There’s an idea floating around the spiritual marketplace, soft and warm and sweet, that goes like this: Every religion is really saying the same thing. All paths lead up the same mountain.

Strip away the costumes and the chanting and the dietary rules, and underneath it’s all just Love, all just One, all just the same cosmic light wearing different guises.

I understand the appeal. It’s generous and peaceable and encourages us to love everybody.

But it’s not close to being true.

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Here are the facts, ma’ams and sirs and every gender in between: The traditions are very different. Not cosmetically different, but different all the way down and in. They ask different things from you, and they make you into different kinds of people.

Jesus of Nazareth tells you to love the people who want you dead. The Vedantic sage wants to dissolve into the one Reality behind all appearances. The Buddhist has no use for an all-knowing creator God and wants to entirely extinguish the fire of craving.

Hindu goddess Kali is the ecstatic force of creation and destruction intertwined, loving us enough to annihilate everything false. The devout Muslim submits to the will of God in every detail of life, finding freedom in disciplined surrender rather than self-invention. The Wiccan celebrates the turning of the seasons as sacred, finding the Goddess not beyond the world but pulsing through the earth, the tides, and the body.

These aren’t mild variations of the same teachings. They are completely different ways to live. Walk one of them all the way to the end, and you become a person the other paths would barely recognize.

Let’s dig in and explore the various paths’ vision of the individual self.

The Buddhist sage spends years training to see that there is no permanent self at all. The “you” that you keep honoring and trying to feed is a rumor, a process mistaken for a thing. The Vedantic sage trains just as hard to realize the opposite: that your deepest Self is eternal, unborn, identical and merged with the ground of all being.

The Western Hermetic approach says, hell, yeah, there’s a gorgeous, robust self, and a key part of the spiritual work is to nurture it.

The Eastern Orthodox Christian: Your self isn’t meant to disappear but to become radiant through participation in God’s life, without ceasing to be uniquely you.

For Jains, your soul is real, eternal, and irreducibly individual. Liberate it from karmic bondage rather than dissolve it into a universal Self.

The Confucians say your self is a lifelong cultivation project, taking shape through how thoughtfully and humanely you live with other people.

The Wiccan says your self is real and divine, a spark of Goddess and God wearing a particular face. You’re not meant to transcend it or dissolve it, but to consecrate it, body and desire included.

They all disagree about the most basic questions we can ask: whether your self even exists, and if so, in what form. They’re not describing one summit in various dialects. Some are climbing toward a Self; others are wriggling all the way out of one.

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Or take the body. The Christian creeds promise you’ll get yours back: raised, glorified, and yours forever. Much of the Indian tradition is laboring to free you from ever having to wear a meat suit again. One says the goal is to be resurrected into flesh; the other says the goal is to stop being reborn into it.

Wicca agrees with India that we reincarnate, then reverses the verdict. Many Wiccans regard rebirth not as a sentence to escape but as a homecoming: another chance to return to this beloved Earth and the people and animals we love. In the Charge of the Goddess, She declares that all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.

These various views are central quarrels about what a human being is for.

(You can probably guess which side my incarnate heart leans toward, and that’s exactly the point. I’m not neutral. And neither will you be if you actually pick.)

I find this thrilling. I don’t want a beige, tasteless God or Goddess. I want the specific, weird, demanding, gorgeous particularity of an actual living tradition that might ask me for something really interesting and demanding.

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The most sophisticated lovers of “all is one” will tell you they already know that the rituals don’t match. Of course the outer forms differ wildly, they say. But at the mystical peak, where the great contemplatives fall silent, all the climbers finally meet in the same light.

It’s a well-meaning claim. I just don’t think it survives contact with the peaks themselves. The theist dissolving in love into a beloved Other is not having the same experience as the Buddhist arriving at a profound and absolute cessation where even the One drops away. Those are two different summits.

Here’s the stranger thing: Even if I granted them an identical mountaintop, it wouldn’t rescue the idea. Because you’re changed by the climb, not the views at the top.

And the climbs run in opposite directions, through wildly different country, demanding dissimilar disciplines. The journey through the desert teaches you what the path through the urban jungle never could. You become whoever the walking makes you, not whoever or whatever is allegedly waiting at the end.

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I’ll go a step further.

I’m suspicious of any spirituality that tells us suffering isn’t real and that good and evil are just “categories of mind.” Everything I’ve learned this time around tells me that realizing we’re infinite consciousness doesn’t mean that all our efforts are meaningless and immaterial.

Out here in the real world, from my perspective, teachings that float above it all look less like enlightenment and more like a comfortable seat far from the action. Meanwhile, people are going hungry, communities are getting decimated, and actual human bodies are breaking and grieving and burning.

I want a spirituality we can do with our hands dirty. I want practice that makes me more present to reality—all of it, the beautiful and the challenging.

The point isn’t to escape the world, but to fall so fervently in love with being incarnate that we’re willing to be diverted and even disturbed by it.

The art above is by Beyond the Abysmal

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SYNCRETISM?

But wait a minute. What about the practice of borrowing from and integrating ideas from a variety of spiritual disciplines? Some critics say that is or verges on cultural appropriation, though it has a long and hallowed tradition under the name of SYNCRETISM.

If I resonate deeply with the Indigenous Australian understanding of the Dreamtime, do I have any right at all to love and abide with and exult in the Dreamtime?

In my present incarnation, I have recorded and worked with my dreams since I was a child. I have become as familiar with the realms we travel in while we sleep as it’s possible for a human to be. But I haven’t visited Australia, and none of my biological ancestors were Indigenous Australians.

Before addressing that question, I’ll ask a related inquiry: If an American resonates deeply with Buddhism and its teachings about Pali and Sanskrit terms like anatta, skandhas, anicca, dukkha, and related doctrines, do they have a right to live their lives in accordance with those precepts—despite the fact that Buddhism originated in India and evolved in Asia for 2,000 years before establishing a presence in America and Europe?

I say yes, they do.

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Though some may accuse me of being a cultural appropriator, I freely admit that my own spiritual path, while primarily rooted in Western Hermetic Magick, also exuberantly borrows from Tantra, Wicca, mystical Christianity, Fourth Way teachings, Goddess worship, the Dreamtime, and Sufism.

None of those paths lead to precisely the same goals as Western Hermetic Magick, and some even have contrary teachings, but I regard them as crucial adjuncts to my core practices and theories about life.

So how does this practice of mine jibe or not jibe with the first part of my essay here?

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Here’s how I’ll answer it: Pretty well, actually, and better than the “all is one” view does.

The whole case I’ve been making is that the traditions are different, not cosmetically but all the way down. If that’s true, then borrowing from them can’t mean pouring them into a blender and calling the gray paste Truth. That’s the move I’ve been arguing against.

If I believed Sufism and Tantra and Wicca were all secretly saying what Hermetic Magick says, there would be nothing worth borrowing. I’d already have it. I go to the Sufis because they theorize something my core tradition doesn’t emphasize, or emphasizes in a different key: the drunken, heartbroken, praise-singing ache for the Beloved.

I go to the Fourth Way because Gurdjieff’s ruthless insistence on self-observation is a corrective that my more exuberant tendencies need. The value comes from the difference.

So I don’t think of my path as a merger. I think of it as a household. Western Hermetic Magick is the hearth, the place where I live, the language I dream in, the discipline I’ve committed to walking all the way to wherever it goes.

The other traditions are honored guests at my table. Some of them argue with each other. Some of them argue with me. A Sufi teacher who speaks of fana, the annihilation of the self in God, is sitting next to a Hermeticist who wants to polish that same self into a nonperishable jewel.

I let the quarrel ramble on freely, because the quarrel teaches me things that a forced consensus never could.

That’s the difference between syncretism as mush and syncretism as conversation. Mush says: It’s all the same, so take what you like. Conversation says: These are different, so take them seriously, including the parts that rebuke you.

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That brings me back to where I began. The reason I won’t accept a beige God or Goddess is the same reason I won’t accept a beige eclecticism that pretends every tradition is interchangeable raw material for my personal growth.

The path of fervent incarnation inspires me to be intimate with specifics: this body, this place, this lineage, this teacher, this tradition with its strange demands and its sharp edges. Borrowing well means honoring that specificity even in the things we didn’t grow up with.

Goddess Wheel White Buffalo Woman — by James Roderick: Durga, includes Pele, Artemis, Baba Yaga, Nut, Ishtar, and White Buffalo Woman

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of October 29

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): This is your high holy season, Scorpio, which also happens to be the time when the veil is thinnest between this world and the other world. Others find this eerie, but you’ve always been at home here. You know how to explore the deepest depths, how to abide with what’s buried and hidden, and how to find treasure in the dark. In the coming weeks, your natural power to perceive what’s concealed will be amplified. For Halloween, be a psychopomp: a keeper of the threshold, a soul-guide draped in shadow and starlight who walks comfortably between the living and the dead. (PS: What secrets would you like to uncover? What spirits of the departed would you like to commune with? What seemingly impossible knowledge could you gain access to?)

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Early balloonists had little control over the direction of their flights. They couldn’t steer horizontally. But they found that changing altitude allowed them to catch different winds moving in different directions. The smartest way to change course was to rise or descend. Keep that image close, Sagittarius. If you can’t alter external circumstances directly, shift your perspective or your social environment. A new current may be waiting higher or lower than where you’ve been drifting. For Halloween, be a hot-air balloon pilot, comet rider, sky pirate, or bird god like the Hindu Garuda.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Life must both perpetuate itself and surpass itself. Capricorn philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that. We need continuity, but we also need transcendence. This beautifully encapsulates your assignment in the coming months. Your fun job will be to continue honoring the commitments that anchor your life while also making room for an exhilarating experiment or two. Make stability your launching pad rather than your destination. For Halloween, be the person you will be three years from now.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Inventors often describe breakthroughs arriving after weeks or months of seemingly unproductive tinkering. Clearly, their subconscious minds kept working on the puzzles even while their conscious minds felt frustrated. Eventually, a fresh arrangement appeared as if by magic. I suspect you’re approaching a threshold like that. Your experiments have been subliminally educating your intuition. The solution that’s searching for you may be cleverer than the one you’ve been searching for. For Halloween, be a time traveler, benevolent extraterrestrial, or eccentric professor.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Travelers crossing dark marshes on foot may report eerie, flickering lights hovering over the bog. Science explains these will-o’-the-wisps as gases from decaying matter that ignites in the night air. Folklore provides other theories: They’re spirit-lanterns, fairy lights, the lamps of the dead, or beckoning wanderers. I believe you’re in a similar liminal zone these days. Science and magic are both at work. Truth may take the form of both inexplicable mystery and fascinating anomalies that light your way. Be open to both! For Halloween, be a will-o’-the-wisp made flesh: a glowing spirit of the marsh draped in mist and lantern-light, beautiful and uncanny.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): For centuries, Japanese craftspeople have cultivated an ethos called shokunin kishitsu: a devotion to skilled work, lifelong learning, and continual refinement. The pursuit of perfection is less about reaching a final state than about bringing ever greater care and precision to the work. In traditional carpentry, this can mean years of learning to make joints whose quality resides in their strength and durability even though no customer will ever notice. I suggest you try out this attitude, Aries. Pour extra focus into details, regardless of whether anyone will applaud them. Be your best and brightest self not to impress anyone but yourself. For Halloween, be a blacksmith, artisan, or eccentric inventor.

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): How do the oldest trees live for so many years? What’s their secret to longevity? They’re very adaptable. During storms, they bend without breaking. During droughts, they slow down their growth. Cultivating alliances with fungi is one of their brilliant tactics. You’re in an opportune phase to favor this approach to strength and endurance, Taurus. Here’s what I propose: Weave gleaming strands of buoyant resilience into your fervent willpower. Experiment with yielding strategically rather than resisting reflexively. Boost your soulful power through flexibility and adaptability. For Halloween, be an ancient oak tree, forest guardian, or mushroom spirit.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): When archaeologists unearth a fresh batch of ancient artifacts, they never find a complete civilization in one dramatic moment. Each object or bone fragment helps explain another. A piece of pottery illuminates the meaning of an inscription. A broken staircase reveals why buildings were constructed as they were. Through educated guesswork and chains of association, knowledge accumulates. I invite you to wield your curiosity in the same way, Gemini. Treasure the sequence of little discoveries that gradually reshape your overall understanding. Have eager faith that every clue will lead you to further clues. For Halloween, be an archaeologist, paleontologist, or investigator of crime scenes. PS: I suspect you’re close to a metaphorical version of discovering a lost civilization.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Researchers studying wolves have found that play remains essential to them throughout their lives. Mature wolves wrestle, chase, and invent games that strengthen trust and sharpen cooperation. They never graduate from joyful experimentation. I hope their friskiness inspires you to remember, dear Cancerian, that serious responsibilities don’t require a terminally serious personality. That’s especially crucial to keep in mind now. I invite you to bring maximum amounts of playful intelligence into everything you value. Laugh during challenging conversations. Invent rituals that nobody else would think of. Observe the true rule: Amused delight generates an atmosphere where meaningful work may become exceptional. For Halloween, be a playful wolf. And before sleep for the next few nights, ask your subconscious to send you dreams of being a playful wolf.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Peacocks’ extravagant feathers are beautiful displays that also communicate health, vitality, and genetic resilience. They’re excellent role models for you. You should never apologize for expressing your charisma with style and theatrical flair. As long as your outer brilliance reflects inner vitality, your radiance will nourish rather than intimidate others. Authentic glamour is a public service. For Halloween, be a sun deity, lion monarch, or glamorous ringmaster.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Dear Oracle: I am obsessed with improving things. I tinker with systems that already work fine. I wake at 3 a.m. and catalog details I could have done better. My results are never ultimate enough. Please offer tips to help me find rest. —Drooping Purist.” Dear Drooping: The autumn season is your teacher. The harvest is in; the fields are meant to lie fallow. Nothing more can be improved by force. Growth happens underground, invisibly. In that spirit, I invite you to practice the radical art of leaving at least one thing gloriously alone so it can work its magic outside the reach of your conscious awareness. For Halloween, be a scarecrow who stands serenely in the harvested field, watching over everything, accomplishing its whole purpose by being present.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): If you’ve spent years regretting the moment a friend took credit for your best idea, that sting may finally lose its hold on you. If an opportunity you earned was handed to someone else, you may soon receive recognition in a form you never anticipated. And if an ancient family legend claims you were doomed to repeat the same mistake forever, you can now break that pattern. The days ahead favor overdue adjustments. Watch for turns of fortune that don’t erase what happened, but change what it means, and what becomes possible next. For Halloween, be an exorcist.

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DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

In the meme I reproduce above, poet Nikita Gill opens her dispatch with “Good news, I just got back from the future.” She beat me to the big headlines: no billionaires, AI in ethical hands, rewilding in hyperdrive, no starving children.

I made the trip to the future, too—all the way to 2065. I stayed longer than she did, maybe because I kept getting invited to dinner by people who wanted to try to understand what the fuck all of us were thinking back in 2026. Here’s some of what else I saw in that new and improved destiny for all of us.

The word “billionaire” is described as “archaic” in the dictionaries of that age. There is no such thing! They weren’t outright banned or exiled to desert islands. It’s just that no one wanted to be such a gross character anymore. Being a paragon of greedy immorality became deeply embarrassing. Would-be billionaires gave away much of their money before reaching that threshold.

The insects returned to the world. On country roads you have to pull over and scrape your windshield again, like in the old days. Suburban lawns have gone shaggy with clover and wild thyme, and bumblebees are so plentiful that kids learn to tell the species apart by their hum. Monarch butterflies migrate in such multitudes that towns along their route hold a Wing Day every autumn.

As an astrologer who loves astronomy and an astronomy geek who loves astrology, I was exultant that the Milky Way Galaxy is again visible in many skies. Light pollution isn’t totally banned, but it’s deeply diminished. Many people recognize constellations as well as their grandparents knew brand logos. Astrology is still around and thriving, I’m happy to report. Bonus: Hardly anyone uses it as a superstitious excuse anymore.

Health care in 2065 is omnipresent and matter-of-fact. It’s simply there when you need it, and no bills arrive later. Doctors spend the necessary unhurried time with each patient. “Medical bankruptcy” is a term history teachers have to explain, and students react the way we might to debtors’ prisons. When I told a nurse in Oakland that people in 2026 set up online fundraisers to pay for their chemotherapy, she laughed, assuming I was joking. Then she saw my face and hugged me.

Many rivers and mountains have legal standing as persons. The precedent was set when the Māori people petitioned the New Zealand government to exalt the status of the Whanganui River in 2017. It became the first river in the world to receive the same legal rights and standing as a human being. Who could have guessed that by 2065, 86 percent of America’s prominent natural features would have the same protections?

Hallelujah and praise the Goddess: Most billboards are gone by 2065. In their place are murals, poems, and enormous hand-painted questions: “What are you secretly good at?” “Who needs your forgiveness?” Advertisers complained for about five years. Then they discovered there was more money in making things people actually wanted.

The standard work week is four days long. The fifth is set aside for reverie and repair and visiting each other. You can spend it however you like, though scheduling a business meeting on it is considered rude.

Many neighborhoods have a Library of Free Things, stocked with stuff like ladders and cellos and telescopes and canning pots and costumes. Garages are emptied out. And since borrowing is how you meet the people three doors down, neighborhood friendships are thriving. That’s the subtlest triumph I saw.

Kids learn math and history with far more joy and competence than they did back in our time. They also learn more practical skills: like how to apologize well, absorb the news with critical discernment, listen to each other without rehearsing a rebuttal, cook for 12, and disagree with someone they love without anyone storming out. The eighth-grade final exam in one school I visited: Make a real friend of someone who isn’t like you.

The oceans are recovering. Kelp forests have grown back along the California coast. There are so many humpbacks, and they’re so talkative, that marine biologists now publish annotated collections of their songs, like editions of Homer.

Loneliness was declared a public health emergency, and the treatment worked. Retirement homes share buildings with daycares. Big apartment blocks are required to have communal kitchens, and Sunday soup night has become a civic holiday, as sacred as the Fourth of July picnic used to be.

Here’s one of the most unbelievably glorious explosions of good news: AI is useful and quiet. It helps farmers predict frost and helps doctors catch tumors early. The giant power-hungry data centers were retired once the models got leaner. The ones that remain run on sun, wind, and geothermal, and are mostly owned by the towns they sit in. Their waste heat warms bathhouses and greenhouses (mangoes growing in Minnesota).

Art, books, songs, and films made with AI stopped drawing attention. Now, real creators make a decent living. They choose whether their work trains models and are paid whenever their influence is used. Give people time and security and, it turns out, they’ll pay for beauty. There are more bands and more dance halls than ever.

Amazingly, over there in the future, there are far fewer prisons. For most nonviolent crimes, restorative justice has taken their place: Offenders sit across from the people they hurt and work out how to make it right. It doesn’t always succeed, but it succeeds often enough that the number of people who reoffend has plummeted. The prisons that remain, reserved for the truly dangerous, are run more like hospitals than cages.

People still get their hearts broken. They lose their parents too soon, make terrible decisions, cheat on lovers they wish they had been faithful to, and argue about whose turn it is to sweep the floor. Sorrow is still there. What’s gone is the industrial production of suffering.

None of this came about because of a few great heroes or one election. Ask people there how it happened, and they’ll tell you about millions of small, unspectacular acts: Someone planted a tree they’d never sit under. Someone kept a promise nobody was checking on. Someone decided, despite everything in the news, that it’s a glorious gift to be a conscious intelligence here on Earth and that life might be conspiring to help us and even liberate us.

That was my favorite part: PRONOIA is a household word in 2065. Few people remember that I wrote the definitive book on the subject, but I’m fine with that. The important thing is that it’s a beloved idea with wide inspirational influence.

The rise and fall of images of the future precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive.

—sociologist Fred Polak

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Hear my spoken-word song, “You Are a Prophet”":

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See and hear me deliver my campaign speech—my proposal to reinvent and redeem the future:

Rob Brezsny: If I Am Elected — delivered at 111 Minna Street in San Francisco

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My new book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available here as an inexpensive e-book.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of October 22

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Are there parts of the past you’re in bondage to? Maybe some shackles are even beloved to you, like a comfortable old belief, a protective habit, or a story about who you are that once helped you but now confines you. If you’re like most of us (me included!), you have fond memories that unfortunately impose limits on your future. Whatever they may be, dear Scorpio, now is an excellent time to disengage from their hold on you. To begin, make one small but potent gesture of liberation. As you do, say this aloud: “I am no longer chained to outdated versions of myself.” Alternate version, if you’re feeling extra fiery: “I am no longer &^%$@# chained to any *%#@&+ outdated versions of myself.”

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The Supreme Ministry of Astrological Myth has agreed to my request to temporarily give you a new designation. For the next four weeks, you are authorized to refer to yourself as the Contemplative Adventurer or the Meditative Rambler or the Pensive Pathfinder—or all three, if you like. In bestowing these titles, I’m encouraging you to free up heroic energy for use in your inner realms. One good way to capitalize on this blessing will be to relax in a comfy chair and negotiate truces with your demons. Another recommended activity: Ask the spirits of nature and the songs of birds to heighten your intuition about your future as you take long walks.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In 2029, I predict you’ll get nanotech implants to fight the aging of your body, ensuring that you’ll live well past 100. In 2032, you’ll begin downloading your nightly dreams into a digital medium, allowing you to study them at length and bolster your ability to learn from their coded messages. In 2037, you and a loved one will be able to take advantage of technology that allows you to merge telepathically. In 2043, you’ll take a vacation on the moon, where you’ll dance exuberantly in low lunar gravity. But in 2027, your task will be simpler. You’ll learn to love yourself better and treat yourself with more tender kindness than ever before. Now’s a great time to get started!

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Many celebrated chefs insist that acidity is an underestimated element that transforms good food into memorable food. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar awakens other flavors already present. Consider what the equivalent might be in your own life, Aquarius. What’s the seemingly simple ingredient that could enliven everything else? More playfulness or more walking? More music, more honesty, or more sleep? The astrological omens are clear that now isn’t the time to overhaul your entire existence. Instead, identify one or two subtle additions that make your existing gifts brighter.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Nothing is the same as what it appears to be, but neither is it the opposite of what it seems to be. Life isn’t fair, yet we’d be wrong to say it’s unfair. You should be on the lookout for the words that are NOT being said. Assume that every question has a hidden complication. Be skeptical if anyone tells you the current mysteries are unsolvable and be eager to discover the deeper riddle buried inside each superficial riddle. But now here’s the good news. The maddening complexities will ultimately prove to be fun and helpful if you’re diligent in untangling them. The key to success: Be tender as you explore uncomfortable thoughts and frustrating feelings.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The 18th-century Aries watchmaker John Harrison solved one of the great scientific problems of his time: how to determine longitude at sea. Many learned astronomers failed to crack the puzzle, yet Harrison, largely self-taught, persisted for decades to refine the method. His breakthrough transformed navigation and enhanced the safety of sea journeys. I nominate Harrison to be your inspirational role model in the coming weeks, Aries. Persistence combined with ingenuity and a trust in your hunches will be more important to your success than your mastery of the way things have always been done.

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If you’d like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A greenhouse can coax flowers to open ahead of their natural timetable. I recommend applying a similar approach to the fears taking root in you. Rather than letting them spread gradually and feed you a stream of low-grade dread, push them toward an immediate peak. Let every concern become enormous and fully formed as quickly as possible. Invite the anxieties to arrive all at once. Then meet them in a decisive confrontation, exhaust their drama, and clear space for adventures that will give you deep, sweet pleasure. Set a date for your worrygasm, the grand finale of your fretting, for no later than 48 hours from now.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini-born physicist Richard Feynman was famous not only for his brilliance but for his refusal to pretend he understood things he didn’t. He routinely asked childishly simple questions in rooms full of experts. “But why does that happen?” was one of his favorites. Those naïve inquiries often cracked open problems the specialists had stopped seeing. He distrusted jargon and prized the ability to explain a complex idea in plain words. If you can’t explicate it simply, he suggested, you don’t really understand it. I invite you to adopt this as your strategy in the coming weeks, Gemini. Your superpowers will be to pose obvious questions everyone else is too proud or numb to ask, and to insist on answers you can actually understand.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin lived to 100 and danced to the end. She taught the idea that movement could heal. Our bodies, given permission to move freely and expressively, know how to release grief, summon joy, and restore wholeness. She once danced through her own cancer diagnosis as a form of medicine and lived for decades longer. Her lesson for you: Your body has its own intelligence, and you can enhance your ability to access it. In the coming weeks, let it lead. Dance, stretch, walk, sway. Trust what your flesh knows that your mind hasn’t figured out yet.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In at least one way, Leo, you’ll be coming home during the coming weeks. Perhaps you will discover a sanctuary that brings out your best: a power spot where you feel unguarded and authentic. Or you may gather (or stumble into) the community you’ve always imagined, or link up with a web of allies and resources that once felt out of reach. You might dream of journeying to the land where your ancestors loved and labored for generations, or consider a pilgrimage to a storied place that holds the key to a mystery you’re hungry to resolve.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Renaissance astronomer and astrologer Tycho Brahe spent decades collecting precise measurements of planetary motion. He never developed a final theory to explain the data, and he harbored mistaken theories about how the solar system worked. But his observations enabled his assistant Johannes Kepler to discover the laws of planetary orbits. You could play a similar role, Virgo. Your careful attention to details can lay the groundwork for important realizations, whether by you or someone working in collaboration with you.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I admire your ability to stay outside the conflict and offer detached, incisive commentary. I respect your preference for avoiding small-minded camps and partisan skirmishes. But in the coming days, I hope you’ll step directly into the muck and bring the passionate contributions of a devotee who’s invested in the outcome. Put the grand ideas aside and stir up good trouble in service of practical justice. Clever sidestepping won’t do; what’s needed are honest tests of what actually works. Be a pragmatist who makes soulful things happen through tender focus on the concrete tasks.

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A Field Guide to Anger

Once upon a time, I regarded anger as a single beast. When I investigated further, I realized it’s a whole menagerie. Some are noble, and some are mangy scavengers. A few are ghosts that never got the news that the war ended long ago.

I’ll name the riffraff first.

The Ricochet originates in an old wound and bounces around until it hits an innocent target that’s standing nearby. When my computer freezes, I’m suddenly furious, but I’m not really furious at the computer. (And what good would that do, anyway?) I’m mad at a feeling of helplessness I had as a child. The computer just happened to be in the line of fire.

Junk-Food Anger is what I snack on when I scroll through the news. It tastes delicious for a few seconds. It gives me a jolt of righteous sugar, then it leaves me bloated and depleted, and I haven’t changed a thing in the world.

Proxy anger shows up when I’m not brave enough to be angry at the person who actually deserves it. So I get irritated at the slow driver or the guy in front of me who takes too long giving his order at Starbucks. These are scapegoats I conscript so I won’t have to have the difficult conversation I’ve been avoiding.

There’s Ghost Anger, which defends me against enemies who left my life long ago. It’s still standing guard at a gate no one has approached in months or even years, still clutching its spear and waiting for an attack that’s never coming. I feel a strange tenderness toward this one and seem to provide it with special leeway.

Habit anger arrives because it has always arrived in situations like the one I’m in. It has no information to give me. It’s just a groove worn into my nervous system.

All of these are compulsive, reactive, misplaced, irrelevant, and wasteful. They burn fuel and go nowhere. They make me stupider. They love to be retold and embellished. They grow fat on repetition.

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Now I’ll survey other kinds of anger.

Clean Blade is an anger that arrives quickly, cuts exactly what needs cutting, and then goes back in its sheath. It doesn’t linger or fester. It says “No, that’s not okay,” and then it’s done. I feel lighter afterwards, not heavier.

There’s the Guardian, which rises up when someone is trying to trespass on my soul’s territory, whether it’s my time, my body, my creative work, or my love. The Guardian draws the line in the dirt, and it doesn’t need to shout, because it knows exactly where the line is.

Midwife anger helps me see truths I’ve been half-hiding from myself. It births surges of heat and light that reveal what I’ve been pretending not to notice. With a relieved shock, I see what I actually want. The Midwife is a clarifier that strips away the delusional fog.

Compass is an anger that points toward an injustice that really does need my attention. Not the cartoon outrages served up by the algorithms, but the specific, actionable wrongs that I’m in a position to do something about.

These angers are real and deserved. They’re a form of fierce love that protects what’s precious. I welcome and appreciate them because they’re on the side of life.

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So how do I tell the difference? I’ve gathered clues over the years. The wasteful kinds feel sticky and gooey. They loop, repeating the same sentence in my head a hundred times. They’re vague about what they actually want and make me feel righteous and superior.

The healthy kinds feel clean. They’re specific, pointing toward a boundary or a change, and once I take action, they dissolve. They make me feel more like myself, not more like a victim or a judge.

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As an astrologer, I think of this as the difference between Mars in its exalted state and Mars in its debased state. The planet of anger is the source of courage, desire, initiative, and the drive to defend what we love. Without it, we’d be mush. The question is never whether to have Mars energy. The question is whether we’re feeding it garbage or giving it good work to do.

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Here’s what I do now. When anger barges in, I ask it, “Are you a messenger or a squatter?” If it’s a messenger, I listen to its news and thank it. If it’s a squatter, I acknowledge that it once served a purpose and tell it goodbye.

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out which one I’m dealing with. Sometimes a single blast of anger is half messenger, half squatter, and I have to separate the gold from the gravel.

But the inquiry itself changes everything. The moment I ask the question, I’m no longer possessed by the anger. I’m in a relationship with it. That’s where the magic begins.

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Listen to my song “Unhappy Hour”:

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BOOK OF ANGER

I predict there will come a day when my fury at the world’s injustices will become so sublime that I’ll sit down and write The Book of Anger in one sustained three-week frenzy of creative indignation. It will be filled with stories that inspire those who read it to express their unique sacred wrath in constructive ways.

Until then, I will work to sublimate my rage so it doesn’t leak all over everything. I’ll honor it by honing it and treasuring it as a precious resource, alchemically blending it with my compassion so that it will always be expressed in the name of love.

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Raw truth: My rage is a holy fire that scorches moldy veils and purges false clarity.

True intention: I call forth my intelligent fury in an ecstatic refusal to abide idiocy and villainy in silence.

Real zeal: I invoke my wisest wrath not just to name what I reject, but to compost what must rot so wild benevolence can flow.

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My new book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available as an inexpensive e-book.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of October 15

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): One morning soon, I predict you will open your inner eyes as well as your outer eyes and discover that you feel freer than you have in ages. Old specters that once pestered you will seem strangely powerless. Worn-out customs will have loosened their hold, and an ancient obligation will finally be settled. By some grace that neither you nor I can quite explain, at least some of the chains you fashioned in your own mind will have fallen away. What then? Celebrate! Host a personal “Out of Captivity” party, and give yourself a day or two to revel in your newfound liberty. Once you’re ready to make purposeful use of that delightful independence, ask yourself: “Where in my life do I most need a clean beginning?”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Not so long ago, you got hints and clues that you were on the verge of getting a taste of tantalizing and off-limits treats. Weren’t you ready to accept when the invitation suddenly dissolved? And by now, haven’t you nearly stopped expecting to enjoy another chance? Then imagine your surprise if that temptation winds its way back to you soon. When you finally take a bite, it may taste and feel nothing like you anticipated. The wisest move will be to let go of your old assumptions and welcome the experience as it is. My prediction: You’ll be delightedly surprised by how deeply and sweetly it alters the way you understand reality—even if at first it feels disorienting.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Your upcoming challenges call to mind a feat once accomplished by conservationist and entertainer Steve Irwin. No, you won’t, as he did, feed a huge crocodile by hand while holding an infant in your other arm. But you may need to bring together qualities that seem at odds: fierceness and tenderness, a wild spirit and a protective instinct, boldness and love. Luckily, I am very sure you will summon the power and flair to do that.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Ecologists have found that transition zones, like where forests meet meadows or where land meets water, can support high biodiversity. They may include species from both neighboring habitats as well as species adapted to the distinctive conditions in the boundary zone. I propose we make these places your power metaphor for the coming weeks, Capricorn. You, too, can flourish in edge habitats. Instead of feeling compelled to choose one identity, community, philosophy, or style, appreciate your role as a translator between worlds. Your greatest gifts may emerge because you refuse to belong exclusively to any single camp. Revel in your fertile in-between-ness.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): After pondering what might bring fresh vigor to your love life, I’ve arrived at an audacious suggestion: Offer a smoldering prayer while making love to a saintly soul in a place you regard as sacred. If that combination proves impractical, try just one or two parts of it: Pray wildly during an intimate encounter; flirt with or even seduce a person of uncommon goodness; kiss and hug and cuddle in a setting that feels holy to you; or speak to the divine in a titillating language you wouldn’t use in a formal religious service. The point is to let sensual delight and spiritual longing meet rather than keeping them apart.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You sometimes regard pleasure like a reward you have to earn through suffering, as if joy were a luxury item requiring payment in pain. But I have an alternate theory: Relaxed glee and earthy enjoyments are essential nutrients that are key to your health. So in my view, denying yourself beauty and comfort depletes you. I hope you will heed my guidance in the coming weeks, which is to treat yourself to almost more fun, happiness, bliss, and amusement than is allowed by law. See if you can break all previous records for rejuvenating delectation. New law of your universe, at least for the next four weeks: The quest for jovial gusto and zesty zeal are mandatory aspirations.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): Before Aries-born Maya Angelou became a celebrated author, she was San Francisco’s first Black female streetcar conductor, a calypso dancer, a cook, a journalist in Ghana, and an actress. She didn’t publish her first memoir until she was 41. She spoke six languages and refused to believe that any single identity could contain her. I offer her as your role model in the coming weeks, Aries. It’s time to celebrate the wondrous truth that you don’t have to be just one thing. In fact, the astrological omens suggest you’ll thrive by rejoicing in the many disparate selves you are and have been and imagining new ones you might like to add. How kaleidoscopic do you dare to be?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Here’s a hypothesis worth entertaining: You don’t fully know everything you want. Not yet. Not at the core, where desire isn’t well-behaved but turns wild and intense. Your fluency with surface desire can sometimes keep you from excavating the mysteries that live below it. The familiar longings override the stranger, stronger ones that haven’t found their bearings. So there are aspects of your primal yearnings that remain unexamined, simply because they require a particular stillness and courage to unearth completely. The good news: Now is an unusually favorable time to go looking.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Is your mental agility a gift or curse? It depends on whether you use it to avoid taking a stand or else deepen your understanding. In the coming weeks, Gemini, I hope you will practice the cagey skill of holding multiple truths simultaneously without letting that multiplicity become an excuse for never choosing or never committing. The goal is to encourage your magnificent mind to serve your heart rather than to override its tender wisdom. I love it when you unleash your clever analysis and it doesn’t devolve into sophisticated evasion.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Astronomers searching for planets around distant stars rarely see the planets directly. Instead, they notice tiny wobbles in the stars or faint dips in their brightness as the planets pass in front of them. You can and should practice a similar art now. Dramatic evidence may be unavailable, so watch for subtle shifts in mood, timing, synchronicity, and atmosphere. Small disturbances may reveal important hidden influences. Your most useful discoveries won’t come from looking harder but from noticing more gently.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Glassblowers repeatedly place molten glass into blazing furnaces as they shape it. They don’t heat it once and expect it to stay pliable forever. Again and again, they return it to the fire so new possibilities become available. This reminds me of the current chapter of your life story, Leo. Emotional intensity keeps recurring, repeatedly returning you to the heart of the heat and pressure. This may sometimes feel like a test or ordeal, but I think it’s the best way for you to master the crucial lessons and ensure the healing transformations. Be patient as you forge your masterpiece.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Master storytellers know that memorable heroes are admired because they continue moving despite uncertainty. Courage entails a resilient and affectionate partnership with doubt. I hope you’ll remember this if your confidence temporarily flickers in the coming weeks. There’s no need to waste precious energy trying to eliminate every hesitation before taking your next meaningful step. Let your questions accompany your convictions. They may sharpen your judgment. The coming weeks favor brave, thoughtful action, not flawless self-assurance.

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My new book isn’t my solo creation, but a collaboration between me and my Soul Team. For more info about that spectacular fact, go here: tinyurl.com/OurSoulTeam

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Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is a manual, manifesto, and storybook. It encourages and inspires us to rearrange our habitual ways of perceiving and understanding the world.

We describe earthy experiments, playful shifts in perception, daring dreamwork, quirky rituals, and wild and funny meditations that have helped my Soul Team and me loosen the iron clutches of consensus reality.

We also share our Alternative Enlightenment Shocks: transgressive, playful, and sometimes chaotic interventions in the everyday flow. They’re designed to liberate us from the boring assumptions and theories we’re addicted to.

None of these rumbles and rambles asks us to renounce our humanness. They invite us to inhabit our beloved flesh more fully, so that the sacred becomes available everywhere, not just sitting in the meditation sanctuary, but also standing at the kitchen sink, dancing in the wetland mud, and waiting in line at the DMV.

Below is an excerpt from the book.

We Don’t Choose to Use Drugs

In our fun project to evoke altered states of awareness, my Soul Team and I don’t use drugs.

Some people find it strange that we don’t call on marijuana, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and similar technologies. A few fellow consciousness explorers regard our choice with bemused skepticism, as if we are choosing to climb a mountain barefoot.

They’re not wrong to be puzzled. Psychedelics are experiencing a renaissance. They have moved from counterculture taboo to therapeutic mainstream, from Grateful Dead concerts to clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Ayahuasca ceremonies, psilocybin retreats, and MDMA-assisted therapy are now respectable paths to the Mysterium.

Many wise guys and riot grrrls we esteem have chosen this mode of experimental exploration: Jean Houston, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Katherine MacLean, Sara Lewis, Maria Sabina, Sonia Gray, and Rick Strassman, to name a few.

So why don’t we partake?

The short answer: We want to build doorways, not smash our way through temporary portals. Our goal is to become skillful architects of consciousness, not meandering tourists.

We want our access to The Other Real World to be a maestro trick we can summon at will, in any circumstance, without depending on any substance beyond what we ourselves can generate.

But there’s a longer answer too, and it begins with acknowledging the bounty we gained from drugs in our earlier years.

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The Gifts We Received

My Soul Team and I aren’t snooty purists who have never touched psychedelics. In my younger adulthood, I experimented reverently with marijuana, hashish, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.

These technologies were generous teachers. They provided abundant evidence that our materialism-obsessed culture prevaricates about the fundamental nature of existence.

As a suburban middle-class kid from the Midwest and New Jersey, I had far to go in my quest to shed my mind-forg’d manacles. My journey was slowed by numerous detours and mistakes, but I eventually claimed my own earthy, hard-earned share of Hermetic Gnostic knowledge.

Crucially for me, my early psychedelic forays gave me wondrous gifts. They demolished any illusions I might have that the material world is the only game in town. They gave me visceral, firsthand immersion in the reality that shamans, sorcerers, and mystics have always known: that there are other dimensions and other ways of perceiving in addition to the usual stories that consensus reality insists on. For that, I am deeply grateful.

My Soul Team and I don’t look down on those who continue to use these tools. How could we? The psychedelic path is ancient, sacred, and necessary for many people. It’s among the prime practices of Indigenous cultures worldwide, as well as an often-used technology in many mystery schools.

But we understand that the very thing that makes psychedelics so powerful is also their limitation for us: their ability to blast through the barriers of ordinary consciousness solely with chemical assistance.

The Problem with Shortcuts

As I wrote in my journal during the experiments of early adulthood, psychedelics comprise a “chemical battering ram” that simply crashes through the doors of perception. There’s little adroitness or craft involved. One of my early magick teachers called drug use, no matter how responsible, “storming the Grail Castle through violence.”

That phrase lodged in my consciousness like a healing splinter.

The revelations that drugs provided were indeed hard to hold onto. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could translate no more than 15 percent (usually much less) of my discoveries in the fourth dimension into usable understandings back in normal waking awareness. If my fantastic insights couldn’t be turned into practical improvements in my life or anyone else’s life, what good were they?

Compare this to dreamwork, which I have practiced since childhood. With dreams, I have seen steady growth, both in my unconscious mind’s ability to generate meaningful stories and in my conscious mind’s skill at interpreting them. Every night, I practice. Every morning, I remember, record, and reflect. Over many years, this has built muscles and created skills. No one can ever become a master of the dream realm, but I have gathered many riches there that serve me well in the waking world.

Psychedelics, by contrast, bypass willpower entirely. They work regardless of whether we have consciously cultivated any capacity for altered states. They deliver the experience but not necessarily the ability to integrate it, sustain it, or return to it at will.

What We’re Building Instead

When William Blake wrote that “this world of Imagination is the world of Eternity,” he gave me a revelation as profound as any drug-induced vision: that the creative imagination itself, when disciplined and cultivated, can be a main doorway to The Other Real World.

His gift changed everything. It meant that my passion for music, poetry, writing, art, dreamwork, and ritual could be at the heart of my spiritual practice. Every song I compose, every poem I write, every waking vision I induce, potentially becomes medicine with which I can shift and mutate consciousness: a method for playing wild and free in The Other Real World.

Here are other practices that can provide robust access to altered states:

• Meditation: We practice multiple, ever-evolving forms. Among our baseline practices are techniques from Hermetic Qabalah and Western Magick, Sufism, the Fourth Way, and Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. But we also celebrate the approach articulated by scholar Christopher Bamford, who said that as a free act, meditation has no fixed recipe. Every meditation is a trial run and experiment, different each time it’s done. It thrives on improvisation and play. There’s no way to “do it wrong.”

• Tantric practice: Erotic play and lovemaking are spiritual technologies.

• Through experiments with breathwork, prolonged arousal, feral prayers, conscious intention, and rowdy play, we generate sustained states of breakthrough ecstasy and epiphanies that can rival drug-induced bliss.

• Music and movement: We drum, chant, sing, and dance ourselves into altered states. Sound and rhythm are among humanity’s oldest consciousness-shifting tools, and we deploy them regularly.

• Creative work: When we write and sing with full attention and surrender, we can enter flow states that open directly into The Other Real World.

• Ritual and ceremony: We create ceremonies and seek imaginal adventures that invoke spirit allies and ancestors. These are collaborative performances that inspire us far beyond what we could do alone.

• An array of Alternative Enlightenment Shocks: healing transgressions and joyous what-the-fuck experiments carried out amidst the everyday routine.

The common thread in all of these? They require work and demand practice. They ask us to develop skills, build capacity, and strengthen the muscles of consciousness.

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The Sustainable Freak Zone

Every time we successfully enter an altered state through our own cultivated abilities, we’re not just indulging in a solo breakthrough. We’re also building infrastructure in the Anima Mundi, or World Soul: what mystics from diverse cultures have called Indra’s Net, the Noosphere, the Akashic Records, the Collective Unconscious, and many other names.

We mostly name it as The Other Real World. But to ensure we don’t take ourselves too tragically seriously, we also refer to it as The Peak Freak Zone.

Consciousness explorers like us are participants in “The Great, Gorgeous, Glorious Work”: a vast interdimensional construction project that has been ongoing for millennia. Each technique we master, each successful journey we make through our own human power, adds another facet to the infrastructure that makes further exploration by others more possible.

Psychedelics are like taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain. You get to the summit, enjoy the view, and gain the revelation. But you haven’t built the trail, and you can’t guide others. You’ll need the helicopter the next time you want to return.

Our practice is trail-building. It’s slower and more laborious. But every time we make the journey, the path becomes more accessible not just for us, but potentially for other adventurers who follow.

We’re not just visiting The Other Real World. We’re creating stable portals between the realms. These portals stay open. The next time, we can access them at will. They don’t require any substance beyond our own consciousness.

The Political Dimension

There’s another reason for our choice.

When you need a substance to access certain states of consciousness, you’re creating a dependency. Not necessarily an addiction, but a structural reliance on a technology outside yourself. You need to acquire the substance. Is it possible to ensure its quality? Maybe, maybe not. If the substance is illegal, you’ve got to avoid being arrested. And chances are good you will require downtime and extra self-care to regenerate from the experience.

By contrast, these are always available for us hassle-free: our breath, our imagination, our nightly dreams, our capacity for inducing waking dreams in broad daylight, and our ability to enter altered states through movement, music, sex, poetry outbreaks, meditation, ritual, and friendly shocks. No government can criminalize them. No scarcity can prevent access. They are freely given gifts we earn through our generous and intimate relationship with the Great Mystery.

In a world of increasing surveillance and control, these concerns matter. For us, the most radical act is to take advantage of the fact that human consciousness itself, properly cultivated, is the most powerful psychedelic of all.

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The Fuller Spectrum

Our choice comes from ambition, not primness or fear. No apologies or inhibitions: We want full access to the entire spectrum of consciousness that’s available, on demand, in any circumstance.

We aspire to enter visionary states while making love or improvising rumbustious music or dancing in the wetland mud. We want to glide into The Peak Freak Zone while hiking up Mt. Tamalpais or babbling poetry or washing dishes and sweeping the floor. Our lives must be continuously permeable to the sacred, not just during special journeys with special substances.

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Hear my song “I Want Everybody”:

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available as a cheap e-book: https://tinyurl.com/REBELSebook

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Check out my NOTES: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/notes

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of October 8

LIBRA: Periodically, you have the cosmic right to receive precisely what you need. Life is duty-bound to deliver a close approximation of full satisfaction. I believe now is one of those times. So please be bold and articulate about naming the specific blessings you require. Write them down, speak them aloud, and pray for them—not as a demand, but as a hearty invitation. Then, for a while, live as if all of creation is indeed honor-bound to respond accordingly, adjusting its behavior so it’s in harmony with the gifts you’ve asked for.

SCORPIO: Every Thursday night, I haul my trash bin out to the street so the collectors can empty it the following morning. Most weeks it’s three-quarters full. But now and then I produce an unusually large haul of debris. On those occasions, I have to turn into a one-person compaction crew: I grab a low-hanging branch of the persimmon tree, hoist myself up, drop down feet-first into the can, and bounce around to squash everything enough to squeeze in the overflow. Consider this my audition to be your role model, Scorpio. According to my reading of the celestial weather, it’s time for you to consolidate and discard at least half a year’s accumulation of obsolete clutter—both the invisible emotional kind and the tangible stuff filling your space.

SAGITTARIUS: Ancient navigators sometimes crossed vast stretches of sea by studying the swells beneath their boats. Their bodies were instruments of perception that enabled them to feel the subtle wave patterns generated by winds and distant islands. Your intuition has a similar sensitivity these days, Sagittarius. I hope you will trust it: what your whole being senses before your rational mind assembles the evidence. I call this fully embodied intelligence. It deserves a key role in your decision-making.

CAPRICORN: I’ve never been a fan of Capricorn poet Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931). The ideas he expressed seem commonplace and sentimental to me. But his book The Prophet is an all-time bestseller translated into over 100 languages. Millions of readers have adored and benefited from his words, and he’s acclaimed as a literary hero in his native Lebanon. So who cares what I think! I’ll just shut up and appreciate the fact that he worked hard and published a lot. His disciplined, painstaking efforts have been widely inspirational. Let’s make him your role model for the coming months. I think you’re primed to create enduring offerings that nourish people’s souls.

AQUARIUS: Think of an aspect of your life that you have always wished you could change but have assumed or feared you could never change. What if, sometime soon, you try to change it, but this time you do it with playful lightheartedness? You resolve to feel zero stress and have as much fun as possible as you try to shift how this problem works. You decide you will use your imagination to dream up unprecedented and even outrageous ways to break your trance and invite sweet liberation to swoop in.

PISCES: Geologists tell us that over time, rocks really do get transformed under sustained pressure. Their material gets reorganized into denser, more stable stuff. This is an apt metaphor for you, dear Pisces. You’re under pressure right now, and it may feel intense. But what if it’s actually reconfiguring you? Maybe the constraints are what you need to make you more focused, more essential, and more real. Not all pressure is bad, and this is proof. Ask yourself: What is this pressure making possible that freedom couldn’t create? Let yourself be reorganized.

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If you’d like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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ARIES: “Dear Oracle: My secret terror is being ordinary. I need to be special, and lately I’m worried I’m just average and unremarkable. That thought is repugnant to me! Can you offer any advice? —Afraid of Average.” Dear Afraid: The pressure to be extraordinary is exhausting because it’s the wrong goal. Your birthright and your life assignment aren’t about being special in the sense of better-than. You’re simply meant to be vividly, generously, amazingly yourself. In the coming weeks, I invite you to trade the anxious hunt for superiority for the warm, throbbing joy of full self-expression. Shine because it feels fantastic, not to outrank anyone.

TAURUS: Ravens sometimes hide food while pretending to conceal it elsewhere, especially if another raven is observing. They’re strategic and imaginative and aware of how they’re perceived. With their social intelligence as inspiration, I will encourage you to think more consciously about the stories you’re broadcasting. Which precious projects will flourish better if protected from premature scrutiny? Do you have any in-progress blooms that really should continue to incubate before being revealed? Discernment isn’t deception. PS: Conversely, there may be a part of you that deserves greater visibility.

GEMINI: The Taurus philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. You Geminis are naturally inclined to resist that advice. Many of you analyze experiences while they’re still unfolding. Can I coax you to try a different approach in the coming weeks? As usual, you may be tempted to figure everything out immediately. But the most useful clarity won’t arrive until later, as you survey what has occurred and recognize patterns you couldn’t see in real time. So try to stay curious rather than overly diagnostic. Keep gathering impressions, stories, and clues. Allow events to transpire like chapters in a book whose ending you haven’t reached yet.

CANCER: The Germans have a word, Sehnsucht, for a feeling that my English language can’t quite convey: a deep, sweet, aching longing for something you can’t name. It may be a faraway home you’ve never visited or a wholeness you seem to remember without ever having had it. Most people treat this yearning as a problem to be fixed or numbed. But I think it’s sacred information, Cancerian, and you’re especially fluent in it right now. Don’t rush to resolve the ache or explain it away. Instead, follow it like a scent. What is your Sehnsucht pointing toward? Let it lead you toward the beauty and meaning your soul is homesick for.

LEO: Botanists know that climbing vines have a simple approach. They keep extending their sensitive tendrils until they discover something sturdy enough to support upward growth. Their progress depends on continual experimentation. I love it when you imitate this style of intelligence, Leo, which I think will be especially useful and successful during the coming weeks. So instead of demanding guarantees before beginning a new endeavor, offer exploratory feelers. Ask friendly questions. Test prototypes. The right support system probably already exists, but may not reveal itself until you reach toward it.

VIRGO: One of my favorite Virgos works in a museum cleaning centuries-old paintings with exquisite patience. She uses tiny swabs and gentle solvents to lift away layers of darkened varnish and grime. She’s an expert at making the original colors emerge so vividly that the painting looks newly made. But her work demands artful restraint. If she presses too hard or applies the wrong solvent, she could destroy the very thing she means to reveal. This approach can be your specialty in the coming weeks, Virgo. I hope you will attend to valuables that have been obscured by accumulated grime, like old habits, stale assumptions, and other people’s projections. Your task is to gently lift it all away and let the true colors shine.

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I invite you to compile a list of the sources you trust most to help guide your journey.

You might want to include: 1. people you love; 2. animals you love; 3. teachers you love; 4. inner resources like spirit guides or your higher self; 5. special parts of the natural world, like beloved trees or rivers; 6. your nightly dreams; 7. favorite authors, musicians, and artists; 8. your ancestors; 9. your past or future selves; 10. your intuition.

But remember that not even these radiant centers of inspiration and support offer infallible guidance 100 percent of the time. Acknowledge, furthermore, that healing and assistance may sometimes arrive from unexpected directions.

THE ART OF GETTING RELIABLE GUIDANCE

People who blindly deride astrology like to assert that consulting a horoscope or sitting for a reading is an unsound way to make judicious decisions about one’s life.

But the haters rarely follow that pronouncement with a detailed revelation of what the sound methods are. Do they know of some Bureau of Acceptable Life Information that issues official rulings on which sources of guidance are worthy and which are not?

I don’t mean to be glib. I am honestly puzzled by the apparent certainty that unambiguous methods exist.

Would the astrology haters approve of the guidance we’ve absorbed from our high school teachers? From our parents and relatives, our friends and colleagues? From the experts and authorities who fling their opinions at us from all directions?

Not one of them is an entirely reliable narrator. None can be trusted to deliver 100-percent accurate, unfailingly wise counsel on how best to conduct our lives.

And how about the lyrics of our favorite songwriters, the literature of Nobel laureates, and the films of Oscar winners? Is it a brilliant move to take on their influence—to let their art infiltrate our subconscious minds and skew and shift our attitudes? Or might we make foolish moves if we regard them as unfailing sources of smart guidance?

Or how about the philosophies of the Upanishads or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Susan Sontag? The psychological ideas of Carl Jung or Clarissa Pinkola Estés or Erik Erikson? The writing of Joan Didion or Pema Chödrön or Ta-Nehisi Coates? The social science of Malcolm Gladwell? The economic theories of Paul Krugman?

Are they all foolproof, unimpeachable sources of sage tutelage that we can unconditionally rely on to steer our personal lives in a righteous direction?

Or should we be ruthlessly careful to draw our direction and inspiration only from paragons of rationalism and science? Should our night tables be stacked with books by Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and mathematician Terence Tao? Should we read passages from their teachings every night in the expectation that they will shape us into paragons of reason and unfailingly lead us to make prudent decisions about how to live?

I don’t think so. It’s fine if those tomes and others like them constitute part of our own personal Bureau of Acceptable Life Information. But we need to get an education from a variety of other sources as well—each of which, like Hawking and Darwin and Kasparov and Tao, is imperfect and incomplete.

It’s perfectly sensible to look to astrology as one of those sources, because astrology is a branch of psychology as well as an art form. It’s also a mode of storytelling that can inspire us as much as the marvelous tales told by Virginia Woolf, Ursula K Le Guin, William Shakespeare, and 10,000 other raconteurs.

Like ancient myths, our nightly dreams, and the folk tales of all cultures, astrology is designed to stimulate our imaginations as we ruminate on what it means to be human.

It’s an evocative mythopoetic system that helps us identify and transform our subconscious patterns, understand our mysterious soul’s code, and have fun speculating about the big picture of our destinies.

Self-anointed “debunkers” rail against astrologers’ predictions, acting as if speculating about the future were a crime against levelheaded thought.

Meanwhile, economists, meteorologists, sportscasters, trend analysts, and political pundits regularly churn out bad prognostications based on dubious data. They spread far more delusions and cost people more money than those of us who divine cosmic omens. And when it comes to weather, the failures can be measured in human lives.

Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences, has spent years documenting how badly our forecasting machinery stumbles at moments that matter.

When Hurricane Patricia exploded into the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere in 2015, not one of the official numerical models—including the multimillion-dollar system the U.S. has invested in for exactly this purpose—came close to predicting its catastrophic intensification.

The following year, Mass showed that America’s flagship forecasting models trailed far behind their European counterparts in charting the track of Hurricane Matthew, the storm that went on to kill over 600 people.

These are life-and-death stakes, and the best-funded prediction machines on Earth get them wrong with regularity. Has any astrological prognostication ever carried consequences like that?

In the 13th century, for example, a brilliant Khitan scholar named Yelü Chucai served Genghis Khan as court astrologer, reading the heavens for omens. More than once he used his interpretations to talk the conqueror out of slaughter.

In 1226, Chucai saved tens of thousands of lives. Genghis had ordered a total massacre of the Tangut people, but the sage insisted that a heavenly sign—a colossal planetary conjunction in Capricorn—was a clear omen not to proceed with the plan. Amazingly, Khan agreed.

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How about doctors? Are they skilled at offering forecasts? A systematic review published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE examined one crucial slice of that question: how accurately physicians predict the life expectancy of terminally ill patients.

That information can be vital for patients and families alike. How will a dying person spend their final days? How much time is left to do everything that still must be done?

The review pooled 42 studies and more than 8,000 individual prognoses. Its finding: Clinicians’ estimates vary wildly and are frequently inaccurate. No identifiable subgroup of “expert” forecasters reliably gets it right. Read the study.

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As for predicting financial futures, public-finance journalist Liz Farmer wrote an article whose headline sums up the consensus: “Why Economists’ Predictions Are Usually Wrong”

More: “Why economists can’t forecast”

The IMF macroeconomist Prakash Loungani studied the record directly and found that his fellow economists had failed to foresee 148 of the previous 150 recessions. “The record of failure to predict recessions,” he concluded, “is virtually unblemished.”

Shall I hazard a guess at how many human lives have been misdirected, sometimes catastrophically, by the erroneous counsel of financial forecasters?

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Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan’s book Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy. I have important decisions to make about the future of my family and the arc of my work, and I’m sure he’ll provide excellent counsel.

YES, I TRULY BELIEVE ASTROLOGICAL COUNSEL, LIKE PSYCHOTHERAPY, CAN BE HELPFUL IN GUIDING OUR DECISIONS, EVEN AS I ALSO TREASURE LOGIC AND REASON AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.

I’ve been a bit arch and playful here in expressing my belief that astrological understanding can be useful in deciding how to live our lives. But I want to be adamantly clear that I think it can indeed be sublimely helpful.

Not all of it is, of course. Like every field, astrology has unskillful practitioners whose efforts are at best unhelpful and at worst detrimental. It’s crucial for us to be discerning as we call on astrological counsel. We should always regard ourselves as collaborators with those whose counsel we seek—participants in the process of getting to the root of our mysteries.

My own life is a testimonial to the uplifting and beneficently transformative potentials of astrological investigations. Since age 18, I have trusted my own natal horoscope to provide insight and guidance into the nature of my soul’s code. There are few days of my adult life when I haven’t ruminated on the meaning of my chart and what it tells me about my unfolding destiny.

So yes, I very much treat astrological wisdom as a key approach to understanding reality.

At the same time, I treasure logic and reason and the scientific method. They are essential in shaping my path, too. For me, there is no contradiction in relying on both modalities, and many others, as well.

Below, I provide links to four essays I’ve written on how and why we can seek astrological counseling for help in living our lives

Introduction to Soulful Astrology

Astrology Is a Mythopoetic Language

Astrology for the Soul

Theory of Divination

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Hear my song “You Taste Delicious”:

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Want to buy my book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality?

It’s available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of October 1

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Let’s make Libran writer Ursula K. Le Guin your patron saint. She believed that any human arrangement, however permanent it seems, was made by people and can therefore be unmade and remade by people. The divine right of kings once seemed eternal and inevitable, she liked to remind us. Be like her in the coming weeks, Libra. Refuse to accept that the way things are is the way they must continue to be. Imagine more beautiful, more just, and more loving arrangements in every area of your life, including your relationships, your work, and your inner life. Then take three steps toward making it so.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Volcanologists distinguish between two different eruptions. In the effusive type, lava flows slowly and steadily, while the explosive eruptions eject material fast and hard. What does this have to do with you? In my astrological estimation, you currently contain building pressures that need release. Here’s the good news: You can maneuver yourself in the direction of effusive expression and thereby make the explosive kind unnecessary. So my advice is to find small, controllable outlets for what’s gathering inside you. Don’t wait until the only option is a massive, sudden discharge.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): You’ll flourish in the coming years if you ask daring questions and befriend sweet ambivalence and welcome adorable uncertainty. You’ll stumble upon weird but interesting success and project potent authenticity if you let your curiosity lead you to situations outside of your cozy bubbles and velvet ruts. On the other hand, you’ll flounder if you cling to folk wisdom foisted on you by the algorithms, treat all your opinions as facts, or pretend you always know what the f*ck is going on in this dazzling mess of a world. Keep it generous and exploratory, Sagittarius. Seek out wide-ranging conversationalists and playful skeptics.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): A river delta is where a river finally meets the sea. Instead of arriving as one bold channel, it fans out into dozens of branching streams, depositing the rich silt it has carried for many miles. Deltas are fertile places because of everything the river gathered along the way and finally lays down. You’re approaching a metaphorical delta, Capricorn. All the experiences, emotions, and impressions you’ve been carrying are ready to be released and turned into fertile ground. Abundance wants to grow from all you’ve gathered.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In the 17th century, Aquarian astronomer Johannes Hevelius mapped the moon with surprising accuracy. Yet he worked with funky homemade telescopes perched on a homemade observatory that he built on the rooftops of his three connected houses. I recommend you borrow his approach, Aquarius. You might feel tempted to postpone action until conditions are ideal, but I hope you’ll begin with what you already possess. Prediction: As you proceed, your tools and strategies will evolve. Momentum will become one of your key resources.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In traditional Chinese medicine, wei qi is a protective energy that circulates beneath the skin, forming a shield against harmful influences. To nourish it, you revel in sleeping and eating well. You work diligently, with tender discernment, to maintain healthy boundaries. How are you doing with that, Pisces? Is it possible you’ve been working so hard on your deep transformations that you’ve semi-neglected this outer layer of strength? I hope that in the coming weeks, you’ll nurture the subtle shields that prevent you from absorbing every stray particle of psychic weirdness in your environment. Think of this task not as building walls, but tending to your garden’s edges.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): Orchids may lure pollinating insects with ingenious illusions rather than nectar. Some mimic the look or fragrance of other flowers. Others resemble female insects so convincingly that hopeful males unknowingly assist with pollination. From this, we might conclude that nature can be as duplicitous as humans. But rather than being bummed out by the facts of life, let’s use this as a lesson for you to wield in the coming days. Appearances can be deceiving—for both better and worse. If a situation initially seems disappointing or confusing, linger before drawing conclusions. Likewise, if something looks irresistibly attractive at first glance, investigate further. I predict your intuition will be extra skilled at distinguishing authentic richness from glamorous distraction.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I propose we make 93-year-old Taurus musician Willie Nelson your patron saint and role model for the foreseeable future. Earthy, unflappable, and unhurried, he has kept making his distinctive, soulful music for over 70 years, devoted all the while to the land and the people who work it. He has never pushed to sound like anyone else; he has patiently, inexorably become more fully himself. It’s your birthright to live like Nelson, Taurus, with a steady, sensual, enduring devotion to what you love. In the coming weeks, I invite you to tend to your deepest roots.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I may be preaching to the choir here, but there’s a fun kind of magic that thrives when you decline to be consistent. You Geminis are least likely, of all the signs, to exhaust yourself in trying to maintain a unified self-presentation. Like the Gemini poet Walt Whitman, you’re often pleased with the fact that you contain multitudes. It’s a potential superpower! The you who loves solitude and the you who craves connection can both be true. The skeptic and the mystic can coexist in the same nervous system. Your assignment: Honor three contradictory impulses without trying to make them coherent. You’re boisterously excused from having to make too much sense.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In certain caves, like the Cave of the Crystals in Naica, Mexico, crystals grow to astonishing sizes. Why? Because the environment remains stable for thousands of years, with steady temperatures, minimal disturbances, and slow mineral flow. Under these stable conditions, ordinary molecules assemble into lavish structures. I believe you’re cultivating a similar sanctuary, Cancerian, as you invoke the powers of steadiness and devoted dedication. Even if progress appears slow, the underlying process is gradually generating a beautiful strength and/or lasting treasure. Now’s a good time to redouble your faith in your good work.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The cosmic powers have granted you a license to be magnificent. Not arrogant, please note, but majestic, resplendent, and marvelous. You know the difference, right? Arrogance is parasitic, demanding that everyone reflects your glory back at you. Magnificence is expansive, making everyone feel more vital and attuned to their own splendor. The second option is far more nutritious and delicious for you in the long run. In the coming eons, and especially now, I hope you’ll be lavish with your praise and generous with your attention. Glow and dazzle in ways that inspire others to glow and dazzle.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): A Zen teaching says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” But being the post-Zen teacher I am, I protest and say, “No, the chopping and the carrying ARE the enlightenment. There is no separate ‘after.’” The sacred is ALWAYS lurking in the mundane, disguised as ordinary tasks. And you Virgos are potentially the zodiac’s supreme master of this controversial truth. Others may chase after astral bling and transcendent glitter, but you know that divinity lives in the earthy details that are right in front of you. That’s how you transmute seemingly unremarkable stuff into the sublime. It’s time to wield your superpower to the hilt, please!

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Many visionaries and prophets expect there to be a huge and sudden shift in the world’s story, and maybe soon. Whether it happens tomorrow or later, some of them even predict that it will be “in the twinkling of an eye”—a sudden cascade of events that completely changes everything everywhere.

Some paint the scenario in broad, catastrophic strokes, expecting something, they’re not sure what, that will be like AI going rogue or a large meteor strike or nuclear war or pandemic disease.

Others harbor a more benign but equally fuzzy expectation, speculating that maybe some higher psychic powers will kick in to the multitudes all at once, or that benevolent extraterrestrials will arrive to solve our energy crisis.

What very few of the prophets do, however, is make a precise prediction about exactly will happen. Their visions contain no assurances, no specifics. And in my view, that’s worse than useless. It fills us with a vague buzz of fear or amorphous sense of bizarre hope, but offers no concrete directions about what to do to prevent the dreaded thing or help create the hoped-for thing.

And the fact is, as I see it, they can’t possibly know what the Big Shift is—if, that is, a Big Shift is really looming. The very nature of any Big Shift will be so unexpected, so beyond our imaginations, and so utterly alien to what we understand, that we can’t possibly delineate its contours in advance.

I’m reminded of psychologist Carl Jung’s formula, which is that we don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

This theory can be applied in reverse: If we have not yet grown wiser than our current predicament, then we can’t see what the evolved state is beyond the predicament. Our minds are as-yet incapable of embodying the vision that will catapult us beyond the problem we’re stuck in

When the Big Shift comes, whether or not it arrives in the twinkling of an eye, it will be something that no one foresaw, let alone described in detail. It will be beyond our comprehension, unlike anything we could have visualized headed our way. (Forty years ago, did anyone imagine the Internet or the impact it’s having?)

And if that’s true, then the inescapable conclusion is: There’s no use trying to plan ahead for it. It’s counterproductive to hold a particular scenario in our mind as the likely development. And it’s downright crazy to harbor a chronic sense of dread about an unknowable, unimaginable series of events.

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift, in my view, is to cultivate mental and emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

• a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

• a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, and worries about the future;

• a trust in empirical evidence over our time-worn beliefs, old habits, and conspiracy theories;

• a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast and tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner’s mind fully engaged;

• an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of the interesting questions that tease and teach us.

Everything I just described also happens to be an excellent way to prime ourselves for a chronic, low-grade, always-on, simmering-at-low-heat brand of ecstasy—a state of being more-or-less permanently in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone. Let’s try it!

Many people alive today are convinced that our civilization is in a dark age, cut off from divine favor, and on the verge of collapse. But similar beliefs have been common throughout history.

As far back as 2800 BCE, an unknown prophet wrote on an Assyrian clay tablet, “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.”

In the seventh century BCE, many Romans believed Rome would suffer a cataclysm in 634 BCE.

Around 300 BCE, Hindus were convinced they lived in an “unfortunate time” known as the Kali Yuga—the lowest point in the great cosmic cycle.

In 426 CE, the Christian writer Augustine mourned that this evil world was in its last days.

According to the Lotharingian panic-mongers who lived more than a 1,000 years ago, human life on earth would end on March 25, 970.

Astrologers in 16th-century London calculated that the city would be destroyed by a great flood on February 1, 1524.

American minister William Miller proclaimed the planet’s “purification by fire” would occur in 1844.

Anglican minister Michael Baxter assured his followers that the Battle of Armageddon would take place in 1868.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses anticipated the End of Days in 1910, then 1914, then 1918, then 1925.

John Ballou Newbrough (”America’s Greatest Prophet”) promised mass annihilation and global anarchy for 1947.

The website “A Brief History of the Apocalypse” at https://tinyurl.com/yqb83n lists over 200 visions of doom that have spilled from the imaginations of various prophets in the last two millennia.

Our age may have more of these doomsayers per capita than previous eras, although the proportion of religious extremists among them has declined as more scientists, journalists, and storytellers have taken up the singing of humanity’s predicted swan song.

More about this from the Smithsonian.

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Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov.

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Hear my song PRAYER FOR US:

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In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard concludes, “It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree.”

I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

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Walt Whitman: “There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now; and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

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My old philosophy professor Norman O. Brown would periodically interrupt his lectures, tilt his head upward as if tuning in to the whisper of some heavenly voice, and announce in a puckish tone, “It’s time for your irregular reminder: We’re already living after the end of the world. No need to fret anymore.”

The implication was that the worst had already happened. We had lost much of the cultural riches that had given humans meaning for centuries. All that was going to be taken from us had already been taken.

On the bright side, that meant we were utterly free to reinvent ourselves. Living amidst the emptiness, we had nowhere to go but up. What remained was alienating, but it was also fresh.

Working from the hypothesis that we’re living after the end of the world, what are we free to do? Who are we free to be?

Many people sincerely think that they will be called before God to account for themselves on Judgment Day. If you yourself have held that belief, you can stop worrying about it. The fact is, according to a survey of over 800 dissident bodhisattvas, urban shamans, sacred agents, and undercover geniuses, that you are called before “God” on Judgment Day on a regular basis.

Since you still exist, you have apparently passed every test so far. “God” obviously keeps finding you worthy. You shouldn’t get overconfident, of course. But maybe from now on you can assume that although there may be a world of pressure on you, that pressure is natural, merciful, and exactly what you need.

Try this experiment: For seven days, see what it feels like to be secure in your knowledge that you have passed the tests of Judgment Day many, many times

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“Picture the Grand Canyon,” says Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. “Every hundred years, a child comes by and throws a mustard seed into it. In the time it takes to fill the hole in the earth with mustard seeds, one maha­kal­pa will have passed. To perfect the virtuous heart—the joy of integrity—takes a thousand mahakalpas.”

If that’s true, then we’ve still got a lot of work to do. The good news is that civilization is in the midst of a critical turning point that could tremendously expedite our ripening. So we could make unusually great progress toward the goal of perfecting the virtuous heart in the next 40 years.

For best results, we could meditate often on the phrase “the joy of integrity.” Get familiar with the pleasurable emotion that comes from acting with impeccability. And try out this idea from Gandhi: Integrity is the royal road to our inner freedom.

P.S. Oddly enough, the work of perfecting the virtuous heart is effective in helping us master the art of cultivating everyday ecstasy. Let’s meditate on the connection.

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It is eternity now; I am in the midst of it.
It is about me in the sunshine;
I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air.
Nothing has to come; it is now.
Now is eternity; now is immortal life.

—Richard Jefferies

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The rise and fall of images of the future precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive.

—sociologist Fred Polak

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

If you’d like to buy my book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality:

It’s available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of September 24

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the 18th century, Libran philosopher Denis Diderot was instrumental in creating the Encyclopédie. It wasn’t the first compendium of the world’s knowledge, but it was the most ambitious and comprehensive. In 28 volumes, it assembled contributions from a large number of writers, including leading figures of the French Enlightenment. Robust collaboration was key to its enduring influence. In the coming weeks, Libra, I’m hoping that you, like Diderot, will be an initiator and facilitator of rich cooperation. Conversations, partnerships, and shared projects could generate insights that none of the participants would have discovered alone. By inviting multiple perspectives into the discussion, you will help cultivate a fertile weave of ideas.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In the volcanic seas around Iceland, underwater eruptions sometimes build entirely new islands that rise from the waves as bare, black rock. During the ensuing years, wind and waves and seabirds seed them with life. Mosses, lichens, hardy plants, and nesting birds slowly transform the raw lava into a living shore. I’m rooting for you to instigate a similar process, Scorpio. My prediction: A development that initially seems stark or unfinished could become fertile ground for growth. Your perceptive instincts will recognize possibilities before they are obvious to others. Be patient with beginnings that look raw.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I invite you to achieve minor miracles that will enable you to brag at parties about how you created something out of nothing. Not in a loud, egotistical way, but with a sly glimmer in your eye, as if you’re sharing secrets about how reality can be coaxed into generosity if you approach it with imagination and chutzpah. Yes, dear Sagittarius, I’m ecstatic to inform you that now is a favorable moment to turn scraps into usefulness, boredom into invention, and vague hunches into tangible results. Be alert! Be on the lookout! Scout around for raw materials that have been overlooked or dismissed. Half-abandoned projects? Mercurial inclinations? Fugitive fantasies? Seemingly idle conversations that reveal marvelous glints and gleams? These are examples of the “nothings” you can turn into treasures.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I’ve got a rough, tough assignment for you: Dare yourself to be startled by your own exquisite beauty. Be bold and even brazen in appreciating what a marvelous creature you are. Can you summon the necessary audacity? I think you can. Please notice the ways you have underestimated your gifts, minimized your impact, or edited out your brilliance to make others comfortable. Allow yourself to feel the tender shock of recognizing that you’re more interesting and mysteriously compelling than you’ve been trained to believe. PS: This will help you call on even deeper inner resources in the coming weeks.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Aquarian writer Virginia Woolf was a fount of interesting ideas. Sometimes she pushed her active mind to track them down and capture them, but on other occasions, she enjoyed gathering gems that arrived as her imagination wandered and drifted. These “moments of being” provided her with small treasures while she was walking in nature, taking a bath, or doing nothing in particular. I believe that you are now primed to experience many such pleasurable eruptions of insight. In the coming weeks, pauses and lulls and intermissions will open unexpected portals.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): For the low price of $199, I could expertly dispel that annoying curse you’ve been lugging around. But I would feel sleazy taking your cash when you are fully capable of zapping the curse yourself. So instead I will recommend that you perform the banishing ritual, then write yourself a check for $199. Here’s how. Step 1: Visualize an object that represents the curse. Imagine hurling it into a beach bonfire and watching it burn. Step 2: Bring to mind a person you believe contributes to the curse. Envision a rope that ties the two of you together, waist to waist. Then imagine yourself revving up a chainsaw, slicing through the binding, and declaring, “You have no power over me!” Step 3: Roll on the floor as you laugh and cry tears of giddy release.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the practice of niwaki, Japanese gardeners shape trees so they look both natural and artfully composed. They prune and style the branches to dramatize the tree’s inherent character. Their goal is to collaborate. I recommend you experiment with a similar approach in the coming weeks, Aries. Try partnering with the living processes in your sphere rather than simply imposing your will on them. Ask yourself: What is trying to flourish here? Can I coax out some useful beauty? How can I coordinate my own intelligence with nature’s intelligence?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Your spirit creatures for the coming weeks are the slow-moving giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands. They can live for more than a century. They conserve energy, move deliberately, and carry their protection with them. I believe you will benefit from embracing their ways in the coming weeks, Taurus. Refuse to be rushed or pressured, either by others or yourself. Proceed at the precise rate you need to. Your natural strength will thrive through your incremental steadiness. PS: Consider giving yourself a tortoise nickname.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): A master perfumer composes a fragrance in three layers. The top notes are what you smell first. They’re vivid and volatile. The next layer blooms gradually, unfurling the heart notes of the fragrance. Underneath everything are the deep, resinous base notes, which don’t fully reveal themselves for hours and cling longest to the skin. Let this be a metaphor to guide your joys and pleasures in the coming weeks, Gemini. Relish the bright top notes that flare and vanish, but persist long enough for the heart to open, and longer still for the deep base notes to emerge. Gather all the rich delights, not just some.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): It’s hard, scary work for a crab to molt its shell and grow a bigger one. As it waits for its new protection to grow, its soft, tender body is exposed and vulnerable. That’s why it often hides in rock crevices, neither moving nor eating until its armor returns. Your situation, dear Cancerian, isn’t nearly as dire as the poor, defenseless crab’s. But as you power through your own personal molting season, I urge you to enhance your psychic protection. You need to feel extra safe and secure.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Bats navigate by echolocation. They send out sounds and interpret the echoes. But when competing for food, they may also jam each other’s sonar, generating acoustic interference that makes navigation harder for rivals. A similar phenomenon occurs in human populations. Some of the noisy talk we hear is other people’s jamming signals. Consciously or unconsciously, they’re creating interference that may make it harder for us to navigate. Now is a good time for you to learn better how to distinguish between real information and meaningless hubbub. Refine your filters.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) was a brilliant typographer who revolutionized graphic design. He left his mark on millions of books. But later in life, he rejected some of his own rules, returning to classical typography and critiquing his earlier work as too rigid. In this spirit, dear Virgo, I will ask you if some of your long-standing rules no longer serve you. Is it possible that some of your own “best practices” may have calcified into unexamined dogma? The coming months will invite productive heresy against your past selves. You’re allowed to contradict your earlier convictions. Hint: Your vigorous evolution requires it.

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Harbinger: Joy and Grief

— an excerpt from my new book, Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality

In 2005, I published the first edition of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Four years later came the expanded 400-page version, with 55% additional new material. Translated editions bloomed across the world: Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Turkish. I became the godfather prophet of pronoia.

The term itself was born in the 1970s from the mind of author John Perry Barlow, who envisioned it as paranoia’s radiant twin—“the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.”

But Barlow didn’t develop the notion beyond his brief definitions. That project became my calling, and I pursued it with the fervor of an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization. I resolved to be relentless in naming and celebrating all that is beautiful and interesting and healing in our bewildering world.

My philosophy rests on three radical propositions: that the universe is a prodigious miracle created for our amusement and illumination; that all of creation conspires to liberate us from suffering while motivating us and educating us to love with precision, intelligence, and courage; and that life delivers exactly what we need—not what we want, but what our souls require—to fulfill our deepest purposes. (PS: These worthy goals may take more than one incarnation to accomplish!)

Core tenets:

· Evil is boring, sterile, and stupid.

· Cynicism is intellectual laziness masquerading as sophistication.

· Fear is a bad habit we can at least partially unlearn.

· Despair is an impotent luxury with no redemptive power.

· Joy is fascinating, revelatory, and necessary.

· Love is an act of heroic genius, requiring bold perseverance and cultivated skill.

· Pleasure is not an indulgence but a birthright.

· Receptivity is a superpower.

But now the plot thickens: I am not a saccharine optimist who ignores life’s brutal realities. At the core of my perspective on pronoia lies an intimate, unflinching relationship with darkness. I don’t ignore or transcend shadows; I engage and negotiate with them.

Here’s a key element of my formulation: Yes, life orchestrates a vast conspiracy to keep us supplied with blessings, but what constitutes blessings? Ten million dollars? A gorgeous body? A hassle-free marriage with a perfect soulmate? A mansion filled with lavish accessories?

Maybe. But more often, the blessings arrive as plot twists we didn’t anticipate. They may bring dizzying adventures that remake us, gifts so unexpected we hardly know what to do with them, challenges that invite us to become smarter and wilder and kinder, and conundrums that dare us to grow luminous and numinous.

LIsten free to the song about that:

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Among the conundrums that have dared me to grow more luminous and numinous is a tragicomic irony about my own soul’s assignment.

The realization slammed into me years ago. I was driving on Highway 1 north of Point Reyes, California after a rare argument with my beloved partner, determined to cool my troubled heart by staring at the white sky and grey ocean until they scoured me clean. A storm seemed imminent. The waves were bruised and restless.

Needing a break and wanting to write down a torrent of tormented thoughts in my notebook, I pulled over into a gravel turnout and parked. When I got out of the car, I had to concentrate on anchoring myself in the face of the steady gusts. Soon I noticed a shrine wedged down near the ground between two boulders. It was modest, but every object within it radiated stubborn endurance.

Wilted, mud-heavy lilies formed a roughly circular boundary around the ceremonial space. There were three candles in glass jars and three dead starfish. A child’s rubber boot, pink once, was now sun-blanched to a weary rose. A weather-beaten teddy bear with one eye missing, its remaining eye cloudy and scratched, gazed outward with a look of baffled tenderness.

There were messages, too: handwritten notes on thick index cards stuffed into rock crevices. Some were barely legible, half-erased by the elements:

We miss you.

Come visit us in dreams. Forgive us.

You changed us.

A few stones had been painted with spirals, hearts, and a stick-figure family holding hands beneath a wan sun. A single abalone seashell was positioned at the center like a small altar bowl, mottled with rainbow flashes whenever the clouds parted.

The whole shrine had the look of having been tended by many hands at various times, but also neglected for long stretches, as if grief came in unpredictable waves.

It was woebegone, unglamorous, and defiant in its shabbiness. I imagined it to be a shrine for a sorrow too enormous or complicated to fit into the easy categories of public mourning.

I stood before it too long. The wind moaned in strange harmonics around the rocks, like an animal circling me. The sky became a color I had never seen before, a blend of purple, silver, black and blue. A seagull’s cry cut through the wind and raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Instead of the usual squawk, I swear it shrieked my name three times: “Rob! Rob! Rob!”

Then a rupture rose up in me from solar plexus to throat: I felt an alien emotion that wasn’t mine blooming in my chest. It was a denser, older, more electric version of empathy.

The grief didn’t feel like it belonged to me, exactly, nor even to one family or one tragedy. It felt like a delta of losses converging from the whole wide world: every drowned wish, every vanished child, every unspoken apology, every hurt creature wailing in the great chain of being. I imagined it as a collective sorrow that had been temporarily stored in this heap of objects and that finally found me available and unguarded enough to hold it.

My knees buckled. I felt simultaneously enormous and hollow, as if I’d become a vessel whose only purpose was to contain this tsunami of loss. The sensation was both exquisitely precise and overwhelmingly diffuse. It was like being pierced by a thousand fine needles made of age-old sadness, each one carrying a story of irretrievable absence.

There was also a sweetness in the anguish, an alien honey-thick tenderness woven through the pain. I wasn’t drowning in it; I was being initiated by it. My chest expanded to accommodate a surge of anonymous agony I couldn’t name: the mother who never got to say goodbye, the lover who died mid-sentence, the child who vanished into an ocean, or the merciless machinery of human cruelty.

I wasn’t being punished or overwhelmed; I was being trusted. And that trust wrestled itself down into my bones like a hot coiling drill. I swore I felt it in my spine and pelvis and both femurs. It was as if I’d been chosen to receive this blessed curse because of my capacity to hold tremendous quantities of affliction that didn’t belong to me.

The sorrow carried intelligence. It had weight, temperature, and texture. It asked not for fixing or fleeing, but for presence without flinching. I felt like the grief was reorganizing me, enlarging my power to love without conditions or caveats.

As the rupture vibrated in my belly and chest, it unleashed a further breach. Mixed with the sorrow was a sense of an unmistakable assignment.

The grief didn’t merely want release. It wanted interpretation, reanimation, and alchemy. It bid me to carry it forward without corrupting it, so it would be neither sentimentalized nor weaponized. I swear I heard it speak to me: I chose you because you won’t collapse or perform martyrdom or pretend it’s not happening.

I whispered aloud, “Why me?”

The ocean answered with a rogue wave that slapped the cliffs with such force I lurched backward. In that sonic boom of saltwater and stone, I heard the unmistakable response:

Because you already praise holy beauty. Now learn to praise holy hurts.

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As vividly as if it were now, I remember standing at that woebegone shrine while the vast grey Pacific Ocean shoved a massive, unwieldy truth into my bloodstream. That was the moment I fully coalesced into the living container who praises the miraculous with fervor while metabolizing the unbearable.

I fully grasped my twin assignments: to celebrate the world audaciously and carry its grief tenderly.

Ever since, I understand that my drive to gather the world’s grief springs from love: profound, unreasonable adoration for our broken, magnificent world. To earn the right to ameliorate suffering, I must first feel it as deeply as it goes. To speak authentically about bliss and pleasure, I must be intimately familiar with sorrow.

Ever since, each praise-song I write has had to carry salty tears. Every gift I offer the world is seasoned by my willingness to sit with what can’t be fixed but only felt and witnessed.

This is the harbinger’s burden and privilege: to be a bridge between what breaks us and what makes us whole. It means I’m not numbed by contradiction but buoyed by completion.

I extol the world’s beauty with ferocity precisely because I know how fragile it is. I celebrate wonder with such abandon because I can hold horror without flinching.

My initiation at the windswept shrine became foundational to everything I now understand about Rebel Enlightenment.

The disembodied spiritual traditions I reject promise transcendence from suffering. Avoid suffering at all costs, they say. They exalt an escape velocity that launches us beyond the messy, mortal realm into a sterile, pristine elsewhere.

But the liberating illuminations that have remade me again and again arrive through my willingness to be a full-bodied vessel for both ecstasy and anguish.

When I expanded to hold that collective grief without numbing or fleeing, I didn’t fly away into heavenly consolation. I dived more deeply into my life’s mission. And that descent made me exquisitely available.

Every Ecstatic Healing Derangement and Friendly Shock Awakening I’ve experienced since then has confirmed this: The sacred doesn’t seek the sanitized or the safely detached.

It hunts for those of us who are brave and brazen enough to be vulnerable, rumpled, and shockingly alive. Can we hold grief in one hand and rapture in the other without needing to choose between them?

This is the paradox at the heart of Sacramental Incandescent Embodiment: Only by refusing to abandon our earthly selves can we become spacious enough for the healing elixir of inscrutable divinity to move through us without destroying us.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

If you’d like to buy my book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality:

It’s available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: https://tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of September 17

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): If I were writing this horoscope for the Gun Lovers’ Gambling Porn website, I might counsel my Virgo readers to maintain strict control over their wickedness, debauchery, and decadence. Why? Because now is a time when vices and sins are even more likely than usual to sow chaos and spawn big messes. However, since you are reading my oracle in a more genteel publication and are almost certainly a refined person of high integrity, I’m confident there will be minimal uproar if I dare you to tap into your raw animal energy and unruly instinctual nature. I believe it’s time to at least experiment with wilder aspects of your deep self.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The Real You and the Semi-Real You have been embroiled in a showdown with the False You. This is as tough and heroic a struggle as you’ve had to deal with in quite some time, though it has often been subtle and partially cloaked. I am of course rooting for the Real You and the Semi-Real You to emerge victorious from the conflict, though I also hope you don’t feel the need to humiliate and crush the False You. That part of you has sometimes served a valuable purpose and doesn’t deserve to be trashed. And what will become of the Semi-Real You after this drama is finished? I suggest you give it a modest place in your repertoire. Like the False You, it sometimes proves to be useful.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Hummingbirds can fly backward. They’re the only birds capable of sustained reverse flight. This requires extraordinary wing flexibility and energy expenditure, but it gives them access to nectar that forward-only fliers have more difficulty sampling. Let’s treat this as a useful metaphor for you in the coming weeks, Scorpio. It may be that your progress and success won’t always come from advancing. Some rich resources may require the equivalent of reverse flight. Consider returning to conversations you thought were finished, revisiting places you’d mentally filed away as “done,” and extracting value from sources you’ve already passed by.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In chemistry, catalysts are substances that accelerate reactions without being consumed in the process. A tiny amount of catalyst can dramatically transform how quickly elements combine. An example is the enzyme catalase in our cells, which breaks down hydrogen peroxide (a byproduct of our metabolism) into water and oxygen millions of times faster than it would decompose on its own. I believe you are now in a phase when your catalytic powers are at a peak, Sagittarius. Be careful where you point that potency of yours! Make sure you really want to change what you’re capable of changing.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Every species adapts to its surroundings. Even harmful microbes evolve over time in order to survive. Syphilis, for instance, was once ferociously swift and deadly, but that intensity limited how far it could spread. So a gentler strain gradually evolved that allowed its hosts to live longer and pass it on more widely. Let this serve as a metaphor for how you handle your dark moods, odd compulsions, and brief bouts of craziness. Befriend the mild, manageable versions of these states and give them space to be felt and understood. Over time, the harsher, more destructive versions will lose ground and fade from power.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Paleontologists know that some dinosaurs traveled in herds with a specific formation: the most vulnerable members gathered in the center, protected by stronger individuals on the perimeter. It was a savvy way to run things, ensuring the group would thrive. I hope you’re willing to borrow some dinosaur wisdom, Aquarius. The coming weeks will be a good time to apply it to your own life. Who or what needs protection? What vulnerable projects or relationships deserve to be surrounded and shielded? Are you willing and able to use your strength to guard what’s tender and growing? Be a shepherd, a steward, a defender.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In ancient times, Hawaii’s Coconut Island was renowned for its healing powers—but on one condition. Those who sought its medicinal help couldn’t just expect the local spirits to do all the work, but had to take part in awakening the magic. Legend tells us that a seeker could be cured by swimming three times around the island. This participatory approach to healing mirrors your current situation, Pisces. You are close to a source of renewal, but if you hope to unlock its full strength, you must coax it out with your ingenuity.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Realities you’ve been oblivious to will soon pop into view. Hints and signals you’ve been unconsciously pushing away will start flocking toward you. A lingering emotional numbness will thaw, and surges of feelings will pour into your awareness. Warning! At first, it may feel like an overload: too much sopping wet data arriving too quickly for you to organize or interpret. If you’re willing to be patient and focus on slowly metabolizing the influx, though, the apparent chaos will ultimately weave itself into a luminous web of new understanding.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In Peru’s Andean mountains, Indigenous and smallholder farmers cultivate a rich diversity of potato varieties, continuing a farming tradition rooted in the crop’s domestication thousands of years ago. Each variety thrives in slightly different soil, altitude, and climate. By planting many types at once, the farmers ensure that at least some crops will flourish no matter what conditions arise. I suggest you apply this way of thinking to your own life in the coming weeks, Taurus. Diversify your efforts instead of depending on a single plan or expectation. Plan for multiple small initiatives that will evolve with unique growth patterns.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In biology, many organisms survive harsh or unpredictable conditions by entering dormancy. This is a reversible state of greatly reduced metabolism and development. Seeds, spores, and the dormant stages of some small animals can remain viable for years until cues such as water, temperature, light, or nutrients signal that conditions are favorable again. Then they can resume growth, development, or activity, often rapidly. I suspect you may experience a comparable upsurge in the coming weeks, Gemini. A project or aspiration that seemed inert may reawaken and reignite.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Novelist Kurt Vonnegut advised us to try some task that scares us every day of our lives. That may be a viable experiment for a Scorpio like him, but is it a wise prescription for us Cancerians, who like to feel secure and protected? Normally, I would say no. I’d recommend that you and I dare ourselves to wrestle with one of our fears no more than once per month. But the coming weeks may warrant a departure from our typical rhythms. I suspect we can fortify our long-term safety and peace through more frequent encounters with unpredictable episodes that rouse our hidden reserves of courage.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The ancient Greeks believed that the goddess Harmonia presided over the blending of opposites into balanced beauty. Her dad was the god of war and her mom the goddess of love, so she had a lot of practice. In her line of work, tension between different forces could produce elegant unity rather than conflict. In alignment with astrological omens, I’ve appointed Harmonia to be your guardian angel in the coming weeks, Leo. I urge you to call on her dynamically and frequently. Rifts and splits and divisions that have never before been possible to heal are now swayable by the collaborative efforts of you and the goddess.

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My new book is:

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality

In this reverently rowdy text, I propose versions of enlightenment that don’t require an escape from our world’s gorgeous pandemonium, but thrive on a wildly disciplined engagement with it.

Through an unpredictable weave of unruly stories and genre-fluid texts, I cross-pollinate exuberant activist passions with drug-free explorations of altered states.

I invite readers to have maximum fun as they experiment and improvise with imaginative spiritual practices. How can we cultivate wisdom that’s both grounded and ecstatic?

The book is available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

It’s also available here:

Bookshop: tinyurl.com/RebelEnlightenment

Barnes & Noble: tinyurl.com/JubilantDefiance

Amazon: tinyurl.com/EcstaticHealing

The ebook will be available in a few days.

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Grateful Immersion in the Glorious Human Mess: excerpt from the book

My family, allies, and I are allergic to spiritual teachers and teachings that coax people to disparage the core features that make us human. We’re not sure why their sprawling quagmire seems so tempting to multitudes of souls.

They claim that the body is a distraction and desire is an affliction? We say NOOOOOOO! They insist out feelings are traps, the ego is a dire hindrance, and our personal stories are obstructions to illumination? We say NEVER!!!!!

Sorrowful dismay wells up as we watch legions of tender aspirants guzzle this fake news as if it were sacrosanct wisdom.

Our love of life protests as our fellow wanderers try to extinguish their mortal magic in the name of escapist transcendence.

We are rattled as they neglect their own precious soul savvy and demean their majestic flesh. It’s tragic and heart-breaking!

Our alternatives are celebratory rhythms and rhymes that immerse us in the glories of flesh wisdom and creature consciousness.

Resolved: We crave and deserve spiritual approaches that honor all the magnificent human features named below.

• Feelings and physical sensations are sources of vigorous wisdom. They’re not erratic, banal burdens we must ignore and expunge to be free.

• Desires are holy fuel for our liberation and intelligence. They’re not toxic obstacles we need to abnegate and suppress.

• The ego is a crucial ally in our zeal to be vividly alive. It’s not an enemy to be demeaned and disowned, but a tool to be tuned and aligned with righteous purpose.

• Many (not all) of our stories and identities are essential to who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. They’re not merely illusions to vanquish and shed, but evocative texts to honor and integrate.

• Our bodies are sacred vessels and sources of sublime savvy. They’re not distracting burdens but miraculous masterpieces.

• Our relationships are potentially at the evocative heart of our spiritual practice, not intrusive diversions.

• Earth is our beloved home, not a limbo or prison where we suffer and grieve in temporary exile from some supposedly better place.

• Our incarnation on this planet is an exalted gift, not a punishment or ordeal.

• Movement and sound are equally valid paths to illumination as stillness and silence.

• Our everyday lives are sources of rich opportunities for delight and discovery. They’re not burdensome trials rife with irrelevant, boring, and oppressive hindrances.

• Connection is just as key to spiritual deepening as solitude; community is as important as self-sufficiency; cooperation and empathy are crucial for growing our glistening sagacity.

• Play, humor, and creative expression are divine gifts that belong at the heart of our spiritual practice. They’re not irrelevancies or optional extras.

• Sexuality can be a pathway to divinely inspired transmutation. It shouldn’t be compulsively dismissed as an inconvenient bedevilment or vulgar need.

• Work may be an aid to spiritual practice rather than an obstructive vexation that interferes with our focus on our highest and noblest aims.

• Grief, rage, envy, and the difficult emotions are worthy teachers rather than sheerly problematic digressions and detours to be overcome.

• The endless changes that life brings us can be sources of interesting challenges, not doleful emblems of constant loss.

• Nightly dreams may be treasured wellsprings of guidance, not indecipherable tangents.

• Our ancestors and lineages, both biological and chosen, are sources of power and wisdom worth consulting and honoring. They’re not to be confined to sentimental and nostalgic musings.

• Some experiences may be so marvelously intense, unique, and potent that they become permanently inscribed in eternity—imprinted on the undying record of all that has ever been felt, witnessed, and loved. They’re not necessarily subject to utter dissolution and disappearance, but are kept alive in the deep memory of existence.

The book’s cover art is by Olaf Hajek.

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To hear the song WORLD KISS, whose text appears in the book, click here:

Here’s another excerpt from the new book:

Pleasure, Bliss, Ecstasy, and Gleeful Zest as Spiritual Fuel

Many spiritual systems the world has inherited regard pleasure, bliss, rapture, ecstasy, elation, and related super treasures as troublemaking distractions. The so-called “lower self” is greedy for such wasteful irrelevance, the saintly authorities say. “Begone foul deceivers!” they imply or declare outright.

How many zillions of us have been taught, often with dire and threatening tones, that feeling really good leads us away from life’s essential goals? Holiness and sanctity are likely to accumulate in us only if we shun the supposedly inferior temptation to bask in delight.

Of all the idiocies foisted on humanity, this one is among the most egregious. We are in danger of veering into apoplexy as we contemplate such a criminal delusion. We’ll try to be civil.

In both our extensive mythic explorations of dreamy truth and our scientific investigations of hard-core reality, we have gathered incontrovertible evidence that pleasure is a central necessity for any spiritual quest that actually works.

It’s a sensory instrument. A tuning fork. A feedback system. A way the body says, Yes, this. More of this. Keep headed in this direction. You’re getting closer to home.

We’re not talking about the jittery sugar-high of addiction or the perverse, jangly thrills that sabotage health.

We mean the rich, ennobling euphoria and exhilaration that arise during encounters with smart fun: inspiring us to love ourselves more, expanding our capacity to love others, leading us in the direction of our shining dreams, and helping us solve our knotty problems.

The eruptions of these life-giving nourishments might come through the stimulation of our senses, emotions, mind, or imagination. They don’t yank us away from the sacred. They are among the sacred’s favorite ways of snagging our attention. Evolution didn’t give us many reliable compasses, but these are among them.

Our comprehensive research reveals that when we feel genuinely good—not inflated or superior, but resoundingly buoyant—our ethics improve. We’re more patient and curious. Less brittle and defensive.

When we’re swooning or even just shimmering with delectation, we see other people more clearly. They’re not obstacles or mirrors of our lack, but fellow creatures doing their best with the weather systems inside them.

By contrast, chronic deprivation, especially when dressed up as virtue, tends to make people tight and pinched and resentful of anyone who looks like they’re enjoying themselves.

Self-denial doesn’t reliably produce saints. Often it just produces people who are very good at pretending they don’t want what they want.

Those who know how to feed themselves often have a super-capacity to give without keeping score. Their generosity leaks out sideways. There’s surplus.

Here’s our very-well proven hypothesis: Compassion grows less from being twisted up about suffering and more from inhabiting joie de vivre so fully that we want others to feel it too.

To read the rest of this article, go here: tinyurl.com/BlissIsSpiritualFuel

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of September

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Master chefs say that diners first taste food with their eyes. The visual presentation is key to the whole experience. But the beauty must arise from craftsmanship rather than empty decoration. I believe you Virgos are in a phase when this is an important metaphor. Your outer style and inner substance are ready to become better collaborators. Some suggestions: Wear clothes that influence you to feel vividly alive. Relax your face and posture. Beautify your workspace. Polish your presentations. And please make sure the dazzling appearances reflect equally nourishing contents.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I just finished a delicate peace mission to the contested inner landscape where your nightmares have been causing a big ruckus. In response to my diplomacy, they have agreed to drop their weapons and release their captives. In exchange, they are asking you to sit with them for a while as they rant and sob, and maybe offer them a few kisses and affectionate embraces. Drawing on my long years of coaxing unruly spirits back into semi-sanity, I conclude that a key reason they turned so dramatic and extreme was that they have been starving for your attention. I am very sure that with just a little effort, you can tame their reckless restlessness.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You’re poised at a threshold between what’s comfortably familiar and excitingly possible. A certain reliable part of your life has served you well for a long time but is now ripe for evolution. The paradox is that letting go of a serviceable asset can feel more difficult than shedding what’s obviously harmful. So here’s the riddle I hope you will meditate on: What good old thing could you relinquish so as to attract and make room for a great new thing in your life?

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with sketches of machines that would not become practical until centuries later. Examples are the parachute, a helicopter‑like “aerial screw,” and an armored tank. Many of his designs were simply too advanced for the materials and engineering of his era. I suspect you may experience comparable moments of visionary thinking in the coming weeks and months, Sagittarius. To some people and even to yourself, your ideas might seem overly ambitious or ahead of their time. But please don’t dismiss them. Write down your inklings and let them cavort around in your imagination.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Sofia Kovalevskaya was born under the sign of Capricorn in 1850. Early in her life, she displayed mathematical brilliance. She longed to develop her talent, but women weren’t allowed to attend college in her native Russia. So she devised a workaround: a marriage of convenience with a man who helped her leave the country and gain the freedom to study in Germany. There she eventually became the first woman to earn a doctorate. Inspired by her example, I encourage you to consider creative strategies for obstacles that seem immovable. What indirect routes might lead you to your goals better than frontal assaults? Be willing to zigzag toward your destination.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Most of us have been cursed. The sources of the bad mojo have rarely been evil sorcerers who cast literal spells. Rather, they were harsh pronouncements about our worth or our future, spoken by people we loved or trusted. For example, when I was 20, my astrology teacher dropped an alarming verdict on me: “You will never be seen and appreciated for who you truly are.” That ugly decree became a jinx I spent years struggling with before I finally banished it. Do you carry a comparable hex, Aquarius? Maybe mommy or daddy proclaimed you would never amount to anything. Maybe an ex declared that you would never again find real love. Whatever it might have been, here’s the good news: You now have the power to at least partially dissolve that old scourge and glide into the future less burdened by it.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Ravens often cache shiny objects and interesting novelties that seem to possess no immediate practical value. They apparently delight in collecting intriguing possibilities. I recommend you channel your inner raven in the coming weeks, Pisces. Assemble an array of quirky treasures and raw materials without immediately deciding whether or why they might be useful. Like what? Like fun ideas, memorable quotations, odd facts, provocative images, curious fragments, and fascinating stories. In ways you can’t imagine yet, your playful cluster will inspire imaginative innovations and delightful breakthroughs.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): Cheetahs are the fastest land animals, but they can maintain top tempo for only about 20-30 seconds before overheating. When they’re hunting, they usually get just one speedy dash to catch their prey. They must spend far more time stalking and positioning than running. The velocity is sensational, but their patient and prolonged strategy is even more essential. In the coming weeks, Aries, I urge you to be like the cheetah as you pursue want you need and want.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov said that true mastery means performing with complete intensity while making the movement appear effortless. Behind the grace lies years of disciplined practice. Is there an aptitude or practice you cultivate that fits this description, Taurus? I hope you’re ready to showcase it, flaunt it, and use it to your maximum benefit. It’s time to capitalize bountifully on skills at which you excel. Your well-deserved rewards are more likely to arrive than usual.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “Dear Oracle: I have contracted a severe case of too-many-tabs-open. My brain has 19 windows running at once, and it’s hard for me to determine which thoughts are the truly important ones. Everything seems equally urgent and equally trifling. Any tips on how I can better figure out what actually matters the most? —Overstimulated Gemini.” Dear Overstimulated: The secret to fixing this dilemma is to consult your body. Focus your attention on your gut and ask it to send you sweet clues about which yearnings it resonates with most. Check in with your feet and seek their wise counsel about which direction they want to lead you. Pat yourself lovingly on the butt a few times and request its loving guidance about what will make you feel most grounded.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): For some people, laughter is like a spiritual practice. A lot of them are Leos, Aquarians, and Sagittarians. They crack up more often and for longer stretches than most, and they tend to howl at ironies everyone else takes too seriously. I bring this to your attention, dear Cancerian, because you’re in a time when you could and should laugh often in wild, liberating ways. I invite you to explore the weirder areas of your sense of humor and work earnestly to expand what you find funny. PS: There’s credible evidence that laughter can reduce stress physiology, ease anxiety, lift mood, strengthen social connection, and even raise pain tolerance.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The astronomer Johannes Kepler spent years trying to prove that planetary orbits were perfect circles because he believed the universe should behave that way. Once he abandoned his cherished assumption, he discovered the truth: The planets travel in ellipses. That revision transformed astronomy forever. With this in mind, Leo, I will ask you: Is there an elegant belief you have outgrown? A theory that was once fun and interesting but now limits your vision? The coming weeks will favor corrections. Changing your mind will show you that reality is even more interesting than you previously understood.

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Dear Readers —

I have composed a Love Letter to Our Egos. It’s below. I invite you to create a ritual space and then read the message aloud to your own precious ego.

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Dear Beloved and Necessary Ego —

I apologize for the mistreatment you have endured from so many teachers who regard themselves as spiritual leaders.

They have turned you into a villain in the human story, blaming you for every excess and distortion, as if you were nothing more than a flaw to transcend rather than an instrument to refine.

I acknowledge that you have sometimes tweaked my destiny and sent me wandering down dead-end paths I wished later I hadn’t followed. You have periodically caused me problems—like everything else life brings us!

But the more important truth is this: You were the first architect of selfhood. You’re the brave little maker of continuity, stitching together memory, longing, wound, and wonder into a coherent somebody.

Thank you for caring how others perceive me. It has helped me learn the social art of being among others: how to listen for feedback and how to recognize that I am immersed in a web of mutual reflection.

Thank you for letting me believe I can make a difference in the world, whether that belief is objectively true or gloriously delusional. Without that presumption, I might never have risked making art, offering love, speaking truth, or attempting repair.

Thank you for not letting me disappear behind counterfeit humility.

Thank you for resisting the temptation to make myself small in order to seem agreeable or spiritually evolved.

Thank you for the self-promotion, for the sometimes awkward, sometimes necessary declaration: I am here. I made this. It matters to me. Maybe it will matter to you.

Thank you for pushing me to crave validation through my acts of service. Even if the motives are mixed, a lot of good things still gets done. Care still circulates and healing happens. Plus: Motives can be composted into cleaner motives over time.

Thank you for helping me to be singular. I love being one peculiar, unrepeatable human being with preferences, hungers, aversions, and passions.

Thank you for reminding me that self-interest may be the sacred instinct of preservation.

Thank you for delightfully reminding me I have a story during the good times and the bad. A narrative, however imperfect and fragmentary, gives shape to chaos. It helps me locate myself in the vast glorious turmoil of life.

Thank you for my drive to be “successful,” and for allowing that marker to evolve. What once meant applause may now mean integrity. What once meant achievement may now mean depth.

Thank you for pushing me to take myself seriously enough to cultivate my gifts with devotion. Not because I am more important than others, but because my particular offering is mine to tend.

Thank you for helping guide my decisions and reveal my fears. Your defensiveness and ambitions are often diagnostic. They show me where I’m attached and unfinished.

Thank you for questioning the collective trance around me. You encourage me to refuse to dissolve into the herd. You help me cultivate discernment when consensus becomes conformity.

Thank you for letting me be human and messy. For letting me contradict myself, embarrass myself, overreach, recover, and try again.

And thank you for carrying the impossible burden of being the temporary steward of a mortal life.

You’re not the whole of me, but you’re an essential part of me. You’re a companion to educate and a wild animal to befriend.

With gratitude,

Your Soul

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In composing this Love Letter to Our Egos, I was inspired by Dawn Robertson. Thanks, Dawn!

THE SHINING TEMPLE OF THE ANNIHILATED EGO

In my dream, I am riding in the back seat of a souped-up tour bus in southern France. The name of this fancy vehicle is the World Riddle.

I’m traveling along a road known as L’Autoroute du Soleil, the Motor-way of the Sun. Our destination is a tourist trap called Le temple resplendissant de l’ego anéanti, translated as the Shining Temple of the Annihilated Ego. It’s a shrine that the tour advertisements tout as being devoted to “le culte de l’individualité éteinte,” or “the worship of extinguished selfhood.”

What the hell does that mean? I’m not sure. I’m thinking it may have to do with the Sanskrit word “nirvana,” whose literal definition is “the blowing out of a flame.”

Many of our fellow travelers on the bus are religious disciples dressed in robes and sackcloth. I see Buddhist monks and nuns, Christian monastics, Hindu mendicants, and turban-wearing Sikh Brahmgianis.

In contrast, I’m dressed in red leather pants, an orange silk shirt, a sparkly gold vest studded with opalescent beads, and a black ankle-length cashmere coat. I’m also wearing rings on all my fingers.

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I recognize the person sitting to my right. He’s Shunryu Suzuki, the well-known Zen master whose books helped popularize Zen Buddhism in America. Years ago, I read every word the man published.

In person, he looks conventional. He’s wearing a dull brown suit and narrow striped blue tie that make him look like a business executive from the 1950s.

This is a welcome opportunity for me. For years, I have had a bone to pick with him. In one of his books, he told a story about the importance of keeping one’s ego under strict control. A student had asked him, “How much ego do you need?” Suzuki’s austere reply was, “Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.”

I felt reverence for that hard-ass attitude years ago when I first came upon it as a young spiritual punk. But later, I came to regard it as puritanical, pretentious, and retrograde. At this moment, piqued by his presence, I feel peeved about it.

It takes a while to work up the nerve, but I finally initiate a conversation with Mr. Zen.

“Long-time listener, first-time caller,” I say to him, copping the approach of a person who has reached a radio talk show host on the phone. “Loved Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Made it my bible for a while.” That was Suzuki’s first book.

“Probably better not to make any book your bible,” he replies, in a tone that is neither friendly nor dismissive.

“Don’t worry. I’ll always love you, but I’ll never worship you.”

“There’s nothing here to worship, anyway,” he says, gesturing toward his torso. “I don’t even exist.”

“Good. I will keep that in mind if I feel any pangs of desire to turn you into a holy icon.”

“Have you ever tried it?” he asks. “Not existing?”

“Well, that idea is a pet peeve of mine,” I say. “As it turns out, I eventually discovered that I preferred existing to not existing. That’s when I had to burn your books down at the beach and take your photo down from my altar.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I mean the part about you preferring to exist. Burning my books and banishing my image were not unwise.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask you a question,” I say. “Do you mind?”

“I’m not sufficiently here right now to say yes or no. You are free to proceed.”

“Remember how you said that no one needs much of an ego; that the best ego size is just big enough to keep one from getting hit by a bus, but no bigger?”

“I recall that a mirage resembling me once said something like that.”

“I wonder if you would consider the possibility that maybe your old advice could benefit from revision. I mean, yes, I acknowledge that the ego is the root of much sour mischief. Maybe as much evil as the craving for wealth and control.”

“In Christian terms,” Suzuki interrupts, “it’s the original sin.”

“Yeah. Even for me, some of the stupidest and cruelest things I’ve done could be blamed on my infected and inflamed ego.”

“Which is why it’s better to live without it,” he says. “Purge that nasty pest completely.”

“I don’t agree,” I say. “I think the ego has crucial redemptive uses. And besides, just because it’s potentially dangerous doesn’t mean that spiritual seekers like us should nuke it.”

“Redemptive uses? Like providing you with the fuel to become an all-knowing rich and famous and powerful sex god?”

“No. Like providing me with the fuel to become a compassionate and creative and curious devotee of the Great Mystery.”

Suzuki makes a sound that might be mistaken for a chortle. “The ego appropriates those noble aspirations and turns them into disguised versions of being an all-knowing rich and famous and powerful sex god.”

“Well, sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how a fundamentalist thinks,” I press. “It would be like me practicing abstinence because I’m afraid of the chaos I might stir up by risking the gifts that sex affords me.”

Suzuki chuckles derisively, but I am unflustered. I’ve argued with famous people before. David Bowie didn’t take it personally when I questioned his feminism. Playwright David Mamet was annoyed when I asked him what specific events had turned him into a rightwing jerk, but he didn’t punch me.

“Instead of repressing the ego,” I say, “we should sublimate its brute force. Use all our best psychological tricks to transform its greed into generosity. And turn it into a beautiful work of art.”

“Good luck with that delusional fantasy,” Suzuki says.

“How about this?” I say. “Let’s be spiritual artisans who devote ourselves to crafting exquisite egos. And let’s do it with the same rigor and panache as a great actor who’s preparing to play the role of Buddha or Joan of Arc. Let’s add ‘egos’ to the list of beautiful artifacts that talented creators produce, along with songs, books, films, sculptures, paintings, electronic games, and dances.”

“What you propose,” he replies, “is like putting lipstick and mascara on a donkey. Or worse yet: on a lipsticked and mascara’d donkey that has explosives strapped to its body like a suicide bomber.”

I don’t feel defensive in the least. On the contrary, I’m delighted he’s fighting back.

“You’re on the wrong side of history,” I tell him cheerfully. “Like the reactionary traditionalists who are quite sure that all humans are one of only two genders.”

“So what do we have here?” Suzuki snorts. He’s getting emotional! “A staunch advocate for the rights of the ego! Good for you, you brazen rebel. The ego has been the victim of appalling oppression over the centuries. I am glad someone is defending its honor.”

“I’m not defending the honor of all the arrogant assholes who have mangled history with their megalomaniacal cruelty,” I say, as serene and amused as a meditator in a mountaintop sanctuary. “I’m proposing a crucified and resurrected ego, a gorgeous and lyrical and empathetic ego that’s a gift to humanity.”

“I’m guessing,” Suzuki sneers, “that someone with your views must have a deep attachment to the phantasms we Zen Buddhists refer to as ‘self ’ and ‘individuality.’ Am I right?”

“I’m more aligned with Gurdjieff ’s position,” I reply. “While it’s possible to create an electric, enduring, beauty-drunk individuality, many people don’t want to work that hard.”

“And am I right to assume you regard that electric, enduring beauty-drunk individuality as permanent and immortal? Going to live forever, are you, my young friend?”

“Yes, I am, thank you. And so you are, too.”

“No, thanks,” he scoffs. “My laughable hallucination of unique selfness has a future appointment with the worm-rich dirt. Good riddance.”

“I’ll bet you a trillion nirvanas that you and I meet again at the end of time.”

“You don’t have a trillion nirvanas to bet.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Suzuki shouts, “Immortality sucks!”, grabs my face with his hands, and smacks his skull into mine, knocking me backward and propelling me out of sleep.

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Dear Readers —

I am dazzled by and grateful for how you responded last week to my request for financial support. (Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/GentleJolt). I feel an infusion of renewed vigor as I rumble into the future, fueled with renewed ambition to provide words that contribute to your inspiration and liberation.

For those of us born under the sign of Cancer the Crab, like me, it can sometimes be difficult to ask for what we need. Many of us are better at nurturing than at receiving nurturing. But emboldened by your generosity, I’m going to dare to be greedy and ask you for one further favor:

If you like what you read in my newsletter, either the horoscopes and essays or both, please consider suggesting to your friends and allies that they sign up for a subscription. Doesn’t have to be a paid subscription. I love it when my offerings are useful, whether or not they earn me money.

I’ve trained my whole life to do this work!

With Love and Appreciation,

Rob

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of September 3

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You’ve been extra reasonable lately. How do you manage to be so responsible, measured, and composed? I’m not complaining. I admire your integrity. But now the cosmic omens are clear that’s it’s time to address your soul’s needs for more wonder and awe and reverence. So I will slip you a tantalizing prod: What’s the best, most healing trouble you could provoke right now? I’m not referring to recklessness and chaos, of course. I mean twists and tweaks that stir up inspiration and liberate creativity. Are you bold enough to follow the truth and beauty that thrills and intrigues you?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I am asking you to give yourself slack in situations where you sometimes treat yourself carelessly or unkindly. Instead of tightening, loosen. Instead of cornering yourself, offer an escape hatch. Ask: “What if I give myself 20% more mercy, 20% more time, or 20% less pressure?” Maybe you’ll get an extension on a deadline or allow yourself to be a learner instead of an expert. Rather than calling yourself a failure because you’re less than perfect, you’ll decide, “It’s good enough for now.” As you slip away from the traps you set for yourself, you’ll teach your nervous system a fresh truth: You can be gentle with yourself but still be responsible.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio, you rarely need to be lighter and breezier. Your assignment is almost always to delve deeper and explore further. This is true now even more than usual. Other people might shiver and cower in the face of your intensity, but I celebrate it because it drives you to excavate the rich, messy truths and complicated feelings that really shouldn’t stay hidden. Regard this horoscope as your authorization to wield your emotional X-ray vision with precision, and to trust that the treasures you seek are often buried in places that scare others away.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In classical music, composers often develop a simple motif into a complex symphony. A short sequence of notes becomes the foundation for an entire composition. A key passage gets rearranged and elaborated in multiple ways. You will have a comparable opportunity in the coming weeks, Sagittarius: a seed of potential that seems modest at first could expand into more substantial riches if you cultivate it patiently. Your visionary aplomb and optimism can transform a core cell into a full orchestration.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You seem to be wandering in a frontier for which there are no maps. You’re hovering in liminal zones, between worlds. So for now, I guess you will have to steer without your usual guidance. That’s a good thing! What I can do is name the gifts that are likely to come your way as you explore the unknown: 1) turbo-charged intuitions about your best possible future; 2) a talent for spotting surprising connections you didn’t even know you were looking for; and 3) a provocative unpredictability that magnetizes allies who can help tease out and illuminate your hidden and buried desires.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The placebo effect has a lesser-known counterpart called the nocebo effect: Negative expectations can create negative outcomes. If you’re told a harmless pill might cause headaches, you’re more likely to develop them. Your belief in harm creates actual harm. I bring this up, Aquarius, because I’m worried you may be nocebo-ing yourself right now. Your conviction that certain outcomes are inevitable is encouraging them to manifest. So here’s my counsel: Which negative expectations or predictions are you treating as facts? Consider the possibility that the problems you’re so skilled at identifying are being called into existence by your identification of them. And if you find that’s happening, STOP! Formulate some healing alternatives.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “Dear Rob: Your horoscopes delight me in a spooky way. They make me feel as if you’re watching me from afar, not like a stalker, but like an eccentric guardian angel who gives me a heads-up before I do something foolish, tells me about opportunities I haven’t noticed, and shakes awake the part of me that’s inclined to quit. Thanks a million times! —Deep Pisces.” Dear Deep: You have exquisite timing, because now is an ideal moment to pour out gratitude for the people who’ve lifted you up and helped you. Offering appreciation now will function as a potent prayer that will be far more effective than pleading for what you don’t have. It will set in motion an irresistible magic that draws even more blessings in your direction.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Most of us are surprisingly clueless about the inner workings of our own bodies. Do you know where your gallbladder and spleen actually live or what jobs they perform on your behalf? Can you trace the journey your breath takes after it slips into your lungs? Have you ever experimented to discover in detail which foods best suit your one‑of‑a‑kind system? Do you know, from experience rather than guesswork, how much sleep you require to stay vividly awake and emotionally balanced? The current astrological climate favors you becoming a curious apprentice of your body’s gorgeous mysteries.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The English idiom “cut to the chase” comes from the silent films of the early 20th century. When the plot dragged, directors would literally switch to a chase scene to restore audience interest. Other languages have other ways to say “get to the point” or “skip to the crux.” Spanish: ir al grano. French: aller droit au but. Italian: venire al dunque. Japanese: hondai ni hairu. In accordance with astrological omens, Taurus, I suggest you do that in the coming days. Skip the boring parts. Jump to the action scenes. You can return later and fill in the story details, but for now you’re best served by moving toward the exciting essence or the crucial core of things.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): This is one of those unusual times when laziness and apathy work in your favor. Life is organizing a relaxing renewal on your behalf, and your main job is to not interfere. So I advise you to skip the hustle and enjoy the thrill of being still. Put a pause on doing and indulge in the fine art of simply being. Please, Gemini? Set aside your ambitions for now. Hide your to-do list. Inform your chattering monkey mind that it’s on temporary leave from its usual jumping and squawking. Feel guilt-free as you immerse yourself in the most relaxed versions of feeling good and welcome whatever fresh vitality wants to flow in.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the 17th century, Dutch inventor Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wall gradually synchronized their swings. Why? He eventually realized that tiny vibrations traveled through the wall and made the clocks influence each other. Scientists call this “entrainment.” Now is prime time for you to capitalize on this phenomenon, Cancerian. I urge you to be extra alert for how your moods, rhythms, and intentions subtly affect the people around you, and vice versa. If you cultivate qualities you’d like to predominate in your relationships, you will find others unconsciously aligning with your rhythm.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Now is an ideal time to have fun cultivating the art of receptivity. Have fun being as open to influence as you can imagine. Be innocent! Be amenable! Be willing and eager to be surprised! It doesn’t mean surrendering your drive or drifting aimlessly while life happens around you. I’m talking about an active, alert sensitivity that invites wonder and transformation. You think boldly, act with purpose, and radiate what’s uniquely yours, and yet you also remain humbly aware that learning never ends and that wisdom can arrive from unpredictable directions.

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LUNAR ECLIPSE ALERT!

A deep partial lunar eclipse happens this week on August 27–28. It will cover up to 96% of the Moon’s surface in Earth’s dark shadow and give it a rust-red “blood moon” look.

Peak eclipse in the Pacific Time Zone occurs at 9:12 p.m. PDT on Thursday, August 27, 2026.

Compulsive hyper-rationalists assert there’s no meaning to this or any other lunar eclipse. But then they also say there’s no meaning to mysterious, synchronistic, and uncanny phenomena of all kinds.

Those self-appointed debunkers of wonder and enchantment have dismissed countless amazements I’ve been blessed with, including the following:

a heron flying into my view, carrying a flounder in its beak, as I gazed at the setting sun on my birthday (the exact minute I was born, 7:05!) and sang the old gospel hymn “Amazing Grace” . . .

13 swans swimming along the creek that adjoins my house exactly on the winter solstice, a creek where no swans had appeared in the 13 years I’ve been observing it . . .

a narrow shaft of rain falling only on my father’s grave and nowhere else, as I visited the grave on the anniversary of his death.

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But what kind of person wants to live life without riffing on the symbolic power of unusual synchronicities like these? Not me.

So in defiance of the compulsive hyper-rationalists, I will provide my thoughts on the possible symbolic meanings of a lunar eclipse.

During the day of the eclipse, as well as two days before and two days after, I propose that you have extra power to gently or roughly wake yourself up out of any trance you might be in. You have an enhanced ability to shock and liberate any part of your psyche that might be acting like an automaton.

This lunar eclipse may be a favorable time to launch a playful or very serious campaign to break free of a bad habit. You could attract help from both expected and unexpected sources if you focus on deprogramming a negative behavior pattern and substituting it with a positive one.

As nourishing and consoling as memories can be, they sometimes act like heavy anchors that prevent you from sailing on toward the future. They may keep you trapped in old grooves that are better escaped.

A lunar eclipse may signify you now have the power to love the past as you leave it behind and glide or rumble toward a new chapter that awaits you.

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Omens to Be Alert For During the Blood Moon of August 27–28, as well as two days before and two days after.

In the spirit of the liberated imagination and playful enchantment, I offer a few examples of the kinds of amazements you could be scanning for:

• A stranger asks you for directions to an address you used to live at. They won’t know why they picked you.

• Something breaks that you were sick of: like a zipper on a jacket you’ve been meaning to donate since 2023. (The eclipse has generously arrived with a small demolition crew and is doing the part you kept postponing.)

• The insects stop all at once, and then start again. The whole ambient sizzle will cut out as if someone unplugged it. Ten seconds, maybe twenty. Then it resumes.

• You wake at 3 a.m. from a dream with a hole in it. There’s a missing scene, and you can feel its exact shape. That absence is the message.

• You mishear a sentence and the misheard version is better. Someone says “we’re closing at nine” and you hear “you’re chosen at nine.”

• You find something intact that should have come apart, like a snakeskin shed whole, right down to the transparent scales that covered the eyes. Or maybe a cicada husk still gripping the bark with all six legs. These are the leavings of creatures who managed a complete exit, who got entirely out of the old body without tearing it or themselves.

• A message arrives that was meant for someone else and is nevertheless meant for you, like a wrong number or a group text you were accidentally included in. (Read it as though it were addressed to you personally, because at the level where eclipses operate, it was.)

• The lunar eclipse’s rust-red hue migrates into your daylight hours: a fox at the edge of the road; a woman’s coat two shades past burgundy; a stain on a ceiling; a dog whose name turns out to be Ruby.

• Something falls at your feet from directly above. An acorn, fig, wind-loosened branch, or feather that takes its time getting down.

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Read more about my understanding of both lunar and solar eclipses: tinyurl.com/EclipsesAreInvitations . As you recall, there was a solar eclipse on August 12. Its impact is still in play.

Read about the Effects of the Moon on Earth: tinyurl.com/MoonEffects

WE NEED MAGIC

Every day, we have to wade through relentless swarms of soul-less information. The experience tends to shut down our sense of wonder.

Every day, we are over-exposed to narratives that are drained of delight and mystery. We must make strenuous and ingenious efforts to ensure our world is enchanted.

I aspire to contribute to the sacred cause of feeding our sense of wonder and enchantment. That’s one of my prime motivations for offering you (and me!) my creative work

PS: Factual information and reasonable thinking alone are not sufficient to guide us through life’s labyrinthine tests. We need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation.

One of our inalienable rights as human beings should be to receive mysteriously useful omens on a regular basis.

Dear Readers –

I’ve long been a big fan of friendly shocks that stimulate my awakening and insight. When I’m blessed with a gently unexpected prod that heightens my lust for life and makes me wiser, I feel I’ve been given a gift—even if the initial adjustment to the change is strenuous.

Recent example? Realizing with a jolt that a health care regimen I had been following wasn’t actually healthy for me, and that I needed to correct my mistaken ideas. I was grateful for the revelation, even as I scrambled to adjust.

I much prefer the friendly shocks to the unfriendly ones, of course, even if the unfriendly ones ultimately prove helpful and educational, too.

This past week I absorbed a shock that so far seems more unfriendly than friendly, though I’ll reserve judgment for now. A whole slew of paying subscribers to my newsletter suddenly unsubscribed. I felt my essay last week was one of my best ever, so the spectacle of a mass exit was extra perplexing.

Should I take it personally? Maybe not. I know money is tight and many of you subscribe to all sorts of things. I’m not naive about the subscription fatigue that has happened in 2026, or the economic pressures so many people face.

I understand you may already be supporting podcasters, journalists, artists, and creators doing important work. Every dollar matters, and choosing where to direct your support is a big decision.

In any case, I’ll accept the verdict if I must, but I will also go down fighting. Here’s my appeal: If you find my writing encouraging or inspiring, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a huge difference in my ability to relax into doing what I love, which is offering you what I hope are liberating inspirations.

Have my words ever opened a door you didn’t know was there or given language to what you felt but couldn’t articulate?

Writing is my life’s work. It didn’t support me financially for many years, and as a result, I was a pauper, the poorest person I knew. Eventually, though, my writing skills improved and my ability to reach readers grew, meaning that I could finally earn a living from doing what I love.

For years, my bread-and-butter livelihood came from syndicating my astrology column to alternative newsweeklies, and that’s still a factor. But when the pandemic struck in 2020 and 2021, it knocked a lot of those papers out of business forever. Now this newsletter is an important source of income for me, along with my audio horoscopes and daily text message horoscopes.

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I make a lot of my content available for free for those who want it free: this newsletter, my horoscopes, plus all my my music, extensive excerpts from my books, a big YouTube page, and extensive posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. To access all my free stuff, go here: tinyurl.com/FreeStuffFromMeToYou

In the future, no matter what, I will continue to offer a massive amount of stuff at no cost. And yes, I will also let you know about the things I create that earn me money, like my books, audio horoscopes, and daily horoscopes.

I believe consciousness-expanding ideas should be accessible, and transformative perspectives shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls that only the privileged can afford. I give away so much stuff freely because I want it to reach whoever needs it, regardless of economic circumstance.

But paid subscriptions to my Substack newsletter are key to making everything I do possible. They’re what enable me to continue this work instead of having to monetize my attention in ways that would compromise the message. They fund the time it takes to distill complex philosophical and poetic insights into readable prose and craft horoscopes that are cosmic and grounded.

Your paid subscription funds a life dedicated to challenging spiritual bypassing, celebrating embodied existence, and offering an alternative to the consciousness-numbing messages that dominate our culture.

It supports a creative soul-worker who has spent decades refusing to water down my weirdness as I stay true to a trickster vision that values sacred activism and healing imagination over algorithm-driven propaganda and sales pitches.

When you become a paid subscriber, you’re participating in an ecosystem of gleeful resistance. You’re voting with your resources for the kind of world you want to see: where artists and philosophers and consciousness rebels can do their work without having to compromise their vision.

If you have chosen or will choose to become a paid subscriber, you have my gratitude. If you don’t become a paid subscriber, you also have my gratitude, because I’m honored that you devote a bit of your precious time and energy to tuning into my thoughts and feelings.

Subscribe here: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/subscribe

How Might I Improve?

A reader recently wrote to me: “Seriously, and I say this with love, but lately your writings have not been as great as they were in the past. I just can’t relate to them as much.” She stopped there. No more words followed.

In response to her, here’s what I wrote:

“I welcome any specific critique that might help me improve the service I aspire to offer. A generalized ‘I don’t like what you’re doing anymore’ isn’t a constructive critique I can benefit from. To aid my growth as a writer and a person, please be specific about what you think has changed and how I could improve.”

I extend the same invitation to anyone reading this. Let me know how I can upgrade, refine, deepen, or polish the playful work and workful play I offer you.

I don’t ask this defensively. After so many years of composing my astrology column and newsletter and books, I’ve made my peace with the truth that not everything I express will land for every reader.

I also know that my work is alive. It keeps mutating, because I’m always mutating. And a living thing can be pruned and fed and trained toward greater usefulness, but only if someone tells me precisely where the wild growth is going astray.

In my world, you’re collaborators in an ongoing experiment. You are my co-conspirators in the long game of helping each other become more free, curious, and alive. That makes your honest, specific reflections a gift.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 27

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The coming months could be a legendary turning point you will celebrate in the future: a pivotal time when you finally outsmart an old adversary and untangle a knotted inheritance, clearing the way to pursue your true calling with undiluted devotion. Or, on the other hand, the days ahead could be another round in the long saga of “almost”: a decisive phase when you avoid a challenge that has been begging for your full brilliance, leaving your future without shining clues for how to further decode the ancient riddle. Which destiny will you accomplish, dear Virgo? Will you answer the call to adventure? Or ignore it until it fades away?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Some of my most useful revelations arrive in the dark. Once, while hiking in a wooded canyon at dusk, I lost the trail and had to feel my way forward by the sound of the creek. In that blind descent, an insight about a personal riddle I’d been pondering for months appeared unbidden, as if it had been waiting in the shadows for me. As I followed the stream bank to safety, I celebrated by singing Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” The moral of the story is that some lessons can be best learned by going down: into the body, into confusing feelings, into the rich compost of mysteries we may be hesitant to explore. How about you, Libra? In my professional opinion, your next pivotal breakthroughs are lurking in the fertile darkness rather than the brilliant heights. I hope you’re brave enough to descend. The treasure is buried, as treasure often is.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In 1912, Scorpio meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. It’s the idea that Earth’s continents were once joined in a single supercontinent and have gradually drifted apart to their present positions over millions of years. Most scientists initially rejected his hypothesis because he couldn’t explain how the movement occurred. He didn’t live long enough to receive vindication, but decades later, his novel hypothesis was fully accepted. I’m pleased to report that your wait will be far shorter, Scorpio. Please keep your faith in the novel ideas and perceptions that others don’t understand yet. The world’s almost ready for your innovations.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): There is a kind of lightning called a “sprite.” It’s a ghostly red discharge that blossoms high above thunderstorms. I suspect you may soon experience your own personal versions of this wonder. Fleeting insights may appear in unexpected places. Emotionally rich revelations could arrive out of nowhere. Because the moments could pass quickly, it will be crucial to notice them when they arrive. They could stimulate major shifts in your understanding. Keep your perceptive powers highly attuned.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Fertility clinics store frozen human embryos. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they are suspended in a long, chilly pause, awaiting instructions from the people who created them. This accumulation of potential life on hold makes me think of you. If you would thaw and reclaim the neglected, untouched regions of your own imagination, you would become an even more formidable generator of focused creative power. The encouraging news is that the coming weeks will be an unusually favorable phase to expedite this process.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Some earthquakes unleash energy in violent bursts, but others are incremental commotions that unfold gradually over days or even weeks. The way they reorganize the Earth’s crust is kinder and gentler. Let’s regard these slow quakes as an apt metaphor for the initially disruptive but ultimately constructive transformations underway in your beautiful life, Aquarius. You may not see spectacular evidence that change is percolating, but I guarantee that it is. Old structures are in a transitional phase of subtle disarray, creating conditions for new dispensations you can’t imagine yet. My prediction: The rearrangement of your landscape will be healing.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Sargasso Sea is the only sea on Earth without a land boundary. It’s defined entirely by four strong Atlantic Ocean currents that circle it. Its edges aren’t solid walls but slowly shifting rivers of water. I think this anomalous body of water is always a vivid symbol of your world, Pisces, and even more so these days. Your boundaries are currents, not coastlines. You hold your shape through movement, not through rigid definition. This is more challenging to maintain than solid borders, but it’s also a great potential strength. Use it with aplomb!

ARIES (March 21-April 19): On the sci‑fi TV show Stargate SG‑1, benevolent aliens known as the Asgard visit Earth to seek assistance from a secret US government team. The ultra-advanced, hyper-intelligent Asgard have been unable to defeat their great nemesis, another alien species called the Replicators. Their hope is that their primitive partners, the humans, might stumble onto some basic, straightforward answer that their own sophisticated minds can’t see. The gamble pays off. One of Earth’s leading physicists, who’s a naive amateur by Asgard standards, devises a rough, unsophisticated strategy that works wonderfully. Treat this as your parable, Aries: Put your faith in simple, uncluttered approaches, and don’t underestimate “beginner-level” fixes.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): During one of my visits to the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, I encountered a prankster named Mother Very Superior. This nonbinary performer was dressed like a nun and wore a prominent chastity belt. Wielding a toy whip, they gently lashed me on my shoulders and prayed over me, saying, “I absolve you of all your sins. Therefore, you are now free to commit a raucous slew of new sins.” I hope you get a similar dispensation, Taurus. To be fully available for the rollicking delights you’re eligible for, it would be wise to reduce your karmic debt.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Archaeologists studying ancient Roman shipwrecks found that sailors deliberately made their vessels heavier by stowing rocks in the hull. This reduced the profitability of their voyages, since it reduced their cargo capacity. On the other hand, it meant they wouldn’t capsize during storms. An excellent trade-off! Let’s use this scenario as a metaphor for your life right now, Gemini. I’m going to suggest that you will benefit from adding more ballast. Seemingly burdensome elements could keep you steady if conditions become unruly. Consider this: Not everything heavy is holding you back. Some of it’s keeping you strong and stable.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): During the Baroque era, Cancerian artist Artemisia Gentileschi painted powerful biblical and historical women who killed tyrants and delivered their people from violent domination. By channeling her creative passion into figures of righteous fury, she transformed her personal trauma into psychological power. I invite you to be inspired by Gentileschi as you reconfigure your own story in the coming weeks, Cancerian. Wouldn’t it be fun and potent to transform the way you imagine both the past and future plot threads of your destiny?

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In traditional sourdough baking, a small portion of fermented dough called a starter is saved and refreshed regularly. Some bakeries maintain the same lineage for years. The starter is a living culture of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that feed on flour and water, producing acids and gases that leaven the dough and create bread with complex flavor, aroma, and texture. Let’s use this as a metaphor for your life, Leo. What long-running resource can you use to help create situations that will empower you to thrive in interesting ways during the coming months?

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My rage against the machine began early. I joined my first protest march when I was a sophomore in high school and led a student walkout against racism when I was a senior. Before I was 20, I was tear-gassed by cops at a demonstration condemning America’s relentless interference in the affairs of sovereign nations.

Since then, my anger at injustice has broadened and deepened. I’ve lent my rebel yells and constructive action and poetic expression to many righteous political and environmental causes. I’m not going to stop. The theory that people grow more conservative as they age doesn’t apply to me.

But eventually I decided that instead of fighting every abuse that incited my ire, I would concentrate on a few.

It became clear to me how important it is to pick my battles and not spend time and energy on issues that aren’t my passion or areas of expertise, and where other people I respect are fighting a good fight on their behalf.

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A “hill to die on” is an idiom that refers to a principle that a person will defend even if doing so has personal, relational, professional, or political cost. Its imagery comes from warfare, where holding or taking strategic high ground could demand a big sacrifice.

“What hill will you die on?” asks: “Which commitments are so crucial that you will accept the consequences of defending them?”

During the rest of this essay, I’ll talk about which hills I choose to climb so as to wage holy battle, and which hills I won’t.

And to be clear: I won’t die on any of them. I will brawl and spar and wrestle as hard and as wild and as ingeniously as I know how. But I won’t fight to the death. I want to keep living so I can continue to fight the good fights.

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Some hills I cede to comrades who hold them better than I ever could. Some hills I leave alone because I don’t know enough about the issues and stakes to grapple with them intelligently.

There are other hills I refuse because the main combatants engaged in the struggle deploy odious methods that I can’t in good conscience join.

I won’t fight on a hill whose defenders act as if nuance is treason or that ambivalence is cowardice. I stay away from self-sabotaging warriors who have decided that an ally who agrees with them only 95% of the time is a more urgent enemy than the tyrant who agrees with them about nothing.

I won’t enlist in the cannibal feast where movements devour their own for the sin of imperfection. I avoid spectacles where one’s own purity is prized above the actual survival of the vulnerable people that purity claims to protect.

I won’t let the perfect strangle the good. I won’t prefer a noble loss to an unglamorous, partial victory that actually saves lives and helps real people live better. I won’t mistake the performance of righteousness for the achievement of it.

The cost of these mistakes always comes due in the lives of those who can least afford it: people who don’t have the same privileges and resources as those who are comfortable and entitled.

I have watched this temptation help hand power to the cruelest among us while its practitioners congratulated themselves on the immaculate condition of their hands. I want no part of that purity. I would rather be useful than spotless.

The eight hills I describe below are mine. I hold them with compassionate zeal, in a manner worthy of the causes I’m fighting for, because how we fight is the first draft of what we’re building.

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Hill 1 — Enchanted, Sane Progressive Politics

I am committed to a version of democratic socialism and progressive politics that’s spiritually literate, empirically grounded, and allergic to fascism and authoritarianism in all its forms. I defend multiracial and multicultural democracy. I oppose oligarchy and minority rule.

I insist that the work of liberation be infused with imagination, eros, humor, and supple moral reasoning rather than rigid dogma.

A politics that can’t laugh or bear complexity is half-dead. At best, it will build a marginally bigger version of the cage it claims to be breaking. I want justice and delight. I want moral fervor and flexibility. I refuse to believe we must amputate the soul to win the world.

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Hill 2 — Protecting Imagination Against Cynicism

I defend the conviction that imagination, mythic thinking, wonder, and play are essential instruments for surviving and transforming a collapsing world.

Cynicism is the cheapest sophistication there is. I despise the flattening, literalist, nothing-really-matters posture that flatters itself as realism while surrendering the future.

I push back against it without inhibition. I want to show anyone who listens to me that enchantment can coexist with harsh realism about suffering and loss. Reverence, curiosity, amazement, and awe are medicines that keep us thriving in the fight.

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Hill 3 — Spiritual Freedom Beyond Dogma

I‘m devoted to spiritual and mystical exploration that’s captured by no single tradition. I am an eager syncretist who borrows from Western Hermeticism, Qabalah, astrology, paganism, Indigenous teachings, esoteric Christianity, Hinduism, tantra, Sufism, and Vajrayana Buddhism. In me, all of it cross-pollinates and evolves

I challenge fundamentalist religion and hyper-rationalist contempt for the spiritual life with equal energy, because both are forms of foreclosure. One locks the mystery in a single creed and the other denies that the mystery exists at all.

Soul work and ritual belong in public culture. I share religious scholar Huston Smith’s perspective: “Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.”

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Hill 4 — Astrology as Art and Wisdom

I defend astrology as a language of psychological and spiritual understanding. I reject delusional concepts of it as being deterministic fortune-telling and fear-based superstition. What I practice is poetry and oracle rather than prediction. It’s not a science, but a mythic container for self-knowledge and ethical reflection.

For more of my thoughts on this subject, go here: https://tinyurl.com/MythoPoeticAstrology . . . and here: https://tinyurl.com/AstrologyIsVeryReal . . . and here: https://tinyurl.com/AstrologyForTheSoul

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Hill 5 — Ecological Tenderness and Responsibility

My life is devoted to cultivating veneration and care for the more-than-human world: the plants, animals, watersheds, and nature spirits. My intention is to invoke our love for the natural world as a primary way of motivating our response to the ecological crisis. Facts and figures are crucial as we find our way out of the climate emergency, but we also need to to feel deep adoration for what we seek to save.

I resist techno-utopian fantasy and fatalistic collapse-narrative, because both are ways of refusing the actual, unglamorous work in front of us.

Our grief is sacred, as are our practical responsibility and creative adaptation.

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Hill 6 — Defense of Nuance, Complexity, and Ambivalence

I protect nuance in an age addicted to absolutes: the right to hold conflicting truths and to see shadow in everything. This means critiquing my own side and myself.

I’m willing to risk being misunderstood in order to model non-binary thinking. I refuse the easy all-good / all-bad story, and I invite my readers into a subtler, braver moral and emotional terrain.

The capacity to hold contradiction without flinching is a marvelous expression of intelligence.

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Hill 7 — Ending Toxic Patriarchy and Defending Women and LGBTQ+ Lives

Hill 7 and Hill 8 are foundational for all the others.

I give my life-energy to opposing toxic patriarchy in all its forms: authoritarian masculinity, gendered violence, compulsory heterosexuality, and every cultural script that erases or belittles women, queer, and trans people.

I stand for a world where women’s agency, queer and trans embodiment, and the full spectrum of gender expression are treated as sacred and politically non-negotiable. They’re never “issues” to be debated for sport by people whose own lives aren’t on the line.

Eros, care, freedom, and pleasure are central to justice, and an attack on them is an attack on democracy.

I expose fascist and religious movements wherever they dress misogyny and queerphobia in lofty language. I answer them with better myths and truer stories in which liberated genders and erotic intelligences are the heroes.

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Hill 8 — Ending White Supremacy and Repairing the Theft of Land and Lives

This Hill, #8, and Hill 7 are the bedrock. Everything else I’ve named rests on them.

The United States was assembled out of two ongoing crimes: the seizure of a continent from the nations who had tended it for thousands of years, and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to make that seized ground profitable. Neither crime is finished. They have continued in different forms under different names.

To read about the Black experience after the Civil War until now, study this essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates: tinyurl.com/WhyBlackReparations or tinyurl.com/WhyWeNeedReparations

Another great resource is the book The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones: 1619books.com

To read about the invading European and American assault on the Indigenous experience, study the book American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, by David E. Stannard: tinyurl.com/TheAmericanHolocaust or tinyurl.com/AnAmericanHolocaust

I won’t list all the ways white American culture has continued its harm against Black and Indigenous cultures to the present day, but here’s a bare glimpse:

The United States signed 370 treaties with Native nations and violated nearly all of them. Confinement on reservations wasn’t enough, so the government rampaged even further. In boarding schools where Indigenous children were forced to attend, they had their languages and traditions beaten out of them.

Slave patrols hunting Blacks who escaped servitude in plantations evolved into police departments. Emancipation didn’t interrupt the arrangement so much as rename it. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, and then white Southern legislatures created racialized criminal offenses and criminalized conditions of Black freedom. Convict leasing filled the coal mines and turpentine camps with men arrested for being unemployed. That machinery evolved into mass incarceration.

I say all this plainly because the current authoritarian project, which I call the Trumpocalypse, desperately wants us not to say it. White supremacy mixed with fundamentalist Christianity is a putrid religion decimating and harming the world NOW. It has a creation myth, a priesthood, sacraments of violence, and a promise of salvation to poor white people who are offered a superiority they can swallow in place of a life they can live.

This is why data alone will never dislodge white supremacy. It has to be met on the level where it actually lives, which is the level of story and soul. So I aspire to answer it with better myths and with oracular sagas in which Black and Indigenous genius is the engine of the future rather than a footnote to the crime.

I live and write on land that was stolen from the Coastal Miwok people who had lived there for at least 200 generations. My spiritual syncretism (see Hill 3) draws from traditions whose keepers were sometimes jailed and hurt for practicing them.

Neither fact is a confession I get to make once and then retire. They are standing obligations: to credit my sources, to ask, to pay, and to follow instead of lead.

And I refuse to confuse the feeling with the transfer. A land acknowledgment that moves no land is a séance. Reparations and Land Back are material propositions, and I passionately support them as material propositions: deeds, dollars, water rights, and jurisdiction. I want the descendants of the stolen and the dispossessed to inherit acreage, capital, sovereignty, and the unbothered freedom to be themselves.

Image by Rob McInnis

Image at top of the newsletter by Rosie Menthos

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The Vows

Eight hills:

I — Enchanted, sane progressive politics

I vow to carry out a politics both intensely progressive and lyrically soulful.

I resist fascism and oligarchy without surrendering to dogma or dehumanization.

I keep imagination, humor, wildness, and eros percolating in my work, even when the world feels brutal.

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II — Protecting imagination against cynicism

I vow to defend imagination from the deadening force of cynicism.

I treat play as necessary medicine, not frivolous decoration.

I insist that wonder is compatible with clear-eyed realism.

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III — Spiritual freedom beyond dogma

I vow to honor spiritual freedom beyond the borders of any single tradition.

I explore and celebrate the occult and mystical currents without letting any of them be a prison.

I speak of soulful mysteries in language that’s intelligent and inclusive.

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IV — Astrology as art and wisdom

I vow to practice and portray astrology as a poetic and ethical art of timing and meaning.

I refuse deterministic, fear-based uses of the craft.

I offer it as a language to cultivate our self-knowledge and our responsibility to the interconnected web of life.

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V — Ecological tenderness and responsibility

I vow to live in reverence for the more-than-human world.

I name ecological grief and danger honestly, without numbing people or collapsing into despair.

I encourage practical, loving responses to Earth’s suffering, grounded in kinship with plants, animals, waters, winds, and the nature spirits.

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VI — Defense of complexity and paradox

I vow to protect nuance in an age addicted to absolutes.

I defend the right to hold conflicting truths and to critique myself and my own side. I am open to seeing shadow everywhere even as I celebrate the world’s gorgeousness..

I model thinking and feeling that resist the easy all-good / all-bad story.

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VII — Ending toxic patriarchy, defending women and LGBTQ+ lives

I vow to oppose toxic patriarchy wherever it harms women, queer, trans people, and the world.

I treat women’s agency, queer and trans embodiment, and diverse gender expressions as sacred and non-negotiable.

I bless the bodies and desires that patriarchy curses, and I expose the spiritual, political, and cultural disguises of misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia.

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VIII — Ending white supremacy and repairing the theft of land and lives

I vow to oppose white supremacy in its laws, its economics, its myths, and its manners, including any versions of it that live in me.

I support the material repair of what was stolen, including land, wealth, sovereignty, jurisdiction, and I refuse to accept the mere ceremony of regret as a substitute.

I amplify Black and Indigenous voices and keep this work alive when it’s inconvenient and when no one is watching.

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These are my hills. I won’t waste my sacred struggles on lesser ground, nor squander my life pretending every battle is mine to win.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 20

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I am nursing a hopeful dream that you will give yourself a fun surprise or two in the coming days—maybe even more than two. Not necessarily the most expensive delights, but those that would inspire your nervous system to relax and your spirit to celebrate. Possible options: a few hours of free time with no obligations, a hike where you adore and praise the sky, a conversation you’ve been craving, a daring yes, or a long-overdue no. Or how about finally starting a fun project you keep postponing, or setting down a burden you’ve been carrying for too long? You might ask yourself: “If someone who loved me dearly were in charge of my rhythm, what would they arrange for me?”

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The first maps of Antarctica contained blank spaces labeled simply “unexplored.” Cartographers didn’t pretend to know what wasn’t yet revealed. This was a gift to future trailblazers, who didn’t have to overcome the confusion of false certainties. You could benefit from adopting a similar practice. Instead of explaining every mystery with confident opinions, designate a few regions of your inner world as magnificently unexplored. Your willingness to say “I don’t know yet” will be a fertile form of wisdom. The unanswered questions will be better allies than premature conclusions.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In architecture, the keystone is the central, wedge-shaped stone positioned at the top of an arch. It’s often the last piece placed, and it’s what holds everything together. If it’s removed, the entire structure collapses. But the keystone itself is held in place by the pressure of the other stones. I love the fact that it’s both the most crucial piece and yet totally dependent on everything else. This is an excellent metaphor for you right now. You’re like a keystone: holding everything together and also being held by everything. Please accept my personal thanks for accomplishing the amazing feat of being both powerful and vulnerable! The structure needs you, and you need the structure. PS: Don’t overestimate your independence or underestimate your importance.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Don’t reorganize your junk drawers anytime soon, Sagittarius. Please? Refrain from scrubbing the oven, organizing your kitchen cupboards, and untangling old extension cords. I’m begging you to believe me when I urge to allocate your energy toward the most interesting and important matters. The cosmic indicators are unambiguous. You will be happiest and most successful if you: 1. dare to access secret wisdom you’ve been hiding from yourself; 2. immerse yourself in almost too much beauty and truth; 3. let your imagination run wild as you visualize future scenarios that thrill you even if they’re also a bit unnerving.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The Grand Canyon in Arizona is 277 miles long, as wide as 18 miles, and a mile deep in some places. Through persistent erosion for millions of years, the Colorado River carved it. This massive creative project happened entirely through subtraction, not addition. I suggest you regard it as one of your role models in the coming months, Capricorn. Your goal is to wear away resistance and eliminate what’s unnecessary. The magnificence you produce will be very gradual and incremental.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In engineering, redundancy refers to the practice of building multiple layers of support into a system so that if one part falters, others keep functioning. Airplanes and spacecraft rely on this principle for safety. I urge you to adopt a similar strategy in the coming weeks. By creating backup plans or additional reinforcement, you can move forward with more daring and flair, which I highly recommend. Artful preparation will strengthen your ability to experiment and improvise.

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PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The ocean has different layers. Each has its own temperature, pressure, and ecosystem. Many sea creatures are adapted to one specific stratum and don’t wander far from their chosen realm. But there are transition zones where the layers meet, and they’re often rich in biodiversity. I propose that we use these areas as metaphors for your power spots, Pisces. You tend to thrive in thresholds and boundaries, where edges meet and overlap. That will be especially true in the coming weeks. To court good fortune and sweet delight, you should hang out at the borders where diverse influences mingle.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Consider this your official alert that you’re close to getting too much of a good thing. To safeguard the lovely momentum you’ve built lately, be vigilant that genuine abundance doesn’t bloat into plain old overload. Say no to becoming indentured to your own brilliant ideas. Don’t let your victories drag you into depletion. Steer clear of grand gestures of generosity that are driven mostly by the urge to dazzle onlookers. You really can keep every delicious reward you’ve earned, dear Aries, as long as you begin installing some graceful new boundaries right now.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1925, Taurus astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979) discovered that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. Famous astrophysicists of that era rejected her conclusions because she contradicted the prevailing theories. Nevertheless, she persisted in her claims and was eventually proved correct by other experts. Sound familiar, Taurus? If it doesn’t yet, I expect it will soon. Naysayers may insist you’re wrong when you know and I know you’re right. My advice: Be faithful to the truths you’ve directly observed even if they don’t match consensus reality. Your understandings are valid even if they’re inconvenient.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You’re ready and able to commune intimately with the hidden source of power that fuels your life. Hallelujah! But first, acknowledge a humbling truth: You’re not entirely sure what that source is. You’ve made assumptions, of course. You’ve told yourself stories about where your vitality comes from: your work, your relationships, your creative projects, your spiritual practices. And while these channels do transmit energy, they’re tributaries of the ultimate spring. In the coming weeks, you’ll have exciting opportunities to trace these streams back to their headwaters. Start this way: Be alert for mini-breakthroughs when you feel unexpectedly energized or mysteriously restored.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The GPS system requires Einstein’s theory of relativity to work correctly. Satellites in orbit experience time slightly differently than we do on Earth’s surface. Without accounting for that time dilation, your phone would be off by 6.8 miles every day. Moral of the story: The practical requires the theoretical and the mundane needs the cosmic. I bring this to your attention as a useful metaphor, Cancerian. I suspect you’ve been trying to solve ground-level problems with ground-level thinking. But your current challenges require you to factor in some relativity: to recognize that different parts of your life are operating in different timeframes, under different rules. What works in one context doesn’t necessarily work in another. In the coming weeks, refrain from trying to apply universal solutions. Calibrate for context.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In traditional textile making, the selvage is the strong edge that holds the fabric together and keeps it from unraveling. It’s braided more tightly than the rest so it can do its guarding work. I think that’s a helpful metaphor for your life in the coming weeks, Leo. Your main weave is pretty gorgeous, but the edges aren’t sufficiently taut. What should you do, practically speaking? For starters, create firm boundaries around your work time, your rest, and your availability to others’ demands.

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Bless the Gates and Portals and Thresholds, Whether They’re “Real” or Imaginal

My writing below was sparked by, indebted to, and in conspiracy with Sarah West, who said it brightly and clearly. A link to her original essay appears after mine, and I hope you read it.

I’ve been loving astrology and writing horoscopes for many years, which obligates me to file the following report: The Lion’s Gate Portal that allegedly opens every year on August 8 isn’t in my ephemeris. There’s no particular recurring aspect.

The star Sirius performs its heliacal rising around that time, and eight is a handsome fat number that resembles the infinity sign. Somewhere in the last decade, the internet committed an act of spontaneous folk mythology and built a door in that day.

Here’s my testimony about that as a dues-paying member of the astrologers’ guild: I loved it, and I don’t care if it wasn’t grounded in actual astrological data.

The compulsive skeptics and scoffers were out in droves, of course, doing what they do best and worst, which is to mistake their own lack of enchantment for a rigorous epistemology. They imagine they’re defending reality. What they’re actually defending is the small studio apartment they rent inside of reality with the blinds drawn and one light bulb glaring, no visitors.

I could hand them a more robust debunking if they would be open to it, which they aren’t. I know that my own beloved craft is a system of poetic metaphors and evocative symbols, and not a set of meticulous instructions about how to run our lives.

I say this in print regularly. Along with my beloved, now deceased astrological colleague Antero Alli, I am the most cheerfully agnostic astrologer you will ever meet.

Here’s what actually occurred on August 8th, whatever the sky was or wasn’t doing: Millions of human beings decided the day was porous and generative and full of possibility, and then behaved as though it were. And behavior is the most concrete substance in the cosmos.

Somebody who hasn’t asked the universe for anything in years finally asked on August 8, the Lion’s Gate Portal. Out loud in a voice that cracked while they drove to the grocery store.

Somebody wrote the thing they really, really wanted on a napkin at work and put the napkin in their shoe and walked around on their own longing all afternoon.

Somebody lit a ritual candle on a stove burner because they couldn’t find the matches, and then did a sacred ceremony unlike any they had ever done. Somebody whispered a stirring vow about their future intentions into a glass of lemonade and then drank it. Somebody stood in a laundromat at 9 pm under the worst lighting God ever permitted, spoke their dead mother’s name aloud, and knew at last what they needed to whisper to her spirit on the other side of the veil..

Note the addresses on these holy moments: kitchens, laundromats, parked cars, bathtubs. The Lion’s Gate, if it opened at all, opened at ground level, in bodies, using lungs. This is the kind of magic I love best.

Our imagination is the single most valuable asset we own. It’s the engine room. Everything humans have ever built, including cathedrals, vaccines, labor unions, and escape routes out of a bad marriage, was envisioned by somebody before it was real.

To let that faculty atrophy, to sand it down into content consumption and irony, is a mutilation, and we modern humans are doing that to ourselves at a rapid rate. The people snickering hardest are frequently the ones furthest along in the debilitating procedure. How dare the scoffers ridicule the Lion’s Gate Portal even if it’s “just” a product of our imagination?

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Did unseen intelligences lean in and listen on August 8 during the Lion’s Gate Portal? I would testify yes under oath.

I’ve spent decades in the company of dream-beings and tulpa companions and unseen forces that have mystified me nonstop. And my field notes say the universe is far weirder and more responsive than the fundamentalist materialists have budgeted for.

But here’s what’s most important to me: Whether the answer comes from a listening, sentient cosmos or from the ferocious reorganization that happens inside a person who finally says the true thing out loud, prompted by playful magic, either way there is dramatic movement.

The sincerity is a catalytic ingredient. Any being worth praying to is going to lean toward the prayer that has actual blood in it and away from the one mumbled out of obligation.

I’ll make one distinction, because I refuse to be conscripted into the flabby wing of this movement. I’m not talking about the version where you visualize a Mercedes-Benz and wait for the universe to make it appear in your driveway. That’s the imagination declawed and put on a leash and sent out to fetch merchandise.

Real imaginative work is closer to labor than to lounging. It’s daily and disciplined. It might ask you to keep faith with invisible beauty for years while nobody confirms it, and then it asks you to go do the dishes and make the phone calls and show up.

So was the Lion’s Gate Portal real?

Wrong question.

The right question is whether anybody got closer to their own longing. Whether the fear loosened or whether a disempowered soul felt for a while like a participant in the world rather than a spectator being marketed to.

If yes, then magic opened itself up, and I don’t need it to have a street address in the heavens.

The gate was in our bodies.

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Sacred Advertisement: This dispatch has been brought to you by every wish ever spoken out loud with a shaking voice, and by Sarah West, who articulated what I believed in her stirring words.

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Addendum

While the narrow-minded debunkers were busy congratulating themselves for knowing that the August 8th Lion’s Gate was “only” imaginary, the sky was loading a big portal for August 12th and 13th. And every bit of this one is in the ephemeris:

• total solar eclipse

• new moon

• Perseids meteor shower

• Six planets strung pretty closely across the heavens in the hours before dawn: Mars and Saturn should be the most conspicuous; Mercury and Jupiter will be very low in the twilight. Uranus needs binoculars, and Neptune a telescope.

Can I tell you, with rationally consecrated logic, what it means that the moon blots out the sun in some parts of the world while six wanderers line up at dawn and the sky rains the crumbs of a comet all night?

I can’t. Nobody can. The instruments measure the phenomena beautifully but are struck dumb at the threshold of significance, as always.

So I hand this overflow show over to your imagination with a formal directive: Have fun with it. Speculate wildly and with abandon

You could also try on the following ideas, or discard them and dream up others: It’s a favorable time to break and escape our harmful habits and the fixations that sap our life force. My muses tell me it’s a reset time extraordinaire.

Feed your imagination this code: DESTINY WORMHOLE.

The brilliant witch Amanda Yates Garcia recommends we do a ritual to shift our focus from what we want to get rid of, to what we want to create.

She says: Start by filling in the blanks in this declaration:

Instead of _______________________

I choose to ______________________

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Read Sarah West’s original essay, which inspired mine:

tinyurl.com/SarahWestImagination

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YOU ARE A PROPHET

One of my beloved tasks as an astrologer of the soul is to help readers learn to distinguish between the wasteful, demoralizing use of the imagination and the uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination.

A good way for me to earn the right to discourse on this subject is to keep learning more about how to distinguish between my own wasteful, demoralizing uses of the imagination and my uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination. I was not adept at this early in my adult life. My skill has improved, but is still far less than expert.

Here’s the foundation of our meditations: Our imagination is the most important asset we possess. It’s our power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that we want to bring into being. It’s like the magic wand we use to shape our future.

We are all prophets. Our imaginations tirelessly churn out images of what we will be doing later. The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of ourselves eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of building our dream home.

Our imagination is a treasure when it generates scenarios aligned with our deep desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating the life we want. We call on it to formulate images of the conditions we’d like to inhabit and the objects we hope to wield.

But for many of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We may use it conjure up fearful or distasteful premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values.

That’s in part the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and influential people.

Chaotic, disturbing, and even sickening fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. These disheartening fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end ruminations.

Every time we entertain at length a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we blast ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren’t healthy for us and that we don’t need.

Whenever we surrender to the allure of false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imaginations are practicing putrid magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that Buddhists dub the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly exudes pictures in the manner of an agitated critter. The teacher Jeff Brown adds a crucial nuance. He says our “monkey hearts” are forever churning up forlorn, fractious, frightful feelings that are at the roots of the monkey mind’s disquiet.

Is there an antidote? Maybe. If we stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind’s and monkey heart’s slapdash chatter, we may become more gracefully attuned to the life that’s right in front of us.

Whether our imagination is in service to our righteous desires or in thrall to our compulsive commotion, there is one constant: Its prophecies play a prominent role in shaping what happens to us. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to us as actual events that confirm our expectations.

The well-documented placebo effect in drug research, for which there is plentiful evidence, has broader implications. So much (not all!) of what unfolds in our lives, for good and for ill, is shaped by what we believe will happen.

Does that mean our mental and emotional projections help create the future? Let’s consider that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we presume will happen does tend to materialize?

Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible and practical approach is to expect blessings.

That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my oracles for you, dear readers. If I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy and pleasure.

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LISTEN TO THE ESSAY ABOVE:

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 13

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Given how extra vibrant and refreshed you have been feeling, I would understand if you had zero interest in confronting The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. Why deliberately tangle with that stale, long‑term energy drain when your spirits are so high? Here’s why: At this moment, you possess a new and unprecedented advantage over The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. You may not manage to completely vanquish it once and for all. But then again, you just might. At the very least, you can now sharply curtail its ability to siphon your energy and meddle with your life.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was known as a “human computer” who specialized in carrying out large volumes of intricate calculations. She also had an uncanny ability to translate complex problems into elegant equations, which was why NASA called on her help to guide its early space missions. She said she simply asked the right questions until the numbers disclosed their hidden patterns. Be like her in the coming weeks, Virgo. Instead of forcing quick and simple answers, focus on dreaming up the smartest questions. Well-crafted inquiries will unlock sweet insights that brute effort can’t.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the art of mosaic-making, tiny fragments of stone or glass are fitted together into intricate patterns. Each piece is insignificant and meaningless on its own, but together they compose luminous images. Let’s deploy the mosaic as a metaphor for your life, Libra. I invite you to consider the possibility that you are assembling minor details and small clues into a big, beautiful masterpiece. You may not even be fully aware of how exactly you’re doing it or what it will ultimately look like and do. That’s fine. Your higher self is in charge of accomplishing this minor miracle.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Before launching spacecraft, engineers perform countless simulations of situations they hope will never happen. They repeatedly practice failures so that success becomes more likely. This is a different version of your current assignment, Scorpio. Your task is not to worry about disaster but to rehearse courage. So I encourage you to use your imagination to strengthen your resilience. Visualize yourself responding with creativity, grace, and humor whenever life springs surprises and unexpected blessings. Your confidence will thrive because you will have lots of inner practice in collaborating adeptly with uncertainty.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The horizon line is always the same distance away from you, about three miles at sea level. If you walk toward it, you will never reach it because it moves with you. Now I’d like to propose that some of your personal goals work like horizons. They are orientations, not actual destinations. You’re supposed to move toward them indefinitely, never arriving. In the coming weeks, I invite you to distinguish between your horizon goals and your destination goals. Some aims are meant to be reached, while others basically guide your direction without ever needing to be attained.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Here’s my normally $600-per-hour advice, provided at a very low cost to you: Don’t get back to where you once belonged. Instead, go toward where you must belong in the future. Maybe the old place feels cozier because it’s familiar, even if it no longer fits the person you are now. But I recommend that you heed the subtle pull of the life that’s calling you from ahead. Who exactly is the even more beautiful self you’re on your way to becoming? Visualize in detail the situation where that sovereign majesty will thrive.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

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and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): If you’re single, the coming weeks will be one of the most auspicious periods in ages for cultivating your own fan club of admirers. Your allure is turned up higher than usual, and the universe seems to have decided that what once might have counted as excessive is now perfectly appropriate. If, however, you’re happily ensconced in a lively monogamous bond, don’t sabotage it with daydreams of juggling multiple lovers. Instead, conspire with your partner to expand the range of flavors inside the relationship. Try stepping into different personas together: Adopt new names, experiment with strange accents, and imagine you’re living in 1453 Italy, or 1506 Spain, or 1685 Japan, or 1721 France.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The speed of thought can zip along at over 200 miles per hour. That’s the rate at which signals travel through neurons. Electrical impulses in computers, on the other hand, may travel much faster, at half the speed of light. So your thoughts are very leisurely compared to machines. But they do what computers can’t. They’re creating meaning, not just moving data. Their slowness is where the richest reality unfolds. Remember that well in the coming weeks, Pisces. It’s extra important for your mental and physical health that you not imitate machines and algorithms. You need to ruminate and meditate and muse as gently and unhurriedly as you dare.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): At the post office, I mischievously plucked a crumpled piece of red paper out of the trash can. I don’t usually do such things, but I sensed some horoscope material was lurking there. It turned out to be a handwritten love note addressed to “My Lush and Luminous Aries Laugh-Lover” and signed, “Your Flawed but Fiery and Funny Provocateur.” The Provocateur had written, “Let’s be rowdy investigators of wonders and miracles. Let’s hack our way through the frontiers to discover the wildest beauty and truth ever.” I was shocked that anyone would have discarded such a tempting proposal—especially an Aries. Please avoid making comparable errors in the near future, my dear.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The ancient Romans could be obsessive perfectionists in their approach to building stuff. They were extra thorough and scrupulous. That’s why some of the roads they constructed are still usable today, 2,000 years later. Workers dug deep foundations, then layered stones, gravel, and sand before placing the final surface. In the coming weeks, Taurus, I recommend that you, too, carry out meticulous groundwork as you upgrade your foundations and optimize your stability. Don’t you dare be lazy or hurried in doing this grunt work. Your dogged and ingenious attention to detail will make your future safety zone shatterproof and shockproof.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I appoint you to be the Chief Role Model in charge of showing everyone how to be a smart lover in all situations. Yes, all situations, not only those involving romance. In addition, I bestow on you the title of Chief Administrator of Amazing Grace, hoping this will inspire you to make elegant interventions in every situation where you have influence. Finally, Gemini, I exhort you to be devoted to seeing the beauty in everyone you encounter, even if you must work hard to find it. In asking you to carry out these humongous responsibilities, I’m interpreting the clues offered by the astrological omens. They have revealed to me that cultivating a generous spirit is crucial to you attracting what you want most.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I confess I have succumbed to a very modern misdemeanor: tossing the word “sacred” around more often than it deserves. To be fair, I haven’t stooped to the tacky depths of New Age hustlers hawking “sacred e‑mail marketing” or “sacred dog-walking.” But still, I would prefer to invoke the word more sparingly, so that on the rare occasions I do, you will feel a genuine shiver of awe. Like now. I predict you will soon be stirred by marvelous encounters and realizations that flood you with reverent feelings and turn your inner life deliciously upside down.

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More and more creative people find they do their best work when they’re feeling healthy and secure. We know writers who no longer need to be drunk or in agony to shed the numbness of their daily routine and tap into the full powers of their imagination.

They have discovered, to their initial embarrassment, that the muses aren’t vampires who feed on suffering. They are co-conspirators who enjoy working with collaborators who are well-rested, well-fed, and well-loved.

We have filmmaker friends whose best work flows not from the depths of alienated self-doubt but rather from the heights of well-earned bliss. They have noticed that despair is monotonous. It tends to produce art about despair on the subject of despair. Joy, on the other hand, is promiscuously curious and will follow a thread of inquiry anywhere it leads.

Musician P. J. Harvey is the patron saint of this new breed. “When I’m contented, I’m more open to receiving a lot of inspiration,” she testified. “I’m most creative when I feel safe and happy.”

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But wait. We already hear the objection rising up, and we’ve even arranged for it to be delivered by Eckhart Tolle, who has been quoted on a thousand inspirational memes as saying, “I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone.”

There’s a kernel of hard truth buried in his tidy formulation. Few of us wake up by burrowing deeper into our nest of pillows. Comfort, in the sense of the cushioned avoidance of all friction, can be a soporific. On that narrow point, Tolle and I agree.

Here’s where we part ways, though. Comfort is different from safety and security, even quite different from happiness. To conflate them is the central error of the entire tormented-genius mythology, and it’s the reason so many gifted people sabotage their own well-being in the superstitious belief that misery is the price of admission to the visionary state.

Child psychologists have a term for the truth that Tolle’s aphorism misses: the secure base. When a toddler is in a strange room and her caregiver is present and attentive, she will venture farther from that caregiver and take more bold experimental risks than a child who feels abandoned. She feels safe.

The scared child clings, while the secure child explores. Safety nurtures the urge to wander into the unknown.

So when we hear that no one awakens in their comfort zone, we counter with a more accurate and more generous proposition: Many of us awaken from a secure base.

The diver who plumbs the abyss is roped to a boat full of friends, and the pilgrim who sets out for the world’s end packs a knapsack and trusts she has a home to return to. The artist who descends into the underworld of the imagination does her bravest work because an animal part of her knows she is held.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we have retired the archetype of the tormented genius. We have zero attraction to books and movies and songs by depressed jerks whose work is celebrated but whose lives are a mess.

Stories about supposedly interesting creeps don’t rouse our perverse fascination, because we’ve broken our addiction to perverse fascination. We kicked the habit the way one kicks any habit: slowly, with relapses, and with a great deal of help from people who had already gotten clean.

When hearing about illustrious creators who brag that they feel most stimulated when they’re angry or miserable, we unleash the Official Beauty and Truth Lab Histrionic Yawn.

We have learned to recognize the boast for what it is: not a report from the frontier of consciousness but a recruitment poster for a cult whose chief sacrament is self-harm.

We decline the invitation, having other plans for our one wild and precious nervous system.

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Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it’s a rare commodity attainable only through dumb luck.

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness,” said novelist Willa Cather. “One only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.”

We generally love Cather’s writing, but we hereby register our respectful dissent to this formulation of hers.

Happiness isn’t a meteorite that may or may not happen to strike you. It’s a garden. It’s the consequence of attention paid daily over seasons, of weeding and watering and the patient observation of which plants thrive in your particular soil.

To say happiness comes only by luck is to confess that you have never tried to grow any.

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There is another obstacle to overthrowing the status quo. Oppressively nice, indiscriminately optimistic, sentimental comfort-hoarders give happiness a bad name. They seem to justify the novelist Flaubert’s mean-spirited observation that “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

But the happiness we champion isn’t stupid and selfish. It’s not the bovine contentment of a creature that has never had a difficult thought. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains. It just refuses to let those horrors have the last word.

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Here’s a third blotch on the reputation of happiness: that it’s mostly an absence of pain. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche frames the issue well: “Would you prefer the happiness of scratching a mosquito bite over the happiness of not having a mosquito bite in the first place?”

The tormented genius is forever scratching. He has mistaken the temporary relief of his self-inflicted itch for joy, and he can’t imagine a life in which the bite was never administered.

We are interested in the other kind of happiness, the unscratched kind that doesn’t require a wound to authenticate itself.

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It’s possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that doesn’t paralyze the will or sap ambition.

For the first clue about how to proceed, we turn to researchers Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. In their book How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People, they reveal that the number one trait of happy people is . . . can you guess? . . . a serious determination to be happy.

This shocking, iconoclastic assertion overturns everything the romance of suffering would have you believe. The happiest people aren’t the luckiest people. They are the most committed people, who treat their own well-being as a discipline worth practicing rather than a windfall worth awaiting.

Bliss is a habit we can cultivate, in other words, not an accident that we stumble upon by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.

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News flash: In a culture that profits from our dissatisfaction and markets to our wounds and aches, choosing happiness on purpose is an act of rebellion.

The cynic imagines he is the brave one, the realistic adult. But we have come to suspect the opposite. Cynicism is the path of least resistance. It costs nothing and risks nothing and protects its owner from ever being caught caring.

The truly daring move, the genuinely dangerous and against-the-grain move, is to remain tender and hopeful and creatively alive in full view of everything that argues against it.

There’s a body of research that backs this up, too. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory tells us that joy, interest, and contentment feel good and also broaden the mind. They expand the range of thoughts and actions a person can call upon, widening the field of the possible.

Fear and despair narrow us to a single grim corridor of fight-or-flight. Delight throws open every door and invites us to explore the rooms we didn’t know were there. The muse, it turns out, has been telling P. J. Harvey the truth all along.

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For the final clue about how to conjure up a kind of happiness that doesn’t anesthetize the soul, we call on poet Kenneth Koch. Here’s what he wrote about Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse: “So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss. But Perse had the courage to look into happiness.”

Here is the answer to Eckhart Tolle and to every gospel that equates awakening with anguish. Looking into the abyss is the easy assignment. It has been done a trillion times. It’s the safe, expected, well-rewarded gesture. Ironically, it’s the true comfort zone of the modern artist, where applause is guaranteed and no one will ever accuse them of being naive. Any sad clever person can stare into the void and report back that it’s really fucking dark.

On the other hand, to look into happiness is bold and rebellious. It’s the work that few of us have the nerve for. How crazy demanding is it for any of us to gaze steadily at joy without flinching, without being ironic or sarcastic, without rushing to undercut it with a caveat, to take it as seriously and render it as precisely as other artists render their suffering.

That’s genuinely uncharted territory. We awaken outside our comfort zone not by courting the misery everyone expects of us. We dare the harder, stranger, more exposing thing: to be fully, bravely, creatively well.

But How Dare You, Now?

Some of you may already be drafting an indignant letter. How dare I counsel the cultivation of joy during the Trumpocalypse, with cruelty enthroned, with the sick and the poor and the hunted informed daily that their misery is the policy working exactly as intended.

To prescribe happiness now can sound not just unreasonable but obscene. I hear and honor that complaint. But here’s the precision: The happiness I champion isn’t the placid, passive contentment of the comfort-hoarder. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains.

If we announce we’re too heartsick for joy while the regime does its cruel work, then we perform the exact comfort-zone flinch we warned against, and feel righteous while performing it.

Those of us in pure, inconsolable despair keep missing the truth that demoralization is the evil regime’s intention. A machine built on cruelty requires your exhaustion. It manufactures the 3 a.m. dread and the slow leak of your ability to imagine anything better, because people too depressed to picture a livable future won’t lift a finger to build one. In the end, our uncompromising despair is compliance.

So I double the prescription, for me and everyone who considers this a worthy antidote. Get well-rested, well-loved, as happy as you can, and dangerous, too, because that’s how we will survive the fight for as long as it may take.

The bullies in power would love to see us too sad to build. Let’s refuse them that reflex.

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Bonus reads:

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 6

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Within most galaxies are dense clouds of gas and dust that astronomers call “star factories.” Here and there, the magic of gravity gradually gathers together diffuse material into concentrated clusters until nuclear fusion ignites, creating brilliant new suns. I suspect you will be operating a metaphorical star factory in the coming weeks and months, Leo. Small ideas, fragments of plans, or tentative experiments could coalesce in productive ways. Through your patient attention and care, luminous concentrations of useful beauty will emerge.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution isn’t a ladder of progress but a branching bush of experimentation. Most species that ever existed are extinct, but they weren’t failures. For a very long time, they were successful experiments in being alive, well adapted to their environment. When conditions changed, they ended. That’s how evolution works. Let’s apply this lesson to your life, Virgo. If a part of your world is concluding, celebrate and thank it, then bid it a fond farewell. Feel grateful that it succeeded completely at what it was meant to do and gave you all it had to give.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Your sense of purpose is intensifying. Your people need you more than ever, and your gifts are ripening just as they are most valuable to your community. But I must add that the road ahead will not be frictionless. You will have to outmaneuver diversionary tactics and dispel pockets of confusion. To serve as a shimmering catalyst of beauty and truth for your allies—and a shrewd strategist in the presence of deflections—lean into the paradoxical counsel attributed to Jesus: Be gentle and pure like a dove, yet keenly perceptive and discerning like a serpent.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Concrete continues to cure beyond the time when it’s first poured. After seven days, it has 70 percent of its ultimate strength, and after 14 days, 90 percent. It usually keeps getting sturdier for a few months, even years. I propose that we use this as a metaphor for what you’re working on, Scorpio. The foundations you established a while back are still solidifying. Projects that are working pretty well are still developing potency. This is a good thing! Everything is slowly improving through processes you’re not actively managing.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Here’s your assignment: Find yourself a pair of enchanted pants that will bring you good luck and stir up fun. How will you know that they’re authentically charmed? Because when you put them on, you will instinctively wander toward adventures that expand your understandings about life. They may also lead you to explore places and situations that aren’t truly forbidden or taboo, but which you have oddly avoided as if they were forbidden or taboo. Finally, your enchanted pants are likely to inspire you to dream up a few crazy good ideas that will turn out not to be mostly good and not at all crazy.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In classical music, a “fermata” is a symbol on the sheet music that instructs the instrumentalist to hold a note longer than its written duration. How long? It’s unpredictable. The musician decides. I think your life would benefit from a metaphorical fermata or two, Capricorn—maybe even more. You won’t come to a protracted pause, but you will engage in strategic prolonging, extending certain notes beyond their expected duration. Examples? Lingering longer in a conversation from which you’re inclined to exit early; staying with an ambiguous emotion rather than rushing to resolution; allowing a project to develop more leisurely than you might if you were simply pushing for sheer efficiency. Opt for what’s soulful instead of what’s crisp and neat.

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Fate is subtly but insistently pressuring you to stop squandering energy on half-hearted, hand-me-down desires. Why? So your real, holy obsessions can move to the center of your attention. The tepid wishes and lukewarm yearnings are being exposed for what they are: distractions that nibble away at your time and passion without fully feeding your soul. As these mediocre drives fade in importance, you’ll be exultant to see how much more fire, clarity, and juice you have available for the few burning, churning yearnings that truly belong to you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is so deep that if Mount Everest were located at the bottom, its peak would be over a mile underwater. The deepest point in the ocean could swallow the highest point on land with room to spare. The world holds more below than above. Please meditate on this fun fact, Pisces. I hope it inspires you to understand that your most interesting power often lies in the depths, not the peaks. While others are summiting, you’re descending into the mysterious, fathomless interiors. Your explorations may not photograph well because they happen in darkness. But they are the source of your strength.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the early days of aviation, navigation instruments were rudimentary, and the skies were often a blur of clouds, darkness, or featureless horizons. Pilots sometimes relied on a technique called “dead reckoning”: good instinct bolstered by simple instruments like compasses and stopwatches. I suspect you will benefit from practicing a metaphorical version of dead reckoning in the coming weeks. You may not have all the data you would like, and the path ahead might be less than clear. But you already possess enough hints and inklings to make thoughtful approximations. If you’re alert and flexible, listening to subtle signals within you and around you, your evolving estimates will guide you uncannily close to the right destination.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her comfortable home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her favorite activity was to sit in her bedroom and compose her odd, unique, brilliant poems. Eventually, she wrote 1,800 of them, though few were published during her lifetime. Today she is renowned as one of America’s great literary geniuses. Her story reminds us that magnificent growth may emerge from simple and humble circumstances. I suspect you will thrive if you borrow her strategy during the coming weeks. You don’t need a hubbub of flashy events to evoke your beauty. A period of creative stillness could amplify your imagination and inspire your dazzle.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Renaissance workshops, apprentice painters learned their craft by assisting masters with small tasks. They mixed pigments, prepared canvases, and cleaned up. There was a valuable trade-off for this humble work. Being in proximity to mature brilliance often spurred the fledgling artists to harness their own creative powers. I suspect this dynamic is relevant for you, Gemini. Now is a favorable time to be alert for unexpected teachers and lessons. Be ready to apprentice yourself to captivating experiences where you might learn what you didn’t even realize you needed to know. Your willingness to be a curious, gracious student is your superpower.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If you knew you were going to live to 95 in reasonably good health, what additional careers or adventures might you pursue? Visualize your lifespan stretching out before you like a wide winding road, where you will have plenty of time not just to survive, but to experiment, wander, and reinvent yourself. Would you train for a new craft or profession? Would you move to another country for a while and apprentice yourself to a language, landscape, or tradition that has always piqued your curiosity? I invite you to take a concrete step that moves you in the direction of interesting future fun.

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I protest and reject this quote, usually attributed to Rumi. The notion that silence represents pure, undiluted divine communication, while all other forms of expression constitute degraded approximations, strikes me as weird, wrong, and pretentious.

This quote proposes that the Divine Source, which I personally call the Goddess, speaks most authentically in the void between sounds.

Everything else is somehow inferior, a corruption of the original silent message: the cry of a newborn, the song of a mockingbird at dawn, the crash of waves against rocks, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “I love you” between partners.

I reject this mystical elitism.

The ranking of silence over sound rests on a dualism I distrust, in which spirit is purer than matter and the ineffable outranks the effable.

Nope. This is the old transcendence trap, the notion that we must escape the messy, noisy realm of embodied existence to access authentic spirituality.

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The opposite is true. The language of Goddess is the entire spectacular, multitudinous symphony of life.

When have I felt most connected to the life that’s larger than myself, most touched by the sacred? Sometimes this miracle has happened during silent meditation, but on other occasions, it has arisen when I’ve heard music that made me sob with reverent joy.

The sound of rain falling or my partner laughing can give me the same startled gratitude for being alive that may arrive when I’m floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

The natural world, recipient of so much of my worshipful adoration, doesn’t privilege silence. As I walk through a forest or stretch of wetland, I’m immersed in constant sound: wind through branches, insects humming, birds calling, streams gurgling, and the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush. This is the Divine language made manifest.

I don’t believe that the Goddess is trying to say something really important in the silence between bird songs, but the stupid birds keep interrupting.

Human language is our amazing capacity to transform interior experience into communicable form. The irony is that mystics who praise silence typically do so using words, often carefully chosen words arranged in precise patterns. If silence is the only authentic divine language, why bother?

Words create worlds and forge connections. They wound and heal. They make the invisible visible and the ineffable slightly less so.

Many religious traditions share the theme proclaimed in the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, Logos. The creative principle first itself expressed through articulation.

When Rumi (the actual Rumi, not the New Age ghost of him) wrote his ecstatic poetry, he was celebrating divine intoxication, exulting in the fecundity of a life that aches for expression. His poems are the universe speaking itself into being through a human throat.

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I’ll correct the record about who actually said the quote at the top.

The line is a paraphrase of Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk in Colorado who popularized a practice called Centering Prayer. In his book Invitation to Love he declared that silence is God’s first language and everything else a poor translation.

Keating was elaborating on St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite friar, who taught that God the Father spoke one Word in eternity, spoke it in silence, and in silence we hear it.

So the meme’s genealogy runs like this: Spanish mystic to Trappist monk to New Age poster to the imaginary mouth of Rumi. The internet borrowed a glamorous Sufi to sell a piece of austere Christian metaphysics, because “silence is purest” plays better in an ecstatic desert than in a monastery down the road from the Aspen ski lifts.

The misattribution is a confession. People sense the doctrine needs a wilder, sexier sponsor than the one it actually has.

And it is a doctrine, not a mood. It belongs to what the contemplatives call the via negativa, the way of negation. This is the conviction that the Divine is the formless No-Thing hiding behind all the noisy somethings, and that we draw near to it only by stripping away every image, name, and sound, until nothing remains but a holy emptiness.

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You see the apostles of this doctrine everywhere, and they share a peculiar affliction. They can’t stop talking about how we ought to stop talking.

Ramana Maharshi, the renowned sage of Advaita Vedanta, taught that silence is the highest instruction, superior to any spoken teaching. He sometimes, not always, “taught” simply by sitting wordlessly in a room with his seekers.

We know this because those seekers wrote down every syllable he uttered and bound them into fat volumes of Talks. The wordless master survives entirely as words.

Meher Baba went further. In 1925 he took a vow of silence and kept it for 44 years, until his death, communicating first by pointing at letters on an alphabet board and later through an elaborate sign language. All the while, he promised that one day he would break his silence and speak the single Word that would transform the human race.

He never did. Yet during those four mute decades he produced books, God Speaks and the Discourses among them, dictated letter by laborious letter. Half a century of not-talking, and a small library to show for it.

Eckhart Tolle has built an empire on the gap between thoughts. The mind is the noise; the still space behind it is the real you, the doorway to Being. It takes him hundreds of pages and a permanent world tour to deliver this news.

Every apostle of wordlessness arrives lugging suitcases of words.

The performative contradiction is fun to point at. The metaphysics underneath is the harder problem.

When nondualists rank silence above sound, they state the entire architecture of their cosmos. Silence stands for the formless, changeless, unmanifest Absolute, the Real.

Sound stands for form, multiplicity, movement, matter, body: the realm of mere appearance, of maya, of the not-as-real and the not-as-pure.

The manifest world is a veil to be seen through, a degraded copy of a perfect, unsullied original.

All of this gets filed under static interfering with the silent signal: the cricket’s chirp, the lover’s laugh, the newborn’s first cry, and Beethoven’s Ninth.

In this curious philosophy, the bustling body is a problem. The restless Earth is a way station. The goal is to dissolve the noisy, particular, gorgeous, changing self back into the undifferentiated hush from which it supposedly leaked.

I want a different life. I experience our riotous, sound-drenched world as a beautiful treasure. The Goddess sings through creation, in the wind and the insects and the gurgling streams and the human throat raised in song. The Real True Actual Deep Reality doesn’t shut up.

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The elevation of silence as spiritually superior has caused a lot of trouble. Throughout history, the powerful have often told the powerless that their highest calling is to be quiet.

The New Testament’s First Letter to Timothy instructs women “to learn in silence with full submission.” America’s antebellum catechisms written for enslaved Africans made obedience without murmuring the road to heaven, while the white “masters” kept the franchise on speaking for God. In Canadian and American boarding schools, Indigenous children were not merely discouraged from speaking; they were often explicitly forbidden to speak their languages and punished for doing so.

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I’m not belittling silence. I treasure contemplative practice and the ability to still my mind’s constant chatter. I’ve spent my entire adult life cultivating the discipline of listening deeply rather than always broadcasting.

I love both silence and sound. Silence gives meaning to sound, and sound gives meaning to silence. They define each other.

I prefer to understand the language of Goddess as the dynamic interplay of expression and receptivity. In my celebration of life, the Divine is equally present in the cricket’s chirp and the pause between chirps.

As a lover of ineffable mystery and a celebrant of embodied life, I know that the sacred is right here, embedded in the gorgeous, terrible, beautiful mess of incarnate existence, including all the ways the world expresses itself through sound.

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I want a mysticism that doesn’t rank-order the modes of divine communication. Yes, there’s plenty of toxic talk, harmful language, and destructive sound. But the remedy is speech that celebrates connection rather than separation.

The universe isn’t trying to shut up and contemplate itself. It’s bursting at the seams, eager to communicate through every available channel.

Outside my window this morning, the mockingbird is running through his entire repertoire, car alarms included. Whatever the silence between his phrases is trying to tell me, I’d rather hear him.

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CODA: THE NOISE I’VE MADE

Most people who know my work know me as a person who arranges words on a page. But before I was a writer, and all through the years I was becoming one, I was a noisemaker.

I’ve been a musician, songwriter, and bandleader, most joyfully as the co-founder of World Entertainment War, whose fusion of rock, funk, punk, spoken word, and social commentary earned a devoted cult following, a contract with MCA Records, and management by Bill Graham.

I’ve also had another parallel career doing solo spoken-word shows with lots of music. My main contribution has been Sacred Uproar: A Pagan Revival Show, where poetry, storytelling, philosophy, music, humor, and ritual merge in a phenomenon that’s equal parts sermon, cabaret, and prankful spiritual insurrection.

I have six albums out in the world. They’re my exuberant personal evidence for the themes I’ve argued here.

Every live show I’ve done, well over a thousand, has been an experiment in these hypotheses: that the Divine can be summoned into a room by a holy racket; that hundreds of people dancing and breathing in the same rhythm at midnight are engaged in a liturgy as legitimate as any silent vigil.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 30

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Neurologists say that when you vividly imagine performing an action like shooting a basketball or playing piano, your brain activates many of the same networks it uses in real practice. In other words, mental rehearsal can measurably improve your actual performance. Many athletes use this trick. But here’s an interesting twist: Such visualizations work for emotional and social skills too. We can enhance our resilience and better regulate our moods if we practice doing so in the privacy of our imaginations. I bring this to your attention, Leo, because you’re in a period when your fantasy life has extra-robust practical power. I invite you to rehearse being who you want to be in the theater of your mind.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your assignment: Compose a vigorous prayer in which you ask life for something you fear you don’t deserve or are not supposed to want. What is the blessing, healing, or freedom that feels “too much,” “too selfish,” “too late,” or “too impossible” for you to yearn for? Name this prize and how you imagine it might allow you to give more, love more, or live more honestly. You could begin your appeal with these words: “Dear Great Mystery, I’m nervous about asking for this, but I will ask anyway,” and then let your heart speak without editing. Do this at least once every day for ten days.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In 1848, a Libra-born carpenter named James Marshall discovered a few glittering flakes of gold floating on the American River in California. His find ignited the Gold Rush, drawing hundreds of thousands of people westward. Alas, Marshall himself never became rich from the discovery, though many other people did. I’m hoping and predicting a different outcome when you locate treasure in the coming weeks, Libra. In this instance, you will share in the spoils.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The lyrebird can imitate almost any sound, including chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and other birds’ songs. But they don’t just mimic sounds randomly. They compose elaborate performances, weaving a variety of imitations into complex acoustic tapestries. In a sense, they are remix artists. During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I hope you give yourself permission to resemble a lyrebird. Sample freely from everything you’ve absorbed. Weave your influences into new configurations. Express your imaginative concoctions of repurposed ideas and enchantments. The voice isn’t less yours because it borrows from other voices. Originality is in part about arrangement, not just source material.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Astronauts who have orbited Earth describe the “overview effect.” Viewing the entire globe from high above triggers rich epiphanies and cognitive shifts, providing a visceral sense of the planet’s fragility and unity. Borders dissolve. Conflicts seem absurd. I surmise you are ripe for a similar blessing, Sagittarius. You’ll be able to see your current dramas from expansive vantage points that make their true scale and significance obvious. Armed with these perspectives, you will naturally clarify your priorities and allow petty concerns to fade away.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You are the result of an ancestral crowd: two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Without these 14 lives weaving together in the precise ways they did, your unique destiny would never have taken shape. Their choices and challenges helped sculpt your gifts and your rough edges, your cravings and your turn-offs. The coming weeks will be a ripe astrological moment to get more intimate with this lineage. As you delve into your family’s stories, you may uncover vital clues for refreshing your views on dilemmas that have dragged on for a while. Are you daring enough to let your sense of “where I come from” evolve—and, with it, your sense of what kind of future you want to create?

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): According to my investigations, there’s a place you need to go, but fear or timidity is holding you back. Where is it? Is it a physical location, a creative risk, a complicated conversation, or a spiritual threshold? Visualize it. Who would you be if you appeared there in your full glory? What do you worry might happen if you do? What interesting future might never bloom if you don’t? I hope you formulate a feisty plan. To begin, write these words: “If I decide to go there anyway, acknowledging my fear but not being controlled by it, what first step will I take and what help will I seek?”

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Professional athletes sometimes talk about “winning ugly.” That’s when they achieve a victory even though they haven’t played their very best. I foresee you using that phrase for yourself soon, after you notch a less-than-pretty but undeniably real success. There’s another expression you might also exemplify, too: “ugly ripe.” Officially, it’s the name of luscious heirloom tomatoes whose lumpy, offbeat forms contrast with the smooth, bland specimens stacked in most supermarket bins. In the coming weeks, it will describe the nonstandard yet succulent flavor of your life.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries artist Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles, France, for 15 months in 1888 and 1889. It was the most prolific time of his career. His buoyant genius overflowed, pouring out over 200 paintings, including the lavish *Sunflowers* series. I suspect you will enjoy your own surge of splashy productivity in the coming months. It may not be as manically generative as van Gogh, though. I think your creativity will be rather relaxed and deeply healing. Start planning now for how you want to channel all this imaginative exuberance.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I invite you to clear out every fixed idea your mind carries about where you are “supposed” to be. Once you have made that inner space wide and uncluttered, begin a fresh inquiry into the nature of your real home. Use questions like these to navigate: 1. What’s the first place you think of when you come across the word “sanctuary”? 2. Which environments reliably bring out your brightest, truest qualities? 3. Do you have what you would call power spots? If so, how do they make you feel in your body and psyche? 4. Which locations on Earth fascinate you, even if you have never visited them? 5. Could there be a future dwelling that offers a more peak-level experience of home than the familiar place where tradition now soothes you?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The brain doesn’t literally multitask. It rapidly shifts attention between tasks, creating the illusion of simultaneity. For many people, each interchange costs mental energy and reduces efficiency. But some brains can switch faster with a lower energy cost, making them better at sustained task-switching. I’m sure you can guess the identity of the zodiac’s number one task-switcher: you, of course! And the good news is that in the coming weeks, you will be even more adept than usual in wielding your superpower. One implication is that you will know when not to overdo it and when not to use it trivially. You will be a master of seamless, effective, and meaningful transitions.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Astronomers know that many stars don’t travel alone. Binary stars orbit each other for eons, their mutual gravity shaping each partner’s destiny. I propose we make this your featured metaphor in the coming months. It will be a favorable time to de-emphasize the notion that strength and creative power require complete autonomy. I suspect that flexible, spirited interdependence will generate far better results than lonely self-sufficiency. Which alliances and relationships will expand your orbit rather than shrink it? Invest in them.

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Who Makes You Feel Real?

I don’t think I’m boring. I have an abundant curiosity, and I love to learn new things. I’ve worked at many different jobs, read widely, and enjoyed interacting with a broad range of humans.

Give me a stranger on a train or an untranslatable word in a language I’ll never speak, and I will find in it a reason to be more awake than I was a moment before.

And yet.

Now and then across the years, I’ve slipped into temporary relationships with people who regarded me as uninteresting. In their eyes I seemed to register as beige. They’ve seen me as forgettable, a background figure in their more vivid movie. They didn’t see much of value in me.

I’m tempted to believe it was entirely their fault. They couldn’t see me for who I really am. But I suspect something more unsettling was also going on.

It’s possible I lived down to their expectations. Their quiet conviction that I was dull may have subtly instructed me to become dull. In their company, I didn’t have full access to my own beauty. I lost touch, at least a little, with my own aliveness.

This rather appalling possibility suggests that our vividness isn’t a fixed possession we carry around like a wallet, always available and immune to circumstance. It’s more like a flame that needs oxygen, and the people around us are part of our air supply. Some of them fan the blaze. Others seem to smother it.

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We like to imagine that the self is a solid, self-generating thing. If we were truly authentic, we would radiate the same wattage in every room, unaffected by who’s watching. It’s a noble fantasy. But it doesn’t match my experience of being a living creature among other living creatures.

The more accurate truth is that we are partly called into being by the attention of others. A child becomes more fully a child under the delighted gaze of a parent who finds her fascinating. A musician plays better for an audience that leans in. And we all become more completely, unmistakably ourselves in the presence of certain people who give us permission to unfurl.

Being seen accurately is a nutrient. When someone perceives us as we really are, in the wild specificity of our idiosyncratic soul, they transcend the flattened caricature or the version that’s convenient for them. And as we bask in their appreciation, we remember things about ourself we had half-forgotten. Our jokes get funnier and our questions get braver. We feel real.

The reverse is just as potent. If we spend enough time being treated as smaller or more boring than we are, we may begin, against our own will, to comply. Not because it’s true, but because it takes an enormous, exhausting effort to keep being vividly ourself in front of someone who has decided we’re not.

Art by Valeri tsenov

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Now I’ll turn away from my lament and focus on my stubborn faith that life is conspiring to help us thrive.

That dull, deflated feeling in the wrong company is useful information. It’s our soul’s way of saying, “This isn’t your habitat. The light here doesn’t reach your particular colors.”

So the discomfort is a gift, if we’re willing to read it as one. It’s a compass needle swinging toward the places where we actually belong.

Because there really are people in whose presence we become more, not less. There are animals who love us without a single agenda, who reflect back a version of us that’s worthy simply by existing. In some situations, we slip effortlessly into the fullness of our gifts and forget to worry about whether we’re impressive.

So I’ll offer you the two questions that may help you organize your own life, as they do mine:

1. Which people, animals, influences, and situations make you feel real?

2. Who and what encourages you to be your authentic self?

Notice how your body answers before your mind does: A name or a face surfaces, or maybe an activity you’ve been neglecting because it doesn’t earn money or look productive. That flicker of warmth or longing is the trailhead.

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I bring this up to encourage you to do what can feel selfish but is in fact an act of profound self-respect: Remove yourself, whenever you reasonably can, from situations where you have trouble being and feeling your true self.

I don’t mean you should flee at the first sign of discomfort or demand that everyone perpetually validate you. Real relationships do involve friction, challenge, and the occasional bruising honesty that helps us grow. There’s a difference between someone who sees you clearly enough to lovingly disagree with you and someone who simply doesn’t see you at all.

What I’m naming is subtler and more corrosive: the chronic, low-grade experience of shrinking. Like the friendships where you perform a smaller edition of yourself. Or the rooms you leave feeling vaguely erased, wondering where your personality went.

You are allowed, in fact, I would say you’re obligated, to protect your aliveness from those places: out of reverence for the improbable miracle of your own consciousness.

And here’s the reciprocal magic, the part that turns this from mere self-care into activism: As you seek out the people who make you feel real, resolve to be that person for others. Become a fanner of flames. Look at the humans and creatures in your orbit with the generous, curious gaze that assumes there is far more to them than meets the casual eye.

See them so accurately and warmly, that they stand up straighter in your presence and remember who they are. This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things a person can do. It costs nothing and it changes everything.

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A proposed experiment: Make an actual list on paper, in ink. Title it: The People, Animals, Influences, and Situations That Make Me Feel Real.

Don’t censor. Include the friend who laughs at your strangest thoughts and the dog who greets you like you’ve just returned from war. Include the particular chair by the window where your best ideas arrive and the collaborator who treats your half-formed notions as treasure.

Then, gently and without drama, begin steering your life toward that list. Give those beings and places more of your hours.

You’re not boring and never were. You have simply, at times, been standing in the wrong light. So please go find the light that reveals your true colors. And while you’re at it, become a source of that light for everyone lucky enough to cross your path.

Addendum: In Praise of the Longing

Some readers may read my essay above and protest. They will reach for a famous prayer expressed by a certain self-help guru whose work I have mixed feelings about. This teacher says: “If I had a prayer, it would be this: ‘God spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen.’”

In a moment, I’ll answer that prayer with a different one. Before I do, I’ll let you know that I reject this teacher’s sterile counsel. Not politely. Not with a nod toward how there’s wisdom on both sides. I just flat-out repudiate it.

To long for love and want approval are not weaknesses leaking through a crack in our enlightenment. They’re the felt evidence of our interdependence. Our body knows instinctively that we are made of each other and that each self is a collaboration.

Ask any mammal. Ask the elder whose loneliness shortens their life more efficiently than cigarettes. Our craving for each other’s care isn’t a spiritual error to be transcended. It’s a biological fact wearing the mask of a feeling.

I would rather be tenderly entangled than serenely untouchable.

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There is tremendous freedom in yearning for the care of others. That sounds like a paradox but isn’t.

The person who has renounced all need for appreciation has purchased their invulnerability at a steep price: They have made themselves unreachable. Nothing can wound them because nothing can enter. They have achieved a kind of safety that’s indistinguishable from not being home.

Whereas I very much want to be home. I want to be susceptible to the good opinion of people I admire, because their good opinion is information about whether my love is arriving and whether the thing I meant to say is the thing that got heard.

So yes, I strive for others’ approval and appreciation and love. I have done this my whole life and I intend to keep doing it. It has made me a better artist and a better human being. The wish to be worthy of my beloveds’ regard has pulled me, again and again, toward more more generosity and more courage than I would have summoned alone in a room with only my own standards for company.

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The teaching of the famous self-help guru implies there are only two available positions:

1. “I am obsessed with being appreciated, and therefore I betray every one of my own interests to get it.”

2. “I care nothing for anyone’s appreciation. I serve only my own needs and my own inner commands.”

But the fact is that between those two poles there is an enormous, fertile territory. Most of the good life happens there.

I live there. I am, I suspect, the most self-sufficient person I know. I satisfy my own fierce standards first and last, and no amount of applause will convince me that a weak sentence I’ve written is a strong one.

AND I also relish my need for the love of people who respect me and treat me well. I revere that need. I feed it and keep it well-watered.

There’s no contradiction. The desire to be loved and the discipline of holding one’s own sovereignty are not rivals for the same throne. They are two hands doing different work on the same instrument.

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I’ll grant the sane kernel inside the famous self-help guru’s prayer. There is certainly a version of the hunger for approval that can be tyrannical. Like the performer who no longer knows what they think, only what will please. Or the person who dissolves in every room to match its temperature. That phenomenon is real, and it’s a form of suffering that deserves compassion and repair.

But the cure for a distorted appetite isn’t the abolition of appetite. We don’t treat compulsive eating by praying for the end of hunger. We don’t cure jealous love by extinguishing love. The work is to metabolize the longing well. How can we want appreciation from people whose appreciation actually means something? How can we let it nourish us without letting it govern us?

Personally, I want to treasure my own compass while remaining warmly and riskily open to being moved by others.

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So here’s my prayer: May I never be spared of the desire for love. May I keep needing the regard of the people I cherish, and may that need make me kinder, wiser, wilder, more useful, and more awake.

And may I never mistake defended numbness for freedom.

Art by Yvonne Coomber

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of July 23

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Oak trees produce far more acorns than could ever grow into trees. Squirrels bury thousands and forget many of them, preparing the way for the next generation of forest. The trees succeed through strategic overproduction. I invite you to adopt their method, Leo. In the coming weeks, overproduce. Make more than you can track. Release more than you can manage. You don’t need to be perfect, just abundant. PS: This expansive capacity is yours to explore with delight and confidence, I guarantee it.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In the 19th century, Virgo naturalist Alexander von Humboldt helped launch the modern science of ecology. While exploring South America, he came to a revolutionary conclusion that’s obvious to us now: Nature isn’t a collection of separate objects but an intricate web of relationships. Mountains shape the weather. The plants and pollinators rely on each other. Underground mycelial networks perform many services for the trees. I propose that you channel your inner Humboldt, Virgo. Shift your focus away from isolated problems and instead observe the larger systems. Solutions may be elusive when you’re bound to a narrow view but strikingly clear when you perceive the wider pattern. If you’d like to take bold action, rely on the spacious perspective.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The coming months will be a favorable time to triple your devotion to the art of rowdy fun. I urge you to attend more revels and celebrations than usual, and always be ready to energize social functions with infusions of festive wit and gleeful conviviality. You will also have extra power to inject buoyant amusements into your intimate liaisons. Therefore, dear Libra, I designate you to be the Party Maestro of the Zodiac. I hope you will carry out your role with maximum exuberance, ingenuity, and joy.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): What if I told you that your most personal and potent dream can come true—but only through months of persistence, disciplined sacrifice, and stretches of bewildering but fascinating uncertainty? Would you reorder your priorities to chase it with every ounce of creativity you have? Or would you set it aside in favor of a safer and easier possibility? Between now and the end of October, I predict the moment will arrive to choose one path or the other.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): On some occasions, you just don’t have the power to act with impeccable integrity and do the totally right thing. Doing the partially right thing may, however, be a useful and compassionate option. I bet this will soon be helpful advice for you. Blunt truth: There are moments when the “perfect” ethical, emotional, or practical choice simply isn’t available: The timing is off, resources are thin, or someone else’s limits block the ideal outcome. In those situations, waiting around for the flawless solution is a kind of paralysis that keeps you stuck in guilt or indecision. Instead, you can aim for the best available good.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In botany and gardening, there is a practice called “companion planting.” Certain plants thrive when grown near each other because they share nutrients, repel or distract pests, or improve soil and microclimate. Here’s an example: Indigenous peoples of the Americas planted the “Three Sisters” together: Corn gave beans a living trellis, beans added nitrogen to the soil, and squash shaded the ground to hold moisture and deter weeds. This principle may be useful for you to contemplate now, Capricorn. The people, tools, and influences you place near one another will influence your productivity and well-being. By blending complementary energies, your efforts will flourish without strain.

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IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECASTS for YOU

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You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on “This week (July 21, 2026.)”

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Author Alain de Botton observed that “the person we marry is always far more remarkable, frightening, and complex than we quite realized when we first declared our love.” Rather than feeling alarmed by this revelation, I invite you to find it thrilling as you apply it to your best allies. The fact that they contain mysteries you haven’t yet plumbed means the relationships aren’t likely to grow stale. There are undiscovered depths in those you may think you know completely. My advice: Approach even your most familiar intimacies as ongoing discoveries.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Do you ever fear or distrust your own desires? Are you suspicious of achieving “too much” success? Do you ever feel starved for hope, but belittle yourself for wanting it? Do you go emotionally blank in the face of possibilities that should thrill you? If so, the coming weeks could bring healing and a breakthrough. You will have a chance to perform a rare kind of exorcism—not of garish demons or foolish ghosts, but of the quiet defeatism and lack of faith that dull your brilliance. Seize this moment, dear Pisces! Purge the automatic doubts that the world has trained you to mistake for wisdom.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Authentic love songs are rare. Much of contemporary music leans toward infatuation, sex, heartbreak, and fury, while few artists seem interested in singing unabashedly about unique expressions of tenderness and enduring devotion. In the months ahead, Aries, your inner life will be gloriously out of step with that trend. Your heart is poised to wake up in sometimes surprising ways. Even if you’re not a trained vocalist, you may feel regular urges to express your passion and adoration in song. If I could give you a gift, it might be a curated playlist packed with the most radiant love songs of the last 60 years, so you’d have a soundtrack worthy of the lush emotions that I suspect will bloom in you.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nobel Prize-winning Taurus physicist Richard Feynman kept a notebook titled “Things I Don’t Know About.” When he came across a question he couldn’t answer, he added it to the collection. I recommend a similar discipline for you now, Taurus, but with a twist. Keep a log of “Beautiful Mysteries I Don’t Really Need to Solve.” Rejoice that not every paradox and puzzle needs resolution. Savor the fun fact that some riddles enrich your life precisely because they remain open-ended. Hooray for not knowing! My theory is that some of your finest qualities will flourish in the presence of productive uncertainty.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In the early days of radio broadcasting, engineers sometimes spoke of “tuning the receiver.” Even when a station was transmitting clearly, a listener might hear static until their radio dial was adjusted to exactly the right frequency. The message was present and clear; the challenge was homing in on it. There’s a similar phenomenon going on in your life, Gemini. Useful information, fun inspiration, and interesting possibilities may be circulating in your vicinity. But you will need to adjust your attention so you can actually receive it. To bring the signals into focus, listen differently. Or pose alternate questions. Or pay attention to sources you don’t usually notice.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Neuroscientists have found that remembering the past and imagining the future rely on many of the same brain networks. That overlap helps explain why vivid visualization may influence our emotions and behavior. When we repeatedly simulate alarming scenarios about what could conceivably happen, our brains treat them much like memories. This makes us prone to spotting “threats” in places that may be relatively safe. The good news is that the coming months will be an excellent time to retrain this habit, Cancerian. More than ever, your imagination can be a precision instrument you use to recalibrate yourself away from fear and toward possibility. Fantasize about wonderful possibilities with the same intensity that in the past you have dwelled on scary speculations.

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The Glorious Incompleteness of Now

You are magnificently unfinished.

I don’t mean this as consolation for your failures or a pacifier for your impatience. It’s a wild, insurgent fact that changes everything about how you regard this peculiar moment you’re living through. Even if this is a moment when you can’t tell whether you’re evolving or devolving.

You are not yet who you will become.

You are a gorgeous, flawed rough draft. The person you’ll be in five years would probably laugh affectionately at the things you’re certain about right now. They’d recognize you the way you might recognize your adolescent self in an old photograph: “Oh yes, that’s definitely me, but wow, I had no idea what I was growing into.”

Your current struggle is still transforming into wisdom. The pain you’re feeling is like compost that hasn’t finished its work. Maybe it even smells, is rotting, and is still a mess. But give it time and tending, and it will become rich soil. The very thing that’s breaking you down is breaking you open. You’re hosting the fertile ground for what wants to grow through you next.

Maybe your confusion has not yet clarified into purpose. That’s probably good. Clarity that arrives too early is just premature certainty, and premature certainty is the death of genuine transformation.

Real purpose usually emerges slowly, the way your eyes adjust to darkness. First there’s nothing but murk and stumbling. Then oh-so-gradually, you begin to make out shapes and find your footing. The confusion isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the medium through which you’re learning to see.

So yeah, the mess may not yet be fully composted into soil. But here’s what composting teaches us: Nothing is wasted in the ecosystem of a life. Everything breaks down to feed what comes next.

Those things you call failures? They’re ingredients. The ending that looms has not yet revealed the beginning it portends.

Endings are tricksters. They pretend to be conclusions when they’re actually thresholds. Every time you think the story is over, you’re just at the part where the protagonist loses what they thought they needed.

You know what comes next in every worthwhile story? The real adventure begins, which couldn’t have happened if everything had gone according to plan.

In sum: You are far from done.

I can’t emphasize this enough. You are so magnificently, frustratingly, gloriously far from done. The story is not yet over. The verdict is not yet in. And anyone who tells you otherwise, including the critic in your own head, is speaking prematurely.

You have not yet met everyone who will love you. Some of your most important people are still strangers. They’re out there right now, living their own unfinished stories, heading toward the intersection where your paths will cross. You can’t imagine them yet. You don’t know their names or their faces or the specific ways they’ll reshape your understanding of what it means to be known and cherished. But they’re coming.

You have not yet become delightfully impossible in the ways you’ll eventually become delightfully impossible.

That might be my favorite fact of all. Right now, you might be trying hard to be possible—to be reasonable, to be acceptable, to fit into the narrow slot the world seems to have assigned you. You may be editing yourself, hedging your bets, and playing it safe.

But the you that’s still emerging, the future version who has metabolized all this confusion and beauty and struggle and education and mess, is going to be so wonderfully, unapologetically, deliciously impossible that your current self wouldn’t believe it.

The future you will say things your current self is too afraid to say. They’ll pursue longings your current self keeps locked in a compartment marked “impractical.” I bet they will even laugh at things that aren’t funny to anyone else and find grace and meaning in places respectable people overlook and make choices that cause certain relatives to shake their heads in fond exasperation. That future self will be weird in precisely the ways you’re destined to be weird. And they won’t apologize for it.

The path from who you are to who you’re becoming isn’t a straight line. It’s more like a mycelial network spreading underground, connecting seemingly unrelated experiences, feeding the fruit that will eventually break the surface. You can’t rush it. You can only trust that the incompleteness isn’t a deficiency but a promise.

So here you are: unfinished, in process, still becoming. The caterpillar in the chrysalis doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly. It just dissolves into chaos and trusts the intelligence of transformation. Maybe that’s what you’re doing too. You’re not lost or behind schedule, but dissolving into the necessary chaos that precedes the next iteration of you.

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I’ve written an extra message for those of you in your sixties and seventies. Read it here: tinyurl.com/ElderWisdomNow

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And here’s a healing rant for all you unfinished souls, a bonus message: tinyurl.com/CongratsOnUpgrade

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I’ve published a new book:

Free Will Astrology: Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination: Aries

This collection is a tender and rowdy guide to understanding and embodying the Aries energy. It offers oracles, insights, and provocations to help Aries natives, their allies, and anyone who aspires to cultivate courage, candor, and daring.

Read the first few pages here: tinyurl.com/LiberatedAries

Confession: I had a beautifully orderly plan to publish all 12 astrology books in graceful succession. Life had other ideas.

So Aries arrives first, gloriously ahead of the caravan.

The other 11 books are deep in their final beautification rituals and will follow as soon as they’ve finished negotiating with Time, Fate, and the publishing gremlins.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to offer you this first volume. I poured decades of liberated love, wild hope, and imagination into it. I think it’s a beauty. And I fully intend for the other 11 to be its worthy companions.

Where to buy: Ingram, only store with a 25% discount: tinyurl.com/IngramAries

Bookshop: tinyurl.com/BookshopAries

Barnes & Noble: tinyurl.com/NobleAries

Amazon: tinyurl.com/AmazonAries

ThriftBooks: tinyurl.com/ThriftAries

KoboBooks: tinyurl.com/KoboAries

It’s also available at Apple Books. Do a search for Rob Brezsny and “Free Will Astrology: Aries: Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination.”

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Check out my music and spoken word: televisionary.bandcamp.com/

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 16

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Make a list of your five greatest pleasures. These are experiences that stir your senses, steady your pulse, and remind you why you love being alive. Write them down as if they were sacred prayers. Sing a spontaneous song of praise of them. Then set out on a quest to discover pleasure number six. This is a delight you have never tasted, touched, or imagined before. Maybe it will come from saying yes to a possibility you usually decline. Treat this experiment as a form of worship and a way to boost your devotion to your healing life force.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): According to neuroscientists, the “default mode network” is the area of your brain that lights up when you’re daydreaming, drifting through thoughts and feelings, and letting your imagination roam around. This is when your deep self does crucial work: weaving memories into stories, making creative connections, rehearsing possible futures, and forging your sense of identity. I mention this, Leo, because the coming days will be prime time for you to indulge lavishly in this healing and restorative activity. Don’t let a task-obsessed world shame you out of your reveries. Your genius will bloom from their slowly swirling flow.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Here are three gentle nudges: 1. One of your trusty tools or assets still seems to be working fine, but I suggest you look into the possibility that it will soon need repair. 2. Unless you act proactively to ease the strain on your system, a mini-breakdown could be on the horizon. 3. The monster hiding in your closet is hibernating, which makes this the perfect time to summon an exorcist before it rouses. Here’s the very good news, dear Virgo: Because you are reading this oracle, you are now armed with all you need to stave off turmoil and head in the direction of an exciting renaissance.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Researchers who study improvisational jazz have found that master musicians often anticipate each other’s ideas milliseconds before anyone actually plays the notes. Their brains become exquisitely synchronized through deep listening rather than rigid planning. Maybe more than any other sign, you Libras possess a similar aptitude in managing your intimate alliances and social connections. In the coming weeks, this superpower will be even more necessary and available than usual. I’ll provide a reminder: Pay less attention to what people claim to mean and more attention to the rhythms beneath their words. Let your intuition guide you. The subtly shared timing will generate elegant cooperation.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “It’s bad luck to be superstitious!” is a delightful paradox that I enjoy playing with. It makes fun of our tendency to believe that invisible forces are constantly keeping score on our behavior. On one level, the phrase pokes at the way superstition multiplies anxiety instead of easing it. If you really believed it’s bad luck to be superstitious, then your belief about bad luck would itself be a superstition. So you’d have to avoid the very thinking pattern you’re using to feel safer. It exposes how easily the mind can tie itself in knots trying to control the uncontrollable. On another level, “it’s bad luck to be superstitious” is an invitation to examine which of your little rituals are entertaining and nourishing and which are cages. Keeping a lucky stone in your pocket is fine if it amuses you, but believing you’re doomed if you don’t carry the stone isn’t so fine. My advice: Notice when your charm or taboo is no longer a quirky companion, but starts being a tyrant that shrinks your freedom.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Are you the type of Sagittarius who pushes open doors with “pull” signs on them? Do you get a secret kick out of opening boxes from the end that says “open other side”? Maybe you even yack on your phone in designated quiet zones. If so, I’d like to suggest channeling your rebellious spark into grander acts. In the weeks ahead, you will be carrying some potent renegade energy. Used wisely, your radiant defiance could topple a stagnant situation that’s overdue for change.

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IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECASTS for YOU

You have two more weeks to listen, and then they’ll vanish.

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR DESTINY with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026.

How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself in the coming months? What well-informed and ingenious approaches can you use to get the most out of the raw materials you’re presented with?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE:

https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026.”

The in-depth, long-range Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $7 apiece if you access them online. Discounts are available for bulk purchases. Each forecast is 6-8 minutes long.

You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on “This week (July 14, 2026.)”

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Many healers favor the slow-and-steady path. They often meet with people once a week, trusting that even stubborn issues must be unwoven with patience and gentleness. But there are also bold experimenters who work differently. I know an acupuncturist who invites clients to live at her clinic for six days straight, offering a new treatment every two hours during the waking hours. She creates a healing immersion chamber. That’s the spirit I recommend for you in the coming weeks, Capricorn. You’re at the threshold of resolving a long-standing imbalance. What will serve you best isn’t dabbling at it but offering it focused, sustained, wholehearted attention until the shift activates.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You can refresh and boost your ambition if you give it a firm, precise adjustment sometime soon. Your raw vitality will surge back if you refrain from indulging in a careless habit that has been draining it. Your willpower and determination have been weakened by the fallout from an old misstep, but you now have the clarity needed to repair that error. Your libidinous energy is not as clear and potent as it could be, but it will become so once you get more honest about what truly excites you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’re like an arrow that has been shot from a bow and is three-quarters of the way to the target. You’re a delicious meal still simmering on the stove, or a pregnancy at seven months, or the last two weeks before a major election. When I tuned my inner vision to you, I glimpsed a honeybee wriggling a dance to show its coworkers where a stand of blooming lilac awaits. Have you ever been on the verge of speaking a new language with ease? That’s where you are now, Pisces: just before true fluency clicks.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In honor of the intensive homecoming phase of your astrological cycle, I have homework for you. 1. Make a prediction about how old you will be when you know precisely who you are. 2. Forecast the day when you will look in the mirror and recognize your face as an intricate portrait of every experience you have ever loved. 3. Imagine the dawn when the boundary between your own longing and life’s longing will dissolve, revealing they’ve always been the same current. 4. Predict when your heart will be as wild and free and brave as you have always wanted it to be.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Ornithologists studying migration know that some birds don’t fly directly to their destination. They follow “leading lines.” These are geographical features like coastlines and mountain ranges that provide orientation. Even when this means taking a longer route, the certainty of having a guiding landmark outweighs the efficiency of a straight line across nondescript terrain. I recommend the birds’ approach to you in the coming weeks, Taurus. Follow your own leading lines: practices and intuitions that provide lucid orientation even when they don’t offer shortcuts. The indirect path offers the surety you need.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): What’s an important truth you keep forgetting about? Maybe it’s a promise you once made to yourself, or an understanding that your younger self knew, or a wisdom your body keeps trying to communicate while your mind ignores it. What truth returns again and again in different guises: through synchronicities, seemingly random comments from friends, recurring dreams, or the same lesson repeating in new situations? What crucial insights about life do you remember during crisis or ecstasy, only to abandon them once normalcy returns? Now is a favorable time to fully recover this lesson and install it firmly at the heart of your life.

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I will begin by dismantling the compliment before anyone tries to hand it to me. When I strive to dismantle misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, I’m not merely being kind. When I devote my wild imagination to enhancing and celebrating the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people, my motivation goes way beyond an expression of niceness.

Niceness is a thin, well-behaved thing. It’s a way of being pleasant while changing nothing. What I’m doing is more selfish and sacred than that.

Here’s my confession: I do this work because I want to live in a gorgeous world, and I have understood for as long as I can remember that I can’t live in a gorgeous world while so much of it is caged.

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I was raised, as most straight white men are raised, inside an invisible bargain. The deal went like this: Accept a narrowed life, and in exchange you will be handed a little extra power. If you will only amputate your tenderness, ration your tears, treat your feelings as a security risk, and learn to dominate rather than to commune, then you will be permitted to stand a half-step above the women and the queer and nonbinary people and anyone else the culture diminishes.

I saw through it early. As a young man I understood, in my body before I could have argued it, that this was a robbery disguised as a coronation. The patriarchy did its utmost best to train me to devalue the feminine. It also tried to train me to deprecate the feminine in myself, including my own capacity for sensitivity, deep feelings, receptivity, and a sense of wonder.

The homophobia that the patriarchy tried to foist on me didn’t merely target other men who love men. It tried to install in me and every boy a low-grade panic that policed every unguarded affection and every place where male love might spill past its assigned borders. I watched it happen to other boys, but luckily it never took hold in me. I simply didn’t buy the fear. I didn’t accept that tenderness between men was a threat to be managed rather than one of the plain glories of being alive.

And I could see, even then, where the whole apparatus was headed: toward the lie that the self is a prison sentence rather than a work of art and that a person is stuck being whatever rigid roles they were assigned. I refused to believe that about anyone, which meant I got to refuse to believe it about myself, too.

I knew instinctively that every wall I was told to build against someone else’s freedom would turn out to be a wall inside my own imagination. So I refused to build them. And I as I emerged into adulthood, I got loud about it.

In the 1970s I turned my rock bands into loudspeakers for a high-intensity feminism and an unapologetic advocacy for gay rights and safety. For a straight white man in those years, this wasn’t a fashionable stance to strike; it was closer to a provocation. I caught a lot of shit for it from men who felt betrayed by a defector, from people who couldn’t fathom why I’d volunteer for a fight that wasn’t, as they saw it, mine to fight. But it was mine. It has always been mine. I wasn’t slumming as an ally. I was refusing to be swindled.

So when I fight for women and LGBTQ+ people, I am also fighting for the exiled parts of myself. This isn’t altruism performing a good deed for the less fortunate. It’s a jailbreak motivated by my clarity that we’re all susceptible to being snared in the same trap.

The Indigenous Australian activist Lilla Watson is often credited with a line I have carried for years: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I take that as scripture. My freedom and everyone else’s are not two freedoms. They are one thing pretending, under duress, to be separate.

A culture that despises women is a culture that has declared war on its own source. A culture that persecutes queer and trans and nonbinary people is a culture that has made imagination a crime. I don’t want to be a citizen of that country. Not just because I am virtuous, but because I am greedy for beauty and liberation, and that country is a wasteland.

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I will be specific about my winnings, because vague nobility bores me and specificity is a form of respect.

When women rise into their full sovereign intelligence—their sublime, unbossed, uncontainable intelligence—the entire world grows smarter, kinder, wilder, and infinitely more interesting.

And I get to live in that world. I get to be surrounded by people operating at full power instead of half-throttled by contempt. Who wouldn’t want that? Only a fool volunteers to be the smartest voice in a room emptied of geniuses.

When queer, nonbinary, and trans people are free to invent themselves in private and public, they teach the rest of us that we, too, are permitted to be creative authors of our destinies. Every trans person who insists on becoming who they are is informing me that my life isn’t a fixed sentence but a living poem I am allowed to revise. That’s a gift of staggering value.

When love is allowed to take whatever shape love takes, the total quantity of love in the culture increases. And love isn’t a scarce resource I have to hoard. It’s a fire that lights other fires without diminishing itself. A society drenched in permitted love is a warmer, wilder, more erotic and more alive place to spend one’s incarnation.

This is what I mean by PRONOIA: the hypothesis, always worth testing, that reality is rigged in our favor, and that the liberation of the people I was urged to diminish is not a loss for me but a windfall. Their flourishing is my inheritance.

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I want to be clear that I’m not offering to save anyone. The white male savior is one of patriarchy’s favorite cartoon characters, and I have no interest in auditioning for the role. Women don’t need me to rescue them from a burning building; they need me to stop stacking the kindling and, more often, to shut up and hand them the water and get out of the doorway.

My job isn’t to lead the parade. My job is to be a fierce and joyful accomplice, to spend my inherited advantages recklessly and gladly, in service of a world where such advantages no longer exist.

And I want to do it while fully embodied and incarnate, not as a bloodless moral position but as a visceral delight. Too much allyship is performed with a long, grave face, as though justice were a grim tax we pay to feel clean.

I reject that funeral. The dismantling of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia isn’t a chore. It’s one of the most thrilling collaborative art projects our species has ever attempted: the reinvention of what a human being is allowed to be.

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So yes, when I do this work I’m serving the higher good of my culture. A culture that liberates its women becomes more intelligent. A culture that honors its queer, nonbinary, and trans citizens becomes more imaginatively courageous and more capable of transformation. A culture that lets love run free becomes more beautiful. These aren’t sacrifices I make on the altar of goodness. They are the conditions of a life I actually want to live.

I fight misogyny and homophobia and transphobia the way a person trapped in a stale room throws open every window. It’s not out of duty to the wind, but out of hunger for air.

Call it selfish, then. I’ll accept the charge and raise the stakes: It’s the most enlightened selfishness I know. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s. And I have come, exuberantly and greedily and for the rest of my life, to work together.

For anyone counting who’s missing

Someone is going to read my essay above and feel a sting: Why only these groups? Where is everyone else?

The answer is built into the argument itself.

I wrote about misogyny and homophobia and transphobia because those are prohibitions I felt pressing on my own life, and the freedoms I had to win for myself before I could recognize them in anyone else. This essay is the map of one particular jailbreak, mine. I won’t pretend I’ve made every escape or know every prison from the inside.

But the thesis doesn’t halt at the borders of my biography. It can’t. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s isn’t a slogan I get to apply selectively. If it’s true, it’s true all the way down.

So I’ll say more of it plainly.

A culture that brutalizes Black people is at war with its own genius.

A culture that works to erase Indigenous peoples is trying to amputate its own oldest memory and its deepest knowledge of how to actually live on this land.

A culture that treats immigrants as invaders is starving itself of the exact hunger and nerve and reinvention that keep a nation alive.

A culture that scorns its Latina and Latino people is spurning the very warmth and boldness it needs and secretly hungers for. A culture that demeans and diminishes its disabled people is throwing away its hardest-won wisdom about adaptation. A culture that punishes the poor is criminalizing a wound it inflicted in the first place. A culture that treats the homeless as inconvenient scenery to be cleared away is refusing to look at its own failure. A culture that pathologizes neurodivergent minds is narrowing the range of the ways it’s allowed to think. A culture at war with certain bodies that don’t match absurdly narrow beauty standards is at war with the fact of embodiment itself.

Each of those cruelties impoverishes the world I have to live in. Each of those liberations is, by the same greedy logic, my inheritance too.

I don’t say all of it every time I say any of it because no single essay can carry the whole weight of everything that needs undoing. But I will never pretend the wrong I named is the only wrong, or that the freedom I’m this greedy for has a color, a border, or a limit.

The invitation is identical for all of it: not to help from a safe distance, but to work together, because we have always been in this together.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Check out my music and spoken word: televisionary.bandcamp.com/

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of July 9

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Male humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean change their songs over the years. New phrases can spread across thousands of miles as other whales take up and transform them. Researchers don’t know why, but the pattern is clear: The whales value novelty even in their ancient rituals. They create an evolving musical tradition. Consider what this practice might suggest for your own relationship with the past, Cancerian. The memories and patterns you’re carrying don’t have to remain frozen. You can honor your history while remixing it, adding new verses, and changing the key. What needs to be preserved isn’t the exact form but the living spirit.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo-born oceanographer Marie Tharp created the first comprehensive maps of the ocean floor. Her work was pivotal in proving theories about plate tectonics.​ She did much of this work in the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed aboard research vessels. She had to rely on data collected by others, never seeing the terrain she mapped. But her limitation became her advantage; distance allowed her to perceive patterns that field researchers missed. I suspect that you, too, are working with incomplete information, Leo. Does this disqualify you from drawing conclusions? No! I believe your inability to access certain details will compel you to see larger patterns. What you’re missing might be precisely what enables you to see what others can’t.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The “problem” confronting you right now is unusual: Your vision is too sharp, your thinking too precise, and your words too unambiguous. This would usually be good news to celebrate, but at the moment it’s blocking you from noticing the subtle openings life is presenting. Those portals may only reveal themselves if you soften your intense scrutiny and call on a creative, blurry logic. It’s like how, at night, you sometimes see more clearly when you peer from the edges of your vision rather than staring straight ahead.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): This is a perfect moment to express your own unique power more than ever before. I invite you to act with conviction, assert your influence, and claim what you’ve earned. For best results, clarify your ambitions and assert your authority. Write down a formal vow or two. Don’t wait for approval from anyone higher up, and don’t waste time wondering whether destiny is on your side. The succulent opportunities aren’t somewhere else or someday later. They’re here and now.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I’m exultant when a vigorous bike ride up the trail of my local mountain leaves me so cleansed and energized that a flash of truth strikes and instantly dissipates the illusions I’ve been clinging to. I get a delightful shock when, while wandering through a city’s maze of asphalt and litter, a sudden breeze carries the earthy aroma of a rebellious garden. I love it when the reckless choices of misguided leaders jolt my community into doubling down on our quest for audacious harmony, inventive affection, and untamed wisdom. How about you, dear Scorpio? Where do you search for your awakenings and salvations? Keep your inner radar tuned; they’re circling close.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might build megastructures around stars to capture their energy. These “Dyson spheres” would be detectable from Earth as unusual infrared signatures. We haven’t found any yet, but his idea revolutionized how we think about looking for alien intelligence. Moral of the story: Valuable contributions can come from inventing the framework for how to search for unknown things. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, you might not solve problems, but you could redesign the questions. You may not find the answers, but you could create better tools for exploration.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Do you have a muse? If not, please find one. You shouldn’t go another day without a provocative, inspiring presence to stir your imagination and drive you deliciously wild. If you already have a muse and that genius has been faithfully fueling your creative fire, bestow a reward. Give a gift or blessing that provides a muse-like boost to your muse. And if your existing muse has grown quiet lately, go off on an adventure together. Dream up plans to stimulate the bursts of kaleidoscopic energy that you two are capable of generating.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In some monastic traditions, practitioners engage in “work prayer.” They transform ordinary labor into spiritual practice not by thinking holy thoughts while working, but by bringing complete presence and fond attention to ordinary labors. Chopping vegetables becomes meditation. Sweeping floors becomes devotion. The sacredness arises from their wholehearted attitude. This would be an excellent experiment for you to try, Aquarius. Divine solace and inspiration will arrive as you perform your daily duties with verve and gratitude. Try this: For a few days or even two weeks, approach routine duties and familiar obligations with a ceremonial reverence. Be joyful for the privilege of being alive in the most ordinary ways.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’ve entered a phase when your magnetism and charisma will expand as you focus on ruminating deeply about what’s most meaningful to you. Seeking out new teachers and fresh lessons will bring lucky breaks and helpful influences into your sphere. Each fresh insight will polish your allure, and every surge of curiosity will add to your glow. Be extra sexy and ultra smart: Cosmic energies will work in your favor as you weave your id and intellect together.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): There are only two types of humans, right? Some of us serve beauty, truth, and goodness, while the rest pledge their allegiance to illusions, lies, and shadows. Our planet is now caught in a colossal showdown between these two sides. And it’s high time for you to align yourself with one or the other. JUST KIDDING! The truth is far messier and more interesting: Every one of us is a blend of luminosity and ignorance. And now is a perfect moment to study how those two currents move within you. When you clearly see how you contribute to the murky jumble, your commitment to love, harmony, and justice will soar.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You’ll move with style and purpose if you take quick jaunts, dare gentle risks, and make a few nimble leaps of faith. You’ll go awry and astray if you wander too far afield, chase swaggering adventures, or try vaulting across yawning chasms. Keep it light, sharp, and intuitive, Taurus. Refrain from lugging heavy emotional baggage or drifting into daydream limbo. It’ll be wise to trust your sprightly impulses, but foolish to dissect them so ruthlessly that the magic leaks out. The color amber and the number three will be your allies. Somber gray and the number four will not. Align with sly visionaries and soulful realists but sidestep bitter contrarians and nostalgic clingers.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I swear I’m smarter in some places than in others. My intelligence soars in Barcelona, Kyoto, Aix-en-Provence, France, and Florence, Italy. But I seem dull-witted in Munich, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. Even in Northern California, my long-time home, some areas bring out the best in me. I feel mediocre on Valencia Street in San Francisco, for instance, whereas I’m extra wise in downtown Berkeley. Why is this? The branch of astrology known as astrocartography says that my strengths are more likely to shine in certain spots than others. In the coming weeks, Gemini, I urge you to experiment with the possibility that this may be true for you, as well. Wander far and wide. Find out where you feel most aligned with your deep, bright, genuine self.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASKS

Below I name five tasks that are very hard and very fun to do. They are less like problems to be solved than like instruments to be played. We don’t “finish” or “master” the cello; we practice it for a lifetime and call the practicing music.

I offer these tasks to you in a spirit of cheerful impossibility. Each one asks for more than any of us can reliably deliver, which is exactly why they stay interesting. The goal isn’t to become experts at these arts, which will never happen, but to become smarter and wilder and kinder as we work on them.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #1. To thrive in the midst of raging contradictions

Our challenge is to not merely tolerate contradiction. Instead we cheerfully apply the truth that contradiction is often a nutrient.

The spiritual traditions we draw from know this well: Taoist sages don’t resolve the tension between yin and yang, but inhabit it.

Kabbalists say the chaotic material world is as real and valid and necessary as Ein Sof, the utterly pristine and unknowable aspect of the Divine.

The trickster, my own favorite archetype, is constitutionally drawn to paradox and contradiction, loves to play in the the overlap between realms. Why? Because that’s where the sacred action is.

What makes a contradiction “rage” is our expectation that it should resolve. Our task is to reframe the rumination so that we fully abide in an uncanny knowing: Contradictions aren’t necessarily problems that demand solutions, but usually the actual texture of reality at sufficient depth.

Life insists on being both precious and brutal. Beauty keeps appearing inside ugliness. Sublime redemption hides in the shameful.

Our job isn’t to file these opposites into separate drawers but to develop the suppleness that lets us be at home in the roar of irreconcilability.

Thriving means we can think clearly, love fully, and act decisively even when the ground is paradox all the way down.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #2. To interrupt and overthrow compulsively negative trains of thought in the middle of their flow through our brains

This is hard. Negative thought patterns have momentum. They gather speed.

By the time we recognize we’re in one, it may have already commandeered significant neural territory and is busy recruiting allies: memories that confirm its narrative, sensations that validate its urgency, and future scenarios that prove its gloomy predictions.

To interrupt the flow mid-stream requires an internal heroism that no one gives us credit for, because the battle is invisible. We have to locate and pull the emergency brake while the train is moving.

We have to remember that we aren’t the train. The thought isn’t a fact. The feeling isn’t a forecast. The story the mind tells with such compelling authority is a ramshackle story, not a verdict.

This is some of the most demanding spiritual athleticism available to humans. And it must often be performed while exhausted, in public, with no applause.

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A Pre-Emptive Word to the Skeptic: People who don’t know my work well may read the passage above and cry “toxic positivity.” If you’re one of them, here’s my reply: https://tinyurl.com/NoToxicPositivity

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #3. To negotiate partial solutions to complex problems; to do the partially right thing when it’s impossible to do the totally right thing

Perfectionism isn’t the noble virtue it pretends to be. Too often it functions as paralysis dressed in high-mindedness. It’s a refusal to act until conditions that will never arrive will supposedly finally arrive.

Real life rarely offers the pure, clean, uncompromised option. It offers the messy middle and the imperfect compromise. If we’re honest and compassionate, the 60% solution might actually help someone—if we’re willing to stop mourning the 100% solution that exists only in our imagination.

To negotiate a partial solution requires the intellectual humility to admit that the half a loaf on the table is far better than having no loaf at all.

We’ve got to prize moral flexibility by accepting that doing some good is better than doing a perfect nothing.

And we must have tolerance for the discomfort of knowing we fell short of the ideal.

Those who gain skill at this exercise become genuinely useful in the world. Those who don’t often become experts at explaining why nothing can be done.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #4. To be discerning as we protect ourselves from people’s flaws while at the same time being generous as we celebrate their beauty.

This one is exquisitely difficult because the two moves, protection and celebration, may seem to be each other’s enemy.

Our discernment can congeal into coldness; our generosity can slide into enabling. The task is to keep both valves fully open at once, which requires a bifocal vision most of us were never taught.

What it demands is seeing people in layers. Their wounds or limitations, which can genuinely harm us, occupy one layer. The irreducible beauty of their soul occupies another layer. And neither cancels the other.

Protection without celebration produces a defended, armored life. We become safe but small. Celebration without discernment produces naivety and eventually resentment.

The mature form of this practice lets us avoid exposing ourselves to someone’s destructive patterns in the same breath as we honor their beauty.

This is fierce love rather than sentimental love. It sees clearly and cherishes anyway.

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #5. To graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted.

Is it even feasible to graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted despite our efforts to outrun and outgrow it? I say yes: But we must:

1. accept the situation as it is;

2. acknowledge our role in precipitating and prolonging it;

3. feel gratitude for what it has taught us.

These are three distinct and sequential gates, and most of us get stuck at the first one.

Acceptance isn’t the same as defeated resignation. It’s the refusal to keep paying the psychic tax of wishing reality were otherwise.

The second gate is harder still: acknowledging not just that we are in a dicey mess, but that we helped create the dicey mess. We didn’t build it alone and we may have done it without our full conscious knowledge. Our unconscious patterns may have played the largest role.

This gate tends to provoke intense resistance, because the ego experiences accountability as an attack. But without passing through it, we remain victims of circumstance rather than participants in our own story.

The third gate, gratitude, seems at first like cruelty, but is in fact liberation. Not gratitude as performance or toxic positivity, but the real thing: the recognition that this peculiar affliction delivered lessons available nowhere else.

It honed capacities that simple ease would never have forged. It revealed dimensions of ourselves that fair weather never would have exposed.

If we pass through all three gates, there’s a good chance that we will graduate from the messy karma. Ignore even one gate, and it willn arrange for our enrollment in the next semester.

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None of these five IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASKS will ever be checked off completely. We will practice them badly, then slightly less badly, then badly again in some fresh way we hadn’t yet imagined. Eventually, we may develop some decent but eminently fallible skill.

That’s the fun of it. The impossibility is what keeps the door open, forever, to becoming more interesting than we currently are.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 2

CANCER (June 21-July 22): There are phases when the cosmic energies and I urge you to put others first—even tend to their pain before you tend to your own. But this isn’t one of those times. Right now, sacrificing yourself for the sake of others would obstruct the flow of righteous grace into your life. So then what is the most soul‑honoring path available? Here’s what I think: Summon your inventive brilliance and use it to imagine generous ways to care for yourself. Shower yourself with gifts, treats, and blessings that delight you. Take the loving care you so deftly pour into other people and lavish it wholeheartedly on yourself.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Most fields of human endeavor work like this: A few people are truly brilliant, a handful are actively harmful, and the majority fall somewhere between “not great” and “pretty good.” That’s true whether you’re talking about engineers, doctors, poets, or astrologers. So it’s inadvisable to assume a physician is wise about your well-being just because they’ve logged 15 years on the job, or to trust your life direction to the first astrologer whose promotion catches your eye. In the coming weeks, dear Leo, discernment like this matters even more than usual. Let your natural hopefulness be balanced by sharp, thoughtful judgment. Don’t just challenge obvious authority. Put every so-called fact, spin, assumption, and official line under your own clear-eyed review.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Architects designing spaces for collective use try to balance two human needs: to see expansively and also have safe places to retreat. Too much exposure creates anxiety; too much enclosure brings claustrophobia. The ideal is to provide both shelter and spaciousness. Let’s use this theme as a metaphor for your life during the coming months. You’ll be wise to create an equilibrium between engagement and privacy, between vastness and protection. Make it easy for yourself to observe the larger scene and also withdraw when needed.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Self-proclaimed “skeptics” love to sneer at astrologers, as if pondering what lies ahead were a violation of scientific purity. And yet economists, sports analysts, trend watchers, and political commentators churn out shaky predictions every day. Honestly, those professionals of probability often create more confusion than those of us who read the heavens. Take weather forecasters, for instance: From Europe to Japan, their models routinely miss sudden floods and twisters and trigger more than a few false alarms. But do the debunkers brand them as charlatans? Of course not. Forgive the outburst, but I’m building to a key foresight: Every forecast, projection, or vision that crosses your path over the next month will miss the mark—except for this one. So free yourself of their meddling.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Ethnobotanists describe how certain Indigenous traditions work with “teacher plants.” These are flora that offer not only physical benefits but spiritual instruction. They include psychoactive substances, but also ordinary plants approached with extraordinary attention. In the spirit of reinventing your education, Scorpio, I invite you to expand your understanding of who and what your teachers are. What ordinary elements of your daily life might offer wisdom if you engage them with deep respect? What situations at the edges of your awareness could bring lessons that enrich your perspectives? Now is an excellent time to seek new apprenticeships.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Western science and Western religions may disagree about how the universe began, but both place its birth in the distant past. Tantra and other spiritual paths, by contrast, propose that the universe is born afresh in every instant through the sacred, erotic interplay of God and Goddess. When humans approach love-making as an experimental sacrament, these traditions suggest, we can tune in to the union of those primordial forces and, in a sense, take part in the continual creation of existence. So, are you ready for a bit of world-making erotic play? The current astrological indicators say yes, you are.​

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): A common obstacle to healthy intimacy is the belief that a beloved ally should automatically know what you need, without you saying a word. I used to suffer from this delusion myself and worked hard to dissolve it. I no longer unconsciously assume that my companions are so attuned to me that they can always intuit my desires. But I know this bad idea feels romantic to many people, even though it can sabotage even the most promising bond. In the weeks ahead, Capricorn, I invite you to starve this fantasy. Your intimate world is ripe for a fresh infusion of lucid, straightforward honesty.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Your next few weeks will be sponsored by CoffeeBeer, the paradoxical elixir that both pumps up your energy and decompresses your defenses. You will be an exemplary role model for this innovative product because you will epitomize what occurs when a sensitive soul gets excited and mellows out at the same time. I also expect you will soon be exploring intriguing opportunities that become available to you because of your supercharged calm. Fortunately, you don’t need to drink actual coffee and beer together to make this happen. The cosmic forces will be conspiring to help you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Finish this sentence, Pisces: “The one thing that really keeps me from being myself is _______.” Is it someone’s opinion, an old story about who you are, a fear of loss, a habit of over-pleasing, a secret shame, or a belief that you’re “too much” or “not enough”? Whatever first pops into your mind is probably closest to the truth. Here’s your next step: Loosen the grip of this stressor by even just 20 percent. I bet your real self will feel relaxed enough to bloom more fully.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Archaeologists studying ancient wells have discovered that some weren’t finished in a single effort. Communities might dig to the current water table, use the well for years, then probe further down when water levels dropped or needs increased. This is a useful metaphor for you, Aries. As of yet, you don’t have the ability or tools to reach the deepest layers you aspire to reach. My counsel is to go as far as you can now and gather what you find there. Later, when you’re readier, you will build on what has come before.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The doom‑and‑gloom wing of astrology is exhausting. The superstition that Mercury retrograde causes scrambled messages and dire mix‑ups is dull and misguided. The planet’s apparent backward motion, which is happening right now, shows up about three times every year like clockwork. It’s perfectly normal! In my view, Mercury retrograde isn’t threatening unless you obsess on the idea that it is, in which case, yes, your payment might go astray, and a friend may misunderstand you. But if cultivating relaxed clarity is more fun and productive for you than coping with fearful tension, treat the time between now and July 23 as a rich opportunity to refine, deepen, and upgrade how you communicate.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You Gemini readers have decreed that I must halt all musings about maddening, riddle-drenched ambiguity. You’ve delivered the message to me that you’re tired of wrestling with enigmas wrapped in paradoxes. Straightforward, plainspoken factualness is what you want. Well, OK. (Please remember that I don’t make this stuff up; I simply channel cosmic omens.) Maybe I’ll start obeying your orders next time. But first, I will advise you: 1. Unexpected gifts are coming from people and situations in transition. 2. Tough but friendly interventions will nudge you toward healthy course corrections. 3. Mysterious assistance is on its way.

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Sometimes we have a strong sense of what our destiny is calling us to do, but we don’t feel ready or brave enough to answer the call. We need a push, an intervention, a serendipitous stroke. I call it FATE BAIT.

It might be a person or event that awakens our dormant willpower and draws us inexorably toward our necessary destiny. It could be a thunderbolt or siren song or stage whisper that gives us a good excuse to go do what we know we should do.

Do you have ideas about how to put yourself in the vicinity of your fate bait?

Here are a few provocations to get you started:

1. Go where the discomfort is. Fate bait may sometimes show up in the places where you feel comfortable and confirmed. But on other occasions it lurks at the edges of your known world, like in the conversation you’ve been avoiding or an intriguing twist you don’t quite feel ready for. Awkwardness may mean fate bait is nearby.

2. Confess your dream out loud. There may be uncanny magic in actually speaking what you have only dared to think. The moment you tell someone, “I think I’m supposed to be doing this,” the universe may rearrange the furniture. Moral of the story: Fate bait is often drawn toward the vibration of a declared intention.

3. Follow the thread of strange attraction: a pull that doesn’t quite make rational sense, a clue that keeps recurring, or a dream image that lingers past noon. These may be the advance scouts of fate bait. Follow these preliminary correspondences with a reckless earnestness.

4. Make yourself a moving target. Fate bait can’t find you if you are perfectly still and totally defended. So maybe say yes to the odd invitation. Attend a gathering that’s slightly outside your tribe’s territory. Take the longer road home. The catalyst you need may be lingering in an intersection you’ve never passed through.

5. Ask fate a direct question, then pay attention for three days. Write it down: What do I need to meet? What needs to meet me? Then watch with relaxed alertness. The answer often arrives sideways, like in the form of a stranger’s offhand remark or a lyric on the radio.

6. Ritualize the readiness. Sometimes fate bait is waiting for a signal that you’re serious. So clear a space. Make a gesture, however private and strange, that says: I am available. I am willing to be interrupted by my own unimagined life. A ceremony you do only for yourself may open the door and glimmer an invitation.

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Surprise! Fate bait isn’t entirely outside you. It’s your own deeper self, engineering encounters and sending emissaries from the future version of you who already made the leap.

When the thunderbolt strikes or when the stage whisper finally reaches you, you will be ready.

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To listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE during the coming months, go here, then register and/or sign in:

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After you log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for 2nd Half of 2026.”

You can also listen to your short-term forecast for the coming week by clicking on “This week (June 23, 2026).”

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The Greatest Gift You Can Give

The greatest gift you can give might be the gift that you yourself were never given. Not the gift you received in abundance and thus understand how to pass along. I mean the gift whose absence left a hollow in you, a shape you learned to recognize because it was missing.

You know its contours better than anyone. You ached and searched for it. And in that long searching, you became an expert in its necessity.

So I invite you to give that gift with the particular tenderness of a soul who knows what it costs not to receive it. Give it as an act of repair for both the other person and for every version of yourself who once went without.

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The most valuable service you have to offer your fellow humans may be the service you always wished were performed for you. Not necessarily the service you were trained for, credentialed in, or celebrated for providing.

Rather, I’m referring to the service you silently longed for in your hours of need, which nobody seemed to know you needed or bothered to provide. That longing was intelligence: your soul taking careful notes.

So I invite you to offer that service. Provide it with the authority of a soul who knows it intimately.

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An experience that wounded you could move you to help people who’ve been similarly wounded.

This isn’t a requirement. You’re not obligated to make meaning from your suffering, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But if you find, as many do, that the wound has left you with an uncanny fluency, then consider turning toward it rather than away. Maybe you now have an ability to recognize others who are in that same darkness and speak to them in a language they thought nobody knew.

The alchemists were onto something: The most contaminated substance, under the right conditions, may become the most precious.

So I invite you to heal yourself by healing others. You may discover that the help you offer them was the help you needed all along. In building the bridge for someone else to cross, you may move yourself on the other side.

Birthday announcement: I’m turning one year older this week—and hopefully at least three years weirder, wilder, and cheekier.

If my words have ever helped you dodge despair, cultivate wonder, or flirt with the Divine YaYa, one of my favorite birthday gifts would be you upgrading to a paid subscription—but only, of course, if it’s easy and joyful for you to do so:

Here’s the link: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/subscribe

PS: The very best gift you could give me for my birthday is to be your authentic self even strong and truer and wilder than ever before.

I wish you fluid insights and “ah-ha!” revelations that lead to cathartic integrations.

I wish you captivating yet relaxing adventures that inspire you to weave together diverse threads of your life story, enabling you to feel at home in the world.

I wish you unexpected encounters with beauty so piercing that they shatter your cynicism and build your faith in the sacramental possibilities of ordinary moments.

I wish you increasing evidence that life is more generous, more interested in your flourishing, and more responsive to your sincere questions than your conditioning has allowed you to believe.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of June 25

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Now is an auspicious time to declare a sweeping amnesty and observe a personal season of pardon. To the best of your ability, release your clenched feelings about people who have caused you pain. Banish blame! Purge any lingering resentment and regret that has curdled into self‑reproach. Celebrate atonement and absolution! Most vital of all, exonerate yourself. Shed the guilt you’ve carried for missteps and missed chances. And please offer yourself a sweet gift: a ritual of renewal.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): If you happen to be swallowed whole by a dragon or whale sometime soon, don’t freak out. It’s far preferable to being chomped into bits first, which absolutely won’t happen. You may indeed spend a brief spell inside the creature’s dark belly, but I confidently predict you will ultimately be deposited on the outside in one intact piece, after which you will only need to find your meandering way back home. The whole episode may be confounding or humbling, but I bet it will also scrub you free of a load of old karma.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Bees perform what scientists call a “waggle dance” to communicate the location of flowers to their hive-mates. But the directions are sometimes imprecise, and the apparent sloppiness actually helps the hive. It forces other bees to explore more broadly, discovering new food sources that the original bee missed. Perfect information would make them too efficient to be adaptable. Your precision is one of your gifts, Virgo, but right now I think you need strategic vagueness and fuzzy logic. Leave some directions unclear. Mistakes and misunderstandings might lead to discoveries that your perfect plans would have eliminated.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In ancient Greek thought, kairos referred to the opportune moment. It meant the right timing, when circumstances aligned for action to be most effective. The term chronos, on the other hand, was about sequential time, which blindly marched forward without any regard for special moments or auspiciousness. Most of us are more or less hypnotized by chronos-consciousness. We measure our lives by calendar dates and external schedules. But in the coming weeks, Libra, I recommend you stay on high alert for kairos-rich pivots. For now, suspend inquiries like “Am I on schedule?” and ask, “Are the circumstances ripe?”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Ravens are strongly motivated to engage in elaborate play: aerial acrobatics, complex games, sliding down snowbanks, and sharing food with non-relatives. These behaviors lack an immediate payoff, yet support learning, motor skill development, and social relationships. They seem to be both emotionally rewarding and indirectly advantageous for survival and success over the long term.​ Let’s apply this to you, Scorpio. Let’s conclude that delight isn’t wastefully frivolous and that pleasure doesn’t need to justify itself through productivity. In the coming weeks, you may face pressure to explain or defend your joy, as if to prove it’s worth it in some utilitarian way. Refuse. Like the ravens, engage in purposeless beauty and fun simply because it feels so good.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Glaciologists studying ice cores can read Earth’s climate history going back 800,000 years. Each layer contains trapped air bubbles. These are time capsules that preserve the atmospheric composition of each moment. The ice remembers everything. You accumulate similar records, Sagittarius. Each of your experiences leaves its trace. And in the coming weeks, you will have extra access to these archived layers of your own history. Memories and patterns you thought were lost will surface with intriguing clarity. I hope you study these revelations to glean insight about your long-term patterns and cycles. It’s time to see the Big Picture.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Many people forget, but you know: Structure is the foundation for freedom, not a suppression of it. While others fantasize about escaping responsibility, you know that mastery is key to every emancipation. When properly practiced, your flair for discipline adds vigor as well as rigor. More than any other sign of the zodiac, you are adept at using limits to give unlimited possibilities their specific shape. I trust you will express all these Capricornian powers to the max in the coming weeks. People in your life need them even more than usual.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Horticulturists practice “deadheading.” They remove spent flowers from plants to encourage new vitality. Faded flowers drain energy that could go toward fresh growth. Plants that have been deadheaded produce more abundant blooms than those left to manage their own decay. I recommend a metaphorical version of this practice to you, Aquarius. You’ll be wise to deadhead your emotional garden. Certain attachments, once vibrant and nourishing, have expired. They’re not evil or wrong; they’re simply finished. It’s best not to keep directing precious energy toward maintaining their faded forms. With gratitude for the old beauty, clear the way for new beauty.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): For maximum safety, be as uninteresting as possible. Shun risks that might shake up your beliefs and avoid adventures that could expose you to people who aren’t similar to you. If you really want to be certain about preserving your security and stability, as I’m recommending, the surest method is to retreat to your power spot and do nothing at all. WAIT! STOP! Dear Pisces, everything I just said was pure misdirection! I was joking! In fact, the opposite is true. The true way to nurture genuine safety and security is to pursue what sparks your curiosity and lights up your zeal. And the coming days are likely to provide you with plenty of chances to do exactly that.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The interesting struggles you’ll wage in the coming weeks will require your vulnerability: showing up exactly as you are when you might rather fight or escape. Your warrior nature probably prefers a clear enemy or a definable problem you can confront, but the truer conquest will come from laying down your weaponry. I suggest you meet aggression with curiosity and engage chaos with receptive stillness. At least for now, your greatest strength will be to remain undominated by your own reactive impulses. Think of it as an advanced martial art.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to be inspired by this wisdom from artist Pablo Picasso: “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.” He’s proposing that we treat a lack of expertise not as an embarrassment, but as a doorway. Instead of waiting until we feel ready, trained, and confident, he suggests we head into territory where we fumble, guess, and feel awkward. Our discomfort may lead to gratifying growth. So I dare you to ask yourself whether there’s a capacity or skill you’d love to add to your repertoire but are too shy or timid to try. Then take small, imperfect steps toward it, trusting that each move will teach you how to do what once felt impossible.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Hummingbirds keep track of every flower they visit and know how long it will take each one to replenish its nectar. They maintain mental maps of many feeding sites and visit them on precise schedules. To ensure their survival, they can’t waste energy on flowers that aren’t ready yet. Your mind could work like this if you want it to, Gemini. Which people, places, and projects need time to refill before you visit them again? Who have you been approaching too frequently, seeking their nectar before it has had time to regenerate? In the coming weeks, practice strategic patience with your resources. In your secret conversations with yourself, call yourself “Hummingbird.”

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HOW COULD YOU NOT FEEL THRILLED?

You are alive in your mysterious, endlessly interesting life, and you are imbued with the fantastically potent power of awareness.

You can perceive a hummingbird hovering at a fuchsia blossom and the light that left a distant star before your ancestors had language, only now arriving in your eyes. You can exult in a lover’s sigh and the taste of ripe peach, the memory of your sixth birthday and a plan you’re hatching for next fall.

All of it streams through the impossible miracle of your attention, this radiance you carry everywhere without ever being able to explain it. How could you not feel thrilled?

You are living on a planet that’s always surprising: a wet blue miracle hurtling through the dark at 67,000 miles per hour while you sit drinking your favorite beverage.

You’re living at a time when so many things are changing that you can’t help being fascinated: empires wobbling, old certainties dissolving, new visions being born in basements and gardens and the secret laboratories of people’s imaginations. You get to witness it. You can participate if you want. How could you not feel thrilled?

You have some intriguing project to look forward to, or some challenging but interesting work you’re in the midst of, or some mind-bending riddle you’re trying to solve with all your heart.

Maybe it’s a book you’re writing or a wound you’re healing or a friendship you’re rebuilding or a melody you can almost hear but haven’t yet captured. Maybe it’s a question so big you will need the rest of your life to answer it.

Whatever it is, it tugs at you. It calls you forward. It refuses to let you sink into numbness. How could you not feel thrilled?

You are wearing a wild, pulsing, improbable body that breathes 25,000 times a day without you ever having to think about it, that knits your skin back together when you cut it, that converts bread and apples into thoughts and laughter.

Your heart has been beating since before you were born and has never once taken a vacation. Trillions of cells are conspiring at this very moment to keep you here, alert, reading these words. You are a collaboration of sun and earth and fresh water. How could you not feel thrilled?

You’re playing the most enigmatic game in the history of the universe, also known as your life on Earth, and you love asking questions about what it all means. Why am I here? What are my gifts? Who are these other dreaming creatures I love, and where did we all come from, and where are we going?

The questions don’t torment you so much as enchant you. You can’t prove it, but you suspect that the questions themselves are a kind of nourishment, and that to live inside the Great Glorious Mystery and keep wondering is its own reward.

Big bonus: There are people who have decided, against all odds, to walk beside you: the friend who knows your complicated stories and offers support; the stranger who held the door; the elder whose face has become a map of everything they’ve survived; the child or animal that looks at you as though you know something worth knowing.

You get to love them. You have the immense privilege of being confounded by them, and forgiven by them, and changed by them. You’re not playing this game alone. How could you not feel thrilled?

You never know what’s going to happen next. Tomorrow could bring a phone call that rearranges your whole understanding of who you are. A book could fall open to the one sentence you’ve needed for years. A song could come on the radio and crack you wide open.

The plot isn’t finished. The twists are still coming. It’s as if you’re one of the heroes in an epic movie that is inexhaustibly entertaining, and you don’t have the script. How could you not feel thrilled?

Even the hard parts feed the thrill. The grief that proves how much you loved and the confusion that comes right before a breakthrough.

You’re not promised comfort, but you’re promised meaning, and meaning is the more electrifying gift. The shadows in the story make the light beautiful.

So here you are: aware, alive, embodied, accompanied, questioning, surprised, mortal, and far more powerful than you usually let yourself believe. You woke up this morning inside a vast, intriguing enigma that has no bottom and no edges, and you are equipped to relish it.

How could you not feel thrilled?

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

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for the REST of 2026:

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This week my Expanded Audio Horoscopes explore themes that I suspect will be important for you during the coming months.

What areas of your life are likely to receive unexpected assistance and divine inspiration? Where are you likely to find the most interesting success? How can you best cooperate with the cosmic rhythms? What questions should you be asking?

To listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE, go here, then register and/or sign in:

https://RealAstrology.com

After you log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026.”

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The Expanded Audio Horoscopes cost $7 apiece. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

HOW DO I LOVE YOU?

I love your renegade soul—the insurgent flame in you that refuses to be tamed by small definitions and safe harbors. And I love your ever-deepening eyes, which have learned to hold more light precisely because they’ve been willing to hold more darkness.

I love how unflinchingly you peer into the heart of your own darkness—not as a penitent seeking punishment, not as a tourist seeking thrills, but as a cartographer making creative maps of difficult territory so others might find their way.

I love how you’re making yourself more and more receptive to truths in their wild states, before they’ve been groomed and domesticated. You meet truth the way a naturalist meets a rare creature in the field: with stillness, reverence, and the discipline not to grab.

I love how you can lose yourself completely in passion, but never once shirk your commitment to the good and the true.

I admire the way you never bear a grudge against the mountains that stand in your way. You don’t curse them or petition the sky for their removal or waste yourself in futile assault. You study their contours with curiosity and tenderness, and then you find the path around.

And I love your patient, stubborn, luminous devotion to deciphering the code you left for yourself before you came into this life. These are the clues you planted in your own nature and the instructions hidden in your longings. You keep reading, decoding, and honoring the Big Self who loved you enough to leave a trail.

Listen to my spoken-word song, “Glory in the Highest”:

The lyrics begin like this:

Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you’ve been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect.

The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

Read more of “Glory in the Highest” freewillastrology.com/beauty

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOY

Week of June 18

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Eastern monarch butterflies migrate annually from the American Midwest to central Mexico. The individuals who start the journey from Nebraska or Wisconsin die long before they reach the oyamel fir trees of Mexico. So do their children and their grandchildren. Their great-grandchildren finish the trip, though they have never been to the destination. Somehow they know where to go, navigating thousands of miles to trees they’ve never seen. Let’s apply this as a metaphor for you, Gemini. I suspect you are carrying navigational wisdom you didn’t realize you possessed. Inherited knowledge, encoded deep in your secret places, is ready to guide you. So pay attention to inexplicable certainties. Trust the directions that arrive without logical explanation.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): A large earthquake doesn’t relieve stress evenly along a fault. Instead, it creates zones where stress is reduced and others where stress increases, making future ruptures more likely. So the stress is redistributed, but not uniformly. According to my reading of the omens, Cancerian, you recently experienced a metaphorical shake-up. I suggest you identify where stress has grown and where it has dissipated. Your next moves should account for this new distribution of pressure. Some areas of your life are now more vulnerable, while others have become more stable. Read the landscape accurately before proceeding.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Songbirds like zebra finches practice their melodies while asleep. Their vocal muscles move in ways that mirror daytime singing. These replay patterns help young birds learn their songs and adults maintain and refine their tunes over time. I suspect that you are engaged in a similar type of learning, Leo. You are enhancing skills and uncovering insights while asleep and dreaming. Bonus! Even when awake, you’re absorbing clues on a subconscious level. Your deeper intelligence is gathering information you will need for your upcoming breakthroughs. Hooray for mysterious help!

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Architects who design concert halls know that perfect sound isn’t achieved through perfect smoothness. The best acoustics come from strategic irregularities, textured walls, and angled surfaces that distribute vibrations in pleasing ways. Too much uniformity creates dead zones and echoes; too much chaos creates muddle. Pleasing resonance arises from organized complexity. In my estimation, Virgo, your life is currently too smooth in some areas and too haphazard in others. You may need more strategic irregularity. Consider introducing productive unpredictability into relationships that have become too routine. Add inventive structure to efforts that have become shapeless. Don’t aim for either total order or complete randomness. What will generate maximum beauty?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Have you ever been ambushed by unexpected bursts of gratification emerging from subtle miracles? Maybe a loved one finally grasps a truth you’ve been trying to convey for eons. Or you feel balanced in a situation that once made you feel lopsided. Or you grasp, with shivers of awe, that you got uncanny spiritual guidance at a key crossroads. I foresee at least three such blessings for you in the coming weeks. To ensure you recognize them, don’t get distracted in the pursuit of splashy bonanzas and gaudy prizes. Be nimbly alert for subtle breakthroughs.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her family home but bequeathed us a marvelous body of lyrical work as she roamed through vast inner worlds. Sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler rose early to write before long shifts at low‑paid jobs, imagining visionary futures during her limited hours to be creative. Lucille Clifton raised six children while shaping poems of distilled, luminous insight, showing us how to summon fierce originality from a life crowded with responsibilities. Moral of the story: Buoyant power can flourish even when circumstances are limited. This lesson may be relevant for you in the coming weeks. If conditions seem imperfect or incomplete, trust that your resilience and adaptability can compensate for external obstacles. I have faith in your ability to generate useful beauty.

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BRAINSTORM ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026:

What will be the story of your life during the coming months? How can you exert your free will to create the adventures that will bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

If you’d like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and justice and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your long-term outlook:

https://RealAstrology.com

After you register and/or log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026”

The cost is $7 per sign. (Discounts are available for bulk purchases.)

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“Your big-picture audio horoscope was somehow both a balm for my soul and a call to action. How did you do that?” - David G., Coral Gables, FL

“Your big-picture horoscopes filled the gaps in my imagination. They woke up the fun plot twists that had been just on the tip of my ability to visualize.” - Ani Kraft, Brattleboro, VT

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Our tongues are primed to heal astonishingly fast thanks to dense blood vessels, saliva’s repair proteins, and a rapid immune response. Wounds that would take more patience elsewhere can heal here in days. I suspect that your psyche now possesses your tongue’s high level of healing power. So I hope you will launch a phase of accelerated repair. Call on every possible form of therapeutic assistance, please!

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Now is an ideal time to clear out old romantic karma from the past. Please consider performing a DIY ritual to release painful memories, leftover grudges, and long-standing hurts that keep tugging at your intimate connections. The coming weeks will also be a favorable phase to discard rigid beliefs about gender and dismantle anything that blocks you from experiencing full-bodied sensual and sexual delight. Expect to be freed from at least some energies that have limited your ability to explore fun and vigorous ways of savoring your desires.​

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I suggest you adopt a new honorary title like “Charm Weaver” or “Emissary of Radiance” or “Beauty Whisperer.” Why? Because I hope it will help inspire you to stir up delightful play and lyrical mystery wherever you wander. For instance: Infuse your conversations with sparkling harmony and sly, graceful humor. Burst into whimsical songs, fling out extravagant compliments, pose clever questions that spark fresh ideas, and call attention to systems and relationships in your world that are functioning wonderfully well. Many perks will flow your way as you do.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Is there a dream from childhood that you’re ready to revive on a higher octave? Think of something you longed for before the world told you to be boringly realistic: an art you wanted to practice, a way you wanted to live, or the kind of person you hoped to become. The question isn’t “Can I go back and do it exactly the same?” but “What is the mature, wiser, present-day version of that dream?” You might write in your journal: “The childhood dream I’m ready to lift to a higher octave is ______,” and then add, “If I took one concrete step toward it, what would it be?”

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries mathematician Paul Erdős lived without a permanent address, traveling the world to collaborate with other mathematicians. He owned little, claiming “property is a nuisance.” His life was structured around doing mathematics and helping others do mathematics. He published over 1,500 papers, more than any mathematician in history. Was his minimalism a form of deprivation? I prefer to think it was liberation from everything that didn’t serve his purpose. What would your life be like if you eliminated things that don’t serve your deepest purposes, Aries? In the coming weeks, you have permission to be ruthless about your priorities. What are you maintaining out of habit rather than conviction? What burdens masquerade as responsibilities?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A friend told me about the creative writing class he took with renowned poet Brenda Hillman. “I recall being in class,” he says, “and having the thought, wow, this teacher works far harder at teaching than I do at learning.” Dear Taurus, please don’t indulge in a similar laziness anytime soon. Your educational opportunities are currently richer than usual. To extract the full benefit, you must match the verve and vigor of your teachers. (PS: The teachers may or may not think of themselves as teachers. They could even be animals, rainstorms, or ancestors.)

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