Love Needs Imagination . . . and Imagination Needs Love

Devotional Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming a gracefully probing, erotically funny, shockingly friendly Master of Orgasmic Empathy

1. A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don't ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can undermine the most promising alliances.

To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.

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2. "For a relationship to stay alive," writes James Hillman, "love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."

Make this your hypothesis. The next time you sense that you're about to say the same old thing to your closest ally, interrupt yourself and head off in the direction of storyland.

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3. Robin Norwood's self-help book Women Who Love Too Much deals with a theme that rightfully gets a lot of play: If you're too generous to someone who doesn't appreciate it and at the expense of your own needs, you can make yourself sick.

An alternative perspective comes from philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said, "When one does not love too much, one does not love enough." He was primarily addressing psychologically healthy altruists, but it's a fertile ideal for pronoia lovers to keep in mind.

Decide whether you need to move more in the direction of Norwood's or Pascal's advice. Develop a game plan to carry out your resolve, then take action.

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4. Play the game called "Tell me the story of your scars." It's best to do it with a skilled empath who is curious about your fate's riddles and skilled at helping you find redemption in your wounds.

"How did you get that blotch on your knee?" he or she might begin, and you describe the time in childhood when you fell on the sidewalk.

Then maybe he or she would say, "Why do you always look so sad when you hear that song?" And you'd narrate the tale of how it was playing when an old lover broke your heart.

The questions and answers continue until you unveil the history of your hurts, both physical and psychic. Treat yourself to this game soon.

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5. Some hetero men believe they won't find romantic happiness unless they hook up with a woman who resembles a supermodel. Their libidos were imprinted at a tender age by our culture's narrow definition of what constitutes female beauty. They steer clear of many fine women who don't fit their ideal.

The addiction to a physical type is not confined to them, though. Some straight women, for instance, wouldn't think of dating a bald, short guy, no matter how interesting he is.

And there are people of every gender and sexual preference who imagine that their attraction to the physical appearance of a potential partner is the single most important gauge of compatibility. This delusion is a common cause of bad relationships.

The good news is that anyone can outgrow their instinctual yearning for a particular physical type, thereby becoming available for union with all of the more perfect partners who previously didn't look quite right.

What's the state of your relationship with this riddle? Describe how you might ripen it; speculate on how you can move it to the next level of maturity.

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6. While loitering on a sidewalk outside a nightclub in San Francisco on a September night years ago, I found the cover of a booklet lying in the gutter.

Written by Marilena Silbey and Paul Ramana Das, it was called How to Survive Passionate Intimacy with a Dreamy Partner While Making a Fortune on the Path to Enlightenment.

Sadly, the rest of the text was missing. Ever since, hungry for its wisdom, I've tried to hunt down a copy of the whole thing, but to no avail.

I'm hoping that maybe you will consider writing your own version of the subject. If you do, please send it to me.

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7. I swear the strange woman standing near me at Los Angeles' Getty Museum was having an erotic experience as she gazed upon van Gogh's Irises.

She was not touching herself, nor was anyone else. But she was apparently experiencing waves of convulsive delight, as suggested by her rapid breathing, shivering muscles, fluttering eyelids, and sweaty forehead.

Fifteen minutes later, I saw her again in front of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Fountain of Love. She was only slightly more composed.

In a friendly voice, I said, "This stuff really moves you, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yeah," she replied, "I've not only learned how to make love with actual flowers and clouds and fountains, I can even make love with paintings of them."

Do you have any interest in mastering the method in this maestro's madness? Where will you begin?

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8. In his book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, historian Thomas Laquer suggests that the clitoris may have been unknown to male anatomists until 1559.

In that year, Renaldus Columbus, a professor at the University of Padua in Italy, announced his discovery of the "seat of woman's delight," and declared his right to name it the "sweetness of Venus."

Is there a sublime pleasure whose existence you haven't discovered? Where is it? How can you find it?

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9. What could you do to make your tenderness and carnality flow from the same refined reflex?

How might you strive to adore every creature, plant, and rock in the world with the same excitement that you bestow upon the lover who excites you most?

What prayers will you unleash at the height of your orgasmic fervor to promote the healing and success of people in need?

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10. Once upon a time, you asked a certain someone for a blessing. Instead, he or she blasted you with a curse. The debilitating blow of that bad juju hit you right in the place that was ripe for the blessing you requested. What a tragedy!

Do you understand that the seed of the blessing you once needed (and still need) is hidden within the curse? If you figure out what that blessing is, you'll find the cure.

(PS: The French word for "wound" is blessure, which suggests that blessing can come from wounding.)

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11. Ruminate about the sublime prototypes that might be hidden within the longings you're not so proud of. Dream of the noble purposes that lie beneath the plaintive cries of your heart.

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12. "The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them," wrote novelist Margaret Atwood. "There ought to be as many for love."
Here are a few that the ancient Greeks devised, according to Lindsay Swope in her review of Richard Idemon's book Through the Looking Glass.

1. Epithemia is the basic need to touch and be touched. Our closest approximation is "horniness," though epithemia is not so much a sexual feeling as a sensual one.

2. Philia is friendship. It includes the need to admire and respect your friends as a reflection of yourself—like in high school, where you want to hang out with the cool kids because that means you're cool too.

3. Eros isn't sexual in the way we usually think, but is more about the
emotional gratification that comes from merging souls.

4. Agape is a mature, utterly free expression of love that has no possessiveness. It means wanting the best for another person even if it doesn't advance your self-interest.

Your assignment is to coin three additional new words for love, which means you'll have to discover or create three alternate states of love that have previously been unnamed. To do that, you'll have to put aside your habitual expectations and standard definitions of what constitutes love so that you can explore an array of nuances, including varieties you never imagined existed.





HAPPY EASTER!

NOTES ABOUT THE REAL JESUS CHRIST

Let's celebrate the justice-loving Christians who've embodied Jesus Christ's actual teachings as they've worked in behalf of progressive ideals, including:

Harriet Tubman
César Chávez
Martin Luther King Jr.
the Berrigan Brothers
Archbishop Oscar Romero
Dorothy Day
Ralph Abernathy
Sojourner Truth
Fred Shuttlesworth
Desmond Tutu
Kim Bobo
Frederick Douglass
Thomas Merton
Sister Joan Chittister
Anna Howard Shaw
Frances Willard
Helen Keller
and John Lewis . . .

. . . all of whom were REAL Christians who cared about poor and marginalized people—unlike evangelicals and fundamentalists, who are the antithesis of everything Christ taught.

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More about the Real Jesus.


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In the Biblical book of Matthew, a rich young man asks Jesus what actions bring eternal life.

First, Jesus advises the man to obey the commandments.

When the man responds that he already observes them, and asks what else he can do, Jesus adds: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven."

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The book of Luke has a similar episode and states that: Jesus said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven."

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Christ loved and accepted everyone. But a core characteristic of many white evangelicals is their intolerance and bigotry toward a wide range of people. Hatred is one of their go-to emotions.

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Jesus was a socialist.

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Without a solution to the problems of the poor, we will not solve the problems of the world. We need projects, mechanisms and processes to implement better distribution of resources, from the creation of new jobs to the integral promotion of those who are excluded'.

—Pope Francis

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In a very real way, the poor are our teachers. They show us that people’s value is not measured by their possessions or how much money they have in the bank. A poor person, a person lacking material possessions, always maintains his or her dignity. The poor can teach us much about humility and trust in God.

—Pope Francis

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You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.

—Anne Lamott

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Jesus's ministry brought women greater liberation than they would have typically held in mainstream society. Jesus taught that, in the imminent kingdom of God, there would be a reversal of roles and those who had been oppressed would be exalted.

According to scholar Bart Ehrman, this idea would have probably been particularly appealing and empowering to women of the time, such as Mary Magdalene, who may have felt oppressed by traditional attitudes to gender roles.

—Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend

—Michael Haag, The Quest For Mary Magdalene: History & Legend

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The Jesus Seminar was an American group of about 50 critical biblical scholars.

The Seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrayed him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage and faith-healer who preached a gospel of liberation from injustice in startling parables and aphorisms.

An iconoclast, Jesus broke with established Jewish theological dogmas and social conventions both in his teachings and in his behavior, often by turning common-sense ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience

He preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God") as being already present but unseen; he depicts God as a loving father; he fraternizes with outsiders and criticizes insiders.

MORE.





BLESSING FOR YOU

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

May you wake up to salsa music one summer morning, and start dancing while ­you're still half-asleep.


May you mix stripes with plaids, floral patterns with checks, and yellowish-green with brownish-purple.

May you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds and one extrasolar planet.

May you put a bumper sticker on your car or bike that says, "My godDESS can kick your god's ass!"

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate."

May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

May you actually kiss the earth now and then.

May you find many good excuses to say,
as physicist Niels Bohr once did, "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."





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Fresh Power to Transform Yourself Is on the Way

Life will deliver the creative energy you need

Pronoia doesn't promise uninterrupted progress forever. It's not a slick commercial for a perfect summer day that never ends.

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow.
The waning reveals a different kind of blessing
than the waxing.

But whether it's our time to ferment in the valley of shadows or rise up singing in the sun-splashed meadow, fresh power to transform ourselves is always on the way.

Our suffering won't last, nor will our triumph.
Without fail, life will deliver the creative energy we need to change into the new thing we must become.





Tweakable Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming a radically curious, wildly disciplined, ironically sincere Master of Sacred Uproar

1. "Obstacles are a natural part of life, just as boulders are a natural part of the course of a river," declares the ancient Chinese book the I Ching. "The river does not complain or get depressed because there are boulders in its path."

I'd go so far to say—this is not in the original text, but is my 21st-century addition—that the river gets a sensual thrill as it glides its smooth current over the irregular shapes and hard skin of the rocks.

It looks forward to the friction, exults in the intimate touch, loves the drama of the interaction.

How would you go about imitating the river?

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2. "The seed cannot sprout upwards without simultaneously sending roots into the ground," says an Egyptian proverb.

Keep that thought in mind as you head into your next phase of growth. What part of you needs to deepen as you rise up? What growth needs to unfold in the hidden places as you gravitate toward the light?

How can you go about balancing and stabilizing your ascension with a downward penetration?

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3. Dumb 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.

Smart suffering is the kind of pain that surprises you with valuable teachings and inspires you to see the world with new eyes.

While stupid 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 smart, 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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4. My friend Riley was the first member of her family to attend college. None of her hardscrabble Irish forebears had ever pursued higher education. In her senior year, Riley began having nightmares of her relatives trying to stop her from finishing school. In one recurring dream, her great-grandfather burned all her textbooks. In another, a mob of aunts and uncles tackled her and held her down as she tried to get to class.

Despite these psychic obstacles, Riley persevered in her studies and eventually got her diploma. The week after graduation, she had another dream: A host of her ancestors came to her in the form of a great choir singing songs in praise of her success.

Riley's psychotherapist speculated that the dream meant she had not only overcome the inertia of her heritage, but had also healed an ancient wound of her family going back many generations.

Is there a similar accomplishment you're capable of? What is it?

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5. Poet Kay Ryan told the *Christian Science Monitor* how she cultivates the inspiration to write. She rouses the sense of a "self-imposed emergency," thereby calling forth psychic resources that usually materialize only in response to a crisis.

Please note that she doesn't provoke an actual emergency: She doesn't arrange to have a loved one get pinned beneath the wheels of a car.

She doesn't climb out onto the window ledge on the 22nd story of a high-rise. Instead, she visualizes hypothetical situations that galvanize her to shift into a dramatically heightened state of awareness.

What imagined emergencies could you invoke to inspire your deep self to rise up and make its mark?

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6. If you're reading this, you're probably not a Cambodian orphan who grew up enslaved in a brothel or a Sudanese man kidnapped by a militia and forced to do heavy labor 18 hours a day or one of the millions of other victims of human trafficking around the world.

But you may be yoked and subjugated in a less literal way, perhaps to a debilitating drug or an abusive relationship or a job that brings out the worst in you or a fearful fantasy about the looming collapse of civilization's infrastructure.

The good news is that you have the power to escape your bondage. Maybe it'll help you muster the strength you need if I remind you that your freedom won't be anywhere near as difficult to achieve as that of the Pakistani boy tied to a carpet loom in a dark room around the clock or the Nigerian woman who's beaten daily as she toils in the sugar cane fields for no pay.

Try this: When you feel overwhelmed by the sadness of your problems or the addiction of your compulsions, put on your best clothes and clean toilets at a homeless shelter, or give foot massages to workers at a sewage disposal plant, or sing songs, sip champagne, and play card games with patients at a psychiatric hospital.

Be ready to get hit upside the soul with exotic varieties of ecstasy, which such acts may unleash.

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7. "Watch out for the dark side of your own idealism and of your moral sense," says Howard Bloom. "Both come from our arsenal of natural instincts. And both easily degenerate into an excuse for attacks on others. When our righteous indignation breathes the flames of anger against a 'villain,' we all too often become a fang in nature's scheme of tooth and claw."

What's the dark side of your idealism and morality?

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8. Traditionally, the Seven Deadly Sins—actions most likely to wound the soul—are pride, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, sloth, and covetousness.

But we have formulated a fresh set of soul-harmers, the Four Foolish Virtues. They are as follows:

(1) being analytical to such extremes that you repress your intuition;

(2) sacrificing your pleasure through a compulsive attachment to duty;

(3) tolerating excessive stress because you assume it helps you accomplish more;

(4) being so knowledgeable that you neglect to be curious.

Are you victimized by any of these Four Foolish Virtues? If so, what are you going to do about it?

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9. James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote the book *We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse*.

They propose that resolving our problems may not necessarily come from talking about our deep, private feelings with a trusted counselor.

Instead, the best approach might be to go out into the world and do good works like helping the underprivileged or fighting for social justice.

Try their approach as a prescription for one of your personal problems.

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10. "Picture the Grand Canyon," says Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. "Every hundred years, a child comes by and throws a mustard seed into it. In the time it takes to fill the hole in the earth with mustard seeds, one maha­kal­pa will have passed. To perfect the virtuous heart—the joy of integrity—takes a thousand mahakalpas."

If that's true, then you've still got a lot of work to do. The good news is that civilization is in the midst of a critical turning point that could tremendously expedite your ripening. So you could make unusually great progress toward the goal of perfecting the virtuous heart in the next 40 years.

For best results, meditate often on the phrase "the joy of integrity." Get familiar with the pleasurable emotion that comes from acting with impeccability. And try out this idea from Gandhi: Integrity is the royal road to your inner freedom.

P.S. Oddly enough, the work of perfecting the virtuous heart is very effective in helping you master the art of cultivating everyday ecstasy. Meditate on the connection.





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HOW'S YOUR KOYAANISQATSI DOING?

In the language of the Hopi Indians, koyaanisqatsi means "crazy life," "life in turmoil," or "life out of balance." It's usually invoked to describe a culture that's in disarray because of corruption and lack of vision.

Right now, I'm using it to identify a chaotic state that each of us periodically goes through in our personal life. It's a phase when we lose our moorings, when we're out of touch with our moral center.

On the one hand, it's uncomfortable and disorienting. On the other hand, the brain-scrambling it stirs up is often a blessing. It flushes out mental habits that no longer serve us. It provokes creative innovations by rearranging the contents of our psyche.

When was your last appointment with koyaanisqatsi? When's your next one?





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