Free Mind, Wild Heart

"Before we can receive the entire truth about anything," wrote my teacher Ann Davies, "we have to love it."




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DO ME A FAVOR, PLEASE?

Would you do me a favor, please? Would you do your friends and loved ones and the whole world a favor? Don’t pretend you're less powerful and beautiful than you are. Don't downplay or neglect the magic you have at your disposal. Don't act as if your unique genius is nothing special.

OK? Are you willing to grant us these small indulgences? Your specific talents, perspectives, and gifts are indispensable . The rest of us need you to be bold and brazen about expressing them.





YOU HAVE ACCESS TO MORE LOVE THAN YOU REALIZE

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

- Rainer Maria Rilke





YES, YOU ARE VERY CREATIVE

"Human beings are in a state of creativity 24 hours a day," wrote Raoul Vaneigem in his book *The Revolution of Everyday Life.* "People usually associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day?"





YOU DON'T NEED TO KEEP ANYONE'S ILLUSIONS AFLOAT

You're hereby relieved of any responsibility you think you have to keep everyone's illusions afloat (including your own).

See how much fun you can have by telling the lush, pulsating, up-to-the-minute truth with kindness and elegance.





FREE MIND, WILD HEART

To be the best pronoiac explorer you can be, I suggest you adopt an outlook that combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the "beginner's mind" of Zen Buddhism, the "beginner's heart" of pronoia, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama. Blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.

To pull this off, you'll have to be willing to regularly suspend your brilliant theories about the way the world works. Accept with good humor the possibility that what you've learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that's right in front of you. Be suspicious of your biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. Open your heart as you strip away the interpretations that your emotions might be inclined to impose.

"Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything," wrote my teacher Ann Davies, "we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true."

At the same time, don't turn into a hard-ass, poker-faced robot. Keep your feelings moist and receptive. Remember your natural affection for all of creation. Enjoy the power of tender sympathy as it drives you to probe for the unimaginable revelations of every new moment. "Before we can receive the entire truth about anything," said Ann Davies, "we have to love it."





WHAT ARE YOUR HEALING POWERS?

Everyone in the world has the power to heal someone else. At one end of the spectrum are the doctors and shamans and therapists who can summon the means to cure lots of people. At the other end are individuals with the power to improve the health or smooth out the distortions in just one other person.

Where do you fit in this range?





Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become.





ALL DESIRES HAVE A SACRED ORIGIN

Psychologist Carl Jung said all desires have a sacred origin, no matter how odd they seem. Frustration and ignorance may cause them to twist into distorted caricatures, but it's possible to locate the beautiful source from which they arose.

In describing an addictive patient, Jung said: "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

With this in mind, ruminate about this question: What are the glorious prototypes behind the longings that confuse you or drain you?





IF THERE IS ANY SUCH THING AS ENLIGHTENMENT . . .

If there is any such thing as enlightenment, it arises from empathy, sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and a quest to be in intimate connection with and in service to other beings.





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





VOWS

I invite you to speak these vows out loud:

"As long as I live, I vow to die and be reborn, die and be reborn, die and be reborn, over and over again, forever reinventing myself.

"I promise to be stronger than hate, wetter than water, deeper than the abyss, and wilder than the sun.

"I pledge to remember that I am not only a sweating, half-asleep, excitable, bumbling jumble of desires, but that I am also an immortal four-dimensional messiah in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation.

"I vow to love and honor my highs and my lows my yeses and noes, my give and my take, the life I wish I had and the life I actually have.

"I promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow my devotion to the truth, fuel my commitment to beauty, refine my emotions, hone my dreams, wrestle with my shadow, purge my ignorance, and soften my heart -- even as I always accept myself for exactly who I am, with all of my so-called foibles and wobbles."





LOVE DOESN'T HAVE TO MEAN LOSING FREEDOM

Love doesn't have to involve losing freedom. It could mean synergizing and deepening freedom with an ally who's as talented a liberationist as you.





HOLY PLAYFUL FUNNY BLISS

The German word "selig" can mean "ecstatic," "blessed," or "holy." It implies that profound bliss can be a divine gift; that deep pleasure may generate or come from spiritual inspiration.

The English language doesn't have a term comparable to "selig," maybe because our culture regards sacred ecstasy with suspicion.

Religious people tend to believe that the blessed are those who are good and kind, certainly not those who are skilled at cultivating rapturous states of union with all of creation.
Many people who worship rationality, on the other hand, think of holy ecstasy as at best an irrelevant state, and at worst a nonproductive or deluded indulgence.

What would you have to do to place yourself in intimate alignment with the values embodied by the word "selig"?

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"They say a thing is holy if it makes you hold your tongue," muses a character in John Crowley's fantasy novel "Engine Summer," speaking of the difference between his culture and another. "But we say a thing is holy if it makes you laugh."

Is your amused joy compatible with your yearning for the breakthroughs that make you feel at home in the world? Can your giddiness serve your reverence?

P.S. The English word "silly" comes from the German "selig."





ANNIE DILLARD JUBILEE

"Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe . . . No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."'

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"If the landscape reveals one certainty," wrote Annie Dillard, "it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor."

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Annie Dillard notes that there is only a tiny difference between the lifebloods of plants and animals. A molecule of chlorophyll contains 36 atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon arrayed around an atom of magnesium, while a molecule of hemoglobin is exactly the same except for an atom of iron instead of magnesium.

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"I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits," writes Annie Dillard, "but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air."

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In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard apologizes to God and Santa Claus and a nice but eccentric older woman named Miss White, whom she knew as a child. "I am sorry I ran from you," she writes to them. "I am still running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain."

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"There is always an enormous temptation in all of life," writes Annie Dillard, "to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end . . . I won't have it. The world is wider than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright."





REJOICING IN ORDINARY THINGS

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

— Pema Chodron





YOU'RE A LUCKY, PLUCKY GENIUS

You are constitutionally incapable of adapting nicely to the sour and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." You're too amazingly, blazingly insane for that.

You're too crazy smart to lust after the stupidest secrets of the game of life. You're too seriously delirious to wander sobbing through the sterile, perfumed labyrinth looking in vain for the most ultra-perfect mirror. Thank the Goddess that you are a fiercely tender throb of sublimely berserk abracadabra.

You'll never get crammed in a neat little niche in the middle of the road at the end of a nightmare. You refuse to allow your soul's bones to get ground down into dust and used to fertilize the killing fields that proudly dot the ice cream empire of monumentally demeaning luxuries.

You're too brilliantly cracked for that. You're too ingeniously whacked. You're too ineffably godsmacked.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece. Read or listen to it here.