Week of October 30th, 2025
The Path with Heart
Jump-Up-and-Down Pronoia TherapyExperiments 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?
Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a celebratory array of tender rants, lyrical excitements, poetic philosophy, and joyous adventures in consciousness.
It arrives every Tuesday morning by 7:30 am.
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I NEED TO SLEEP AND DREAM A LOT!
I've observed that some people are proud about how little sleep they need. They regard it as a sign of vitality that six hours provide all the refreshment they require. Personally, I rarely get less than nine and a half hours, and usually prefer ten.
Maybe it has to do in part with how active I am while asleep. I've been remembering and recording an average of 3 dreams a night since I was 19.
Dreamwork is a vocation for me. I regard it as having been crucial to my development as a creative writer and musician.
How about you? What is your relationship to sleep and dreams? Is there a dream you had that you'd care to share?
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To reiterate and emphasise: I wouldn't have been able to become the person I wanted to become without honoring my need for sleep and my love for the worlds I live in during dreams.
PRIVILEGE
"Aren't we privileged to live in a time when everything is at stake, and when our efforts make a difference in the eternal contest between the forces of light and shadow, between togetherness and division, between justice and exploitation? Oh, be joyful that you are a warrior in this great time!
"Will we rise to this battle? If so, we cannot lose, for rising up to it is our victory. If we represent love in the world, you see, we have already won."
—Doris "Granny D" Haddock, political activist
THE HEDONISTIC IMPERATIVE
David Pearce writes: "The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment.
"They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture—a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss.
"States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health.
"Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd.
"Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive.
"The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice."
—David Pearce
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
PRONOIA is 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
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
A free preview of the book is available here
