Brainstorm about what causes happiness

What causes happiness? Brainstorm about it. Map out the foundations of your personal science of joy. Get serious about defining what makes you feel good.

To get you started, I'll name some experiences that might rouse your gratification: engaging in sensual pleasure; seeking the truth; being kind and moral; contemplating the meaning of life; escaping your routine; purging pent-up emotions. Do any of these work for you? Name at least ten more.





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Devotional Pronoia Therapy: Experiments and exercises in becoming a Master of Ecstatic Empathy

1. Are other people luckier than you? If so, psychologist Richard Wiseman says you can do something about it. His book The Luck Factor presents research that proves you can learn to be lucky. It's not a mystical force you're born with, he says, but a habit you can develop.

How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.

Name three specific actions you'll try in order to improve your luck.

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2. Useless suffering is the kind of suffering you're compulsively drawn back to over and over again out of habit. It's familiar, and thus perversely comfortable. Useful suffering is the kind of pain that surprises you with valuable teachings and inspires you to see the world with new eyes.

While useless suffering is often born of fear, wise suffering is typically stirred up by love. The dumb, unproductive stuff comes from allowing yourself to be controlled by your early conditioning and from doing things that are out of harmony with your essence. The useful variety arises out of an intention to approach life as an interesting work of art and uncanny game that's worthy of your curiosity.

Come up with two more definitions about the difference between dumb suffering and smart suffering.

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3. Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day, [put date here], that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."

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4. The primary meaning of the word "healing" is "to cure what's diseased or broken." Medical practitioners focus on sick people. Philanthropists donate their money and social workers contribute their time to helping the underprivileged. Psychotherapists wrestle with their clients' traumas and neuroses. I'm in awe of them all. The level of one's spiritual wisdom, I believe, is more accurately measured by helping people in need than by meditation skills, shamanic shapeshifting, supernatural powers, or esoteric knowledge.

But I also believe in a second kind of healing that is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what's merely sufficient to a sublime state. Using this definition, describe two acts of healing: one you would enjoy performing on yourself and another you'd like to provide for someone you love.

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5. Is the world a dangerous, chaotic place with no inherent purpose, running on automatic like a malfunctioning machine and fundamentally inimical to your drive to find meaning? Or are you surrounded by helpers in a friendly, enchanted universe that gives you challenges in order to make you smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier?

Trick questions! The answers may depend, at least to some degree, on what you believe is true.

Formulate a series of experiments that will allow you to objectively test the hypothesis that the universe is conspiring to help dissolve your ignorance and liberate you from your suffering.

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6. Those who explore pronoia often find they have a growing capacity to help people laugh at themselves. While few arbiters of morality recognize this skill as a mark of high character, I put it near the top of my list. In my view, inducing people to take themselves less seriously is a supreme virtue.

Do you have any interest in cultivating it? How might you go about it?

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7. Computer programmer Garry Hamilton articulated the following "Game Rules." Give examples of how they have worked in your life.

1. If the game is rigged so you can't win, find another game or invent your own.

2. If you're not winning because you don't know the rules, learn the rules.

3. If you know the rules but aren't willing to follow them, there's either something wrong with the game or you need to change something in yourself.

4. Don't play the game in a half-baked way. Either get all the way in or all the way out.

5. It shouldn't be necessary for others to lose in order for you to win. If others have to lose, re-evaluate the game's goals.

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8. "There are two ways for a person to look for adventure," said the Lone Ranger, an old TV character. "By tearing everything down, or building everything up." Give an example of each from your own life.

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The above is excerpted from my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia:

You can buy the book at Amazon and Powells.





HARRIET TUBMAN

I'm thrilled about the arrival of a film about the historical figure I admire most, Harriet Tubman.


One way to prepare for the film might be to look at this animated diagram about the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for 315 years, involved 20,528 voyages, and kidnapped millions of people.

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After escaping from slavery in 1849, Harriet Tubman helped organize the Underground Railroad and personally led hundreds of slaves to freedom. Few history books choose to convey the fact that she often relied on her dreams to provide specific information about where to find safe houses, helpers, and passages through dangerous territory.

Read some of my writing about Harriet Tubman.

And read Robert Moss's fine accounts of Harriet Tubman in his book Dreaming True.





BLESSING IN THE CHAOS
by Jan Richardson

To all that is chaotic
in you,
let there come silence.

Let there be
a calming
of the clamoring,
a stilling
of the voices that
have laid their claim
on you,
that have made their
home in you,

that go with you
even to the
holy places
but will not
let you rest,
will not let you
hear your life
with wholeness
or feel the grace
that fashioned you.

Let what distracts you
cease.
Let what divides you
cease.
Let there come an end
to what diminishes
and demeans,
and let depart
all that keeps you
in its cage.

Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.

— Jan L. Richardson





My book THE TELEVISIONARY ORACLE has been reprinted:

See the cover.

Read the first four chapters.

Here's what novelist Tom Robbins said after reading the book: "I've seen the future of American literature and its name is Rob Brezsny."





People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.

― Carl R. Rogers





CHANGING OUR MEMORIES

"We should not think of our past as definitely settled, for we are not a stone or a tree," wrote poet Czeslaw Milosz. "My past changes every minute according to the meaning given it now, in this moment.”

So, yes, you have the power to re-vision and reinterpret your past. Keep the following question in mind as you go about your work: "How can I recreate my history so as to make my willpower stronger, my love of life more intense, and my future more interesting?"





THE LOVE AFFAIR WITH LIFE

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.

—Diane Ackerman

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I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another.

—Diane Ackerman

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"Ecstasy is what everyone craves—not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless.

—Diane Ackerman





CITIZEN OF DARK TIMES

Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.
When things go wrong, do right.

Set out by the half-light of the seeker.
For the well-lit problem begins to heal.

Learn tropism toward the difficult.
We have not arrived to explain, but to sing.

Young idealism ripens into an ethical life.
Prune back regret to let faith grow.

When you hit rock bottom, dig farther down.
Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song.

Keep seeing what you are not saying.

Plunder your reticence.

Songbird guards a twig, its only weapon a song.

—Kim Stafford





CHANGING OUR MINDS

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw

The person who never alters their opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
—William Blake

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
—W. Somerset Maugham

The snake that can't cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.
—Walt Whitman





CHANGING OUR SHADOWS

Let's explode memories
and leap out of
yesterday's shadows,
lucid as they may be

Let's unanticipate the future
and answer all the torturous riddles
with deliriously simple YESes

Let's break the sky mirrors
and unsing the national anthems
and refuse the fake medicine

Let's change into light
that can neither be killed nor predicted

Let's forget every dance move
unless we learned it
in last night's dreams

Let's get invaded
by the only sunbeams
that know our true names
and let's be feasted on
by images erupting
from the center of the Earth

We will prevail
over our former glories
We will vanquish
the stories
that believe in us
more than we believe in them

No river will be able
to tell us who we are
No wind will have the power
to trap us with promises

No love will survive
unless it's reinvented right now

No reverence
will have any right
to enchant us
unless we feel it
in our bodies
for the very first time

—by me





REGENERATING OUR SOULS

Here's an excerpt of a letter I wrote to America's richest woman, Oprah Winfrey.

"Dear Oprah," I began. "Please buy up all the Pizza Huts and convert them into a network of Menstrual Huts. Create 10,000 or 100,000 local neighborhood sanctuaries where women can retreat while they're in the throes of their monthly appointment with dying and purification—or any time they need a break from the tyranny of the clock.

"Let the men come, too. They need sabbaticals. We're all desperate for a regular chance to drop out of the crazy-making grind, to find respite from civilizations' crimes against the rhythms of sleep and love and play.

"Men may actually need the Menstrual Huts even more than women. They mistakenly imagine that they can drive themselves on and on and on. Their poor bodies don't have a built-in menstrual mechanism to cyclically slow them down. And so they mostly never stop to peer into the heart of their own darkness. Which is why so many of them tend to find evil everywhere else except in themselves, and fight it everywhere else except in themselves.

"Just a theory to consider: If men got a chance to have periodic breakdowns and negotiate in a safe place with the toxic feelings that just naturally build up inside everyone over time, maybe they wouldn't wreak so much havoc out in the world. Maybe Menstrual Huts would save the world."

My letter to Oprah went on for two more pages, but you get the gist. She has not yet responded to my plea.

In the meantime, I suggest that anyone who's interested create their own local Moon Lodges and Menstrual Huts. Here's a list of self-inquiries that could help to guide the time in the sanctuary.

1. What feelings and intuitions have you been trying to ignore lately?

2. Which parts of your life are overdue for death?

3. What messages has life been trying to convey to you but which you've chosen to ignore?

4. What red herrings, straw men, and scapegoats have you chased after obsessively in order to avoid dissolving your most well-rationalized delusions?

5. What unripe parts of yourself are you most ashamed or fearful of? How can you give those parts more ingenious love?

6. What parts of yourself have the least integrity and don't act in harmony with what you regard as your highest values? How can you bring them into alignment with your true desires?

7. Is it possible that in repressing things about yourself that you don't like, you have also disowned potentially strong and beautiful aspects of yourself? What are they?

8. Are those really flaws that are bugging you about the people whose destinies are entwined with yours, or just incompletely developed talents? Are those really flaws that are bugging you about yourself, or merely incompletely developed talents?

9. Some people try to deny their portion of the world's darkness and project it onto individuals or groups they dislike. Others acknowledge its power so readily that they allow themselves to be overwhelmed by it. We believe in taking an in-between position, accepting it as an unworked gift that can serve our liberation. Where do you stand?

10. It's easy to see fanaticism, rigidity, and intolerance in other people, but harder to acknowledge them in yourself. Do you dare?





SACRED UPROAR

If you'd maybe like to see me perform my pagan revival show "Sacred Uproar," but aren't sure whether you want to commit to an entire evening, here's a ten-minute sample.





May sound and light
not rise up and appear as enemies,
may I know all sound as my own sound,
may I know all light as my own light,
may I spontaneously know all phenomena as myself,
may I realize original nature,
not fabricated by mind,
emptynaked awareness.

—John Giorno





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.





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.