Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter February 26, 2014

Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
FEBRUARY 26, 2014
FreeWillAstrology.com

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My book
PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA
is available at Amazon: bit.ly/Pronoia
or Powells: bit.ly/PronoiaPowells

Lots of people I like and admire are not big fans of "God" -- or at least the fake "God" that the fundamentalists hallucinate about. In an effort to whip up a new, improved Divine Wow untainted by bigotry and delusion, I wrote a piece for my book entitled "Re-branding God." An excerpt is below. You can read it in its entirety here: bit.ly/8Nd0M5

RE-BRANDING GOD

1. Philosopher Robert Anton Wilson proposed that the single greatest contribution to world peace would come from there being over seven billion different religions -- a unique spiritual path for each person on the planet. The Beauty and Truth Lab urges you to get started on doing your part to make this happen. What will your religion be called? What rituals will you perform? Write down your three core tenets.

2. You'll also need a new name for the Creator. "God" and "Goddess" have been so overused and abused that most of us are numb to them. And given the spiritual opportunities that will open up for you as you explore pronoia, you can't afford to have an impaired sensitivity toward the Great Mystery.

Here's an idea to stimulate your search: The Russian word for God is "Bog." The Basques call the Supreme Being "Jingo." To purge your psychic dockets of built-up fixations about deity, you might try singing improvisational prayers to "Jingo Bog."

Here are a few other fresh names to inspire you:
Blooming HaHa
Divine Wow
Whirl-Zap-Gush
Sublime Cackler
Chthonic Riddler

3. Since ancient times, China has hosted three religions: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Many Chinese people have cobbled together a melange of beliefs gathered from all three. This is different from the Western way, which is to be faithful to one religion or another, never mixing and matching.

But that's changing in certain enclaves in North America, where growing numbers of seekers are adopting the Chinese approach. They borrow elements from a variety of spiritual traditions to create a personalized path. Religious historians call this syncretism.

As you meditate on conjuring up your own unique mode of worship, think of the good parts you'd like to steal from other religions.

4. Most religions designate a special class of people -- priests, rabbis, ayatollahs -- to oversee official communications with the Source. This has led to a prevailing assumption, even among those who don't follow an established faith, that we can't initiate a divine conversation without the aid of a professional class of trained mediators. Among some sects of the ancient gnostics, in contrast, everyone was regarded as a potential prophet who could experience epiphanies worthy of becoming part of the ever-evolving doctrine.

The equivalent today would be if the Bible were regarded as an unfinished text to which every Christian or Jew might be eligible to add new content.

As you create your own spiritual path, experiment with this do-it-yourself approach. What might you do to eliminate the middleman and commune directly with the Source?

There's a lot more to this piece.
READ THE REST HERE: bit.ly/8Nd0M5

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IT'S NOT TOO LATE

Go here to read a compendium of your long-term, big-picture forecasts for 2014: bit.ly/BigLife2014

To hear my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for your long-range future, go here: bit.ly/BigPicture2014

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MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

"German Dads Demand Family Time - Family friendly policies in German business have been targeted at women in the past, but the tables are turning. Men are demanding more flexible working conditions in order to balance work and family burdens, forcing big changes in corporate culture."
tinyurl.com/kcqsgxe

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How to create more economic opportunity in America.
1. House the homeless.
2. A debt-free college education.
3. Medicare for all.
4. End the war on drugs.
5. Guarantee everyone a basic income.
6. Invest in averting more climate emergencies.
7. Scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
8. Establish state banks that invest in us, not Wall Street.
Read more: tinyurl.com/m5rh3cm

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A Healing Walk through Canada's Tar Sands Dystopia
tinyurl.com/mj4tkoa

(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They are not advertisements, and I get no kickbacks.)

Please tell me your own personal nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning February 27

Copyright 2014 by Rob Brezsny
FreeWillAstrology.com

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):

Avery, a character in Anne Michaels' novel The Winter Vault, has a unique way of seeing. When he arrives in a place for the first time, he "makes room for it in his heart." He "lets himself be altered" by it. At one point in the story he visits an old Nubian city in Egypt and is overwhelmed by its exotic beauty. Its brightly colored houses are like "shouts of joy," like "gardens springing up in the sand after a rainfall." After drinking in the sights, he marvels, "It will take all my life to learn what I have seen today." Everything I just described is akin to experiences you could have in the coming weeks, Pisces. Can you make room in your heart for the dazzle?

ARIES (March 21-April 19):

The battles you've been waging these last ten months have been worthy of you. They've tested your mettle and grown your courage. But I suspect that your relationship with these battles is due for a shift. In the future they may not serve you as well as they have up until now. At the very least, you will need to alter your strategy and tactics. It's also possible that now is the time to leave them behind entirely -- to graduate from them and search for a new cause that will activate the next phase of your evolution as an enlightened warrior. What do you think?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20):

"Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony," said Lou Reed. That might be an accurate assessment for most people much of the time, but I don't think it will be true for you in the coming days. On the contrary: You will have a special capacity to make contact and establish connection. You've heard of dog whisperers and ghost whisperers? You will be like an all-purpose, jack-of-all-trades whisperer -- able to commune and communicate with nervous creatures and alien life forms and pretty much everything else. If anyone can get a pony to understand Sanskrit, it will be you.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20):

Does Kim Kardashian tweak and groom her baby daughter's eyebrows? They look pretty amazing, after all -- elegant, neat, perfectly shaped. What do you think, Gemini? HA! I was just messing with you. I was checking to see if you're susceptible to getting distracted by meaningless fluff like celebrity kids' grooming habits. The cosmic truth of the matter is that you should be laser-focused on the epic possibilities that your destiny is bringing to your attention. It's time to reframe your life story. How? Here's my suggestion: See yourself as being on a mythic quest to discover and fully express your soul's code.

CANCER (June 21-July 22):

The 19th-century American folk hero known as Wild Bill Hickok was born James Butler Hickok. At various times in his life he was a scout for the army, a lawman for violent frontier towns, a professional gambler, and a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Women found him charismatic, and he once killed an attacking bear with a knife. He had a brother Lorenzo who came to be known as Tame Bill Hickok. In contrast to Wild Bill, Tame Bill was quiet, gentle, and cautious. He lived an uneventful life as a wagon master, and children loved him. Right now, Cancerian, I'm meditating on how I'd like to see your inner Wild Bill come out to play for a while, even as your inner Tame Bill takes some time off.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):

"If I was a love poet," writes Rudy Francisco, addressing a lover, "I'd write about how you have the audacity to be beautiful even on days when everything around you is ugly." I suspect you have that kind of audacity right now, Leo. In fact, I bet the ugliness you encounter will actually incite you to amplify the gorgeous charisma you're radiating. The sheer volume of lyrical soulfulness that pours out of you will have so much healing power that you may even make the ugly stuff less ugly. I'm betting that you will lift up everything you touch, nudging it in the direction of grace and elegance and charm.

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LISTEN TO AN EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE

Factual information and reasonable thinking alone are not sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation.

One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive mysteriously useful omens on a regular basis. In this spirit, I offer you the free weekly horoscopes you read here.

If you ever want more, and think it's worth paying for, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. They're available here:

Register and/or sign in at RealAstrology.com.

You can also access them by phone:
1-877-873-4888

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VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take," says hockey great Wayne Gretzky. In other words, you shouldn't be timid about shooting the puck toward the goal. Don't worry about whether you have enough skill or confidence or luck. Just take the damn shot. You'll never score if you don't shoot. Or so the theory goes. But an event in a recent pro hockey game showed there's an exception to the rule. A New York player named Chris Kreider was guiding the puck with his stick as he skated toward the Minnesota team's goalie. But when Kreider cocked and swung his stick, he missed the puck entirely. He whiffed. And yet the puck kept sliding slowly along all by itself. It somehow flummoxed the goalie, sneaking past him right into the net. Goal! New rule: You miss only 99.9 percent of the shots you don't take. I believe you will soon benefit from this loophole, Virgo.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):

If you are the type of person who wears gloves when you throw snowballs, Germans would call you Handschuhschneeballwerfer. They use the same word as slang to mean "coward." I'm hoping that in the coming days you won't display any behavior that would justify you being called Handschuhschneeballwerfer. You need to bring a raw, direct, straightforward attitude to everything you do. You shouldn't rely on any buffers, surrogates, or intermediaries. Metaphorically speaking, make sure that nothing comes between your bare hands and the pure snow.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21):

In his song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," Bruce Springsteen mentions a disappointing development. "That waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me," he sings. "She said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore." I'm assuming nothing like that has happened to you recently, Scorpio. Just the opposite: I bet there are attractive creatures out there who would set themselves on fire for you. If for some reason this isn't true, fix the problem! You have a cosmic mandate to be incomparably irresistible.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

"Some people say home is where you come from," says a character in Katie Kacvinsky's novel Awaken."But I think it's a place you need to find, like it's scattered and you pick pieces of it up along the way." That's an idea I invite you to act on in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. It will be an excellent time to discover more about where you belong and who you belong with. And the best way to do that is to be aggressive as you search far and wide for clues, even in seemingly unlikely places that maybe you would never guess contain scraps of home.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):

What words bring the most points in the game of Scrabble? Expert Christopher Swenson says that among the top scorers are "piezoelectrical" and "ubiquitarianism" -- assuming favorable placements on the board that bring double letter and triple word scores. The first word can potentially net 1,107 points, and the second 1,053. There are metaphorical clues here, Capricorn, for how you might achieve maximum success in the next phase of the game of life. You should be well-informed about the rules, including their unusual corollaries and loopholes. Be ready to call on expert help and specialized knowledge. Assume that your luck will be greatest if you are willing to plan nonstandard gambits and try bold tricks.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18):

Sorry to report that you won't win the lottery this week. It's also unlikely that you will score an unrecognized Rembrandt painting for a few dollars at a thrift store or discover that you have inherited a chinchilla farm in Peru or stumble upon a stash of gold coins half-buried in the woods. On the other hand, you may get provocative clues about how you could increase your cash flow. To ensure you will notice those clues when they arrive, drop your expectations about where they might come from.

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HOMEWORK:

What is the best gift you could give your best ally right now? Testify at FreeWillAstrology.com

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Submissions sent to the Free Will Astrology Weekly 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 such submissions for length, style, and content. Requests for anonymity will be honored with submissions; otherwise, reader names, screen names, or initials will be used. Please be sure to note your preference when sending to us. We are not responsible for unsolicited submission of any creative material.

Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright 2014 Rob Brezsny

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