Falling in Love with Life

Some people get mad at me for not being "optimistic" in the face of the world's travails. So I periodically reiterate one of my definitions of optimism:

cultivating the bright energy and practical love to fight with all our ingenuity against those who would degrade our beautiful world with their selfishness and cruelty and carelessness.





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WHAT IS PRONOIA?

Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy designed to keep us well supplied with blessings. What kind of blessings?

Ten million dollars, a gorgeous physique, a perfect marriage, a luxurious home, and high status? Maybe.

But just as likely: interesting surprises, dizzying adventures, gifts you hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that dare you to get smarter.

Novelist William Vollman referred to the latter types of blessings when he said that "the most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that's a complicated, tricky problem for you that you don't know how to solve."

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis once said, "I thank God that He hasn't given me all the things I've prayed for, because as I look back now I realize it would have been disastrous to have received some of them."

Pronoia provides the boons and prods your soul needs, not necessarily those your ego craves.

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.

Pronoia works because there is a Divine Being who comprises the entire universe.

When I say, "Life is a conspiracy to shower us with blessings," I understand that this Divine Being is the Chief Architect, Builder, and Manager of the conspiracy.

She oversees the evolution of 500 billion galaxies and every single thing in them, yet is also available as an intimate companion and daily advisor to each one of us humans.

Some lovers of pronoia don't like this part of my rap.

They want pronoia to be free of anything that smacks of a Divine Being. Atheism works better for them. That's OK with me. No hard feelings.

Other lovers of pronoia don't appreciate me referring to the Creator as "She." They either want to stick with the pronoun that has been used for hundreds of years, or else don't want any gender associations whatsoever. That's OK with me. No hard feelings.

The Maker of the conspiracy constantly tinkers, always keeping the big, 14-billion-year-long picture in mind and moving in the direction of ultimate blessings for all concerned.

But the Maker also loves getting help from us. To the degree that we co-conspire, the inevitable blessings ripen more lyrically and in greater fullness.

Pronoia asks us to be awake to the shifting conditions of the Wild Divine's ever-fresh creation.

It encourages us to be quite happy about regularly divesting ourselves of the beliefs and theories that guided us yesterday so that we can see clearly what's right in front of us today.

As much as we might be dismayed by the actions of our political leaders, pronoia says that toppling any particular junta, clique, or elite is irrelevant unless we also overthrow the sour, puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality" including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves.

The revolution begins at home.

If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.

Pronoia will change your past if you let it. It's the language you study at night in your dreams, the open secret of how to live forever, the Last Judgment transformed into a daily gift.

Pronoia is a gnostic art: Everyone is potentially a visionary capable of revealing more of its mysteries.





REMINDER

Lately, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of us have given in to the temptation to believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out.

Ignorance and inertia, partially camouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround us. Pessimism is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic.

Stories about treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.

So no, at this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it's not easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life.

We've got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those messiahs among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of know-it-all deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the sour, puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality."

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.





WTF

PJ Harvey and I are not directing this cogent song message at you, dear listeners, but rather in the direction of lying psychopathic authoritarian leaders. Tune in here.





CONSPIRACIES

From the perspective of most modern conspiracy theorists, the conspiracies they imagine to be loose in the world have been dreamed up and are perpetrated by coordinated groups of evil people.

The pronoia conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is rooted in a hypothesis at the core of Western Hermetic Magick, which is what I have studied with love for years.

Here's the hypothesis: that life is divine play—an art project and game and ceremony designed and carried out by a loving Creator.

This Creator, whose consciousness pervades every cubic centimeter of the universe, provides all necessary help and tools for us to be liberated from our suffering and realize our essential oneness with all beings in the process of developing, over millennia of incarnations, a unique and beautiful personal identity.

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In purely spiritual matters, God grants all desires. Those who have less have asked for less.

—philosopher and activist Simone Weil





LIBERATION IS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

"This body that we have, this very body that's sitting here right now in this room, this very body that perhaps aches, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive.

"Furthermore, the emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need.

"It is just as if we looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead to a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it right here."

—Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness





WHAT IS PRAYER?

In her book Traveling Mercies, Ann Lamott says the two best kinds of prayer are "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

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Religion writer Rabbi Marc Gellman says, "When you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!"

Personally, I would add a fifth type of prayer to Gellman's list: "Do you need any assistance?" The Creator always needs collaborators to help implement the gritty details of the latest divine schemes.

And I think we could all benefit from volunteering for that role—especially in tasks that involve blending beautiful fragments, healing sad schisms, furthering peace negotiations, and overcoming seemingly irreconcilable differences.

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Poet W. H. Auden told us, "The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions."

I would add the following: Every moment is an opportunity to escape the paradise jail of your mind's filters and enter a state of meditation—which is to say: establish empathetic relationship with other versions of the divine source with whom you share this planet.





IS LOVING KINDNESS TOO MUCH TO ASK?

An interviewer urged the Dalai Lama to discourse on how to cultivate lovingkindness.

His Holiness said, "That may be too much to ask. How about if we just work on getting the 'kindness' part right?"





FUTURE FREEDOM

"The people of future generations will win many a liberty of which we do not yet even feel the want," said German philosopher Max Stirner.

See if you can become aware of an interesting freedom that has not previously been on your radar screen.