Love Is Headed Your Way

My birthday is coming up soon. If you feel moved, send me love and blessings!

Via email: Truthrooster@gmail.com

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By snail mail: 454 Las Gallina Avenue, #255, San Rafael, CA 94913

Buy my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings — and/or leave a favorable review

Buy my book The Televisionary Oracle — and/or leave a favorable review.

Here's the Kindle version of The Televisionary Oracle





Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other stuff, including good news, lucky advice, and tender rants. It arrives every Tuesday morning.

Read past issues of the newsletter.

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Everyone's my teacher. Everywhere I go, I'm a student.

Everyone is in some way my informant, my revelator, my healer, my direct connection to the Who-Knows-What.

The animals, too: They are my confidants, my beloveds, my spirit guides.

And yes, the plants! My godparents, my role models, my advisers.

Yes, too, to the wind and sun and sky and mountain and rivers and oceans and rocks: I greet them daily as my family members, my agent provocateurs, my fellow celebrants.

Playful, mysterious intelligences surround me in every direction. I'm available! I gleefully vow to shut up and listen reverently on a regular basis.





FRESH POWER IS ON ITS WAY TO YOU

Pronoia doesn’t promise uninterrupted progress forever. It’s not a slick commercial for a perfect summer day that never ends.

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow.

The waning reveals a different kind of blessing than the waxing.

But whether it’s our time to ferment in the valley of shadows or rise up singing in the sun-splashed meadow, fresh power to transform ourselves is always on the way.

Our suffering won’t last, nor will our triumph.

Without fail, life will deliver the creative energy we need to change into the new thing we must become.


[This is excerpted from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia





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YOU BELONG TO YOURSELF

While you commune with us here at the Conspiracy to Commit Insurrectionary Beauty and Smart Love:

Your favorite phrase might be "flux gusto"

The colors of your soul might be sable, vermilion, ivory, and jade

Your special emotion might be skeptical faith

Your magic talisman might be a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth

The garage sale item you most resemble might be an old but beautiful and sonorous accordion with a broken key

Your magic verbs are dig, descend, and disclose

Your sweet spot might be in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics

You have a secret name that will be revealed to you very soon

You have fire in your blood and sea salt in your tears

Your vision of power is the red-tailed hawk soaring over the shopping mall

Your sacred fungus might be yeast and your soil of destiny might be peat moss

Your lucky number might be 3.14159265

Your lucky phobia might be arachibutyrophobia, or the fear of peanut butter adhering to the roof of your mouth

Your holiest pain might come from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change





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.





MAKING PEOPLE HAPPY IS EASY

How easy it is to make people happy, when you don't want or need anything from them.
― Gail Godwin





WILLFUL PERCEPTIONS OF PERFECT MOMENTS

Funky pagan scientists at Zen State University have found that the regular perception of perfect moments is an effective way to smooth jagged wrinkles on your attitude, scour away stains on your courage, and dispose of old psycho-gunk stuck to your karma.





LOVE HYMN
(by me)

Cushioned on each others' sighs
in a garden of reveries,
me sipping your streaming song,
you renaming my hymned blossoms,
we reweave the aftertaste of sun,
the fragrant glimmer of rising moon.

When I drench myself in your dream
and you adore my sweet shadows,
lotus petals flutter and surge from the mud
like childhood prayers,
remembering our resurrected breath,
reclaiming our holy bodies.

When I submerge myself in your eyes,
and you discover my lost secrets,
barely visible whirlwinds
erupt from the soaked roots
bearing our guts' primeval questions,
reviving the thunder in our blood,
retraining our future liberations.





RESURRECTION OF WHAT HAS BEEN MISSING

Novelist Tom Robbins: "I'm afraid I can't be counted among those who've latched onto the Goddess as a politically correct alternative to God the Father. The Transcendent Principle—the Divine, if you willis no more wholly female than it is wholly male.

"To be sure, the Divine has feminine aspects and masculine aspects, but its cumulative aspects transcend gender and, indeed, are so far beyond definition or description that they can't even be rationally discussed.

"It's the Mystery, baby, and the Mystery is ultimately unknowable. We can interface with it, we can marvel at it, we can connect to it and be elevated by it, but we can never comprehend it.

"What really interests me about the Goddess is the fact that while she was beloved and honored by our ancestors, was the central spiritual archetype and prevailing deity all over the globe for thousands of years, she has been so successfully eradicated by revisionist patriarchal spin doctors that most modern Christians, Moslems and Jews are totally ignorant of her massive and dominant historical presence.

"If someone or something of that enormous scope can be so thoroughly concealed from the masses, it can't help but call into question everything we've been taught by our various institutions.

"The subversion and repression of the Goddess is the Big Lie of the past two millennia —and as the dumbing down of America gains momentum, the duplicity is strengthening its grip.

"The good news is that a significant minority has recently become informed about the Goddess, and that has both revealed the essential spiritual foundation of feminism and inspired a growing distrust of traditional dogma and the meatballs who've propagated it."





Wrestling and Negotiating with Our Shadows

The people I trust the most are those who are always tenderly wrestling and negotiating with their own shadows, making preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil, fighting the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on those around them.

Hear the song.





ASTROLOGY IS NOT A SCIENCE

Astrology is not a science. Nor is depth psychology, mythology, dream interpretation, or poetry. It makes as much sense to criticize astrology for not being scientific as it does to deride a Florence and the Machine song for not upholding the binomial theorem.

The question "Do you believe in astrology?" is like asking someone if they believe in storytelling or art.

Picture a no-nonsense physicist gazing at a Kandinsky painting, with its teeming blobs of mad color and exuberant shapes, and declaring it to be a superstitious eruption of delusion that's not based on a logical understanding of the world.

Like Kandinsky's perspective, astrology at its best roots us in the poetic language of the soul. It has a special capacity to liberate our imaginations and encourage us to think less literally and to visualize our lives as a mythic quest. It helps us loosen and transform our subconscious fixations.





BE YOURSELF?

You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.

I'm not pandering to your egotism by telling you these things. When I say, "Be yourself," I don't mean you should be the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on top of a Mt. Everest-sized pile of pretty garbage.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the self that says "Thank you!" to the wild irises and the windy rain and the people who grow your food.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the rebel creator who's longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the dissident bodhisattva who's joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment.

When I say, "Be yourself," I mean the spiritual freedom fighter who's scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve your fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with rowdy blessings.





MY PRAYER
(written by me, Rob Brezsny)

I pray to the ancestors with their medicine stories
I pray to the descendants with their elixir stories
I pray to the tale-tellers alive now
who subterfuge their way free
of the dead stories that numb and pound and sicken

I pray that they will reforge me
into a magnet
for visions of unbuyable wonder
and dreams of pregnant rapture
and fables from beyond the brain

May they craft me
into a sweet vessel for creation myths
that are alive with mist and smoke and whispers
unknown to the Internet

May they massage me
into a blissful mess of receptivity
so I can always detect
the dramas and comedies and parables
owned by the solar system
and copyrighted by eternity

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I pray to the chroniclers
who rebirth killed history
I pray to the narrators
who remember stolen memories

I pray to the journalists
who track down
the taboo conversations
that women and children
have explored
in the middle of the night
for the last four thousand years

I pray to the compassionate liars
who disinter insurrectionary enchantments
and restore their dazzling dark joy

May those agitators
and awakeners
and animators
mark me with signs
that my creature teachers
will recognize
in the propaganda-free future

May they infuse me
with resurrected confusions
that sensitize me
to the prematurely solved mysteries
that I need to crack open again

May they make it easy
for the medicine beasts,
the talking animals,
the earth's real gods,
to welcome me
as one of their own





THE MIRACLE OF THE PSYCHE'S WAYS

"The miracle of the psyche's ways is that even if you are halfhearted, irreverent, didn't mean to, didn't really hope to, don't want to, feel unworthy to, aren't ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway. Then it is your soul's work to not overlook what has been brought up, to recognize treasure as treasure no matter how unusual its form."

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes





ASTROLOGY IS NOT A SCIENCE, PART 2

It's usually not productive to engage in a conversation with people who long ago dismissed astrology because it is "pseudo-science." Their minds are as irrevocably and self-satisfyingly closed as an evangelical Christian who already knows forever that there's no such thing as human-caused climate change.

So I expect that any rational ideas I serve up to those folks will have little impact.

But here's a start: Many who deride astrology with kneejerk derision have done no research on the subject. They don't know that four of history's greatest astronomers were practicing astrologers: Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Pierre Gassendi.

Most of the deriders haven't read smart astrological philosophers like Dane Rudhyar and Alice O. Howell and Steven Arroyo and Liz Greene. They aren't aware that pioneering psychologist Carl Jung cast horoscopes and believed that "astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity."

The deriders don't know that astronomer Martha Maiden, who was a program executive at NASA for years and achieved such prominence that she now has an award named after her, is an excellent astrologer. (I know because I went to Duke University with her and we studied astrology together.)

The closest approach that fraudulent "skeptics" usually make to the ancient art of astrology is to glance at a random horoscope column in a daily newspaper. To match their carelessness, I might make a drive-by of a strip mall and declare that the profession of architecture is shallow and debased.

That's one reason why these ill-informed "skeptics" spread so many ignorant lies. For instance, they say that astrologers think the stars and planets emit invisible beams that affect people's lives. The truth is, most Western astrologers don't believe any such thing.

Rather, the planets are symbols of the unfolding evolutionary pattern. Just as clocks tell time but don't create it, the heavenly bodies show us the big picture but don't cause it.

Here's some straight-out logic: Astrology doesn't claim to be a science, so it can't be a pseudo-science!





DO NOT BE DAUNTED

Do not be daunted by the insurmountability of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.

— The Talmud





A THOUSAND YEARS FROM TODAY

A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There’ll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe.

But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of history? What if your day-to-day decisions can actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we’re living through?

And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of at least some of the memories of the person you were back in this era? Reincarnation is a taboo theory among fundamentalist materialists, but it won't always be so.

These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. That’s why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.

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Everyone influences the world in some way. No matter how powerless we may feel, each of us is a creator who continually churns out energy that bends and shapes our world and the people in it.

What is the signature of your effect? How do you change the environments you pass through? What magic, for good or ill, do you perform in the daily rhythm of your life?

I invite you to take inventory—and to fix any discrepancies between the mark you ideally want to make and your actual impact.





I AM BUSY
(written by me, Rob Brezsny)

I am busy
today and tomorrow
and next week
and for as long as it takes

struggling to change
the way my eyes work,
learning to peel away
the memories that
make me blind

to the science light of the fairies
and the dark love sparks
firing in our brains
and the luminous dreams
of PARADISE NOW
shrouded in my blood and yours.

I want to see all those things!
I want you to see all those things!

+

Today and always
I am fidgeting
finagling
finessing

as I kill off
the dull decayed shock
that blocks me
from finding and speaking
the magic words
that got lost
inside my old misunderstanding
of death.

I don't misunderstand any more!
But it's taking me
longer than I thought
to fix the glitch.

Hard work!
Unwavering effort!
I'm fighting,
exultant and relentless,
to dismantle the buffers
that make me half-deaf
to the hum of the planets
and the thrum of the rivers
and the music of your ripe longing.

I am grappling and scrapping
with my self-appointed censors—
LET GO, IDIOTS!—
so I can hear again
the pre-verbal prayers
chanted to me in the crib
by the helpers
with kaleidoscope lyrics
woven in their wings.

I am yearning and pleading
for the animals to teach me
the mysteries of their ordeals and joys
in their own language,
not mine.

+

Now and forever
I am frantic
to disgorge the machine stories
that trick my empathy
into falling asleep
with their fake blood and explosions
with their digitally rendered sobs
and pretend suffering.

Because OF COURSE!!!
I want to sear
the real sobs and suffering,
the true blood and explosions,
into my blasphemous quest
for reverent justice

my rowdy, rumbling quest
for sacred justice
not just for myself
but for all seekers
of the gods' everlasting fuck wonder.





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

Below are some excerpts.

John Keats wrote that "if something is not beautiful, it is probably not true." I celebrate that hypothesis in my book.

I further propose that the universe is inherently friendly to human beings; that all of creation is set up to liberate us from our suffering and teach us how to love intelligently; and that life always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it (although not necessarily what we want).

Dogmatic cynics are often so mad about my book's title that they can't bring themselves to explore the inside. Why bother to actually read about such a preposterous idea? They accuse me of intellectual dishonesty, disingenuous Pollyannaism, or New Age delusion.

If they do manage to read even a few pages, they find that the blessings I reference in the title are not materialistic fetishes like luxurious vacation homes, high status, and a perfect physique.

I'm more interested in fascinating surprises, dizzying adventures, challenging gifts we hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that compel us to get smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

I also enjoy exposing secret miracles, like the way the sun continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into heat, light, and energy for our personal use.

But I don't take the cynics' fury personally. When I suggest that life is a sublime mystery designed to grow us all into strong, supple messiahs, I understand that's the equivalent, for them, of denying the Holocaust. They're addicted to a formulation that's the opposite of Keats': If something is not ugly, it is probably not true.

Modern storytellers are at the vanguard of promoting this doctrine, which I refer to as pop nihilism. Many journalists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, talk-show hosts, musicians, and pundits act as if breakdown is far more common and far more interesting than breakthrough; that painful twists outnumber redemptive transformations by a wide margin, and are profoundly more entertaining as well.

Earlier in my life, I, too, worshiped the religion of pop nihilism. In the 1980s, for example, I launched a crusade against what I called "the global genocide of the imagination." I railed against the "entertainment criminals" who barrage us with floods of fake information and inane ugliness, decimating and paralyzing our image-making faculties. For years, much of my creative work was stoked by my rage against the machine for its soulless crimes of injustice and greed and rapaciousness and cruelty.

But as the crazy wisdom of pronoia overtook me in the late 1990s, I gradually weaned myself from the gratuitous gratification that wrath offered. Against the grain, I experimented with strategies for motivating myself through crafty joy and purified desire and the longing for freedom. I played with ideas that helped me shed the habit of seeing the worst in everything and everyone. In its place I built a new habit of looking for the best.

But I never formally renounced my affiliation with the religion of cynicism. I didn't become a fundamentalist apostate preaching the doctrine of fanatical optimism. In the back of my wild heart, I knew I couldn't thrive without at least a tincture of the ferocity and outrage that had driven so much of my earlier self-expression.

Even at the height of my infatuation with the beautiful truths that swarmed into me while writing Pronoia, I nurtured a relationship with the awful truths. And I didn't hide that from my readers.

Yes, I did purposely go overboard in championing the cause of liberation and pleasure and ingenuity and integrity and renewal and harmony and love. The book's destiny was, after all, to serve as a counterbalance to the trendy predominance of bad news and paranoid attitudes. It was meant to be an antidote for the pandemic of snark.

But I made sure that Pronoia also contained numerous "Homeopathic Medicine Spells," talismans that cram long lists of the world's evils inside ritually consecrated mandalas. These spells diffuse the hypnotizing lure of doom and gloom by acknowledging the horror with a sardonic wink.

Pronoia also has many variations on a theme captured in William Vollman's testimony: "The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem that you don’t know how to solve."

Furthermore, the book stops far short of calling for the totalitarian imposition of good cheer. I say I can tolerate the news media filling up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration, misery and destruction. All I seek is equal time for stories that inspire us to adore life instead of fearing it. And I'd gladly accept 25 percent. Even 10 percent.

So Pronoia hints at a paradoxical philosophy more complex than a naive quest for beauty and benevolence. It welcomes in a taste of darkness, acknowledging the shadows in the big picture.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS ESSAY, GO HERE.





"I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place."

– Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, March 1886





Are you willing to push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart -- even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections, never demeaning the present by comparing it to an idealized past or future?





"People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

- Charles Fort





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

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 a bit of 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 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.





"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."

— Elizabeth Gilbert





Relationship" is a dull term for something so interesting. Try "link-flash" instead. Rather than calling people your "friend" or "partner," call them your "accomplice," your "freestyle," or your "lightning."

Boring terms like "significant other," "boyfriend," "girlfriend," & "spouse" could be retired, too. Try "lushbuddy," "heartbeat," or "jelly roll."

Feel free to coin your own surgecrafts and questbursts. Post them here!





"I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me."

– Wendell Berry, "Woods"