What's Your Holiest Desire?

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YOUR HOLIEST DESIRE

I invite you to devote five minutes to visualizing the fulfillment of your holiest desire, followed by five minutes of visualizing the fulfillment of a loved one's holiest desire.





"Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible. Never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed."

- Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish theologian and civil rights activist

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"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

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"The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to seeing them that we call them ordinary things."

- Hans Christian Anderson

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"I will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers. I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air, alive, with closed eyes."

- E. E. Cummings

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"The whole existence is celebrating. These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious. The rivers and the oceans are wild, and everywhere there is fun, everywhere there is joy and delight."

- Some guru





FREE MIND, WILD HEART

To be the best pronoiac explorer you can be, I suggest you adopt an outlook that combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the "beginner's mind" of Zen Buddhism, the "beginner's heart" of pronoia, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama. Blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.

To pull this off, you'll have to be willing to regularly suspend your brilliant theories about the way the world works. Accept with good humor the possibility that what you've learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that's right in front of you. Be suspicious of your biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. Open your heart as you strip away the interpretations that your 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, don't turn into a hard-ass, poker-faced robot. Keep your feelings moist and receptive. Remember your natural affection for all of creation. Enjoy the power of tender sympathy as it drives you 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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To achieve what the Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind," you dispense with all preconceptions and enter each situation as if seeing it for the first time.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," wrote Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, "but in the expert's there are few."

As much as I love beginner's mind, though, I advocate an additional discipline: cultivating a beginner's heart. That means approaching every encounter imbued with a freshly invoked wave of love that is as pure as if you're feeling it for the first time.





THE BEAUTY OF IRREGULAR THINGS

When you're an aspiring master of pronoia, you see the cracks in the facades as opportunities; inspiration erupts as you careen over bumps in the road; you love the enticing magic that flows from situations that other people regard as rough or crooked.

"That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal," wrote poet Charles Baudelaire, "from which it follows that irregularity -- that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment -- is an essential part and characteristic of beauty."





UNLEASH YOURSELF

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.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better.

1) Extreme poverty has fallen

2) Hunger is falling

3) Child labor is on the decline

4) People in developed countries have more leisure time

5) The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US

6) Life expectancy is rising

7) Child mortality is down

8) Death in childbirth is rarer

9) People have been getting taller for centuries

10) More people have access to malaria bednets

11) Guinea worm is almost eradicated

12) Teen births in the US are down

13) Smoking is down, too

14) In the long term, homicide rates have fallen dramatically

15) In the short term, they’re down in the US, too

16) Violent crime in the US is going down

17) We’ve rapidly reduced the supply of nuclear weapons

18) More people in the world live in a democracy now

19) More people are going to school for longer

20) And literacy is, predictably, up as well

21) Moore’s law isn’t quite over yet

22) Access to the internet is increasing

23) Solar energy is getting cheaper





VOWS

I invite you to speak these vows out loud:

"As long as I live, I vow to die and be reborn, die and be reborn, die and be reborn, over and over again, forever reinventing myself.

"I promise to be stronger than hate, wetter than water, deeper than the abyss, and wilder than the sun.

"I pledge to remember that I am not only a sweating, half-asleep, excitable, bumbling jumble of desires, but that I am also an immortal four-dimensional messiah in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation.

"I vow to love and honor my highs and my lows my yeses and noes, my give and my take, the life I wish I had and the life I actually have.

"I promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow my devotion to the truth, fuel my commitment to beauty, refine my emotions, hone my dreams, wrestle with my shadow, purge my ignorance, and soften my heart -- even as I always accept myself for exactly who I am, with all of my so-called foibles and wobbles."





GREAT AWAKENING

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 loves to obsess on.





GO LIGHTLY

Aldous Huxley was the renowned 20th-century intellectual who wrote the book *Brave New World*, a dystopian vision of the future. Later in his life he came to regret one thing: how "preposterously serious" he had been when he was younger. "There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet," he ruminated, "trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling . . . Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply."

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"When Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh was invited to the San Francisco Zen Center, the students asked him what they could do to improve their practice. He had entered a monastery at age sixteen, was an ordained monk, and had endured the horrors of the war in Vietnam. I imagine they expected some rigorous prescription for deepening their spiritual life.

"Thich Nhat Han's response: 'You guys get up too early for one thing; you should get up a little later. And your practice is too grim. I have just two instructions for you. One is to breathe, and one is to smile.'"

- from True Refuge, by Tara Brach.





GRATEFUL ANGER

A conversation between two of the characters in my book The Televisionary Oracle.

"Remember, there is a difference between grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred," he shouted above the din.

"What do you mean?" I yelled back.

"Grateful anger is good darkness. Dehumanizing hatred is bad darkness."

"More clues, please."

"Grateful anger flows when you have engaged and studied your shadow. Dehumanizing hatred flows when you have ignored and denied your shadow. One is fertile, the other hysterical."

A mathematical formula: I liked that. I assumed he meant the shadow that Carl Jung described. The unripe and unillumined corners of the soul.

He continued: "Grateful anger is when you feel thankful for the irritating people and sickening situations that have spurred you to clarity and righteous action. Dehumanizing hatred is when you are so in love with your terrible emotion that you forget what needs to be changed and turn yourself into your enemy."





GOD SHMOD

There is no God. God is dead. God is a drug for people who aren't very smart. God is an illusion sold to dupes by money-hungry religions. God is a right-wing conspiracy. God is an infantile fantasy favored by superstitious cowards who can't face life's existential meaninglessness.

JUST KIDDING! The truth is, anyone who says he knows what God is or isn't, doesn't really know.

Now read Adolfo Quezada's prayer, then confess what you don't know about God. "God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."

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What if the Creator is like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's God: "like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence"? What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual?

What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to change the ways you think about everything? What if, as Rusty Morrison speculates in Poetry Flash, "the sublime can only be glimpsed by pressing through fear's boundary, beyond one's previous conceptions of the beautiful"?

Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

All the Pronoiac resources below come from the wonderful site, Celebrate Small Victories.

A judge threw out key provisions of Missouri’s voter ID law, making this the ninth consecutive win for Priorities USA in their fight against state voter suppression laws.

With help from volunteers from BGTX, Texas saw nearly 400,000 people register to vote since March, a record four times the average yearly number.

Uber is joining Lyft in offering free rides to voters on November 6th. If you or anyone you know needs help getting to the polls, click here or here.

Seattle is dismissing over 500 misdemeanor marijuana convictions after a court ruled that they unfairly impacted people of color.

Washington became the 20th state to abolish the death penalty, following a unanimous ruling by the state’s Supreme Court.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from terminating TPS protections, allowing roughly 300,000 immigrants from Nicaragua, Sudan, Haiti, and El Salvador to live and work in the U.S.

In response to a petition brought by environmental and public health groups, seven synthetic food additives that were found to cause cancer have been banned by the FDA.

Rev. William J. Barber was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant… the same day he was arrested while demonstrating with workers in Chicago to demand higher wages and union rights.

The minimum wage for 40,000 airport workers in New York City will rise to $19 per hour over the next five years, becoming the country’s highest minimum wage set by a public agency.

And after years of organizing by workers, and months of pressure from Bernie Sanders, Amazon announced it is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour for more than 250,0000 workers. While this is good news, just a day later, Amazon pulled this shady move, so there’s still more work to be done.

Following pressure from the Rainforest Action Network and Sum of Us, PepsiCo and Nestlé are cutting ties with palm oil supplier IndoFood due to ongoing environmental and labor violations.

Publicly traded companies in California will now be required to have at least one woman on their board of directors of directors by next year.

A group of Latina women have created an underground network to protect immigrant women from domestic violence.

The ban on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon will be preserved, now that the Supreme Court refused to hear a case brought by the mining industry.





WHAT NOURISHES YOU EMOTIONALLY AND SPIRITUALLY

What nourishes you emotionally and spiritually?

I'm not talking about what entertains you or flatters you or takes your mind off your problems.

I'm referring to the influences that make you stronger and the people who see you for who you really are and the situations that teach you life-long lessons.

I mean the beauty that replenishes your psyche and the symbols that consistently restore your balance and the memories that keep feeding your ability to rise to each new challenge.

I invite you to take inventory of these precious assets. And then make a special point of nurturing them back.





MAKE OPTIMAL USE OF YOUR LIFE ENERGY

Here's a prescription that may help you make optimal use of your precious life energy:

Set an intention to clarify your intentions about the essential matters in your life. Say "I am clarifying my intentions about . . ."

"who I really am"

"whom and what I love"

"how I want to serve my fellow creatures and the planet Earth"

"the unripe qualities in myself that I am ripening"

"what I need to do next"

"the best way for me to make money"

"the moral principles I hold most strongly"

"the truth about my relationship to the Source"

"the best use of my creative energy"

others?





GET MORE RESPECT

Here are some ways to get more respect:

1. Do your best in every single thing you do -- whether it's communicating precisely or upholding the highest possible standards at your job or taking excellent care of yourself.

2. Maintain impeccable levels of integrity in everything you do -- whether it's being scrupulously honest or thoroughly fair-minded or fiercely kind.

3. On the other hand, don't try so compulsively hard to do your best and cultivate integrity that you get self-conscious and obstruct the flow of your natural intelligence.

4. Make it your goal that no later than four years from now you will be doing what you love to do at least 51 percent of the time.

5. Give other people as much respect as you sincerely believe they deserve.

6. Give yourself more respect.

7. Others?





I ME WED

I invite you to deepen and intensify your commitment to the most important person in your life -- you. One way to further that sacred cause is to get married to yourself. In my book, I've created a text you can refer to as you perform the wedding. Or you can use my text for inspiration as you create your own version.

Let's begin by telling a simple truth: You will probably never create a resilient, invigorating bond with the lush accomplice of your dreams until you master the art of loving yourself ingeniously. A wedding ritual that joins you to yourself could catalyze an uncanny shift in your personal mojo that would attract a fresh, hot consort into your life, or else awaken the sleeping potential of a simmering alliance you have now.

If you're feeling brave, try speaking the following words aloud:

"I am no longer looking for the perfect partner.
I am my own perfect partner."

Say it even stronger:

"I am no longer looking for the perfect partner
to salve all my wounds
and fix all my mix-ups
and bridge all my chasms.
I am no longer looking for the perfect partner
because I am my own perfect partner."


READ THE REST OF "I ME WED"





THOUGHTFUL OPTIMISM THAT DOESN'T IGNORE THE SUFFERING

One of my heroes, radical historian Howard Zinn, said that pessimism tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we relentlessly imagine the worst possible outcomes, if we concentrate on all the things that are falling apart and going wrong, it cripples our capacity to make constructive changes. "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic," he wrote. "It gives us the energy to act."

More from Howard: "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."





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Danielle LaPorte writes:

Right now there are Tibetan Buddhist monks in a temple in the Himalayas endlessly reciting mantras for the cessation of your suffering and for the flourishing of your happiness.

Someone you haven’t met yet is already dreaming of adoring you.
Someone is writing a book that you will read in the next two years that will change how you look at life.

Nuns in the Alps are in endless vigil, praying for the Holy Spirit to alight the hearts of all of God’s children.

A farmer is looking at his organic crops and whispering, “nourish them.”

Someone wants to kiss you, to hold you, to make tea for you.

Someone is willing to lend you money, wants to know what your favorite food is, and treat you to a movie. Someone in your orbit has something immensely valuable to give you — for free.

Something is being invented this year that will change how your generation lives, communicates, heals and passes on.

The next great song is being rehearsed.

Thousands of people are in yoga classes right now intentionally sending light out from their heart chakras and wrapping it around the earth.

Millions of children are assuming that everything is amazing and will always be that way.

Someone is in profound pain, and a few months from now, they’ll be thriving like never before. They just can’t see it from where they’re at.

Someone who is craving to be partnered, to be acknowledged, to ARRIVE, will get precisely what they want — and even more. And because that gift will be so fantastical in it’s reach and sweetness, it will quite magically alter their memory of angsty longing and render it all "So worth the wait."

Someone has recently cracked open their joyous, genuine nature because they did the hard work of hauling years of oppression off of their psyche — this luminous juju is floating in the ether, and is accessible to you.

Someone just this second wished for world peace, in earnest.
Someone is fighting the fight so that you don’t have to.

Some civil servant is making sure that you get your mail, and your garbage is picked up, that the trains are running on time, and that you are generally safe. Someone is dedicating their days to protecting your civil liberties and clean drinking water.

Someone is regaining their sanity. Someone is coming back from the dead. Someone is genuinely forgiving the seemingly unforgivable. Someone is curing the incurable.

You. Me. Some. One. Now.





Below is an excerpt from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. You can hear my musical performance of it here.

This is a perfect moment.

It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you and I are waking up from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking, dumb-clucking collusion with the masters of delusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their crimes against nature,
extinctions of species
and brand new diseases.

Their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water.

Molestations of God,
celebrations of shame,
stealing our dreams and
changing our names.

Their cunning commercials
and blood-sucking hustles,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their painful blessings are cracking open more and more gashes in the shrunken and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." And through the fractures, ripe eternity is flooding in; news of the soul's true home is pouring in; our allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring us to become smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

We are waking up . . .

As heaven and earth come together, as the dreamtime and daytime merge, we register the shockingly exhilarating fact that we are in charge -- you and I are in charge -- of creating a brand new world. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now.

If you do not bring the genius within you, it will destroy you. But if you do bring forth the genius within you, it will free you.

As we stand on this brink, as we dance on this verge, we cannot let the ruling fools of the dying world sustain their curses. We have to rise up and fight their insane logic; defy, resist, and prevent their tragic magic; erupt with our sacred rage and supercharge it.

But overthrowing the living dead is not enough. Protesting the well-dressed monsters is not enough. We can't afford to be consumed with our anger; can't be obsessed and possessed by their danger.

Our mysterious bodies crave delight and fertility. Our ancient imaginations demand fresh tastes of infinity.

In the new world we're creating, we need lusty compassion and ecstatic duty, ingenious love and insurrectionary beauty. radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks.

I believe reality is a marvelous joke that is staged for my edification and amusement, and everyone is working very hard to make me happy.

In the New World we're creating,
We will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom.
We will embrace the cause of zoom and boom.
We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate;
we'll summon the brilliance to praise and create.
No matter how upside-down it all may appear,
we will have no fear
because we know this big secret:

Pronoia is real. All of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings. Life is crazily in love with us--brazenly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

Earth is crammed with heaven.

The winds and the tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The fire and the rain are scheming to steal our impossible pain. The sun and the moon and the stars remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we're dreaming.

We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers
provocateurs with designs to unleash us
helpers and saviors we can't even imagine
brothers and sisters who want us to blossom

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

The roads they pave us
the places they save us
the tomatoes they grow us
the rivers they flow us

Their mysterious stories
and morning glories
Their loaves and fishes
granting our wishes

The songs they sing us
The gifts they bring us
the secrets they show us
above and below us

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

We are free
We are free
We are free

Listen to my musical performance of "This Is a Perfect Moment".





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

MIRABILIA

What are mirabilia? They're phenomena that inspire wonder, winsome curiosities, small marvels, eccentric enchantments. Here are a few:

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing.

* Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises.

* In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the hero and heroine fall in love without ever gazing upon each other, simply by hearing tales about each other's good deeds.

* Twelve percent of the population believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

* The closest modern relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex may be the chicken.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does.

* Singing Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia.

* All the gold ever mined could be molded into a 60-foot bust of your mom.

* The moon smells like exploded firecrackers.

* The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible.

* Black sheep have a better sense of smell than white sheep.

* There are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. Every square inch of your body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

* French author and statesman André Malraux observed that Jesus Christ was the only anarchist who ever really succeeded.

* In his book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead at the end of time.





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 puzzling dilemmas 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.





You're an immortal freedom fighter who longs to liberate all sentient creatures from their suffering.

You're a fun-loving messiah who wants to help your fellow messiahs claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright.

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?

Read the rest of this essay.





The alchemists said the magic formula for enlightenment was Visita Inferiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem, or "Seek out the lower reaches of the earth, perfect them, and you will find the hidden stone"—the treasured philosopher's stone.

Jungian psychologists might describe the process this way: Engage in a relationship with the blind and sickly parts of yourself, perfect them, and you will awaken your hidden divinity.





Abraham Maslow's definition of real listening: to listen "without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating, approving or disapproving, without dueling what is being said, without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance, without free-associating to portions of what is being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all."





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?





EVIL IS BORING

Who are the perpetrators of the genocide of the imagination? I call them the entertainment criminals.

They're the nihilistic creators and dramatis personae who spread the propaganda that trouble and strife and disintegration are more worthy of our attention than integrity and splendor and quantum leaps.

The entertainment criminals are the decadent fools who preach the bizarre doctrine that witty gloom is the mark of a deep thinker. They are the educated idiots who try to trick us into believing that optimism is solely for naive fools with no aptitude for critical thinking.

The visionary philosopher Buckminster Fuller said, "When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

To the entertainment criminals, Fuller's perspective is heretical. With the know-it-all certainty of religious fanatics, they imply with every word and image they produce that there is rarely such a thing as a beautiful solution.

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I heard an interview with the German film actor Udo Kier. He specializes in playing villains. "Evil has no limit," he sneered, blustering like a naughty genius. "Good has a limit. It is simply not as interesting."

How many times have I heard that idiotic cliché? Most everyone everywhere seems to agree with Udo Kier. And I'm in a tiny minority in my belief that evil is boring. There seem to be few thinkers, communicators, and creators who share my curiosity about exploring the frontiers of righteous pleasure and amusing truth and boisterous integrity.

Some pretenders do make counterfeit attempts: Hollywood producers who produce sentimental fantasies with artificially happy endings, advertising executives who sell the pseudo-positivity of narcissistic comfort, and New Age gurus who ignore the darkness with their one-dimensional appeals to sweetness and light.

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The word "imagination" gets little respect. For many people, it connotes "make-believe" and is primarily the domain of children and artists. But the truth is that your imagination is the engine of your destiny. It's the single most important tool you have in your daily campaign to be free. It's the source of every act of liberation you will ever need to pull off.

That's why it's so disturbing to know that all over the planet, the imagination is deeply wounded—paralyzed by the media's nonstop onslaught of toxic psychic waste. How can you generate images that energize you to create your highest good if your mind's eye is swarming with dazzling yet vacuous and fear-inducing stories crafted by the most monumental brainwashing juggernaut in the history of the world?

To get a sense of the growing devastation, I suggest you wander around a grade school playground at recess. You'll hear kids' conversations overflowing with the degrading narratives they've absorbed from their favorite sources of information and stimulation.

I call this ongoing tragedy the genocide of the imagination. Because of it, many people cannot access their greatest magical power. They have forsaken the sanctity of their sacred temples, allowing them to be defiled with soulless images and stories that are at odds with their deepest desires. As a result they live incoherent lives corroded by chronic anxiety.

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If we hope to prevent the genocide of the imagination, we've got to perpetrate massive, mirthful attacks of pronoia. But we have to do it without acting like True Believers, because fanaticism is anathema to our cause. Our strategy is to be blithe and flexible as we learn not just to believe, but actually perceive the truth that life is a benevolent conspiracy designed to keep mutating our immortal souls until they're so far beyond perfection that perfection is irrelevant.

We will succeed. We will overthrow the doom and gloom fixation and make the cause of zoom and boom irresistible. Our parties will be better than theirs. Our jokes will be funnier, our jobs more enjoyable, our lovemaking more revelatory. We'll dream up tricks to create an environment in which it's more fun and interesting to talk about wise bliss than clever cynicism.

We will build shrines devoted to righteous pleasure and amusing truth and boisterous integrity in the ugliest places we know. We will unleash praise and gratitude without regard for the taboos we shatter thereby. And we will perform senseless acts of altruistic chutzpah everywhere we go.