Last Week to Hear My Big-Picture Audio Forecasts

I invite you to listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECASTS for your life in the coming months. This is the last week they will be available.

Normally my Expanded Audio Horoscopes cover the immediate future. But this week, I'm reporting on themes that I think will be important for you during the second half of 2018 and beyond.

Where are you likely to find most success? How can you best cooperate with the cosmic rhythms? What questions should you be asking?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE. Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Term Forecast for Second Half of 2018."

They're available on your tablets and smart phones as well as your computers.

The in-depth, long-range Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $6 apiece if you access them on the Web (discounts are available for multiple purchases), or $1.99 per minute if you want them over the phone. For phone access, call: 1-877-873-4888.

What will be the story of your life in the second half of 2018 and onward into 2019? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?





Here's a link to my free weekly newsletter archives, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus good news, lucky advice, and tender rants. Subscribe here.





TO-DO LIST

1. Say these words into a mirror: "It’s bad luck to be superstitious."

2. Fantasize that your so-called "dark side" is sweet and creamy.

3. Watch TV with your third eye.

4. Put on inflatable sumo wrestler costumes and play bagpipes as badly as possible.

5. Imagine you have guardian angels who look like Malcolm X and Eugene Debs.

6. Plant orchids on a strip-mined hill.

7. Dream you're a red-tailed hawk soaring over a shopping mall.

8. Forgive yourself for the blindness that put you in the path of those who betrayed you.

9. Put bumper stickers on your car that says, "My goddess can kick your god's ass!"

10. Hire a puppet troupe to reenact your life story using marionettes in Renaissance costumes.

11. Buy seven used gowns worn to the Academy Awards show by famous actresses, and send them gratis to seven Guatemalan teenagers.

12. Meditate on how one of the symbols of plenitude in Nepal is a mongoose vomiting jewels.

13. Thank your mother for the pain she endured while birthing us.

14. Review in painstaking detail the history of your life, honoring every moment as if you were conducting a benevolent Judgment Day.

15. Create a royal crown for yourself out of shower cap, rubber bands, and light bulbs.

16. Test to see if people are really listening to you by asserting that Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers and that Joan of Arc was married to the Biblical Noah.

17. Teach an animal to dance.

18. Make believe you are the ocean king or the thunder queen.

19. Actually kiss the earth now and then.

20. Find many good excuses to say, as physicist Niels Bohr once did, “Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.”

21. Ask butterflies if they will hang out on our faces for a while.





YOU'RE A MAGICIAN

I'm not a major fan of occultist Aleister Crowley, but I appreciate some of his ideas. His definition of magic is pure and true: the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

He wasn't simply referring to the esoteric transformations attempted by wizards and witches wielding spells and conjurations. He meant anyone who seeks to make practical shifts in his or her life.

Let's say you grew up conditioned to feel shame about behavior there's no good reason to feel shame about, and you resolve to do whatever it takes to dissolve that shame, and you succeed in doing it. That's magic.

Or maybe you no longer want to attract bad listeners and flaky collaborators into your sphere, and you promise yourself you will alter that pattern, and you ultimately achieve your goal. That's magic, too.

One other example: You decide you want to be a skilled songwriter, and spend years learning to play an instrument, analyzing the songs you love in order to understand how they're constructed, and cultivating your creativity. That's magic at work.

I invite you to identify an example of one or two of your own magic skills.





Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you

for everything.


– Mary Oliver, from WHAT DO WE KNOW





POTENTIAL CODE WORDS FOR YOUR EXPERIMENTS IN ENHANCING YOUR LIST FOR LIFE

vorfreude: (n.) the joyful, intense anticipation that comes from imagining future pleasures

numinous: (adj.) describing an experience that makes you overwhelmed yet fascinated, awed yet attracted -- the powerful, personal feeling of being viscerally inspired

ostranenie: (n.) encouraging people to see common things as strange, wild, or unfamiliar; defamiliarizing what is known in order to know it differently or more deeply

smultronställe: (n.) lit. "place of wild strawberries"; a special place discovered, treasured, returned to for solace and relaxation; a personal idyll free from stress or sadness

rasasvada: (n.) the taste of bliss in the absence of all thoughts

firgun: (n.) the act of sharing in or even contributing to someone else's pleasure or fortune, with a purely generous heart and without jealousy

namascray: (n.) The crazy in me recognizes and honors the crazy in you.

"Vorfreude" is a German word. "Numinous" is English. "Ostranenie" is Russian. "Smultronställe" is Swedish. "Rasasvada" is Sanskrit. "Namascray" is a made-up English-Sanskrit hybrid. "Firgun" is English.





YOU HAVE THE POWER

You have the power and ingenuity necessary to outwit and outflank fake magic, seductive delusions, well-disguised pretending, and clever mirages.





The worse the state of the world grows, the more intensely I try for inner perfection and power. I fight for a small world of humanity and tenderness."

- Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry written in June 1942





THE WAY OF ABUNDANCE

'"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 are what we are inherently hungry for."

—Rick Jarow, Alchemy of Abundance: Using the Energy of Desire to Manifest Your Highest Vision, Power, and Purpose





3% OF THE GREAT MYSTERY

The ever-evolving truth is far too complicated and fluid and slippery and scrambled and gorgeously abundant for one human being to completely master.

I'm lucky to have gotten my percentage of mastery up to about 3%. On a good day, that’s how much I understand of the Maddening and Delightful Mystery we are embedded in.

Here's a hypothesis that's a cornerstone of my 3%: It's smart and healthy to joyfully rebel against everyone who assuredly tells me that they know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

How well do you understand the Great Mystery? What's your percentage?





SPIRITUALITY AND POLITICS

"Those who say spirituality has nothing to do with politics," declared activist Mohandas Gandhi, "do not know what spirituality really means."

What do you think he was driving at? I'll tell you what I think. Since he used the term "spirituality," not "religion," I surmise that he wasn't referring to belief systems like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.

Rather, he was talking about being guided by love, seeking the highest good for as many people as possible, and opening one's heart to the interconnectedness of everything. *That* was the influence he wished to bring to politics.





FOUR RETROGRADE PLANETS

People ask me what they should do now that Mars, Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto are retrograde. Here's one answer: stick to drinking low-fat water; avoid the high-fat H20 whenever possible. Likewise, inhale only the kind of oxygen that's low in cholesterol, and don't allow your eyes to take in fatty landscapes or other calorie-rich sights.

As usual, it's best not to host and entertain too many fears, but if you really need to do so, try to invite in only the organic, gluten-free fears.

(P.S.: This is my satirical way of the traditional astrologers who wrongly tell us that retrograde planets mean trouble. They don't!)





GOOD PROBLEMS

Is there anything more dangerous than getting up in the morning and having nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up? That state can be a threat to your health, because if untreated it incites an unconscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might rouse some excitement.

Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It's as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself--indeed, you make yourself--through the riddles you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.

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 an ultimate truth.

I half-agree. 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 book is a good example. I've had a good time handling the perplexing challenges with which it has confronted 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 state of mind. 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 divine kicks in the ass.





Re-Genius Yourself

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.





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

Below are excerpts.

Let me remind you who you really are: You're an immortal freedom fighter who longs to liberate all sentient creatures from their suffering. You're a fun-loving messiah who devoutly wants to help all of your fellow messiahs claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright.

Try to remember. You're a vortex of fluidic light that has temporarily taken on the form of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins. And why did you do that? Because it was the best way to forge the identity that would make you such an elemental force in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth.

I'm not speaking metaphorically here. You are a mutant deity in disguise—not a Buddha or a Christ exactly, but of the same lineage and conjured from the same fire. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you're getting better at playing the preposterously amusing master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed.

Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of us have given in to the temptation to believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Ignorance and inertia, partially camouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround us.

Pessimism is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Stories about treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.

So no, at this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it's not easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We've got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those messiahs among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of know-it-all deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the sour, puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality."

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.





"The criteria for success: you are free, you live in the present moment, you are useful to the people around you, and you feel love for all humanity."

—Sri Sri Ravi Shankar





HOW WELL DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE GREAT MYSTERY?

The ever-evolving truth is far too complicated and fluid and slippery and scrambled and gorgeously abundant for one human being to completely master.

I'm lucky to have gotten my percentage of mastery up to about 3%. On a good day, that’s how much I understand of the Maddening and Delightful Mystery we are embedded in.

Here's a hypothesis that's a cornerstone of my 3%: It's smart and healthy to joyfully rebel against everyone who assuredly tells me that they know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

How well do you understand the Great Mystery? What's your percentage?





THE ACTIVISM OF LOVE

Environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill spent two years living in a redwood tree she named "Luna." Her goal was to save it from being cut down by a logging company. She succeeded both literally and mythically. Luna was spared from death, as was a surrounding three-acre swath of trees. Hill became an inspiring symbol of artful, compassionate protest.

Later she told Benjamin Tong in the DVD "The Taoist and the Activist": "So often activism is based on what we are against, what we don't like, what we don't want. And yet we manifest what we focus on. And so we are manifesting yet ever more of what we don't want, what we don't like, what we want to change.

"So for me, activism is about a spiritual practice as a way of life. And I realized I didn't climb the tree because I was angry at the corporations and the government; I climbed the tree because when I fell in love with the redwoods, I fell in love with the world. So it is my feeling of 'connection' that drives me, instead of my anger and feelings of being disconnected."