Declare amnesty for the part of you that you don't love very well

The greatest gift you can give might be the gift that you yourself were never given. Give that gift.

The most valuable service you have to offer your fellow humans may be the service you have always wished were performed for you. Offer that service.

An experience that wounded you could move you to help people who've been similarly wounded. Heal yourself by healing others.





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SUBTERRANEAN PRONOIA THERAPY

1. Declare amnesty for the part of you that you don't love very well. Forgive that poor sucker. Hold its hand and take it out to dinner and a movie. Tactfully offer it a chance to make amends for the dumb things it has done.

And then do a dramatic reading of this proclamation by the playwright Theodore Rubin: "I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool."

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2. Pathologist Paul Wolf has suggested that some of history's great artists may have never created their masterpieces if the wonders of modern medicine had been available to them. For example, what if doctors had cured van Gogh's mental illness with a regimen of drugs like Prozac and Xanax?

Maybe he would have been spared the torment that goaded him to the outbursts of genius that erupted on his canvases.

Are there ways in which the very things that have driven you crazy might play a role in your finest accomplishments?

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3. Some of my readers complain when I draw inspiration from a public figure they consider a bad person. Once I cited philosopher Bertrand Russell, and a woman from Austin went into a rage: "Russell was a terrible father! How dare you give him any credence?"

Another time I invoked the wisdom of ex-U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt. "What possessed you to quote such a militaristic bully?" wrote an outraged emailer.

Here's how I respond to these grumbles: If I refused to learn from people unless I agreed with everything they had ever said and done, I would never learn from anyone.

What about you? Have you set up your life so that everyone is either on or off your good list? If so, consider trying something new: Cultivate a capacity to derive help and insight from people who aren't perfect.

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4. No matter how holy and good, everyone in the world has a portion of the world's sickness inside them. It's known by many names: neurosis, shadow, demon, devil. Many people try to deny that it inhabits them. Others acknowledge its power so readily that they allow themselves to be overwhelmed and distorted by it.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we take a position between those two positions. We accept the fact that the evil is part of us, but treat it with compassionate amusement and flexible vigilance. Our stance is partly that of loving parents and partly that of warriors.

Once you make a commitment to explore the mysteries of pronoia, your shadow will try to play tricks on you that it has never tried before. How will you respond? We recommend an aggressive, tender, improvisational approach. Be ready for anything. Avoid both blithe excesses of tolerance and grave fundamentalism.

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5. "We are attracted to people who express the qualities we deny or repress in ourselves," says creativity expert Shakti Gawain. Using this idea as your hypothesis, take an inventory of the people you're most drawn to. Ask yourself whether they have talents and dreams that you wish could come alive in you. If you find this to be the case, consider the possibility that it's time to claim those talents or dreams as your own.

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6. Philosopher William James proposed that if our culture ever hoped to shed the deeply ingrained habit of going to war, we'd have to create a moral equivalent. It's not enough to preach the value of peace, he said. We have to find other ways to channel our aggressive instincts in order to accomplish what war does, like stimulate political unity and build civic virtue.

Astrology provides a complementary perspective. Each of us has the warrior energy of the planet Mars in our psychological makeup. We can't simply repress it, but must find a positive way to express it. How might you go about this project?

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7. In his book The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, psychologist James Hillman writes: "The question of evil refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness."

What would you have to do in order to triumph over this kind of evil in yourself?

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8. "The problem, if you love it, is as beautiful as the sunset," wrote J. Krishnamurti. "The obstacle is the path," says the Zen proverb. What frustrating puzzle do you love the best?

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9. Acquire a hand puppet, preferably a funky old-fashioned one from a thrift store, but any one will do. Give the puppet a name and wear it on your hand wherever you go for several days. In a voice different from your normal one, make this ally speak the "shadow truths" of every situation you encounter: the dicey subtexts everyone is shy about acknowledging, the layers of truth that lie beneath the surface, the agreed-upon illusions that cloud everyone's perceptual abilities.

10. All of us are eminently fallible nobodies. We're crammed with delusions and cracked beliefs. We give ourselves more slack than anyone else, and we're brilliant at justifying our irrational biases with seemingly logical explanations. Yet it's equally true that we're each a magnificently enigmatic creation unique in the history of the world. We're immortal geniuses in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation.

Dramatize this paradox. Tomorrow, buy and wear ugly, threadbare clothes from the same thrift store where you got your hand puppet. Eat the cheapest junk food possible and do the most menial tasks you can find.

The next day, attire yourself in your best clothes, wear a crown or diadem, and treat yourself to an expensive gourmet meal. Enjoy a massage, a pedicure, and other luxuries that require people to wait on you.

On the third day, switch back and forth between the previous two days' modes every couple of hours. As you do, cultivate a passionate indifference to the question of whether you are ultimately an unimportant nobody or a captivating hero.





PURGE YOUR NEGATIVE CONDITIONING—OR AT LEAST SOME OF IT

Who knew that in one of my past lives I was a guerrilla Qabalistic performance artist studying at Exorcise Your Television University?

Who knew that at this time I was also a New Edge anti-guru who created a guided meditation designed to drive you sweetly crazy?

Listen to this track if you’d like help in purging your negative conditioning!





WEIRD ELDERS

Michael Meade says: "In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them.

"The old word for having a foot in each world is 'weird.' The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.

"An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no 'normal' elders. Normal bespeaks the 'norms' that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life.

"In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.

"Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply 'weirdoes,' but strange and unusual in meaningful ways.

"Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive."

– Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul





WE NEED AN UNCOLONIZED IMAGINATION

Excerpts from an interview with storyteller and mythologist Martin Shaw: We need an uncolonized imagination, a mythic intelligence. Why? Because we are constantly being fed signs that frighten us, and then paralyze us, and then colonize us. And imagination, through myth, wants to give you symbols to raise you up.

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People often prefer to dismiss myth, saying: it’s not true. But a way to think about myth is as something that never was and always is. Or as a beautiful lie that tells a much deeper truth.

But one way or another when we lose our mythic sensibility, the powers in this world that may not wish us well have a greater purchase on us, a greater hold.

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Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us.

Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre.

If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics at some point the soul grows weary and turns its head away because we are not allowing it into the conversation, and by denying soul we are ignoring what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river.

We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.

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The days of conventional hero myths are not serving us. What is being called for now culturally is a word you find often in Ancient Greece: metis. Metis is a kind of divine cunning in service to wisdom.

We can’t be naïve in times like this, because we are in the presence of underworld forces that will do one of two things: they will either educate us, or annihilate us.

And in fairy tales whenever the movement is down – and the movement culturally is down right now – you have to get underworld smart, have underworld intelligence, underworld metis.

I have a strong feeling that a lot of what wants to emerge through many ancient stories is a kind of wily, tough, ingenious and romantic force that needs to come forward at this point in time.

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If you don’t have ancestors you have ghosts. At the moment many of us are so impoverished and lacking in a cultural root system that what is around us are not ancestors supporting us but ghosts depleting us.

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I notice that several times a day I go into what you could call a mild trance state. I’m not talking about ouija boards here! I’m just talking about falling under the influence of advertising, or various politically engineered neuroses that might be floating around.

But I recognize I have come into a kind of enchantment. And the way I recognize it is that I feel less than grounded. I feel I’m not in the realm of imagination, I’m in the realm of fantasy. So the imaginal is not present; the Earth as a lived, breathing, thinking being is not present.

What’s happening is I’m simply fretting – to use my mother’s language – I’m spinning my wheels. And so actually I think stories have a capacity to wake us up.

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Gaston Bachelard says, "the Earth seeks to be admired by you."

So if you do nothing else, admire natural things. Learn to give them praise. Learn to speak their 12 secret names. You hear about the Inuit having all these different names for snow.

Well, I thought, what are the 12 secret names of those old-growth oaks that I see down near Greenwich docks? My advice really is what the Hindus call the ‘joyful participation in the sorrows of the world’.

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Read the entire interview with Martin Shaw





DREAM WORK AS AN AID TO ACTIVISM

Modern post-industrial societies tend to produce un-sane populations -- multitudes of people who are unbalanced in their adaptation to the destructive stress of daily existence. One of the symptoms of this un-sanity is the loss of contact between the waking ego and the depths of the self, a contact that requires involvement in dream experiences and information.

Cultures generally resist change, and modern materialist societies are no different in this respect. Devaluation of dreaming and other spiritually efficacious experiences is part of the foundation of 'false consciousness' required by capitalist/materialist political economies.

Materialist cultures require that the focus of awareness be upon the material conditions of life and away from involvement with the inner being which is the only road to spiritual maturation.

—Charles D. Laughlin, Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain





What if there's no contradiction between being your idiosyncratic self in love with your life and serving others with the best gifts you have to give?

What if exploring your inner world to activate your personal genius dovetails perfectly with fighting to recreate the soulless culture we're embedded in?

What if working on your own salvation makes you a more effective force in liberating others from their suffering?





WE'RE ALL FAMILY

Quoting geneticists, Guy Murchie says we're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than your fiftieth cousin.

Murchie also describes our kinship through an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and—owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation—over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived.

Right now you may be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra.





EXPERIMENTS

Be tastefully crazy and gracefully racy,
walk sleek and lithe like a supernatural champion,
think chunky and sing funky,
dream upside-down and breathe inside-out,
laugh incorrectly and change everything you look at,
be a wonder-plucker and a thunder-sucker,
expunge guilt with a tender vengeance
and erase shame like a legendary joker,
do no harm and take no shit





PRIMAL LONGING

Recently I wrote about the pleasures that can come from cultivating a robust relationship with one’s primal longing. "What is a 'primal longing' exactly?" a reader asked me.

I replied: Your primal longing is the deepest yearning you have; the essential desire that brought you here to earth; the reason why you're alive; the goal that's most important for you to strive for this lifetime; your core driving force.





FAKE ENLIGHTENMENT

If your quest for spiritual enlightenment doesn't enhance your ability to witness and heal the suffering of your fellow humans, then it's fake enlightenment.





SEVEN BILLION, 700 MILLION RELIGIONS

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 or she knows what God is or isn't, doesn't really know.

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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?

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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.

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In "Letters to a Young Poet," Rilke urged an aspiring bard to change the way he imagined the Supreme Being. "Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming," Rilke said, "who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?"

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Philosopher Robert Anton Wilson proposed that the single greatest contribution to world peace would come from there being over seven billion different religions—a unique spiritual path for each person on the planet. The Beauty and Truth Lab urges you to get started on doing your part to make this happen. What will your religion be called? What rituals will you perform? Write down your three core tenets.

You'll also need a new name for the Creator. "God" and "Goddess" have been so overused and abused that most of us are numb to them. And given the spiritual opportunities that will open up for you as you explore pronoia, you can't afford to have an impaired sensitivity toward the Great Mystery.

Here's an idea to stimulate your search: The Russian word for God is "Bog." The Basques call the Supreme Being "Jingo." To purge your psychic dockets of built-up fixations about deity, you might try singing improvisational prayers to "Jingo Bog."

Here are a few other fresh names to inspire you:

Blooming HaHa
Divine Wow
Whirl-Zap­Gush
Sublime Cackler
Chthonic Riddler

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Read more of these excerpts from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia:

Or buy the book. It's available at Amazon and Powells.






Forbidden knowledge & illegal truth

Defiant compassion & outlaw gratitude

Friendly shocks & fertile chaos

Sacred transgression & tumultuous beauty

Spiritual anarchy & liberated morality

Joyful wrath, adoring pranks, & taboo justice

Outrageous prayers & tender apocalypses

Venerable violations & seething exaltations

Zen pride & redemptive charisma

Unopinionated perceptions & shrewd innocence

Flagrant exaltation & notorious lucidity

Fanatical balance & insane poise

Rigorous flexibility & robust humility

Militant ecstasy & raucous resonance

Shadowy clarity & illuminating ambiguity

Open-hearted rage & luminous teasing

Mystical activism & crazy logic

Devout breakdowns & restorative deviance

Radical curiosity, fierce inquiry, & voracious listening


(The above is excerpted from the Chaos Magick manual disguised as a self-help book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It's available at Amazon and Powells.