Take What You Need

How’s your fight for freedom going? Are you making progress in liberating yourself from your unconscious obsessions, bad habits, conditioned responses, and oppressive memories?





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UNUSUAL AND UNEXPECTED JOY

Guidelines to celebrate "Loving the Luxurious Hole at the Heart of Luminous Nothingness," a six-hour jubilee to be performed once every season for as long as you live.

• Empty yourself out completely, and do it gladly.

• With impish daring, lower your expectations all the way down to zero.

• Surrender every remnant of hope you might be tempted to cling to.

• With a jaunty nonchalance, pretend you have nothing to lose.

• Open an enormous welcome in your heart for the messy, unpredictable sweetness of life exactly as it is.

• Say yes to the hilarious beauty of ambiguity and paradox.

• Free yourself to accept every person and every situation on their own terms.





THE MORE ACCIDENTAL, THE MORE TRUE

"The more accidental, the more true," wrote Boris Pasternak. Scholar Mikhail Epstein expanded this observation: "The more accidental the phenomenon, the more divine its nature, for the divine is what has not been envisioned, what cannot be deduced from general rules, nor irreducible to them."

If we pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion, we may decide that the most useful sources of illumination are not always holy books, revered dogma, and great truths that everyone has heard. They might also be serendipitous anomalies that erupt into the daily routine and break the trance of ordinary awareness.

"The tiny spark," Epstein writes, "is the precise measure of the holiness of the world."

(Source: Mikhail Epstein, "Judaic Spiritual Traditions in the Poetry of Pasternak and Mandel'shtam." Translated from Russian by Ruth Rischin.)





DREAMWORK AS A FOUNDATION FOR ACTIVISM

Some people imagine I'm an unruly drug-user with a deranged view of reality. They don't seem cognizant of the fact that parts of reality are deranged, not me.

I assume that maybe they also can't tell the difference between the impact of taking drugs and the influence of doing dreamwork. The latter has been instrumental in shaping my unusual perspectives. I've remembered and recorded and learned from my dreams virtually every single night since I was 19 years old. They've been creative disruptors and rigorous educators.

I'm certainly not a perfect master of transmuting the unripe and less beautiful aspects of my psyche, but I have developed some skill—and working with my dreams has been crucial in that quest.

I am eternally perplexed by how few people draw on the challenging wisdom of their own dreams. More and more of us seem to have come to appreciate the value of meditation and mindfulness, but a comparable embrace of dreamwork hasn’t happened.

(Meditation is a wonderful tool for clearing away the monkey mind's chatter and tuning in to interesting modes of consciousness beyond our default everyday awareness. Dreamwork, on the other hand, helps us work with and transform what's painful and unripe in our own make-up.)

This cultural blindspot, the neglect of our dreams, seems like an unrecognized form of insanity to me. I'm convinced that if dreamwork were a more regular practice—if people were constantly working on wrestling with their shadows and redeeming the toxins in their souls—some of our massive collective problems would dramatically diminish.

Here's my hypothesis: To the degree that we stop projecting evil onto others and face it and deal with it in ourselves, we are far more likely to act with moral equanimity toward everyone else.

So yes, I recommend dreamwork as a foundation for effective activism. Our effort to wrangle compassionately with the shadow within us is an effective ground-level way to purify and strengthen our efforts to help and redeem the outer world.

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"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn





A Charm Against the Language of Politics
by Veronica Patterson

Say over and over the names of things,
the clean nouns: weeping birch, bloodstone, tanager,
Banshee damask rose. Read field guides, atlases,
gravestones.

At the store, bless each apple by kind:
McIntosh, Winesap, Delicious, Jonathan.
Enunciate the vegetables and herbs: okra, calendula.

Go deeper into the terms of some small landscape:
spiders, for example. Then, after a speech on
compromising the environment for technology,
recite the tough, silky structure of webs:

tropical stick, ladder web, mesh web, filmy dome, funnel,
trap door. When you have compared the candidates’ slippery
platforms, chant the spiders: comb footed, round headed,
garden cross, feather legged, ogre faced, black widow.

Remember that most short verbs are ethical: hatch, grow,
spin, trap, eat. Dig deep, pronounce clearly, pull the words
in over your head. Hole up
for the duration.





SOUL AND SPIRIT

"I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit," says Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, "and the dark and heavy aspects soul."

To his formula I would add my notion that the spirit is about rising above and seeking what's most noble, while the soul is about diving in and wrestling with exactly what is.

Neither realm is better or more important than the other.

Synergize!





MY DAUGHTER ZOE'S CURATION

On Tuesday, April 16 at 7 pm, my daughter Zoe Brezsny is curating a poetry reading by Jackie Wang, Gabby Bess, and Audrey Wollen. The event is at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 548 West 22nd Street in New York City. It's free.

Jackie Wang is a black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, student of the dream state, poet, filmmaker, trauma monster, and PhD candidate at Harvard University in African and African American Studies. She is the author of punk zines, including On Being Hard Femme, and a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In her recent work she is researching the bail bonds industry and the history of risk assessment in the criminal legal system.

Gabby Bess was the long-time curator of Illuminati Girl Gang, a publication dedicated to showcasing female-identified artists working within the context of internet culture. She has also published *Alone with Other People*, a collection of her poetry and short stories.

Audrey Wollen is a feminist theorist and visual artist. She uses Instagram, where she has over 25,000 followers, as a platform for her work on Sad Girl Theory, which includes the notion of sadness as a form of power.

Wang, Bess, and Wollen offer inspiration to a new generation of young poets seeking to fuse activism with their writing. They shift with lyrical fluidity from interior to exterior landscapes.

MORE INFO.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

A 96-year-old self-taught conservationist dedicated the last 40 years of his life to saving North American bluebird populations, building and monitoring 350 nest boxes all across southeast Idaho. In part from his conservation efforts, bluebird populations have significantly rebounded.

Environmental activist elected as Slovakia's first female president.

History is full of well-documented human atrocities, but what are the stories about when large groups of people or societies did incredibly nice things?





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YOUR PATH

"If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.“

— Joseph Campbell





WILDER, WETTER, MORE INTERESTING PROBLEMS

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 a maxim.

There's some truth in that perspective. 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 books is a good example. I have abundant fun handling the perplexing challenges with which they confront 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 mood. 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 necessarily 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 fate's kicks in the ass.





NO SUCH THING AS PREDESTINATION

Contrary to what some horoscope fans believe, there’s no such thing as predestination. Fate is a tricky, wiggly sucker that keeps changing its inclination about where it wants to go. Your willpower has a role to play in that drama. As the astrological saying goes, “The stars may impel, but they don’t compel.”

That’s why I’ve never really considered myself a fortuneteller. I prefer to think that my service is as a psychic intelligence agent, helping you expose the hidden patterns and unconscious forces that may be affecting your life without your knowledge. If I “predict” anything, it’s not so much the future as the missing part of the present.





35 Steps Men Can Take to Support Feminism
by Pamela Clark





BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD

The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit.

"For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue.

"But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

—Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are





LOVING ANIMALS

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

~Anatole France

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See wonderful photos of beloved animals by Rob MacInnis:





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, go here.


1. Thanks to tightening restrictions, the United Kingdom reported a 12% drop in vehicle emissions since 2012, as well as significant overall drop in air pollutants.

2. 250 of the world’s major brands, including Coca-Cola, Kellogs, and Nestle, agreed to make sure that 100% of their plastic packaging will be reused, recycled, or composted by 2025.

3. The European Parliament passed a full ban on single-use plastics, estimated to make up over 70% of marine litter. It will come into effect in 2021.

4. As of the end of 2018, at least 32 countries around the world had plastic bag bans in place—and nearly half are in Africa. Kenya enacted the world’s toughest plastic bag ban, and has reported that its waterways are clearer, the food chain is less contaminated—and there are fewer ‘flying toilets.’

5. China said it had seen a 66% reduction in plastic bag usage since the rollout of its 2008 ban, and that it has avoided the use of an estimated 40 billion bags.

6. India’s second most populous state, Maharashtra, home to 116 million people, banned all single use plastic (including packaging) on June 23 of 2018.

7. India’s environment minister also announced the country would eliminate all single-use plastic by 2022. Oh, and three years after India made it compulsory to use plastic waste in road construction, there are now 100,000 kilometers of plastic roads in the country.

8. Four years after imposing a levy, the United Kingdom said it had used nine billion fewer plastic bags, and the number being found on the seabed has plummeted.

9. Following a ban by two of its biggest retailers, Australia cut its plastic bag usage by 80% in three months, saving 1.5 billions bags from entering the waste stream.

10. There is now a giant 600-meter-long boom in the Pacific that uses oceanic forces to clean up plastic, and you can track its progress here. Despite a few early setbacks, the team behind it thinks they can clean up half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the next seven years.