not the same as advising them to pretend there's no suffering in the world.





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: My mom calls me fat but feeds me pork rinds. My strongest supporter is a person I want to wrap up like a mummy, shove into a canoe, and push into the middle of the lake.



My exuberant imagination has taken me hostage, violating its own principles. I'm so ambivalent and indecisive about everything that even my addictive nature can't figure out what to be addicted to.



I'd embrace my contradictions if I could, but they've got me surrounded like a pink-haired, cross-dressing SWAT team frothed up on multiple espressos. Can you point me in the direction of the pronoiac exit from this circus-like hell? —Crazy Crank



Dear Crazy: We detect a lot of wit and style in your meditations. Maybe that's the purpose of the limbo you're in: It's an opportunity to build your skill at being lively and feisty and smart no matter what your outer circumstances are.





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: The chemo treatments burned out all the math skills in my brain, which were already pretty meager. On the other hand, they awakened my ability to feel perfectly at ease while in the midst of paradoxical situations that everyone else finds maddening and uncomfortable.



The chemo also made me ridiculously tolerant of people's contradictions, sometimes even their hypocrisies, and freed me to enjoy life as an entertaining movie with lots of interesting plot twists rather than as a pitched battle between everything I like and everything I don't like. I guess I could say that my cancer helped turn me into a pronoiac! —The Chaos Artist Formerly Known as Risa Kline



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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I'm sorry to report that your bright and cheery outlook for the future did not come true. The gods have laid the cosmic smackdown upon me. My metaphorical buttocks are still smarting. I don't blame you, mind you. It is entirely my fault. My wishes were different from what the gods wished for me; I was utterly out of sync with the Grand Scheme of Things. My question now is: Being that I am in the habit of desiring pleasures that are good for my ego but bad for my soul, how do I break the habit? —Contrite Karma Chameleon



Dear Contrite: Not blaming others, but rather taking responsibility for your actions, is the best way. And you've just done that.



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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I used to give fear a free rein to crawl around my mind. But your philosophy has inspired me to fight back against that bad habit. I made a pronoiac shield for myself, and I sleep with it every night.



It's a hubcap on which I've glued protective symbols, like the fragment of a mirror I stole from the hospital where I was born, the toothbrush of an ex-lover I'm still good friends with, 20 Tylenol pills arranged in the shape of a peace sign, a notebook page on which I wrote my best dream ever (in which my mom and dad were Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama), a library card from Princeton University with both my name and Einstein's on it, a painting of a mutant butterfly dive-bombing a rainbow that's on fire, a bumper sticker that reads "Adrenaline is my drug of choice," and a million dollars in money I made out of cut-up photocopies of all the people I love. — Laughing at My Anxieties



Dear Laughing: If we ever market a line of pronoiac products, we hope you'll contribute a whole batch of your shields.





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Dear Compassion Police: Can you tell me why my trivial prayers are often answered (please don't let the light turn red, please let there be enough milk for one cup of coffee, etc.), but never my big life-changing prayers (please send me a soul mate, please help me make money at what I love to do)? Are God's priorities screwed up, or is it me? —Dumb Luck Collector



Dear DLC: There's an old fairy tale in which two old folks are given three wishes by a magic dwarf, but impulsively waste them on the first silly whims that pop into their heads. I'll tell you what I would have told them: Proceed on the assumption that only a few of your fervent prayers will be granted. Don't use them up on pleas for convenience when you're tired, cranky, or desperate. A Tibetan proverb says, "The person who gets stuck on petty happiness will not attain great happiness."





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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I'm a very analytical person, with a doctorate in nuclear physics and a high-tech job. All my training and business savvy tell me that Rob Brezsny's astrology column is superstitious mumbo jumbo, yet every time I've faced a crisis in the last 10 years, his horoscopes have provided accurate wisdom and counsel when things seemed darkest.



The same is true about the book Pronoia. The scientist in me knows that you Beauty and Truth Lab people are utopian nutcases. It's absolutely demented to regard the universe as friendly and to fantasize that there's some vast, invisible conspiracy of blessing-bestowers. And yet I have to confess that whenever I try the pronoiac strategies you describe, my life veers in the direction of synchronicity and delight.



On the one hand, none of this makes any sense. On the other hand, I don't care that it doesn't make any sense. Somehow I'm able to draw sustenance from something whose power I don't understand or even believe in. In any case, thank you! —Humble Genius



Dear Genius: You've described a quality that we aspire to in our efforts to cultivate pronoia: the ability to be helped by powers that are beyond our ken.











MUTUAL AID SOCIETY



If you would like to support my ongoing work, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal.



You can also contribute to my well-being by buying the Expanded Audio Horoscopes I create every week. These forecasts are different in tone and content from the written horoscopes I provide here. They're my four- to five-minute-long ruminations about the current chapter of your life story. They're available here.











QUESTION. How can an intelligent person possibly believe astrology has any merit?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. Many of the debunkers who try to discredit astrology have done no research on the subject. They haven't read smart astrological philosophers like Dane Rudhyar, don't know that seminal astronomers Johannes Kepler and Galileo were skilled astrologers, and aren't aware that eminent psychologist C.G. Jung cast horoscopes and believed that "astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity."



The closest approach the fraudulent "skeptics" usually make to the ancient art is to glance at a random horoscope column in a newspaper or on a website. To match their carelessness, I might make a drive-by of a strip mall and declare that the profession of architecture is shallow and debased.



That's one reason why these ill-informed "skeptics" spread so many ignorant lies. For instance, they say that astrologers think the stars and planets emit invisible beams that affect people's lives. The truth is, many Western astrologers don't believe any such thing. (You can read more comments about this below.)



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QUESTION. Because you pack your column with doses of wry humor and wild imagery, some people think you don't take astrology seriously.



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. On the contrary, I think my humor and imagery, along with my passion for crafting cliché-free language, demonstrate how much respect I have for astrology. With the vigor I apply to writing my oracles, I feel I'm alerting people to the possibility that astrology may have more credibility than both its sloppy practitioners and careless debunkers have afforded it.



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QUESTION. You have said in the past that you believe in astrology "about 80 percent." What's up with the other 20 percent?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. I use the same 80-20 approach with every belief system I love and benefit from: Qabala, science, paganism, transpersonal psychology, postmodern rationalism, feminism, and others. I take what's useful from each, but am not so deluded as to think that any single system is the holy grail the physicists call the "Theory of Everything." Unconditional, unskeptical faith is the path of the fanatic and fundamentalist, and I aspire to be a rowdy philosophical anarchist, aflame with objectivity and committed to the truth that the truth is always mutating.



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QUESTION. But don't you risk playing the same role the lazy astrologers do: enticing people to take on a superstitious approach to life and seducing them into believing their fate is determined by supernatural forces beyond the influence of their willpower?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. I call what I do predicting the present, not forecasting the future. My goal is to awaken my readers to the hidden agendas, unconscious forces, and long-term cycles at work in their lives so that they can respond to the totality of what's happening instead of to mere appearances. I want to be a friendly shocker who helps unleash their imaginations, giving them the power to create their destinies with the same liberated fertility that great artists summon to forge their masterpieces.



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QUESTION. How do you write your column? Do you use actual astrological data, or just go into a trance and let your imagination run wild?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. I draw up a weekly chart for the sun, moon, and major aspects of each sign. It's the framework within which I improvise. The artistic part of the work is harder to pin down. One of my guiding principles, though, is to treat each sign's horoscope as a personal love letter—to speak as intimately about the mysteries of the moment as if I were addressing a close friend.



Where do my inspirations come from? Dreams, letters from readers, overheard conversations, meditation, lots of reading in a wide variety of texts both sacred and profane, and the intensive cultivation of my own receptivity.



I also rely on fact-finding missions I call whirlygigs. During these, I steep myself with the intention of attracting lessons I don't know I need, then meander the streets at random, going places I've never been and striking up conversations with strangers with whom I apparently have nothing in common.



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QUESTION: Many modern skeptics/scientists' assumption imagine that astrology is based on the belief that the gravity or movements of the planetary bodies themselves is what influences us. Is that a misconception?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. Yes. It's another case of scientists not acting like scientists -- not bothering to research the subject they speak about authoritatively.



In his book *Cosmos and Psyche*, Richard Tarnas says the planets don't emit invisible forces that shape our destinies as if we were puppets. Rather, they are symbols of the unfolding evolutionary pattern. Just as clocks tell time but don't create it, the heavenly bodies show us the big picture but don't cause it.



Quoting Greek philosopher Plotinus, Tarnas writes, "The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together."



So it's not just the distant globes whose movements and relationships serve as divinatory clues. If you're sufficiently attuned to the gestalt of creation and pay close enough attention to its unfolding details, you can read the current mood of the universe in the arrangement of red onions in the grocery store bin or the fluttering of sunlight and shadow on the mimosa tree or the scatter of soap suds in your sink after you've finished washing the dishes.



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QUESTION. 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'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. 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 are superstitious, uneducated, and 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.



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QUESTION. Can you sum up your approach to seeing the world?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. My outlook combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the "beginner's mind" of Zen Buddhism, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama. I blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.



To pull this off, I have to be willing to regularly suspend my theories about the way the world works. I accept with good humor the possibility that what I've learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that's right in front of me. I'm suspicious of my biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. I open my heart as I strip away the interpretations that my emotions might be inclined to impose.



"Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything," wrote my teacher Ann Davies, "we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true."



At the same time, I don't want to turn into a hard-ass, poker-faced robot. I keep my feelings moist and receptive. I remember my natural affection for all of creation. I enjoy the power of tender sympathy as it drives me to probe for the unimaginable revelations of every new moment. "Before we can receive the entire truth about anything," said Ann Davies, "we have to love it."



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INTERVIEWER: Can you provide a 25-words-or-less summary of what "Free Will Astrology" is not?



ROB'S BREZSNY'S ANSWER. My Free Will Astrology 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.











SUPPORT



I was born under the sign of Cancerian the Crab. One of the potential weaknesses of our tribe is that we can tend to be almost pathologically self-sufficient. Some of us may find it challenging to ask for help and support. In my continuing effort to overcome this inclination, I'm asking for your support!



If you would like to contribute to me and my ongoing work, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal.



You can also contribute to my well-being by buying the Expanded Audio Horoscopes I create every week. These forecasts are different in tone and content from the written horoscopes I provide here. They're my four- to five-minute-long ruminations about the current chapter of your life story. They're available here.