You are affection. You are the future.
You are love: miraculous and unforeseen reason
Was there a time when a breakdown mutated into a breakthrough; or a spiritual emergency evolved into a spiritual emergence; or a scary trial led to a sacred trail?
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Despite what cynics say, the future is wide open. No one can suppress or deny your power to create your life in ways that reflect your noblest longings.
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I’m excited that my book is finally available as an eBook: Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Plus, the eBook includes a new foreword and a new piece, “Strange Blessings,” that weren't in the Revised and Expanded edition.
(And by the way, this eBook, like the Revised and Expanded edition, has 55% additional new material beyond what the first edition had.)
I'm very pleased. The project of converting PRONOIA to an eBook took a lot of work because of all the unique graphics and images.
Many thanks to my editor, Paul Hersh, and to eBook Partnerships for making this happen
PRONOIA as an ebook at Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaEbook
PRONOIA as an ebook at Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaNook
If you have the Apple Books app, click on it and search for "Pronoia."
You can also buy the hard-copy edition of PRONOIA: Available at Bookshop.org: https://tinyurl.com/548hp8y8
Available at Powells: https://bit.ly/PowellsPronoia
Available at Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaBN
Available at Amazon: https://bit.ly/Pronoia
A free preview of the book is available here: https://tinyurl.com/PronoiaPreview
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"Rebranding God" Pronoia Therapy
Experiments and exercises in becoming a bewilderingly enlightened, ecstatically grateful Master of Fiendishly Benevolent Tricks
1. There is no God. God is dead. God is a drug for people who aren't very smart. God is an illusion sold to dupes by money-hungry religions. God is a right-wing conspiracy. God is an infantile fantasy favored by superstitious cowards who can't face life's existential meaninglessness.
JUST KIDDING! The truth is, anyone who says he knows what God is or isn't, doesn't.
Now read Adolfo Quezada's prayer, then confess what you don't know about God.
"God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."
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2. The German word selig can mean "ecstatic," "blessed," or "holy." It implies that profound bliss can be a divine gift; that deep pleasure may generate or come from spiritual inspiration.
The English language doesn't have a term comparable to selig, maybe because our culture regards ecstasy with suspicion.
Religious people tend to believe that the blessed are those who are good and kind, certainly not those who are skilled at cultivating rapturous states of union with all of creation.
Many people who worship rationality, on the other hand, think of holy ecstasy as at best an irrelevant state, and at worst a nonproductive or deluded indulgence.
What would you have to do to place yourself in intimate alignment with the values embodied by the word selig?
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3. "They say a thing is holy if it makes you hold your tongue," muses a character in John Crowley's fantasy novel Engine Summer, speaking of the difference between his culture and another. "But we say a thing is holy if it makes you laugh."
Is your goofy joy compatible with your yearning for the breakthroughs that make you feel at home in the world? Can your giddiness serve your reverence?
PS: The English word "silly" comes from the German selig.
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4. In the film Angels in America, the character named Belize describes his vision of heaven. It's not a spotlessly clean gated community where everyone wears white gowns and nothing ever changes.
Rather, it's a "big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew, and something new and crooked going up catty-cornered to that. Gusts of gritty wind, and a gray, high sky alive with ravens.
"Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian. Diamond-colored streamers. Voting booths. Dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. All the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers."
Inspired by Belize, vamp and riff on your vision of heaven.
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5. I love this excerpt from "The Seeker," a poem by Rilke in his Book of Hours (translated by Robert Bly): "I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, / and I have been circling for a thousand years, / and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, / or a great song."
Here's my own permutation: "I am circling around love, around the throbbing hum, and I have been circling for thousands of days, and I still don't know if I am a wounded saint, or a rainy dawn, or a creation story."
I invite you to compose your own version.
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6. Neither God nor the gods are dead, but they seem to be disappearing because so few of us are capable of carrying on authentic relationships with them anymore.
The materialist delusion rules: Millions believe that nothing's real unless it can be perceived by the senses.
Churches and temples are full of ethical people, but many of them have no clue about how to know or feel or converse with the divine intelligences.
What can the deities do, having been banished from our conscious knowing? Jung said they have no recourse but to worm their way into our lives as sickness and pathology. Repressed, they come in the back door.
Which of your maladies or pains might be gods in disguise? How might you get them to take off their masks and begin knocking on the front door?
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7. What if the Creator is like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's God: "like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence"?
What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual?
What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to change the ways you think about everything?
What if, as Rusty Morrison speculates in Poetry Flash, "the sublime can only be glimpsed by pressing through fear's boundary, beyond one's previous conceptions of the beautiful"?
Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.
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8. In Judeo-Christian cultures, many people associate the sky with the masculine form of God. According to this bias, the Supreme Father rules us all from on high—up, away, far from here.
But if you were an ancient Egyptian, the sky was the goddess Nuit, her body its very substance. She was a loving mother whose tender touch could be felt with each new breath.
For one day, act as if you and the sky goddess are in constant contact.
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9. In some ancient Greek dramas, a god showed up out of nowhere to cause a miraculous twist at a crucial point in the tale.
This divine intrusion was referred to as theos ek mechanes, literally "god from a machine," because the symbolic figure of the god was lowered onto the stage by a crane.
In modern usage, the term is Latin—deus ex machina—and refers to a story in which a sudden event unexpectedly brings about a resolution to a baffling problem.
Write a tale in which you're the beneficiary of such an intervention.
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10. A few years ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a shiny red planet-like world orbiting the sun far beyond Pluto.
They called it Sedna, a name they said was derived from the Inuit deity that created the Arctic's sea creatures. But the truth about the myth of Sedna is more complicated.
She is the Dark Goddess, embodiment of the wild female potencies that are feared yet sorely needed by cultures in which the masculine perspective dominates.
Dwelling on the edge of life and death in her home at the bottom of the sea, Sedna is both a source of fertile abundance and a mysterious prodigy.
Shamans from the world above swim down to sing her songs and comb her long black hair. If they win her favor, she gives them the magic necessary to heal their suffering patients.
I suspect the discovery of Sedna is an omen signaling our collective readiness to welcome back the long-repressed influence of the Dark Nurturer. Do you have room for her in your religion?
Here are some further omens, all of which have pronoia embedded in their dark and fertile musings.
1. Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
2. Spiritual Madness: The Necessity of Meeting God in Darkness, an audio CD by Caroline Myss.
3. The Creative Fire, an audio CD by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
4. My book The Televisionary Oracle, which you can buy at https://bit.ly/Televisionary and read sections of for free at https://freewillastrology.com/books/oracle
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TO BE THE BEST PRONOIAC EXPLORER YOU CAN BE
Alert, relaxed listening is the radical act at the heart of our pronoiac practice.
Curiosity is our primal state of awareness.
Wise innocence is a trick we aspire to master.
Open-hearted skepticism is the light in our eyes.
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To be the best pronoiac explorer you can be, I suggest you adopt an outlook that combines the rigorous objectivity of a scientist, the "beginner's mind" of Zen Buddhism, the "beginner's heart" of pronoia, and the compassionate friendliness of the Dalai Lama.
Blend a scrupulously dispassionate curiosity with a skepticism driven by expansiveness, not spleen.
To pull this off, you'll have to be willing to regularly suspend your brilliant theories about the way the world works.
Accept with good humor the possibility that what you've learned in the past may not be a reliable guide to understanding the fresh phenomenon that's right in front of you.
Be suspicious of your biases, even the rational and benevolent ones. Open your heart as you strip away the interpretations that your emotions might be inclined to impose.
"Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything," wrote my teacher Ann Davies, "we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true."
At the same time, don't turn into a hard-ass, poker-faced robot. Keep your feelings moist and receptive. Remember your natural affection for all of creation. Enjoy the power of tender sympathy as it drives you to probe for the unimaginable revelations of every new moment.
"Before we can receive the entire truth about anything," said Ann Davies, "we have to love it."
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The Swahili word kule means "in between" or "neither-this-way-nor-that." Kule people are highly valued, according to Beauty and Truth Lab researcher Russ Crim, because they are unbiased but not apathetic.
Their passionate objectivity allows them to imagine a common ground that's in the best interests of both sides in a conflict, thereby promoting an organic form of harmony. "To be kule is to rule," says Crim.
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"The truth is always more interesting than your preconception of what it might be," writes Steven Levy. Journalists "should not have the stories written out in their heads before they report them. Preconceptions can blind you to the full, rich human reality that awaits you when you actually listen to your subjects and approach the material with an open mind. It wouldn't surprise me if the same tabula rasa principle applies when scientists try to answer the big questions."
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Most people associate innocence with naiveté. Conventional wisdom regards it as belonging to children and fools and rookies who lack the sophistication or experience to know the tough truths about life.
But the Beauty and Truth Lab recognizes a different kind of innocence. It's based on an understanding that the world is always changing, and therefore deserves to be seen fresh every day.
This alternative brand of innocence is fueled by an aggressive determination to keep clearing one's imagination of all preconceptions.
"Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good," wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves. "Innocence is knowing everything and still being attracted to the good.
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"The ancient Greeks knew that learning comes from playing," writes Roger von Oech in his book A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative. Their word for education, paideia, he says, was close to their word for play, paidia.
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"The knowledge I'm interested in is not something you buy and then have and can be comfortable with. The knowledge I'm interested in keeps opening wider and wider, making me smaller and more amazed, until I see I cannot have it all -- and then delight in that as a freedom."
—Heather McHugh
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"Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology." So proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.
Note well that he used the adjective "joyous" to describe distrust, not "cynical" or "grumbling" or "sour."
The key to remaining vital and strong while questioning every so-called absolute is to cultivate a cheerful, buoyant mood as you do it.
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"Be homesick for wild knowing," advises Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run with the Wolves.
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MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:
In Austria, the Government Pays to Repair Your Stuff. https://tinyurl.com/2s373ysm
Do Your City’s Parks Need a ‘Colonial Audit’? Chances are, the answer is yes. https://tinyurl.com/2p88bb5r
Solar Panels Built From Waste Crops Can Make Energy Without Direct Light. https://tinyurl.com/k8rn4js8
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning April 28
Copyright 2022 by Rob Brezsny
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it," wrote author and activist Gloria Steinem. "Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born," she added. Those are excellent meditations for you to focus on right now, Taurus. The time is ripe for you to envision in detail a specific new situation or adventure you would like to manifest in the future. It's also a perfect moment to picture a truer, deeper, more robust version of your beautiful self—an expanded version of your identity that you hope to give birth to in the coming months.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini author William Butler Yeats won a Nobel Prize for Literature, so I conclude he had considerable talent and wisdom. But he cultivated interests and ideas that were at variance with most other literary figures. For example, he believed fairies are real. He was a student of occult magic. Two of his books were dictated by spirits during séances. In the coming weeks, I invite you to draw inspiration from his versatile repertoire. Welcome knowledge in whatever unusual ways it might materialize. Be eager to accept power and inspiration wherever they are offered. For inspiration, here's a Yeats' quote: "I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know."
CANCER (June 21-July 22): You know what's always good for your well-being? Helping people who are less fortunate and less privileged than you. To enhance your health, you can also fight bigotry, campaign against the abuse of animals, and remedy damage to the natural world. If you carry out tasks like these in the coming weeks, you will boost your vigor and vitality even more than usual. You may be amazed at the power of your compassion to generate selfish benefits for yourself. Working in behalf of others will uplift and nurture you. To further motivate you, here are inspirational words from designer Santiago Bautista: "I am in love with all the gifts of the world, and especially those destined for others to enjoy."
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): "There is a moment in each day that Satan cannot find," wrote author and artist William Blake. Here's how I interpret his poetic words: On a regular basis, you become relatively immune from the debilitating effects of melancholy, apathy, and fear. At those times, you are blessed with the freedom to be exactly who you want to be. You can satisfy your soul completely. In the next six weeks, I suspect there will be more of these interludes for you than usual. How do you plan to use your exalted respite from Satan's nagging?
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Poet Louis Little Coon Oliver (1904–1991) was a member of the indigenous Mvskoke people. He declared, "I do not waste what is wild." That might mean something different for him than what it would mean for you, but it's an excellent principle for you to work with in the coming weeks. You will have more access than usual to wildness, and you might be tempted to use it casually or recklessly. I hope that instead you harness all that raw mojo with precision and grace. Amazingly, being disciplined in your use of the wildness will ensure that it enriches you to the max and generates potent transformative energy.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I suspect you will have the skills of an acrobat in the coming weeks—at least metaphorically. You will be psychically nimble. Your soul will have an exceptional ability to carry out spry maneuvers that keep you sane and sound. Even more than usual, you will have the power to adjust on the fly and adapt to shifting circumstances. People you know may marvel at your lithe flexibility. They will compliment you for your classiness under pressure. But I suspect the feats you accomplish may feel surprisingly easy and breezy!
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OUR COLLABORATION
I really do feel that you're here with me as I create these horoscopes. In a sense, you're my assistant. Our telepathic connection is utterly palpable and practical. The hopes and questions you project my way stream into my higher mind, coloring my psychic environment and enriching my desire to give you exactly what you need.
If you ever want more inspiration generated in that same collaborative spirit -- beyond the horoscopes you're reading here -- keep in mind that every week I also offer EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for you. They're four-to-five-minute meditations on the current state of your destiny.
These forecasts are different in tone and format from the written horoscopes you read here in the newsletter. They're longer and more leisurely in tone.
To listen to your Expanded Audio Horoscope online, go to https://RealAstrology.com
Register and/or log in through the main page.
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The cost is $6 per sign online. (Discounts are available for bulk purchases.)
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SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): A Tumblr blogger named Af-70 gives copious advice. From his wide selection of wise counsel, I have selected six tips that are right for your needs in the coming weeks. Please study the following counsel. 1. "Real feelings don't change fast." 2. "Connect deeply or not at all." 3. "Build a relationship in which you and your ally can be active in each other's growth." 4. "Sometimes what you get is better than what you wanted." 5. "Enjoy the space between where you are and where you are going." 6. "Keep it real with me even if it makes us tremble and shimmer."
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Consider putting a sign on your door or a message on your social media that says something like the following: "I've still got some healing to do. While I'm making progress, I'm only partway there. Am open to your suggestions, practical tips, and suggestions for cures I don't know about." Though the process is as yet incomplete, Sagittarius, I am proud of how diligent and resourceful you have been in seeking corrections and fixes. My only suggestions: 1. Be bold about seeking help and support. 2. Be aggressive about accessing your creativity. Expand your imagination about what might be therapeutic.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): "To uncover what is hidden in my soul might take me a week or two," my friend Allie told me. I told her she would be lucky if her brave and challenging exploration required such a short time. In contrast, some people I know have spent years trying to find what is buried and lost in their souls: me, for instance. There was one period of my life when I sought for over a decade to find and identify the missing treasure. According to my astrological analysis, you will soon enjoy multiple discoveries and revelations that will be more like Allie's timeline than mine: relatively rapid and complete. Get ready! Be alert!
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): A Thai cook named Nattapong Kaweenuntawong has a unique method for cooking the soup served in his Bangkok restaurant. At the end of each night, he saves the broth for use the next day. He has been doing that daily for 45 years. Theoretically, there may be molecules of noodles that were originally thrown in the pot back in 1977. In accordance with current astrological omens, I urge you to dream up a new tradition that borrows from his approach. What experience could you begin soon that would benefit you for years to come?
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Pisces-born Casimir Pulaski (1745–1779) was a Polish nobleman and military commander. As a young man, he fought unsuccessfully to free Poland from Russian domination. Driven into exile, he fled to America, arriving during the Revolutionary War with Britain in 1777. General George Washington was impressed with Pulaski's skills, making the immigrant a brigadier general. He distinguished himself as a leader of American forces, exhibiting brilliance and bravery. For that excellence, he has been honored. But now, over two centuries later, his identity is in flux. DNA analyses of Pulaski's remains suggest he was an intersex person with both male and female qualities. (Read more: https://tinyurl.com/PulaskiSmithsonian.) I bring this to your attention, Pisces, because the coming months will be a favorable time to question and revise your understanding of your identity. May you be inspired by Pulaski's evolving distinctiveness.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I recommend you adopt a limitation that will enable you to claim more freedom. For example, you could de-emphasize your involvement with a lukewarm dream so as to liberate time and energy for a passionate dream. Or you could minimize your fascination with a certain negative emotion to make more room for invigorating emotions. Any other ideas? You're in a phase when increased discipline and discernment can be liberating.
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Homework. Testify about how you redeemed the dark side. Newsletter@freewillastrology.com
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Submissions sent to Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter or in response to "homework assignments" may be published in a variety of formats at Rob Brezsny's discretion, including but not limited to newsletters, books, the Free Will Astrology column, and Free Will Astrology website. We reserve the right to edit submissions for length, style, and content.
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Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright 2022 Rob Brezsny
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I am circling around the emptiness, around the shape of form, and I have been circling for unnameable eternities, and I still don’t know if I am a galactic seed, or a black hole, or a memory of home.
An especially beautiful and profound news letter this week, Rob. Thank you.