You are a fluid process, not a fixed thing

A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.

— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person





NEWS ABOUT MY AUDIO HOROSCOPES AND TEXT-MESSAGE HOROSCOPES

I love writing weekly horoscopes for you. I also love the fact that you can read them for free—and always have since I first started creating them many years ago.

Some people who enjoy my work are curious about this. How do I earn a living doing what I love to do if I simply give away my oracles?

The answer is that I also offer Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text-Message Horoscopes, and they cost money to use. Some people who draw inspiration from my free written horoscopes also choose to pay for my two other services. Hooray!

I plan to continue providing Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text-Message Horoscopes for years to come.

To make sure this proceeds with maximum grace, I am switching them to a system with higher tech than I've had access to before.

The transition happened this past weekend. I expect there will be a few hiccups as the new machinery gets fully comfortable. Please be patient with it and me!

Here's a detailed explanation of the new system.

If you have any problems or questions at all, contact my kind and expert support team: freewillcs@gmail.com

And oh, by the way, I am also slightly raising the price—my first cost increase in 29 years! As always, there's a steep discount if you buy in bulk.

Access the Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text-Message Horoscopes.





ASTROLOGY FOR YOUR SOUL

Astrology is not a science. It's an elegant system of symbols, an art form with a special capacity to feed your soul and educate your imagination. When used with integrity, it doesn't predict literal events. Rather, it engenders imaginative and lyrical approaches for deepening your connection to life's great mysteries.

Astrology is not designed to compete with scientists' logical analyses of why things are the way they are. Rather, it's meant to open your mind to the mythic patterns that underlie the surface-level interpretations of what you're all about.

ASTROLOGY IS NOT A SCIENCE! Nor is story-telling, depth psychology, mythology, dream interpretation, or poetry. It makes as much sense to criticize astrology for not being scientific as it does to deride an Ursula K. Le Guin novel because it doesn't explicate and illustrate the quantum field theory of physics. We need both: mytho-poetic storytelling and logical analysis.





WHY WE NEED A NEW KIND OF EDUCATION: IMAGINATION STUDIES

Philosopher Stephen T. Asma writes: "It is time to initiate Imagination Studies at every level of education, primary school through university.

"Studying the imagination – its creations, its processes (creativity), and its underlying cognitive structures – is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities.

"But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason, and tesselate facts and values."

READ THE REST.





HOW TO TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR IMAGINATION

I invite you to read this fine article on Imaginal Hygiene





YOU ARE A PROPHET

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

Read and/or hear the rest of this essay by me.





THE CHILD-LIKE FAITH IN REASON

John Gray: “Belief in human rationality requires a greater leap of faith than any religion.

"Believers in reason imagine that we can become much more rational than we have ever been, if only we want to be and try hard enough. This is itself thoroughly irrational.

"It’s an example of magical thinking, an expression of the belief in the omnipotence of human will that psychoanalysts identify as the fundamental infantile fantasy.”

—John Gray

MORE by John Gray.





THE LANGUAGE OF THE IMAGINATION

Storyteller and mythologist Martin Shaw says: Stories with weight to them have what C.G. Jung terms "the lament of the dead," which in our frenetic culture we can no longer have time to hear.

Most indigenous cultures will tell you that this world belongs to the dead, that’s where we’re headed. So mythology for me involves a conversation with the dead, with what you might call ancestors.

Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins, not the center.

If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics, at some point the soul grows weary and turns its head away because we are not allowing it into the conversation. And by denying soul we are ignoring what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river.

We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.

—All the above written by Martin Shaw

Read the entire interview with Martin Shaw.





BIOCENTRISM

Robert Lanza and Bob Berman write: The philosophy of biocentrism states that consciousness creates the universe; the universe does not create consciousness.

Biocentrism says biology is the fundamental science, not physics. Current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness.

While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism says that scientists must place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Seven principles of biocentrism.

1. What we perceive as reality is “a process that involves our consciousness.”

2. “Our external and internal perceptions are intertwined.”

3. The behavior of particles “is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer.”

4. Consciousness must exist, and without it “matter dwells in an undetermined state of probability.”

5. The laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life.

6. Space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding.

7. We carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.”

—from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe — by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman





Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

—Chinese proverb




WRITE A LETTER TO THE FUTURE YOU

I invite you to write a letter to the person you'll be one year from today. Tell this Future You that you've taken a vow to accomplish three feats by then.

Say why these feats are more important to you than anything else. Describe them. Brainstorm about what you'll do to make them happen. Draw pictures or make collages that capture your excitement about them.

Then create a sanctified space where you will put this letter. Open it one year from today.





COURTING A BREAKTHROUGH

Search your memory and recall a time when you pushed yourself to your limits as you labored over
a task you cared about very much.

At that time, you worked with extreme focus and intensity. You were rarely bored and never resentful about the enormous effort you had to expend.

You loved throwing yourself into this test of willpower, which stretched your resourcefulness and compelled you to grow new capacities.

What was that epic breakthrough in your past?

Once you know, move on to your next exercise: Imagine a new assignment that fits this description, and make plans to bring it into your life in the near future.





ADDED FEATURES IN THE NEW PRONOIA E-BOOK

I’m excited that my book is finally available as an eBook: Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings


Plus, the eBook includes a new foreword, "Subversive, Transformative Hope," and a new story, “Strange Blessings,” that weren't in the Revised and Expanded edition.

Below is how "Strange Blessings" begins.

When I was 19 years old, a stranger shot me with a gun. The attack happened on Duke University's East Campus in Durham, North Carolina. It was 1:30 a.m. on a night in May.

I was walking from my friend's home near the campus to the Greyhound bus station downtown, where I planned to hop a bus to Philadelphia at 2:30.

Too bad I couldn't afford a taxi. My backpack was heavy, I was already sleepy, and the trek would take 40 minutes.

I had passed Baldwin Auditorium at the north end of the campus. As I looped behind Brown Residence Hall, two prowlers stepped out from behind a tree.

They were both holding shotguns and stood less than 20 feet away. One spoke to me: "Do you know where the auditorium is?" I was petrified and confused.

A few moments later, I heard a bang, then felt a whoosh of tiny missiles piercing the right side of my buttocks.

I knew I was in trouble. Would they fire again? My questionable strategy was to fall on the ground and pretend I was dead. I hoped they would think they had killed me. There'd be no need to bombard me with more rounds.

Unfortunately, I collapsed in a way that I could not see them. I lay there in a heap, not knowing their next move. Were they creeping closer to pull the trigger again, or were they fleeing the scene of the crime?

I worked hard to act like a dead man, trying to betray no motion. It was almost impossible to keep from shivering and avoid taking deep breaths . . . .

[story continued in the Pronoia ebook]





Here's how to buy the book:

PRONOIA as an ebook at Amazon

PRONOIA as an ebook at Barnes and Noble

If you have the Apple Books app, click on it and search for "Pronoia."

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You can also buy the hard-copy edition of PRONOIA at Bookshop.org

Available at Powells

Available at Barnes & Noble

Available at Amazon





ARE YOU CONSPIRING?

All of creation is conspiring to shower you with blessings. But here's my question: Are you conspiring to shower all of creation with your blessings?

I invite you to say, "I love all of creation."

Life is crazily and innocently in love with you. Are you ready to be crazily and innocently in love with life?

I invite you to say, "I love the high and the low, the light and the dark, the yes and the no."

The universe always gives you what you need when you need it. But are you willing to give the universe what it needs when it needs it?

I invite you to say, "The deeper I love, the smarter I grow. The stronger I love, the more I know. The bigger I love, the better I see. The wilder I love, the freer I be."





SUBVERSIVE POWER OF JOY

The subversive power of joy by Janey Stephenson: “The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective celebration is one of the great equalisers of social and political struggle.

“Holding onto and centering joy is a vital tactic for personal and group resilience, as well as political resistance to an agenda that seeks to enforce hierarchy and division through mass fear.

“Authoritarianism is directly incompatible with collective joy; it demands fear, obedience, hierarchy and an obsession with security and preparation for war.

“The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective joy takes people off guard and is one of the great equalizers of social and political struggle.”

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“Liberation movements have a long history of communal dance. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has documented the history of collective joy in her book Dancing In The Streets. She argues that collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for binding groups together.

“Physical movement—a powerful escalation of typical protest chanting—not only releases emotion, it also creates bonding, trust and equality, dissolving hierarchy and increasing a sense of community.”

More.





VIKTOR FRANKL ON HOW LOVE IS KEY TO UNDERSTANDING

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

"Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
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— Holocaust survivor, Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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I love Frankl’s quote, but also feel a longing to translate it into a the language of another gender:

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of her personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless she loves her. By her love she is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, she sees that which is potential in her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

"Furthermore, by her love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making her aware of what she can be and of what she should become, she makes these potentialities come true.”





SPIRITUAL FAST

There is both a physical and a spiritual fast.

In the physical fast, the body abstains from food and drink.

In the spiritual fast, the faster abstains from anger, rage, malice, and vengeance. One abstains from idle and foul talk, empty rhetoric, slander, condemnation, flattery, lying and spiteful talk.

—Basil of Caesarea

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PS: The above messge doesn't advise us to ALWAYS abstain from anger: only to take breaks from it every now and then.





“I will facilitate people in the mainstream world to become overwhelmed with desire, ferocious arousal and lust for a more sustainable, regenerative world, enflamed and engorged with erotic passion for a more beautiful, mutualistic, community based, easeful, magical abundant way of being.”

—Jason Hine





I'm working on creating 12 astrology books, one for each of the signs. For the cover images, I will be using gorgeous mandalas from these two artists:

Ana

Mayumi





You have always been in love. You will always be in love.

In fact, it is impossible for you NOT to be in love. You would be unable to get out of bed each morning unless there were someone or something that roused your heart and stirred your imagination.

So please admit that you are alive because of love; that you are MADE of love.

I invite you to write a list of five things you love and devote some time in the coming days to expressing your appreciation.




LOVE LOVES LOVE

Time for some Love Bombs:

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Be my ruckus, my perfect non-sequitur. Be my circuit-breaker, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest of pine needles, my second-story window. Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you’ll-see. Be my subatomic particle.

Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my scandalous reparté, my maximum payload. Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating.”

—Andrew Varnon

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I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn’t bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses.

—Pablo Neruda

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Let’s heat up the night to a boil. Let’s cook every drop of liquid out of our flesh till we sizzle, not a drop of come left. We are pots on too high a flame.

Our insides char and flake dark like sinister snow idling down. We breathe out smoke. We die out and sleep covers us in ashes. We lie without dreaming, empty as clean grates.

Yet we wake rebuilt, clattering and hungry as waterfalls leaping off, rushing into the day, roaring our bright intentions. It is the old riddle in the Yiddish song, what can burn and not burn up, a passion that gives birth to itself every day.

—Marge Piercy

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You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day’s wage.

You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.

—George Bernard Shaw

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The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. The merest whisper of your name awakes in me a shuddering sixth sense. I am longing for a kiss that makes time stand still.

—(The preceding testimony is a blend of words from Edgar Allan Poe, Pamela Moore, and John Keats.)

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Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.

—Erica Jong

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We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones.

—Rumi

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I love you more than it’s possible to love anyone. I love you more than love itself. I love you more than you love yourself. I love you more than God loves you.

I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the universe. In fact, I love you more than I love you.

—A voice in your dream

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For a relationship to stay alive, 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.

—James Hillman

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Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

—Emily Dickinson

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Holding your hand, I can hear your bones singing into mine and feel the moon as it rolls through you.

—Sara Eliza Johnson

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Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love.

Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

—Henri Nouwen

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The giving of love is an education in itself.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

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The bottom line for those of us who love humanity, not just our tribe, not just our own selfish interests, is this: What are the most effective actions that we can take that will reduce the amount of suffering in the world and save peoples' and animals' lives?

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Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

—Audre Lorde





TO KNOW SOMETHING OR SOMEONE, YOU MUST LOVE THEM

In order to understand anyone or anything, you have to love it. I don’t mean feel romantic passion from it, or express any version of love that is tinged with expectation or sentimentality. This love I mean is characterized by compassion, empathy, and lovingkindness.

To open yourself up with love to an iris or redwood tree or hermit crab is to assert that you find it worthy enough to bestow blessings upon; and furthermore, that you find it worthy of communicating with.

Because when you open yourself with love to understand a living thing, you make it possible for that living thing to communicate with you in its own language and through the lens of its unique intelligence.

When you open yourself in love to understand a living thing, you are showing it that that you want to perceive its essence and that you are also willing and even interested in being influenced by its essence.

You’re proving you’re receptive to its specific intelligence speaking through its special language—not your own intelligence and language.

This gives the living thing—iris, redwood, or crab—a great gift.

I'm not being metaphorical or poetic here. I'm not using fairy tale logic. My meaning is literal.

Every living thing is a cell in the Divine Consciousness. Is a special case of the One Intelligence expressing itself.

Everything LONGS to express itself so that you can take it in. And everything LONGS to thereby give you the gift of itself.

This is not a selfish longing to be seen for itself so much as a longing to give you the special wisdom and beauty that it alone possesses and channels: a longing to give the unique glimpse at the Divine Consciousness that comes through it alone.

In giving your loving attention to the iris or redwood or crab, you are showing it that you want to understand it. This allows it, in turn, to give you the tremendous and mysterious gift of its special intelligence, expressed through its unique language.

The gift you receive is double: You’re able to get out of yourself, able to transcend your narrow interests and intelligence sufficiently, to learn how to understand the iris or redwood or crab in its native tongue.

The second gift is that you’re able to harvest the actual benefits of the “information” that the iris’s intelligence and language convey (and redwood’s and crab’s), whether than information comes in the form of an intuition about the nature of reality, or an opening in yourself of the part of the universal God hologram that corresponds to the iris or redwood or crab.

Yes, you are a tiny hologram of the Universal Projector, the One and Only Hologram, but sometimes, in order to “turn on” parts of the Universal Hologram within you, you have to open to those parts in the physical world.

This is an important part of my strategy to enter into a variety of altered states in my quest to viscerally commune with the Divine Consciousness, a.k.a. the mind of Goddess.

If I can learn to speak the language of the iris and redwood and crab, and somehow awaken in myself the part of my intelligence that is like an iris’s and redwood’s and crab’s (and it’s all there, since I contain or rather am a hologram of the All-in-One), then I have in effect achieved an altered state.

I have jolted myself out of my normal human humdrum awareness and added to my repertoire a fresh perspective, an additional mode of perceiving and understanding the world: as the iris or redwood or crab does.

Let’s say I can do this every day, in little or big ways.

At least once every day, and sometimes more on my freer days, I can open my heart-brain with love in the attempt to understand the essence of a iris or redwood or crab, and can, thereby, allow the iris or redwood or crab to do what comes naturally for it, to do what it was made to do, which is to unveil itself to me in glorious extravagant fullness, with its own love nature bursting

. . . and so the iris or redwood or crab can initiate me into the mysteries of its intelligence, teach me how to experience the world as it does, and bestow on me the power to alter my state of awareness—giving me yet one more tool for knowing Goddess’s mind not just conceptually but with gnosis – with visceral understanding.





YOU HAVE TO LOVE

Louise Erdrich writes: Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum





HOW TO PRIME YOUR ECSTATIC SKILLS

Nothing primes your ecstatic skill better than invoking and expressing thanks. So consider the possibility of celebrating regular Gratitude Fests. During these orgies of appreciation, you could confer praise and respect on the creatures, both human and otherwise, that have played seminal roles in inspiring you to become yourself.

Who teaches and helps you? Who sees you for who you really are? Who nudges you in the direction of your fuller destiny and awakens you to your signature truths? Who loves you brilliantly?





OUR LOVE IS A WARM DAMP WIND

Our love is a warm damp wind through the manzanita grove, a meditation on the votive light where red, purple, and bronze converge.

We dream together in a bed made of lost time, sipping the gold that leaks from our virtuoso memories.

Our murmured laughter escapes from secret jokes. The sun at midnight tempts us to believe every confusing thing is true. As we roll and tumble down the imaginary a green hill, celebration commands our lazy perceptions to snap awake! "Be real wild, not fake wild!"

We transform our creature telepathy into song talk, restoring the glory of playful language to its rightful place as ruler of all discourse.





Jump-Up-and-Down Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming a delightfully excitable, actively receptive, smoothly inquisitive Master of Discerning Joy

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1. There's a three-mile stretch of Interstate 880 south of Oakland, California, that I call the Singing Highway.

For reasons I don't understand, it generates low humming melodies every time I drive over it, similar to the guttural chants of Tibetan monks. Sometimes I swear I can even hear lyrics.

Once, as I was driving to the airport on the Singing Highway, I swear I heard the same lyric repeating over and over again:

"a shortcut to the path with heart
a shortcut to the path with heart
a shortcut to the path with heart"

Where's the path with heart for you? What would it involve for you to take a shortcut to get on it?

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2. If a cow is given a name by her owner, she generates more milk than a cow that's treated as an anonymous member of the herd.

That's the conclusion of a study done by researchers at Newcastle University in the UK. "Placing more importance on knowing the individual animals and calling them by name," said Dr. Catherine Douglas, "can significantly increase milk ­production."

Building on that principle, I suggest that you give everything in your world names, including (but not limited to) houseplants, insects, cars, appliances, and trees.

It will help you get more up-close and personal with all of creation, which is an effective way to cultivate pronoia.

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3. Qabalist teacher Ann Davies told a story about a U.S. Army general negotiating with a cannibal chief in New Guinea during World War II.

The general wanted the chief to rally his tribe to help American troops fight the Japanese.

The chief refused, calling the Americans immoral.

The general was shocked. "We are not immoral!" he protested. "The Japanese are immoral!"

The cannibal chief replied, "The Japanese and Americans are equally immoral. You both kill far more people than you can eat."

Using this tale as your impetus, describe how parts of your moral code may not be rooted in an absolute standard of what's good and evil, but rather bound by the idiosyncrasies of your culture and historical era.

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4. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke urged an aspiring bard to change the way he imagined the Supreme Being.

"Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming," Rilke said, "who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?

"Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?"

How would your life change if you made this idea your working hypothesis?

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5. Comment on the following rant, which Beauty and Truth Lab operatives put on flyers and tacked up on laundromat bulletin boards all over San Francisco:

"The Doctrine of Original Sin? We spit on it. We reject it. We renounce it and forget it and annihilate it from reality.

"In its place we embrace the Doctrine of Original Fun. This reformulation asserts that it is our birthright to commune with regular doses of curious beauty and tricky truth and insurrectionary love.

"A robust, heroic joy is even now roaring through us, bringing us good ideas about how to apply the metaphor of ingenious foreplay to everything we do.

"We will not waste this euphoric deluge on any of the million and one numbing little diversions that pass for pleasure among the ecstasy-starved pursuers of mediocre joy. Rather, we will remain ever alert for the call of primordial delight."

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6. Psychotherapists say it's not only naughty but counterproductive to blame others for your problems. A skilled practitioner urges her clients to accept responsibility for the part they've played in creating their predicaments.

The reason is as much pragmatic as it is ethical: When you're obsessed with how people have done you wrong, you have little ambition to change the behavior in yourself that led you into the mess.

While I endorse this approach, I also know that dogmatic adherence to it can warp your mental health as much as any other form of fanaticism.

That's why I urge you to enjoy an unapologetic Blame Fest. Choose a time when you will find fault with everyone except yourself. Howl in protest at the unfair slights people have committed against you. Wallow in self-pity as you visualize the clueless jerks who have done you wrong.

For best results, bark your complaints in the direction of no one but God, an inanimate object, or your mirror.

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7. "Esoteric astrology teaches that anyone whose future can be predicted by any means is living like a robot. It assumes that some people are more robotic (predictable) than others; and that further implies some of us have more free will than others." Author Carolyn L. Vash wrote that in the Noetic Sciences Review.

How much free will do you have?

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8. We all have a war going on inside ourselves. What's yours? Is it a just and fruitful war or a senseless and wasteful war, or both?