Your Story Keeps Getting More Interesting

MY UPCOMING PERFORMANCE IN NEW YORK CITY

Join me as I read poetry

at The Strand bookstore
828 Broadway, New York City
7:30 pm on Friday, September 13

I'll be opening for three crazy-good poets:
Ariana Reines
and
CAConrad
and
Zoe Brezsny


Here's the info.

In the meantime, check out Ariana Reines' sensational new book
A Sand Book, and read my review of it

Here's my favorite book by CAConrad:
ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness

Find Zoe Brezsny's poetry here.


Photo of me preparing





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.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

―Maxine Hong Kingston





YOUR HOLY IMAGINATION

Listen to a spoken-word version of this rap

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. In fact, it's an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values. That's the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the "monkey mind." It's the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind's slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to the life that's right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.

Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize?

Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

That's one reason why I'm reverent in composing my messages for you. If I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

Listen to a spoken-word version of this rap





GENERATE THE FREE BRAIN

Instructions from poet Kenneth Patchen:

1. Discourage all traces of shame.
2. Bear no cross.
3. Extend all boundaries.
4. Blush perpetually in gaping innocence.
5. Burrow beneath the subconscious.
6. Pass from one world to another in carefree devotion.
7. Exhaust the primitive.
8. Generate the free brain.
9. Forgo no succulent filth.
10. Verify the irrational.
11. Acquire a sublime reputation.
12. Make one monster at least.
13. Multiply all opinions.
14. Inhabit everyone.





ANGER IS THE DEEPEST FORM OF COMPASSION?

David Whyte says: “ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt.

“Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding.

“What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.”

- From David Whyte’s book, "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words”





SING TALKING

If you were to approach the mountain village of Kongthong in India, you might notice the cacophony of peculiar bird calls echoing through the jungle. They wouldn't sound like any birds that you had heard before, though — these songs come from the villagers themselves.

They call to their neighbors in song. They sing to their children in to eat. They rhapsodize to find each other in the jungle.

Each song is unique, and each one refers to a specific individual. The practice, known as *jingrwai lawbei*, means each villager is given a musical name alongside their more traditional one.

MORE





IMMORAL TO ONLY COMPLAIN

In my value system, it is immoral to complain and denounce and deprecate without ever praising; it's immoral to compulsively criticize without also identifying—at least now and then—what's working well.






THE PEOPLE I TRUST MOST

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. I aspire to be like that.





WANT TO GET YOUR PERSONAL 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.





SHADOW SCHOOL

You're a gorgeous mystery with a wild heart and a lofty purpose. But like all of us, you also have a dark side -- a part of your psyche that snarls and bites, that's unconscious and irrational, that is motivated by ill will or twisted passions or instinctual fears.

It's your own personal portion of the world's sickness: a mess of repressed longings, enervating wounds, ignorant delusions, and unripe powers. You'd prefer to ignore it because it's unflattering or uncomfortable or very different from what you imagine yourself to be.

If you acknowledge its existence at all (many of us don't), you might call it the devil, your evil twin, your inner monster, or your personal demon. Psychologist Carl Jung referred to it as the shadow. He regarded it as the lead that the authentic alchemists of the Middle Ages sought to transmute into gold.

+

Astrologer Steven Forrest has a different name for the shadow: stuff. "Work on your stuff," he says, "or your stuff will work on you." He means that it will sabotage you if you're not aggressive about identifying, negotiating with, and transforming it.

+

The shadow is not inherently evil. If it is ignored or denied, it may become monstrous to compensate. Only then is it likely to "demonically possess" its owner, leading to compulsive, exaggerated, "evil" behavior.

+

"The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values, cannot be accepted as a negative part of one's own psyche and is therefore projected -- that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as 'the alien out there' instead of being dealt with as one's own inner problem." -- Erich Neumann, *Depth Psychology and a New Ethic*

+

The qualities in ourselves that we deny or dislike are often the very qualities that we most bitterly complain about in other people. So for instance, an old friend of mine named Mark had a special disgust for friends who were unavailable to him when he really needed them. But I was witness to him engaging in the same behavior three different times, disappearing from the lives of his friends just when they needed him most.

+

"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event," said Jung. If you disown a part of your personality, it'll materialize as an unexpected detour.

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil . . . .

READ THE REST OF "SHADOW SCHOOL.




HOW TO KICK YOUR OWN ASS

How-to-kick-your-own-ass lessons are available at 2:20 of this video:

How-to-kick-your-own-ass lessons are also available at 7:30 of this video:

Here's the "Kick Your Own Ass" anthem.





WEEDS CAN BE GOOD

It turns out that some weeds are good for flowers and vegetables, protecting them from predatory insects. So say horticulturalists Stan Finch and Rosemary Collier, writing in Biologist magazine. When the bugs come looking for their special treats -- the plants we love -- they often get waylaid by the weeds, landing on them first and getting fooled into thinking there's nothing more valuable nearby.

So for example, when cabbages are planted in the midst of clover, flies lay eggs on only seven percent of them, compared to a 36 percent infestation rate on cabbages that are grown in bare soil with no clover nearby.

This could be a useful metaphor in working with your own versions of impurities and interlopers. Make sure there are always a few chickweed or henbit weeds surrounding your ripening tomatoes.





LOVE YOUR ENEMIES?

The Bible quotes the radical first-century religious activist Jesus Christ as follows: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." Sounds like he had a good strategy for working with his shadow.

Here's a corollary to Christ's injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself: "I will love the dark, difficult side of my neighbor -- not just the attractive, friendly side -- and I will encourage it to express itself in constructive ways."





PERSEPHONE'S OTHER STORY

In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down into the underworld by Hades, whose title is "Pluto." But in earlier, pre-patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively seeking to graduate from her virginal naivete by exploring the intriguing land of shadows.

"Pluto" is derived from the Greek word *plutus*, meaning "wealth." Psychologist James Hillman says this refers to the psyche-building riches available in Pluto's domain. Hades, he says, is "the giver of nourishment to the soul."





SEEDS ARE NOURISHED IN THE DARK

"Suffering can't be avoided," James Broughton told Jack Foley. "The way to happiness is to go into the darkness of yourself. That's the place the seed is nourished, takes its roots and grows up, and becomes ultimately the plant and the flower. You can only go upward by first going downward."

—James Broughton





WHERE YOU STUMBLE

"It is by going down into the abyss that you recover the treasures of life," wrote Joseph Campbell. "Where you stumble, there lies your treasure."





POETIC JUSTICE

"As is demonstrated by a wealth of historical examples, every form of fanaticism, every dogma and every type of compulsive one-sidedness is finally overthrown by precisely those elements which it has itself repressed, suppressed, or ignored."

—Erich Neumann





MAKE THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUS

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

—Carl Jung





My book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia got quoted by Marianne Williamson.

Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson posted an extensive quote from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia on her Facebook page

Here's the piece that Marianne Williamson quoted.

On this page you'll find links to a lot of other material from my book that you can read for free.