Your Love Guides You

Invitation: Go inward and contact the wisest source you know—call it your higher self, your holy guardian angel, Goddess or God, the genius of nature, or your strongest intelligence. Then pose this inquiry: What do I need to become aware of that I wouldn't even know to ask about?





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BE ASTONISHED

Poet Mary Oliver provides us with this excellent guidance:

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

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Here are some suggestions I would add:

Make the invisible dark force beautiful.

Create a song out of your moans.

Brag about your wounds.

Sneak gifts to your bad self now and then.

Dissolve the ties that bind you to hollow intelligence.

Train yourself in the art of unpredictability.

Play forever in time's blessing.

Lift up your heart unto the wild sun.

Distribute your favors to the vulnerable ones who can never pay you back.

Fall out of love with fear.

Make beautiful messes in the midst of ugly messes.





SAVING NATURE

How can we influence people to stop their desecration and extermination of nature? How can we motivate people to stop committing genocide against animal species? My suggestions:

1. Show people scientific data that shocks them into acknowledging how much harm human activity is inflicting.

2. Speak to people about the sin of bequeathing their descendants a damaged, impoverished planet.

3. Ask people to dissolve the unethical greed that leads them to consume so many of the earth's resources and produce too much waste.

4. Cultivate and express smart love for the interconnected web of life. Feel it deeply.

5. Celebrate the fact that there are other forms of consciousness and intelligence besides just the human kind. Cultivate loving relationships with them.

6. Embody the hypothesis that spending time in wild places enhances one's mental hygiene and physical health.

7. Value the feminine as much as the masculine.

8. Cultivate the art of empathy, and demonstrate how to make it flourish in everything you do.

9. Show what it means to think with your heart and feel with your head.

10. Stay in close touch with the Mysterium, the other real world that is the root of the material world.

11. Vow to bring the I-Thou dynamic to bear on all your relationships.

12. Be as curious about intimacy as you are about power.





I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE SOIL

Poet Gary Snyder wrote:
"I pledge allegiance to the soil
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
with joyful interpenetration for all."

Environmentalist Edward Abbey said, "My loyalties will not be bound by national borders . . . or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language or culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time."

In *Moby Dick*, Herman Melville suggested that ideally a person should be a "patriot to heaven."





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. Her website is here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and 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. She integrates psychological insight with astrology's cosmological perspective.

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

Check out Ro's website.





BIG UNSOLVED PROBLEM

What's your biggest unsolved problem?

One of mine is: why hasn't the music I've created reached a bigger audience? It's great music!

LISTEN HERE:

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Here's a list of some of the world's biggest unsolved problems





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

The world's first electrified road opened in Sweden

An international agreement banned commercial fishing in the Arctic

The New Zealand Prime Minister made history by bringing her baby to UN meeting

London became the first of the major global fashion weeks to end the use of animal fur in its shows

A $15 minimum wage seemed impossible. Now it's a reality for a million New Yorkers.

The Chicago crime rate dropped for second year in a row

Oslo, Norway will limit cars in city center

Viet Nam has been making efforts to foster organic farming

Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching team gives abused women a chance to become badass. They protect the animals of Phundundu Wildlife Park in Zimbabwe, watching over 115 square miles of habitat which had been prime trophy hunting ground, home to over 11,000 elephants.

Norway will become the first country that bans palm oil biofuels that are linked to deforestation





GIFTS!

Since 1995, I've been offering my written horoscopes on the Internet for free. I love doing that. It's relaxing to be able to offer you my oracles without asking for anything in return. It's healthy for my soul and yours.

But I also don't mind earning money from doing what I love to do. That's why I make it possible for you to bless me with donations. If you would like to contribute to me and my well-being, please visit my Gift Page

Give your gift via the "Friends and Family" option.

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In addition to the free written horoscopes I provide in this newsletter, I also offer two other sources of astrological information that cost money: my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text Message Horoscopes.

I love you just as much if you don't buy my extra stuff as if you do! No pressure! But if you would like the extra stuff, here's how to get it:

Go to my Expanded Audio Horoscopes page. Register or log in. On the new page, you have two choices: Expanded Audio Horoscopes or Daily Text Message Horoscopes.

If you have any questions about how to access them, write to my tech support team at freewillcs@gmail.com.





Some religious traditions preach the value of banishing or renouncing your desires. I do not subscribe to those traditions, so I will never urge you to banish or renounce your desires.

I prefer to encourage you to cultivate excellent desires. Here are a few I highly recommend:

• a desire for interesting riddles and fascinating challenges that excite both your mind and your heart;

• a desire for comrades who enjoy your specific idiosyncrasies and eccentricities;

• a desire to attract ongoing encounters with nonstandard beauty so as to always ensure a part of you remains untamed;

• a desire to help create a world in which everyone gets the food, housing, and health care they need;

• a desire for good surprises and unpredictable fun;

• a desire for group collaborations that enhance the intelligence of everyone in the group;

• a desire to keep outgrowing what worked for you in the past and a desire to ceaselessly explore and invent new approaches to being yourself;

• a desire to be playful and creative with your libidinous energy;

• a desire to help cultivate the health and beauty of the natural world;

• a desire for revelations and experiences that steer you away from thinking and acting like the machines you interact with so much;

• a desire to keep reinventing and reinvigorating your relationships with those you love;

• a desire to keep refining and expanding your ability to learn from non-human intelligences;

• a desire to keep refreshing your quest for freedom and deepening your capacity to be free;

• a desire to move your body in ways that delight your soul;

• a desire to help eliminate bigotry, misogyny, plutocracy, racism, and militarism.

Any others you'd like to add?





AUTHENTIC OPTIMISM AND DESPAIR

No optimism is authentic without visiting the depths of despair. No despair is authentic unless it has fully let in the joy.

—Charles Eisenstein





TRUE NATURE OF FUNDAMENTALISM

The fundamentalist takes everything way too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. He divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and those who don't. There is only one right way to interpret the world, and a million wrong ways. Correct belief is the only virtue.

To the fundamentalist, the liberated imagination is a sinful taboo. He not only enslaves his own imagination to his ideology, but wants to enslave our imaginations, too.

And who are the fundamentalists? Let's not remain under the delusion that they are only the usual suspects—the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism.

There are many other kinds of fundamentalists, and some of them have gotten away with practicing their tragic magic in a stealth mode. Among the most successful are those who believe in what Robert Anton Wilson calls fundamentalist materialism. This is the faith-based dogma that swears physical matter is the only reality and that nothing exists unless it can be detected by our five senses or by technologies that humans have made.

Life has no transcendent meaning or purpose, the fundamentalist materialists proclaim. There is no such thing as a divine intelligence. The universe is a dumb accidental machine that grinds on endlessly out of blind necessity.

I see spread out before me in every direction a staggeringly sublime miracle lovingly crafted by a supernal consciousness that oversees the evolution of 500 billion galaxies, yet is also available as an intimate companion and daily advisor to every one of us. But to the fundamentalist materialists, my perceptions are indisputably wrong and idiotic.

Many other varieties of fundamentalism thrive and propagate. Every ideology, even some of the ones I like, has its share of true believers—fanatics who judge all other ideologies as inferior, flawed, and foolish.

I know astrologers who insist there's only one way to do astrology right. I know Buddhists who adamantly decree that the inherent nature of life on Earth is suffering.

I know progressive activists who sincerely believe that every single Republican is either stupid or evil or both.

I know college administrators who would excommunicate any psychology professor who dared to discuss the teachings of Carl Jung, who was in my opinion one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

I know pagans who refuse to consider any other version of Jesus Christ beyond the sick parody the Christian right has fabricated.

None of the true believers like to hear that there are at least three sides to every story. They don't want to consider the hypothesis that everyone has a piece of the truth.

And here's the really bad news: We all have our own share of the fundamentalist virus. Each of us is fanatical, rigid, and intolerant about products of the imagination that we don't like. We wish that certain people would not imagine the things they do, and we allow ourselves to beam hateful, war-like thoughts in their direction.

We even wage war against our own imaginations, commanding ourselves, sometimes half-consciously, to ignore possibilities that don't fit into our neatly ­constructed theories. Each of us sets aside certain precious beliefs and symbols that we give ourselves permission to take very seriously and personally and literally.

Our fundamentalism, yours and mine, may not be as dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists and right-wing Christian politicians. It may not be as destructive as that of the CEOs who worship financial profit as the supreme measure of value, and the scientists who ignore and deny every mystery that can't be measured, and the journalists, filmmakers, novelists, musicians, and pundits who relentlessly generate rotten visions of the human condition.

But still: We are all infected, you and I. We are fueling the war against the imagination. What's your version of the virus?





MY BOOK OF ANGER

Someday I'll have an epiphany and tap adeptly into the raw, supercharged fuel of my anger. I'll stop going numb with blind rage when I think about misogyny and racism and militarism and plutocracy and homophobia and the rape of the earth.

On that day, my fury will become so beautiful and strong that I'll sit down and write "The Book of Good Anger" in one sustained three-week frenzy of creative indignation. It'll be filled with stories that inspire everyone who reads it to express their sacred wrath in the most constructive ways possible.

In the meantime, I'll be here urging you to seize those times when getting mad naturally gives you the lucid clarity to help correct the injustices you perceive—and encourages you to not wallow in rage for rage's sake.





MAGICAL THINKING

One of my readers, Jay O'Dell, told me this story: "After my cancer surgery, a nurse said to me, 'You may as well try magical thinking. Regular thinking hasn't helped.' I said to the nurse, 'Well, why the hell not?' That was seven years ago."

In bringing O'Dell's testimony to your attention, I don't mean to suggest you will have any health problems that warrant a strong dose of magical thinking. Not at all. But now and then in the coming years, you may get wrapped up in a psychological twist or a spiritual riddle that could benefit from magical thinking.

And what exactly is magical thinking? Here's one definition: The stories that unfold in your imagination may have important effects on what actually happens to you.





ARGUMENTS WITH GOD is the only organization on the planet that specializes in the art of debating with the Creator. Our trained Prayer Warriors are standing by, ready to deliver the protests and complaints that you want to convey.

Send your mad, rebellious, poignant appeals to Truthrooster@gmail.com, and we will relay them directly to the Cosmic Trickster with persuasive eloquence. Write your first draft here.





HOMEWORK

Homework: Diminish any predilection you have for shuffling, drooping, mumbling, wallowing, pigeonholing, and pussyfooting.

Practice your gliding, flowing, leaping, skipping, twirling, undulating, reverberating, galloping, and rub-a-dub-dubbing.

Become an expert at rumbling, romping, rollicking, cavorting, and zip-a-dap-doodling.





Your soul's code is your sacred calling; the blueprint of your destiny; the mission you came to earth to fulfill.

Now and then life pushes you away from influences that might be interfering with your ability to discern and express your soul’s code.

Higher powers and mysterious forces purge obstacles that have been preventing you from achieving a more complete embodiment of who you were born to be.

When that happens, it's time to celebrate.





A GOOD COURSE OF STUDY

A good course of study: how to find and attract the challenges and difficulties that best serve your quest for liberation and build your compassionate intelligence.





MANIFESTO

We are dissident bodhisattvas rebelling against all those forces that feed fear and ignore love.

We are spiritual freedom fighters rising up to protect nature and foment peace and demand justice.

We are subversive mystics stoking the cool blue fires of poetry and lobbying for the liberated imagination.

We are militant ecstatics invoking the transformative powers of pleasure to sanctify and beautify our one and only Earth.

We are mutinous purveyors of grace who redistribute the wealth so that all creatures may have the means to thrive.





THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES

INTERVIEWER: You confuse me in the way that you praise rational thought and the scientific method, yet reserve the right to believe in astrology, angels, miracles, and other woo-woo.

Rob Brezsny: Thousands of amazing, inexplicable, and even supernatural events occur every day. And yet most are unreported by the media. The few that are cited are ridiculed.

Why? Here's one possible reason: The people most likely to believe in wonders and marvels may be superstitious, uneducated, or prone to having a blind, literalist faith in their religions' myths.

Those who are least likely to believe in wonders and marvels are skilled at analytical thought, well-educated, and yet prone to having a blind, literalist faith in the ideology of materialism, which dogmatically asserts that the universe consists entirely of things that can be perceived by the five human senses or detected by instruments that scientists have thus far invented.

The media is largely composed of people from the second group. It's virtually impossible for them to admit to the possibility of events that elude the rational mind's explanations, let alone experience them.

If anyone from this group manages to escape peer pressure and cultivate a receptivity to the miraculous, it's because they have successfully fought against being demoralized by the unsophisticated way wonders and marvels are framed by the first group.

I try to be immune to the double-barreled ignorance. When I behold astonishing synchronicities and numinous breakthroughs that seem to violate natural law, I'm willing to consider the possibility that my understanding of natural law is too narrow.

And yet I also refrain from lapsing into irrational gullibility; I actively seek mundane explanations for apparent miracles.





MY SANCTUARIES

My social media accounts are not free-for-alls where anyone can disgorge whatever abuse and sneers and insults and rancor they have an urge to.

My Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts are my sanctuaries where I welcome people I trust. They're salons where people I'm interested in gather to discuss subjects of mutual interest.

It’s fine if some of those people I trust disagree with me, but when they do, they must do so with kindness and respect.

If you don’t meet those standards, I at least delete your comments and may block you from making further comments.

You can call that “censorship,” as some do. But that's a misuse of the word. If you write a nasty letter to the editor of a newspaper and magazine or website, and they don’t publish it, does that constitute censorship? No, it does not.

If I invite you into my home, and you hurl bad vibes in my direction, my asking you to leave doesn't constitute censorship.

If I'm hosting a public ritual or doing a public performance and you heckle me, I'll have my bouncer usher you out. I am not "censoring" you.

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P.S. People disagree with me ALL the time.

I have a total of 147,000+ readers on my American FB pages and 329,000+ readers on my Italian FB page. If even just 1% of those people find problems with any of the two posts I average every day (and I've been on FB nine years), that's a lot of disagreements I am asked to deal with.

The majority of those disagreements are fine, offered in a spirit of respectfully seeking to correct my errors and looking for common ground in collegial collaboration.

But for that small percentage of disagreements that are jarring, distasteful, contemptuous, and accusing, I don't abide them. To be a social justice warrior for the long haul, I must take good care of myself.

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To access my various SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS, GO HERE.





GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS

In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés suggests that we all need to periodically go cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds. Make sure, she says, that at least one part of you always remains untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine. Be adamant in your determination to stay intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about your life.

At the same time, though, Estés believes you need to keep your unusual urges clear and ordered. Discipline your wildness, in other words, and don't let it degenerate into careless disorder.