Let's Be Oases for Each Other

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

—Ralph Ellison

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You’re something between a dream and a miracle.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning





THE PRONOIA EBOOK

My book PRONOIA is finally available as an eBook:
Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

The eBook includes a new foreword and a new piece, “Strange Blessings,” that weren't in the Revised and Expanded edition.

(This eBook, like the Revised and Expanded edition, has 55% additional new material beyond what the first edition had.)

PRONOIA as an ebook at Amazon

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

A free preview of the book is available here





Shapeshifting Pronoia Therapy

Experiments and exercises in becoming an aggressively sensitive, thunderously receptive, ethically mischievous Master of Mutant Intimacy

1. Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell explores the relationship between mind and body. He thinks you can achieve optimal physical health if you're devoted to shedding outworn self-images.

In his book The Shaman's Body, he says, "You have one central lesson to learn—to continuously drop all your rigid identities. Personal history may be your greatest danger."

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

What identities would be healthy, even ecstatic, for you to lose? Describe the fun you'd have if you were free of them.

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2. I was never the class clown. I am not a troubled but devilishly handsome wastrel living on a trust fund.

I've never beaten up anyone, have steadfastly not aspired to write like Raymond Carver, and have never played strip Scrabble with a junkie violinist on a leaky waterbed in a Key West penthouse.

There are so many things I am not and will never be, and I'm glad I know about them. It helps me stay focused on exactly who I am.

What about you? Who aren't you? Fantasize about all the paths you will never take. Put it in writing.

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3. "Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are," suggests psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. This advice is one of his ideas about how to get into attunement with the Tao, also known as being in the zone.

How would you go about being the opposite of who you are? Try it and see if it drives you into a state of euphoria.

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4. Writing on Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg recalled how in his youth he loved to play the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

"You'd have to choose not one but two 'alignments' for your character," he mused. "Good and evil, of course, but also 'law' and 'chaos.' And among the people I ran with, 'chaotic/good' was the thing to be, because it let you trust other people and still have fun."

Try out the "chaotic/good" approach for the character you play in your actual life.

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5. To create a pearl, an oyster needs an aggravating parasite inside its shell. It builds layers of calcium carbonate around the invader, gradually fabricating the treasure.

How long does it take from the initial provocation to the finished product? Five years for a pearl of average size, and as many as 10 years for a big one.

Our question for you: How many years have you been engaged in the process of transforming your irritant into a masterpiece? How many more years do you think you still have to go?

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6. Ariel was going through a hard time. She'd been weaning herself from a painkiller she'd taken while recovering from surgery. Her cat ran away, and there was a misunderstanding at work.

One night while at a nightclub with her friend Leila, she spied her ex-boyfriend kissing some woman. Meltdown ensued. Ariel fled the club and ran sobbing into the street, where she hurled her shoes on top of a passing bus.

Leila retrieved her and sat her down on a bench. "Because up until now you've displayed such exemplary grace in the face of chaos," Leila said, "I'm giving you a free Crazy Pass. It gives you a karma-free license to temporarily lose your mind."

This compassionate humor helped Ariel feel more composed. The rest of the night she partied with elegant savagery, achieving major relief and release without hurting ­herself.

Now I'm awarding you, too, a free Crazy Pass. How will you use it?

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7. Attention please. This is your ancestors speaking. We've been trying to reach you through your dreams and fantasies, but you haven't responded. That's why we've commandeered this space.

So listen up. We'll make it brief. You're at a crossroads analogous to a dilemma that has baffled your biological line for six generations.

We ask you now to master the turning point that none of us have ever figured out how to negotiate. Heal yourself and you heal all of us. We mean that literally. Start brainstorming, please.

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8. When playing the card game known as bridge, you're fortunate if you're dealt no cards of any particular suit. It allows you to use the trump suit to win tricks.

Identify a situation in your own life where a lack of a certain resource can work to your advantage, allowing you to be a free agent, an X-factor, a wild card; freeing you to capitalize on loopholes that aren't normally available; giving you access to luck that comes to you through what you're missing.

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9. I give thanks for the dented rusty brown and gray 1967 Chevy 10 pick-up truck that my neighbor parks askew on the shoulder of the road near my house.

Its messy beauty snaps me back to sanity when my own perfectionism threatens to de-soul me, or when all the shiny, sleek, polished things of the world are on the verge of hypnotizing me into believing that only they should be considered attractive.

Are there equivalent triggers in your life?

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10. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress. While serving seven terms, she was an outspoken warrior who fought tirelessly for the rights of women, minorities, and the poor.

"My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear," she said, "is my mouth, out of which comes all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency."

One of Chisholm's most famous exploits was her visit to segregationist politician George Wallace in the hospital after he was shot. Her supporters complained that she was consorting with the enemy.

But years later it paid off. Wallace helped her win the votes of southern congressmen when she sponsored legislation to give domestic workers a minimum wage.

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11. The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world.

The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil.

Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination.

Talk about a time you dwelt in kumulipo.





THE NECESSITY OF HIDING

David Whyte writes: "HIDING is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light.

"Even hiding the truth from ourselves can be a way to come to what we need in our own necessary time.

"Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear.

"Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.

"Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.

"We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others.

"What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

"Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control.

"Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed.

"Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future."

—David Whyte
Excerpted from CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words