Thanks for Making My Life Better

Sometime in the next 24 hours, try saying this to someone (but only if you really mean it): "Thanks for making my life better."





Here's a link to my weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other really good stuff. It arrives every Tuesday morning.





WE'RE ALL FAMILY

We're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than your fiftieth cousin.

With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and, owing to the wind's circulation, every year you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. (Source: Guy Murchie, *The Seven Mysteries of Life*)

Right now you may be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra.

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Your body contains about four octillion atoms. That's four with 27 zeroes after it. Believe it or not, 200 billion of that total were once inside the body of Martin Luther King, Jr. For that matter, an average of 200 billion atoms of everyone who has ever lived and died is part of you. I am not making this up.

See the mathematical analysis here,

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told The Washington Post the following fun facts: "There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than cups of water in all the world's oceans. This means that some molecules in every cup of water you drink passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Abe Lincoln, or any other historical person of your choosing."





IMAGINAL HYGIENE

"Imaginal hygiene is the inner art of self-managing the imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, colonize, shrink, and sterilize it, and to cultivate those that illuminate, expand, and nourish it."

The above is an excerpt from a wonderful piece by M. T. Xen, which I highly recommend.

Listen to my six-minute take on the power of your imagination.

Or read my piece here.





DUMB PAIN VERSUS SMART PAIN

Dumb pain is the kind of pain you're compulsively drawn back to out of habit. It's familiar, and thus perversely comfortable.

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

While stupid pain is often born of fear, wise pain 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 a beautiful, interesting game that's worthy of your curiosity.

I invite you to come up with more definitions about the difference between dumb pain and smart pain.





ANGER VERSUS CALM

Your opinion, please: When you are waging a righteous battle, is it better to be constantly feeding off your anger about the situation you're trying to change?

Or are you more likely to be an effective fighter if you're relatively clear and calm, holding a vision of the new reality you want to create?

Or neither? Other choices? Your thoughts?

Write to Truthrooster@gmail.com.





WORLD KISS

All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.

If we want to become the gorgeous geniuses we were born to be, if we want to give back as many blessings as we are given, we've got to be in love with every single part of the Goddess's extravagant masterpiece.

And so we can't possibly be mere heterosexuals. We can't possibly be mere homosexuals or bisexuals.

If we want to commune with the world the way the Goddess does, we've got to be Pantheosexuals -- we've got to be experts in the art of Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess Cuddling. Anything less is a lie, an obscene limitation.

Hear this as a song.





PROCEED WITH ABANDON

"In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."

- Patti Smith





THE NECESSITY OF PLAY

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown has proposed this simple definition: "Play is spontaneous behavior that has no clear-cut goal and does not conform to a stereotypical pattern. The purpose of play is simply play itself; it appears to be pleasurable."

In a study of 26 convicted murderers, Brown discovered that as children, most of them had suffered either "from the absence of play or abnormal play like bullying, sadism, extreme teasing, or cruelty to animals."

Brown's work led him to explore the biological roots of play. "New and exciting studies of the brain, evolution, and animal behavior," he wrote, "suggest that play may be as important to life -- for us and other animals -- as sleeping and dreaming."

—Stuart L. Brown, "Animals at Play," National Geographic





BLESS YOURSELF

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

— Elizabeth Gilbert





THE DOOR YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO OPEN

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through," writes novelist Anne Lamott, "you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in."

Is it perhaps your time to slip through that forbidden door? The experiences that await you on the other side may not be everything you have always needed, but they could at least be everything you need next.

Besides, it's not like the taboo against penetrating into the unknown place makes much sense any more. The biggest risk you take by breaking the spell is the possibility of losing a fear you've grown addicted to.





VOWS

I invite you to speak these vows out loud:

"As long as I live, I vow to die and be reborn, die and be reborn, die and be reborn, over and over again, forever reinventing myself.

"I promise to be stronger than hate, wetter than water, deeper than the abyss, and wilder than the sun.

"I pledge to remember that I am not only a sweating, half-asleep, excitable, bumbling jumble of desires, but that I am also an immortal four-dimensional messiah in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation.

"I vow to love and honor my highs and my lows my yeses and noes, my give and my take, the life I wish I had and the life I actually have.

"I promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow my devotion to the truth, fuel my commitment to beauty, refine my emotions, hone my dreams, wrestle with my shadow, purge my ignorance, and soften my heart -- even as I always accept myself for exactly who I am, with all of my so-called foibles and wobbles."

"I pledge to wake myself up, never hold back, have nothing to lose, go all the way, kiss the stormy sky, be the hero of my own story, ask for everything I need and give everything I have, take myself to the river when it's time to go to the river, and take myself to the mountaintop when it's time to go to the mountaintop."





RECEPTIVITY REMEDIES

Alert, relaxed listening is the radical act at the heart of our pronoiac practice.

Curiosity is our primal state of awareness.

Wise innocence is a trick we aspire to master.

Open-hearted skepticism is the light in our eyes.

MORE





GOOD PROBLEMS

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.

There's a bit of truth in that perspective. 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 my books is a good example. I have abundant fun handling the perplexing challenges with which they confront 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.





WHERE THE SPIRITUAL MEETS THE PRACTICAL

"How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth? How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity? How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?"

~ Starhawk





IN SERVICE TO THE LIBERATED IMAGINATION

My horoscopes are not rooted in or justified by any belief system, doctrine, fairy tale, authoritative teacher, elaborate secret joke, mystical wishing, well-rationalized bias, or rebellion against science. My horoscopes are fueled by poetry and in service to the liberated imagination.





THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF MY BOOK Pronoia AND THE REVISED EDITION

I published the original version of MY BOOK Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings in 2005. For my next big writing project, I might have chosen to write a sequel. But instead I opted to fatten up the first edition.

The Revised and Expanded edition of Pronoia, which came out four years later, is MUCH fatter. It has 55% brand new extra material, or 92 more pages and 63,000 additional words -- the size of a whole new book.

There are 17 totally new pieces. It also has amplified and intensified versions of many of the central pieces of the original book, including "This Is a Perfect Moment," "Glory in the Highest," "World Kiss," and "I Me Wed," the ceremony for you to use if you want to marry yourself.

I got especially pumped up and carried away while revising "Glory in the Highest," which is a manifesto celebrating the everyday miracles we take for granted, the uncanny powers we possess, the small joys that occur so routinely we forget how much they mean to us, and the steady flow of benefits bestowed on us by people we know and don’t know.

In the new edition of the book, "Glory in the Highest" is eight times longer than in the original. Read it. Hear a short version of it.

The Revised and Expanded edition of Pronoia also has 14 brand new Sacred Advertisements. Don't worry -- if you're new to Pronoia -- the Sacred Ads aren't real ads. Here's an example:

"This perfect moment is brought to you by the imaginary lightning bolts you can shoot out the ends of your fingers anytime you want to."

Like the 2005 edition, the revised and expanded Pronoia has an abundance of space for you to write and scrawl and draw your responses to what you read. It's designed to make you my collaborator as we conspire together to incite the Great Awakening.

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The book is available at Barnes & Noble

Also available at Amazon

A free preview of the book is available here




MY DAILY HOROSCOPES

Some people don't know that I write daily horoscopes, available as text messages sent to your cell or smart phone.

They're shorter than the weekly 'scopes, but on the other hand they're more frequent -- every day of the week.

My weekly horoscopes are free, but the dailies cost about 67 cents a day if you sign up for a subscription.

If you think you might enjoy getting regular bursts of inspiration from me to illuminate your adventures, check them out.

Go to RealAstrology.com. Register or log in. On the new page, click on "Subscribe / Renew" under "Daily Text Message Horoscopes" in the right-hand column.





NOVEL INTUITIONS ARE ERUPTING FROM YOUR SMART HEART

As an experiment, I invite you to say this twice a day for the next ten days: "Novel intuitions are now erupting from my smart heart, awakening me from any trance I've been ensnared in. I am hereby breaking and escaping obstructions that have hindered my ability to express my soul's code. My unique capacities are being liberated, my potentials activated."





WHAT CAUSES HAPPINESS?

What causes happiness? Brainstorm about it. Map out the foundations of your personal science of joy. Get serious about defining what makes you feel good. To get you started,

I'll name some experiences that might rouse your gratification: engaging in sensual pleasure; seeking the truth; being kind and moral; contemplating the meaning of life; escaping your routine; purging pent-up emotions, doing practical work that helps others or that serves your high ideals.

Do any of these work for you? Name at least ten more.





HOW CAN THERE BE ANY SUCH THING AS "FREE WILL ASTROLOGY"?

CONDUIT magazine: Can you say what you mean by "Free Will Astrology"? It sounds like an oxymoron.

ROB BREZSNY: When I first began writing my column many years ago, I didn't like astrology columns, and I didn't like a lot of the ways astrology was practiced. Then as now, astrology in the hands of many practitioners tends to make people afraid of the future, fills them with ideas about there being some sort of fixed destiny that they're being pulled toward and that they're helpless to resist. That kind of thinking was and still is repulsive to me.

So when I first got the opportunity to write an astrology column, I decided that if somebody's going to do it, it might as well be me—an optimistic astrologer who's trained in using interesting language, is motivated primarily by love, and respects the free will of the people who might be my audience.

The bedrock of my practice has always been the idea that the planets may impel, but they don't compel. A study of the configurations of planets shows us the archetypal forces that are coalescing and becoming active in our lives. That can instruct us on how to use our free will to activate the best versions of those archetypal forces as they coalesce.

So for me, "free will astrology" conveys the notion that we have far more power than we might imagine over the way that we harness and express the bigger forces that are at work in our lives.

My aspiration is not to consign my readers to a particular fate that they supposedly can't avoid, but rather to show them the options that are available: the higher level, the mid-level, and the low-level ways in which they might express the archetypal forces—and to nudge them in the direction of finding where the highest-level expression of those forces might be.