Your Three Miracles

What are the three miracles
that are most likely
to happen to you?

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Let the body think of the spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into it from all sides.

—Plotinus





A PREVIEW OF YOUR DESTINY IN 2022

Want to get a head start on your future? This week my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES offer you a sneak-peek at some major themes I think you'll be working and playing with in 2022.

Start dreaming and scheming about who you're going to be in the new year. Enlist my help as you energize your quest to become your best self.

To access the EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, go to hRealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "This week (Dec. 21, 2021)."

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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $6 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)

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Beginning with next week's EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, I will devote three consecutive weeks to an in-depth discussion of your long-range outlook for the coming year.

Part One of my BIG-PICTURE FORECASTS FOR 2022 will be available beginning Tuesday, December 28.

Part Two will be available on Tuesday, January 4.

Part Three will be available on Tuesday, January 11.





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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Read past issues of the newsletter since May 12.

Read past issues of the newsletter from before May 12.

Sign up here for your free subscription.




QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE NEW YEAR

1. "When I grow up," wrote Ramona McNabb, "I want to be a river." What impossible magnificence would YOU like to be when you grow up?

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2. "When nothing's working, it might be a cosmic conspiracy to get you to experiment," said Caroline Casey. Try out this theory.

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3. In the Beauty and Truth Lab parlance, "Über-fun" (always capitalized) refers to righteous delight that inspires you to shed limiting beliefs, thereby making you trickier, smarter, kinder, and wilder. Go out and have some Über-fun, then report back.

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4. Seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon said this: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Talk about how this applies to you, or to someone or something you care about.

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5. Everywhere you go, visualize yourself being accompanied by three great warriors who're dedicated to your well-being.

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6. Write a love note to the person you love best or to the person you want to love best.

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7. What's the single most important question you'd like to resolve before you die many years hence?

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8. What would you have to do in order to keep getting smarter and smarter?

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9. Describe how you've fought off the seductive power of trendy cynicism without turning into a gullible Pollyanna.

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10. Eckhart Tolle says this: "The most powerful starting point for any endeavor is not the question 'What do I want?', but 'What does Life (God, Consciousness) want from me? How do I serve the whole?'" Try this, then report back on how it worked.

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11. "Each person is a story that the Soul of the World wants to tell to itself," says storyteller Michael Meade. What does that Soul want to say through you?





MIRABILIA REPORT

Mirabilia n. strange amazements, rare delights, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies; eccentric enchantments, unplanned jubilations, sudden deliverance from boring evils; from the Latin *mirabilia*, "marvels."

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* "The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles," says science writer James Trefil.

* There are about nine million people on earth who were born the same day as you.

* Robust singing skill is correlated with a strong immune system in songbirds. Male birds with the most extensive repertoire of tunes also have the largest spleens, a key measure of immune system health.

* Bali has 80,000 temples.

* Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the whole island smells like vanilla ice cream.

* Some piranhas are vegetarians.

* In an apparent attempt to raise their volume above the prevailing human din, some nightingales in big cities have learned to unleash 95-decibel songs, matching the loudness of a chainsaw.

* The 5.5 million people who live in Papua New Guinea speak 820 different languages, or one per every 6,707 people. Two villages within an hour's walking distance of each other may use utterly different tongues.

* Thirty-eight percent of North America is wilderness.

* There is a statistically significant probability of world-class athletes and military leaders being born when Mars is rising in the sky.

* In the pueblos of New Mexico, bricks still measure 33 by 15 by 10 centimeters, proportions that almost exactly match those of the bricks used to build Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut 3,500 years ago.

* In hopes of calming flustered lawbreakers, Japanese cops have substituted the sound of church bells for sirens on police cars.

* Scientists believe they'll eventually be able to figure out why cancer cells are virtually immortal, and then apply that secret to keeping normal cells alive much longer, thereby dramatically extending the human life span.

* In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the hero and heroine fall in love without ever gazing upon each other, simply by hearing tales about each other's good deeds.

* Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it, and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up.

* Very few raindrops are actually raindrop-shaped. A far greater number take the form of doughnuts.

* Twelve percent of the population believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

* Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises.

* The closest modern relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex may be the chicken.

* Bluebirds cannot see the color blue.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does.

* Bees perform a valuable service for the flowers from which they steal.

* All the gold ever mined could be molded into a 60-foot bust of your mom.

* The moon smells like exploded firecrackers.

* A piece of paper can never be folded more than nine times.

* Your tongue is the strongest muscle in your body.

* The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible.

* "I always turn to the sports page first," said Earl Warren, former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. "It records people's accomplishments; the front page, nothing but man's failure."

* In his book *The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead*, physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead at the end of time.

* In the Ukraine you can buy Fat in Chocolate, a food with a layer of dark chocolate covering a chunk of pork fat.

* French author and statesman André Malraux asserted that Jesus Christ was the only anarchist who ever really succeeded.





HEART-BREAKING

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-­more wonders."

—Andrew Harvey, *The Return of the Mother*





HEALING SHOCKS

Many of us are essentially asleep, even as we walk around in broad daylight. We're so focused on the restless narratives and repetitive fantasies unfurling in our heads that we only dimly perceive the larger story raging in all of its chaotic beauty around us.

To have any hope of permanently breaking out of our fuzzy trance, we require regular shocks. A single jolt might cause us to briefly come to attention and see the miracle of creation for what it is, but once the red alert has passed, we relax back into our fixation on the dreamy tales our mind never stops telling us.

In the course of its conspiracy to shower us with blessings, life does its best to provide us with a steady flow of healing shocks. But because it tends to err on the side of tenderness, its prods may be too gentle, allowing us to ignore them. Gradually, life will up the ante, trying to find the right mix of toughness and love, as it encourages us to WAKE UP!

But our addiction to the phantasmagoria is tenacious. The stream-of-conscious narratives and ever-bubbling fantasies, even when they're racked with torment and terror, are perversely entertaining. And so we may avoid responding to the kind shocks for so long that life finally has to resort to stronger medicine. Then we might get sick or lose our job or muck up our closest relationship.

It doesn't have to be that way. We could cultivate in ourselves a sixth sense for the wake-up calls life sends us. We might develop a knack for responding with agile grace to the early, gentler ones so that we wouldn't have to be visited by the more stringent measures.

There's also another possibility: With hungry intent, we could seek out and hunt down invigorating jolts. We wouldn't wait to have our asses kicked, but would kick our own asses—over and over again, with a creative ingenuity that would be the envy of a great pronoiac novelist or musician or filmmaker. Who knows? We might even master the art of inducing shocks that feel really good.





THE WAY OF ABUNDANCE

"The Way of Abundance is all too often misconstrued as a shallow sense of 'getting what one wants,' 'eliminating the negative,' or 'being free from pain.' Even the often-touted 'manifesting your dreams,' offers a psychological disposition that generally remains fixated around manifestation as 'the project of me.'

"But the 'project of me' can never be enough, for it does not meet 'the other,' and real living involves meeting. The touch and contact with all of life, the full freedom of non-separation, the completeness of full relationship, and the radiance of compassionate ecstasy are what we are inherently hungry for."

—Rick Jarow, *Alchemy of Abundance: Using the Energy of Desire to Manifest Your Highest Vision, Power, and Purpose*





RE-DREAMING CHRIST

Some Christians might be shocked to learn that Jesus Christ is one of the Main High Magicians in the Beauty and Truth Lab's pantheon of deities and avatars.

They may believe that people like us—Goddess-worshiping tantric Sufi Qabalist pagans who hang around with Zen trickster witches and espouse a socialist libertarian political philosophy—couldn't possibly have an intimate and vivid relationship with the cosmic hero they claim to own. They act as if they have commandeered the trademark of one of the smartest wild men in history.

But many of us do have an intimate and vivid relationship with Jesus Christ. How could we not? He was a champion of women's rights, an antidote to the established and corrupt political order, and a radical spiritual activist who worked outside religious institutions.

The dude owned nothing and was a passionate advocate for the poor and underprivileged. He was uncompromisingly opposed to violence and war. Besides that, he was a master of love and he devoted his life to serving the Divine Intelligence. He even went so far as to say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, and give away all your possessions."

I want to be like Jesus Christ when I grow up!

(But it's quite OK with us if you don't want to be like him. The good thing about adoring Christ's pronoiac glory but not being a Christian is that we don't have any investment in wanting you to do as we do. We want you to do as you do!)

Is there any hijacked hero you'd like to liberate? Any spoiled treasure you hope to redeem? Any detoured savior you want to get back on track?





"I'm going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life."
—Elsie de Wolfe

"I want enough time to be in love with everything."
— Marina Keega

"I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion—and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies."
- Ram Dass





BIGGER, BETTER, MORE INTERESTING PROBLEMS

Is there anything more dangerous than getting up in the morning and having nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up? That state can be a threat to your health. If untreated, it incites an unconscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might rouse some excitement.

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Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It's as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself—indeed, you make yourself—through the puzzling dilemmas you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.

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Conventional wisdom implies that the best problems are those that place you under duress. There's supposedly no gain without pain. Stress is allegedly an incomparable spur for calling on resources that have been previously unavailable or dormant. Nietzsche's aphorism, "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger," has achieved the status of a maxim.

We half-agree. But it's clear that stress also accompanies many mediocre problems that have little power to make us smarter. Pain frequently generates no gain. We're all prone to become habituated, even addicted, to nagging vexations that go on and on without rousing any of our sleeping genius.

There is, furthermore, another class of difficulty—let's call it the delightful dilemma—that neither feeds on angst nor generates it. On the contrary, it's fun and invigorating, and usually blooms when you're feeling a profound sense of being at home in the world. The problem of writing this book is a good example. I've had abundant fun handling the perplexing challenges with which it has confronted me.

Imagine a life in which at least half of your quandaries match this profile. Act as if you're most likely to attract useful problems when joy is your predominant mood.

Consider the possibility that being in unsettling circumstances may shrink your capacity to dream up the riddles you need most; that maybe it's hard to ask the best questions when you're preoccupied fighting rearguard battles against boring or demeaning annoyances that have plagued you for many moons.

Prediction: As an aspiring lover of pronoia, you will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn't require pain. You'll be so alive and awake that you'll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you're forced to do so by fate's kicks in the ass.

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In Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity. There has been no English equivalent until now.

The Beauty and Truth Lab has retooled an English term to convey a similar meaning: "kairos." Originally borrowed from Greek, "kairos" has traditionally meant "time of destiny, critical turning point, propitious moment for decision or action." In its most precise usage, it refers to a special season that is charged with significance and is outside of normal time. Its opposite is the Greek chronos, which refers to the drone of the daily rhythm.

These meanings provide the root of our new definition of the word. As of now, when used in the context of a discussion of pronoia, "kairos" will have the sense of "a good crisis, a rich problem, a productive difficulty."

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"We should feel excited about the problems we confront and our ability to deal with them," says Robert Anton Wilson. "Solving problems is one of the highest and most sensual of all our brain functions."

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The definition of "happiness" in the Beauty and Truth Lab's "Outlaw Dictionary of Pronoiac Memes" is "the state of mind that results from cultivating interesting, useful problems."





GOING BOTH WAYS

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement," said the physicist Niels Bohr. "But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

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The Dalai Lama says: "I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit and the dark and heavy aspects soul.

"Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup.

"Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel -­ like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances."

—The Dalai Lama, as quoted by James Hillman in *A Blue Fire*

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You Go Both Ways

"Chiaroscurofy" is a word that means "to find a comfortable place where you are partially in darkness and partially illuminated, or half in shadow and half in sunlight." You may actually do this someday.





INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DIVINE INTELLIGENCE

I want to be transparent about the fact that my spiritual practice and my relationship with the Divine Intelligence are at the heart of everything I do and say. All that I publish is deeply colored by my love of Goddess.

Among the understandings that fosters in me: I'm welcoming toward people who don't have similar inclinations; I'm fine with you NOT having spiritual views or having spiritual views that are different from mine.

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I want to say more on the subject: People often tell me how horrible and awful and malignant and destructive all religion is. They are quite sure that religion is responsible for the majority of the world's problems, that religion is the cause of most wars, and that there is nothing at all redemptive or benevolent about any religion anywhere anytime.

These people often don't seem to recognize that there are types of religious paths other than the fundamentalist varieties of mainstream religions. If they've heard of shamanism and indigenous spirituality, for example, they are oddly dissociated from the prospect of evaluating those practices as quests for transcendent religious experiences.

They make no acknowledgment of the abundance of organized religious and spiritual practices that comprise the total human experience—like, for example, Sufism, paganism, Qabala and Kabbalah, shamanism, Tantra, Western Hermetic Magick, Taoism, Hinduism, African diaspora religions like Vodou, Candomblé, and Santeria, various kinds of Buddhism, Bahai, and mystical Christianity.

They don't seem to be aware that most of those systems have deities and spirit beings, and many have characters like angels and faeries.

Here's my response: I truly have no urge to convince the religion-despisers and the staunch or even fanatic atheists that they should change their minds. I am glad they have views that are right and healthy for them. I feel the same about people who are apathetic toward religion and deities. Follow your truth!

However, I want them to know that I myself am a first-degree, totally devoted worshiper of Goddess. My daily communions and conversations with Her are the highlights of my life. I have also studied and loved Western Hermetic Magick and Qabalah for decades.

That means I have prayed and carried out Qabalistic meditations and performed ceremonial magick and done a whole lot of things that religious and spiritual people do. My intimate relationship with the Invisible Realms is primary. It is at core of my life, and informs every single thing I do.

Again, I have no desire at all for you to be like me; no wish for you to think and act like I do. My hope is for you to be yourself, purely and strongly.

But I feel it's important that readers of mine who hate religion or feel apathetic about it should know the truth about me. Whenever you read anything I write, you should know that it has originated in my connection with the Divine Intelligence—the One Being in the Universe who is the source of us all.

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I will add that my passion for social justice is rooted in my spiritual practice. My intimate relationship with the Divine Intelligence fuels my quest to undo all that contributes to patriarchy, misogyny, bigotry, racism, oppression of LGBTQIA people, the perpetrators of ecocide, militarism, and plutocracy.

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PS: In my view, there is no hard, fast, unambiguous distinction between religion and spirituality. I see many people fond of citing them as being different, but I don't share that idea.

A reader said to me, "I too worship Goddess, but not in any set form with set dogma, and that I think is the difference between religion and spiritual practice. In one word the difference is certainty. People who worship a religion are certain of the name of their god they are certain of their attributes, they treat the spiritual as a static unchanging experience. When actual spiritual practice is the opposite of certain, it is as variable as life itself."

My responses to that reader:

No one develops their "spiritual" views and practices in isolation. We are always borrowing and adopting from views and practices that have come before and that we have heard about.

My experience of people with religious inclinations, including myself, is that they are often NOT at all certain. That's why faith is a key component in spiritual and religious practices.

No one I know who worships Goddess has come to understand Goddess sheerly on the strength of their inner connections with Goddess. We have ALL learned from other humans about how to perceive, understand, and worship Goddess.





YEARNING TO BE LOVED

Notice how you feel as you speak the following: "The strong, independent part of me resisted the embarrassing truth for a long time, but I finally came to accept that I'm someone who craves vast amounts of love.

"Ever since I surrendered to this need, it doesn't nag me all the time, as it used to. In fact, it feels comforting, like a source of sweetness that doesn't go away. I never thought I'd say this, but I've come to treasure the feeling of having a voracious yearning to be loved."






ENHANCING YOUR LOVING LUST FOR LIFE

Code words for experiments in enhancing your lust for life:

numinous: (adj.) describing an experience that makes you overwhelmed yet fascinated, awed yet attracted—the powerful, personal feeling of being viscerally inspired

ostranenie: (n.) encouraging people to see common things as strange, wild, or unfamiliar; defamiliarizing what is known in order to know it differently or more deeply

smultronställe: (n.) "place of wild strawberries"; a special place discovered, treasured, returned to for solace and relaxation; a personal idyll free from stress or sadness

rasasvada: (n.) the taste of bliss in the absence of all thoughts

firgun: (n.) the act of sharing in or even contributing to someone else's pleasure or fortune, with a purely generous heart and without jealousy

Mudita: (n.) sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others.

vorfreude : (n.) the joyful, intense anticipation that comes from imagining future pleasures

unne (adj.) to be happy on someone else’s behalf.

compersion (n.) an empathetic state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy.

The words and definitions are from other-wordly.tumblr.com/