Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter http://ezezine.com
Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology Newsletter
"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a
hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light,
the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles."
-Francois Voltaire
"You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a
single power, a single salvation . . . and that is called loving. Well then,
love your suffering."
-Hermann Hesse
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December 13, 2006
The piece below is excerpted from my book
"PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA:
How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings"
available at http://tinyurl.com/qaj62
or find out more at http://www.freewillastrology.com
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WELCOME HOME
Let me remind you who you really are: You're an immortal freedom fighter
in service to divine love. You have temporarily taken on the form of a
human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins, in order to
liberate all sentient creatures from suffering and help them claim the
ecstatic awareness that is their birthright. You will accept nothing less
than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth.
Your task may look impossible. Ignorance and inertia, partially
camouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround you. Pessimism
is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism
masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Stories about
treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people
who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are
suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.
To grapple against these odds, you have to be both a wrathful
insurrectionary and an exuberant lover of life. You've got to cultivate
cheerful buoyancy even as you resist the temptation to swallow
thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively
packaged by very self-important people who act as if they know what
they're doing. You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you
overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to
as reality.
What can we do to help each other in this work?
First, we can create safe houses to shelter everyone who's devoted to
the slow-motion awakening. These sanctuaries might take the form of
temporary autonomous zones like festivals and parties and workshops,
where we can ritually potentiate the evolving mysteries of pronoia. Or
they might be more enduring autonomous zones like homes and cafes and
businesses where we can get regular practice in freeing ourselves from
the slavery of hatred in all of its many guises.
What else can we do to help each other? We can conspire together to
carry out the agenda that futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard names: to
hospice what's dying and midwife what's being born. We need the trigger
of each other's rebel glee as we kill off every reflex within us that
resonates in harmony with the putrefaction. We need each other's
dauntless cunning as we goad and foment the blooming life forces within
us that thrive on the New World's incandescent questions.
Here's a third way we can collaborate: We can inspire each other to
perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks,
blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom.
What? Huh? What do tricks and mischief and jokes have to do with our
quest? Isn't America in a permanent state of war? Isn't it the most
militarized empire in the history of the world? Hasn't the government's
paranoia about terrorism decimated our civil liberties? Isn't it our duty to
grow more serious and weighty than ever before?
I say it's the perfect moment to take everything less seriously and less
personally and less literally.
Permanent war and the loss of civil liberties are immediate dangers. But
there is an even bigger long-term threat to the fate of the earth, of which
the others are but symptoms: the genocide of the imagination.
Earlier I cited pop nihilist storytellers as vanguard perpetrators of the
genocide of the imagination. But there are other culprits as well: the
fundamentalists. I'm not referring to just the usual suspects—the religious
fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism.
Scientists can be fundamentalists. So can liberals and capitalists, atheists
and hedonists, patriots and anarchists, hippies and goths, you and me.
Those who champion the ideology of materialism can be the most
fanatical fundamentalists of all. And the journalists, filmmakers, novelists,
critics, poets, and other artists who relentlessly generate rotten visions of
the human condition are often pop nihilist fundamentalists.
Every fundamentalist divides the world into two camps, those who agree
with him and like him and help him, and those who don't. There is only
one right way to interpret the world—according to the ideas the
fundamentalist believes to be true—and a million wrong ways.
The fundamental attitude of all fundamentalists is to take everything way
too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. The
untrammeled imagination is taboo. Correct belief is the only virtue. Every
fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless
the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system.
And here's the bad news: Like almost everyone in the world, each of us
has our own share of the fundamentalist virus. It may not be as virulent
and dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of
Islamic terrorists or right-wing Christian politicians or CEOs who act as if
making a financial profit is the supreme good or scientists who deny the
existence of the large part of reality that's imperceptible to the five
senses.
But still: We are infected, you and I, with fundamentalism. What are we
going to do about it?
I say we practice taking everything less seriously and less personally and
less literally. I suggest we administer plentiful doses of healing mischief,
friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy
pranks, and crazy wisdom.
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To read other news and features from my book, go here:
http://snipurl.com/l9o3
You can buy the book here:
AMAZON
http://snipurl.com/krjj
BARNES & NOBLE
http://snipurl.com/krjn
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OTHER PRONOIA RESOURCES:
REVERSALS
Top Ten Bad Things That Are Good for You
http://tinyurl.com/yjyzlc
NEWS
The Return of the Forest
"A major study concludes that in vast parts of the world, forests are
expanding. In the last 15 years alone, 22 of the most forested 50
countries in the world have experienced growth in tree stocks."
http://tinyurl.com/y79nhf
BOOK
*Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West*
by J. Douglas Kenyon
"Reveals the thread that unites the spiritual paths that have opposed
orthodox religion over the centuries and the challenge they provide to the
status quo."
http://tinyurl.com/yf4w2z
(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They're 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 December 14
Copyright 2006 by Rob Brezsny
http://www.freewillastrology.com
Grammar key: Asterisks equal *italics*
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Listen! I will be honest with you. I do not
offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes." Walt Whitman
wrote that in his poem "Song of the Open Road," and now I'm saying it to
you. If you expect the events of 2007 to bring you old smooth prizes,
you'll be disappointed. But if you can figure out how to change your
attitude in such a way as to actually yearn for rough new prizes, you will
be rewarded beyond anything you can imagine. The first hint of how true
this is will arrive soon.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Drugs and alcohol need play no role in
activating this week's potentials. Your mind will just naturally inhabit what
we in the consciousness industry call an "altered state." This is very
different from being sick or crazy, and it could turn out much better than
being merely healthy. My advice to you? Break taboos that are no longer
necessary to observe. Wander uninhibitedly in zones that have previously
been off-limits. Explore the frontiers of fun. (P.S. If you try what I'm
suggesting, chances are good that you'll finally be able to scratch an itch
that has been maddeningly inaccessible. But be sure you know when
you've scratched enough.)
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): "God was a little too busy to do anything about
the genocide in Darfur last weekend," reported Fark.com a while back,
"but did manage, during a snowstorm in Buffalo, to leave fallen tree limbs
in the form of a crucifix on a statue of Jesus." That's a mean-spirited
interpretation of the Divine Wow's behavior, although it's funny in a
snarky kind of way. Your assignment in the coming week, on the other
hand, is to joke about spiritual matters with a more generous attitude. It's
prime time for you to be humorously amazed by the tricky enigmas of
creation.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Imagine you're with a team of explorers in
Antarctica. You're climbing the 2,000-foot granite spire called Rakekniven
that thrusts up out of the ice in Queen Maud Land. The temperature is
ten degrees below zero. There's not a plant or animal in sight. The
blinding white emptiness of the wasteland beneath you fills you with
desolate reverence, alienated awe, and soaring gratitude. As far as you
are from everything that normally gives you comfort, you've rarely felt
stronger or more alive. Got that scene in your mind's eye, Cancerian?
Though you won't experience it literally, I bet you'll experience emotions
similar to those you'd have if you did.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Your face alternately contorts with strain and
breaks into beatific grins. Your body language careens from garbled jargon
to melodic poetry. Your clothes make a fool of you one day and show off
your inner beauty the next. Are you becoming bi-polar? Probably not. The
more likely explanation is that you're being convulsed by growing pains
that are killing off bad old habits as fast as they're creating interesting
new ones. This is one of those times when you should be proud to wear a
badge that says "hurts so good."
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Here's the bad news. Sometimes your
perfectionism verges on being a sophisticated death trip--a manic
compulsion to trap life inside a tight little cell where no change is allowed.
Here's the good news: You now have the power to strip away the
pathological part of your perfectionism and liberate the healthy core of it.
Please swear to me that you'll figure out how to be more fluid and playful
with your zeal for excellence. Spend less time running your mind in vicious
circles and more time running your mind in upward spirals.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Would you like to explore your adventures in greater depth?
You might like my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, which are my weekly
reports on your destiny. Find out more at http://RealAstrology.com.
The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at 1-877-873-4888 or
1-900-950-7700.
My DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES are short, sweet bursts of
illumination delivered seven days a week to your cell phone or other
mobile device. Find out more at http://RealAstrology.com.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): There are three kinds of darkness: (1)
pathology and evil; (2) the mysterious unknown; (3) the shadowy, unripe
parts of our psyches that are on their way to becoming more interesting
and useful but are still awkward and inarticulate. I believe that you can
help prevent outbreaks of the first kind of darkness by developing a
closer personal relationship with the second and third types. This would
be a good time for you to do just that, Libra.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio actor Leonardo DiCaprio is not a big
fan of locking lips. "When you think about it, kissing is pretty disgusting,"
he told Britain's *Eva* magazine. "The human mouth is one of the dirtiest
things on this planet. There's so much bacteria, slime, and trapped food."
I hope that you will not only ignore DiCaprio's opinion in the coming
months, but that you will launch a campaign to increase your commitment
to kissing and all related pursuits. In my opinion, the potentials inherent in
2007 should inspire you to raise your mastery of the oral arts to a very
high level. And it starts now.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): "The thing that makes you exceptional
is inevitably that which must also make you lonely," said playwright
Lorraine Hansberry. I agree. That's why my exuberant advice for you this
week is also cautionary. According to my reading of the omens, in 2007
you will have unprecedented opportunities to cultivate and express the
special talents that make you so unique. To get to the root of them,
though, you'll have to be willing to get less of the approval and
appreciation you'd ideally like to have. You may not have to be
relentlessly solitary, but you will have to be vigorously independent.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Harper's Index says the U.S. government
spends more than twice as much on military defense than do Russia,
China, North Korea, and Iran combined. The aggregate population of those
four countries, on the other hand, is five times larger than America's 300
million people. One might reasonably conclude, therefore, that while the
U.S. has a right to safeguard itself, its glut of weaponry is absurdly
extreme. I'm not definitively asserting, Capricorn, that you, too, are over-
invested in defending and protecting your interests, but the astrological
omens suggest it's a possibility. Please look into it. In any case, consider
freeing up some of your contracted, fearful energy and directing it toward
more pleasurable and constructive goals.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Some Christians believe Jesus will come
back to fix this corrupt world. Certain Jewish sects propose that the
messiah will soon appear on earth for the first time. Among Muslims,
many predict the legendary 12th Imam will return and bring salvation to
humanity. In India, devotees of Vishnu expect the avatar Kalki to arrive on
the scene and carry out a miraculous redemption. Even the Buddhists
prophesy Maitreya, the chosen one who'll establish universal peace.
Personally, I suspect that the whole point of our spectacularly
confounding moment in history is that each of us must become our own
savior. The coming year will be an excellent time, Aquarius, for you to
master the art of doing just that: being your own savior. And it all starts
now. (P.S. You can perform a great service by being a role model for
those who haven't yet figured out how to be their own saviors.)
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In Cracker's hit song "Where Have Those
Days Gone," singer David Lowery recounts a road trip he made through
his old haunts in California. "In Mendocino County, I thought I saw Thomas
Pynchon at the end of the bar," he croons. "No, that's just Rob Brezsny
writing his astrology column." While in the past I've been confused with
David Duchovny, Peter Coyote, and Ry Cooder, this marks the first time
I've been mistaken for the great novelist Pynchon. Thanks, David. Now it's
time for you Pisceans to find out what celebrity you resemble. The omens
say it's perfect moment for you to identify with a hero, role model, or
famous mover and shaker. To do so might help free your self-image from
the unheroic confines it has gotten stuck in. Go here to investigate:
http://tinyurl.com/c4x23.
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HOMEWORK:
Imagine what your life would be like if you licked your worst fear. Describe
this new world to me by going to http://www.RealAstrology.com and
clicking on "Email Rob."
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WANT TO GET YOUR CHART DONE?
I'm not doing personal charts these days, but I highly recommend my
favorite astrological colleague, RO LOUGHRAN. Her approach closely
matches my own. In our many discussions about astrology over the years,
we've had a major influence on each other's work.
Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and a high
degree of technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation; she is skilled
at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your
connection with your own inner wisdom.
Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise
work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.
Ro's website is at
http://www.YourSoulJourney.com
She can also be reached at roloughran@comcast.net
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anyone.
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Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright
2006 Rob Brezsny
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