What's Trying to Be Born Within You?

“Before success comes in anyone's life, they are sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure.

“When defeat overtakes a person, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of people do.

“More than 500 of the most successful people this country has ever known told me their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.”

—Napoleon Hill





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I DON'T THINK I'M BORING

I don't think I'm boring. I have an abundant curiosity and I love to learn new things. I've worked at many different jobs, have read widely, and enjoy interacting with a broad range of humans.

Yet now and then I've had temporary relationships with people who regarded me as uninteresting. They didn't see much of value in me.

I tend to believe it was mostly their fault—they couldn't see me for who I really am—but it may have also been the case that I lived down to their expectations. Their inclination to see me as unimportant and uninteresting may have influenced me to be dull.

I bring this up so as to encourage you to remove yourself from situations where you have trouble being and feeling your true self.





WHAT'S TRYING TO GET BORN?

Anne Lamott writes: When a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born—and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.





HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

If I ever produce a self-help manual called The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want, it will discuss the following paradoxes:

a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you're not greedy or grasping.

b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you have already achieved them.

c. Whatever you're longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It's different from what it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. To make it yours, then, you'll have to modify your ideas about it.

d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn't foresee.

Any others you can think if?





BRAINWASH YOURSELF!

Brainwash yourself before someone nasty beats you to it. Study the difference between wise suffering and dumb suffering until you get it right. Commit crimes that don't break any laws. Build illusions that make people feel so beautiful they shed their illusions.

Pretend to be crazy so you can get away with doing what's right. Sing anarchist lullabies to homosexual eagles. Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks. Review in detail the history of your life, honoring every moment as if you were conducting a benevolent Judgment Day.

Eat money. Fuck gravity. Drink the sun. Dream like a stone.





YOU COULD BECOME

You could become a master of renegade sacraments, dissident splendor, and secret freedom.





THE WORLD MIGHT BE A POEM

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

—David Byrne

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Western science and religion have differing views on how the universe was created, but they agree that it happened a long time ago.

The mystery schools of the West, on the other hand, assert that the universe is re-created anew in every moment through the divine erotic play of God and
Goddess.

They say that if we humans treat lovemaking as an experimental sacrament, we can attune ourselves to the union of the two primal deities and, in a sense, participate in the ongoing creation of the world.

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Why is it so hard for Westerners of the last two centuries to feel the intimate presence of the divine intelligences? Every other culture in the history of the world has had a more vital connection with the realm of spirit.

According to poet Gary Snyder, California's Yana Indians explained it this way: The gods have retreated to the volcanic recesses of Mt. Lassen, passing the time playing gambling games with magic sticks.

They're simply waiting for such a time when human beings will "reform themselves and become 'real people' that spirits might want to associate with once again."

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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is the exact measure of her importance and dignity.

—George Santayana

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The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.

The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

—John Muir

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Guess what: God created beings not to act in a morality play but to experience what is unfathomable, to elicit what can become, to descend into the darkness of creation and reveal it to him, to mourn and celebrate enigma and possibility. The universe is a whirling dervish, not a hanging judge in robes.

—Richard Grossinger

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Funny how people get upset that gender is a social construct. EVERYTHING is a social construct. Ask a frog what day of the fucking week it is.

—Marsixm

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Each morning is all mornings.

The oak tree's shadow is the messiah.

The elephant shrew and the supernova are equals.

The Honda Accord is as natural as the Grand Canyon.

The skin is a temporary boundary, and so is the planet's surface.

The swallowtail butterfly is a savant.

Logic is crazy love.

The bat-eared fox is a razor-backed musk turtle.

Jubilation is an ecologically sound strategy.

No one knows how to sing the end of time because there is no end of time.

The critically endangered white rhinoceros is a forgotten birthday.

The vulnerable arctic wolf is emancipated from sin.

Purity is a sacrilegious vortex of panic.

Listening is the apotheosis of arrogance.

Our serpent thoughts keep us linked to original mirth.

The bumble bee redeems our unfertilized prophecies.

—Me

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I often describe astrology as being "applied poetry" (as opposed to "applied science").

—Susan Mengel Abnos Lederer





DANCE LIKE EVERYONE IS WATCHING

Supaman is an Apsáalooke rapper and fancy dancer. He founded the Native American hip-hop group Rezawrecktion.

He says: "They say to dance like nobody is watching. I think that implies that we are afraid or ashamed to dance in front of the people. I say dance like everybody watching. Dance like your children are watching, your ancestors, your family.

"Dance for those who are hurting, those who can't dance, those who lost loved ones and those who suffer injustices throughout the world. Let every step be a prayer for humanity!

"Most of ail dance for the Creator, who breathed into your soul so you may celebrate this gift of life! "





CALIFORNIANS, PLEASE VOTE TO KEEP GOVERNOR NEWSOM

PLEASE, fellow Californians, cast your vote to keep Gavin Newsom in office as Governor. He ain't perfect, but he's pretty good—and he's far, far better than all the alternatives.

The election is September 14, but you can cast your vote by mail now.

If Newsom doesn't receive at least 50% of the vote, he will be removed. The challenger who receives the most votes will finish out Newsom's term in office, even if that candidate receives only 25% of the vote. That's pathologically anti-democratic.





SHEDDING OUTWORN SELF-IMAGES

Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell believes you can achieve optimum physical health if you're devoted to shedding outworn self-images. He says, "You have one central lesson to learn to continuously drop all your rigid identities. Personal history may be your greatest danger."

Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, agrees. Raised as a male, she later became a female, but ultimately renounced gender altogether. "I love being without an identity," she says. "It gives me a lot of room to play around."

What identities might be healthy for you to lose? Describe all the fun you'd have if you were free of them.





TELL YOUR OWN STORY

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

—Rebecca Solnit





EVEN A WOUNDED WORLD

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

—Robin Wall Kimmerer





A REMINDER

Let me remind you who you really are: You're an immortal freedom fighter who longs to liberate all sentient creatures from their suffering. You're a fun-loving messiah who devoutly wants to help all of your fellow messiahs claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright.
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You have the power to remember these things. You're a vortex of fluidic light that has temporarily taken on the form of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins. And why did you do that? Because it was the best way to forge the identity that would make you such an elemental force in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth.
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I'm not speaking metaphorically here. You are a mutant deity in disguise—not a Buddha or a Christ exactly, but of the same lineage and conjured from the same fire. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you're getting better at playing the preposterously amusing master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed.





EXCITING QUALITIES IN ANOTHER PERSON

Hypothesis: The exciting qualities that attract you to someone in the first place may make you half-crazy if you go on to develop a long-term relationship.

That doesn't mean you should avoid seeking connections with intriguing people who captivate your imagination. It does suggest you should have no illusions about what you are getting yourself into.

It also implies you should cultivate a sense of humor about how the things that rouse our most intense love and passion often bring us the greatest tests and trials.





THE INFLUENCE OF SATURN

Many astrologers regard the planet Saturn as an agent of limitation—a baleful influence that invariably nags you to rein yourself in and take on more responsibility.

But for the ancient Romans, Saturn's influence was anything but baleful. As the vine-growing god who ruled over a golden age, he was synonymous with abundance. The holiday in his honor, Saturnalia, was a seven-day feast of freedom and pleasure. Businesses and schools were closed, masters served their slaves, grudges were forgotten, and parties raged nonstop.

So whose version of Saturn is more correct? Maybe both. Can you think of ways in which limitation has led to abundance and vice versa?





YOUR ADDICTION

Your addiction is obstructing you from your destiny, and yet it's also your ally.

What?! How can both be true?

On the downside, your addiction diverts your energy from a deeper desire that it superficially resembles. For instance, if you're an alcoholic, your urge to get loaded may be an inferior substitute for and a poor imitation of your buried longing to commune with spirit.

On the upside, your addiction is your ally, because it dares you to get strong and smart enough to wrestle free of its grip; it pushes you to summon the uncanny willpower necessary to defeat the darkness within you that saps your ability to follow the path with heart.

(P.S. Don't tell me you have no addictions. Each of us is addicted to some sensation, feeling, thought, or action, if not to an actual substance.)





REVOLUTIONIZING THE ART OF REBELLION

1. Experiment with uppity, mischievous optimism.

2. Invoke insurrectionary levels of wildly interesting generosity.

3. Indulge in an insolent refusal to be chronically fearful.

4. Pursue a cheeky ambition to be as wide-awake as a dissident trickster messiah.

5. Bring reckless levels of creative intelligence to all expressions of love.





THANKS FOR YOUR HARD WORK!

Dear Co-Conspirators: Congratulations on having such ambidextrous brains and hearts. Due to your ever-growing ability to blend supple rationality with robust intuition, you're not falling prey to the inane strains of insanity that are going around. Instead you're achieving glorious victory after glorious victory over the fearful fantasies that pass for normalcy.

Best of all, you're increasing your mastery of the art of paradox; more and more you're attuned to the amusing fact that when the mythic shifts hit the fan, the apparent opposites turn inside-out and trade places. The rot prepares the way for the splendor. The chaos becomes the source of the rejuvenation. The end of the world mutates into the beginning of the world.

Please accept the thunderous applause of my one hand clapping. The people who take everything personally and seriously may not recognize your ingenious work, but we connoisseurs of the liberated imagination do.





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





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.