You Do Your Best

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WANT TO GET YOUR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. We've been enjoying regular conversations about astrology since 1989! Her website's here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and a high degree of technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. This enables her to integrate psychological insight with the cosmological perspective that astrology offers.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.





Below are excerpts from my book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It's available at Amazon and Powells.


FEELING FOREVER AMAZED

"If everything seems under control," said auto racer Mario Andretti, "you're probably not moving fast enough."

I second that emotion. It applies to the entire human race, which is swirling through evolutionary tipping points at an accelerating speed. But it's doubly apropos for you spiritual freedom fighters and renegade bodhisattvas, because you're the vanguard shock troops fighting to merge heaven with earth.

For your edification and amusement, we will add three corollaries to Andretti's wisdom: 1. If you're not pretty much always half-confused, most likely you're not thinking deeply enough. 2. If you're not feeling forever amazed, maybe you're not seeing wildly enough. 3. The truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and outrageously abundant.

How might you go about using these tricks to marinate yourself in a gentle state of discerning bliss on a regular basis?





UNIMAGINED FORMS OF FREEDOM

"The people of future generations will win many a liberty of which we do not yet even feel the want," said German philosopher Max Stirner. See if you can become aware of an interesting freedom that has not previously been on your radar screen.





DOES THE WORD "FAITH" HAVE ANY MEANING TO YOU?

Here's Caroline Myss' explanation of faith: "Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you."

If you don't like the word "heaven" in Myss' statement, substitute a term that works for you, like "your higher self" or "your destiny" or "your soul's code."

Modify anything else in it that's not right for your needs, as well. When you're finished tinkering, I hope you'll have created a definition of faith that motivates you with as much primal power as you feel when you're in love.





CULTIVATING INSPIRATION

Poet Kay Ryan told the Christian Science Monitor how she cultivates the inspiration to write. She rouses the sense of a "self-imposed emergency," thereby calling forth psychic resources that usually materialize only in response to a crisis.

Please note that she doesn't provoke an actual emergency: She doesn't arrange to have a loved one get pinned beneath the wheels of a car. She doesn't climb out onto the window ledge on the 22nd story of a high-rise. Instead, she visualizes hypothetical situations that galvanize her to shift into a dramatically heightened state of awareness.

What imagined emergencies could you invoke to inspire your deep self to rise up and make its mark?





YOU ARE CIRCLING

I love this excerpt from "The Seeker," a poem by Rilke in his Book of Hours (translated by Robert Bly): "I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, / and I have been circling for a thousand years, / and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, / or a great song."

Here's my own permutation: "I am circling around love, around the throbbing hum, and I have been circling for thousands of days, and I still don't know if I am a wounded saint, or a rainy dawn, or a creation story."

Compose your own version.





DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL FUN

The Doctrine of Original Sin? We spit on it. We reject it. We renounce it and forget it and annihilate it from reality. In its place we embrace the Doctrine of Original Fun.

This reformulation asserts that it is our birthright to commune with regular doses of curious beauty and tricky truth and insurrectionary love. A robust, heroic joy is even now roaring through us, bringing us good ideas about how to apply the metaphor of ingenious foreplay to everything we do.

We will not waste this euphoric deluge on any of the million and one numbing little diversions that pass for pleasure among the ecstasy-starved pursuers of mediocre joy. Rather, we will remain ever alert for the call of primordial delight.





COMPASSION THERAPY

If you're reading this, you're probably not a Cambodian orphan who grew up as a slave in a brothel or a Sudanese man kidnapped by a militia and forced to do heavy labor 18 hours a day or one of the millions of other victims of human trafficking around the world. But you may be yoked and subjugated in a less literal way, perhaps to a debilitating drug or an abusive relationship or a job that brings out the worst in you or a fearful fantasy about the looming collapse of civilization's infrastructure.

The good news is that you have the power to escape your bondage. Maybe it'll help you muster the strength you need if I remind you that your freedom won't be anywhere near as difficult to achieve as that of the Pakistani boy tied to a carpet loom in a dark room around the clock or the Nigerian woman who's beaten daily as she toils in the sugar cane fields for no pay.

Try this: When you feel overwhelmed by the sadness of your problems or the addiction of your compulsions, put on your best clothes and clean toilets at a homeless shelter, or give foot massages to senior citizens at a retirement home, or sing songs, sip champagne, and play card games with patients at a psychiatric hospital. Be ready to get hit upside the soul with exotic varieties of ecstasy, which such acts may unleash.





DOORWAYS TO ECSTASY

Alice finds her way to Wonderland by falling down a rabbit hole. Dorothy rides to Oz on a tornado. In C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy stumbles into the magical land of Narnia via a portal in the back of a large clothes cabinet.

In the sequels to all these adventures, however, the heroines must find different ways to access their exotic dreamlands. Alice slips through a mirror next time. Dorothy uses a Magic Belt. Lucy leaps into a painting of a schooner that becomes real.

Take heed of these precedents. The next time a threshold opens into an alternative reality you've enjoyed in the past, it may not resemble the doorways you've used before.





LOVE AMONG THE IMAGES

I swear the strange woman standing near me at Los Angeles' Getty Museum was having an erotic experience as she gazed upon van Gogh's Irises. She was not touching herself, nor was anyone else. But she was apparently experiencing waves of convulsive delight, as suggested by her rapid breathing, shivering muscles, fluttering eyelids, and sweaty forehead.

Fifteen minutes later, I saw her again in front of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Fountain of Love. She was only slightly more composed. In a friendly voice, I said, "This stuff really moves you, doesn't it?" "Oh, yeah," she replied, "I've not only learned how to make love with actual flowers and clouds and fountains, I can even make love with paintings of them."

Do you have any interest in mastering the method in this maestro's madness? Where will you begin?





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

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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.