You Know What to Do — and You Know How to Do It

Say to those you love: I have sipped the gusts of your dusky gaze, and so I am eternally mobilized.

—my rendering of a poem by poet Sohrab Sepehri




SUCCESS! Last week, I upgraded the way I offer you my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES and Text-Message Horoscopes.

New machines! Fresh codes!

Amazingly, it all worked pretty well. Thanks for your patience and understanding, everyone!

Since I give away my written horoscopes for free, these two other services are key sources of income for me. I need them to work well.

Here's a detailed explanation of the new system.

If you do have any issues with the new system, please get in touch with my fabulous tech support team at freewillcs@gmail.com

Access the EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES and Text-Message Horoscopes.





MIRABILIA

What are mirabilia? They're phenomena that inspire wonder, winsome curiosities, small marvels, eccentric enchantments. Here are a few:

* 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.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing.

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

* 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.

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

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

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

* Singing Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia.

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

* The moon smells like exploded firecrackers.

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

* Black sheep have a better sense of smell than white sheep.

* There are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. Every square inch of your body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

* The seeds of some trees are so tightly compacted within their protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free them, allowing them to sprout.

* Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

* 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.

* 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.

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

* Some piranhas are vegetarians

* 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.

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

* Revlon makes 177 different shades of lipstick.

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

* Thirty-eight percent of North America is wilderness.

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

* 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.




UNEXPECTED REDEMPTION

Beauty and Truth Lab researcher Firenze Matisse traveled to Antarctica. On the first day, the guide took him and his group to a remote area and left them alone for an hour to commune with the pristine air and unearthly stillness.

After a while, a penguin ambled up and launched into a ceremonial display of squawks and stretches.
Firenze responded with recitals of his favorite memorized poems, imagining he was "engaged in a conversation with eternity."

Halfway through his inspired performance of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Please Call Me by My True Names," the penguin sent a stream of green projectile vomit cascading against his chest, and shuffled away.

Though Firenze initially felt deflated by eternity's surprise, no harm was done. He soon came to see it as a first-class cosmic joke, and looked forward to exploiting its value as an amusing story with which to regale his friends back home.

Beauty and Truth Lab researcher Michael Logan was the first person to hear Firenze's tale upon his return from Antarctica.

"You might want to consider this, Firenze," Michael mused after taking it all in. "Penguins nurture their offspring by chewing food -- mixing it up with all God's enzymes -- and then vomiting it into the mouths of the penguin babies.

"Perhaps you weren't the butt of a cosmic joke or some Linda Blair-esque bad review, but in fact the recipient of a very precious gift of love. Who knows?"

Now Firenze has two punch lines for his tale of redemptive pronoia.





CAN THE IMAGINATION SAVE US?

Feminist philosopher Susan Griffin relates a story that exemplifies the possibility of envisaging solutions that defy conventional logic. The story is below, all in Griffin’s words.

Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner.

Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers.

And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent.

But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned.

Improbable as it is, Desnos reads the man's palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline.

And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.

As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems so inarguable.

They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions.

So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks.

Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.

The story poses a question. Can the imagination save us?

Robert Desnos was famous for his belief in the imagination. He believed it could transform society.

And what a wild leap this was, at the mouth of the gas chambers, to imagine a long life! In his mind he simply stepped outside the world as it was created by the SS.





LIFE IS WRETCHED AND GLORIOUS

“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected.

“But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction.

“On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there.

“The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple.

“Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.”

- Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living





GENUINE LISTENING

“Genuine listening requires that you willingly bare witness to what someone else needs to say while simultaneously sparing them of your own solution, defense, dismissal, alternative reality, rebuttal, counterpoint, comparable story or more extreme example.

“This kind of listening is a very ‘active’ part to play in a conversation. You have to believe for those moments that none of the things you might say could possibly be as valuable as hearing someone out.

“You may need to employ every ounce of your strength of character to actually pay attention and not butt-in with your own bit. That kind of attention paid to another is powerful medicine.”

~ Gil Hedley, Integral Anatomy





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





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 two weekends ago. 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 Johm 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