Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
May 23, 2018
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See a pretty version of this newsletter: http://bit.ly/YouAreWildlyReal
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We call our organization the Beauty and Truth Lab and not the Beauty
and Truth Think Tank because we want to put our ideas to the test -- to
apply them in unpredictable situations beyond our control and see
whether they're useful to people who aren't necessarily steeped in the
mystique of pronoia, as discussed in the book *Pronoia Is the Antidote for
Paranoia.*
One way we've gone about that is to encourage the public to testify and
ask questions about their practical experiences with pronoia. Below is a
taste of the exchanges that have unfolded.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I read about the concept of "pronoia" in your
book. Here's my question: Does pronoia make you feel like you're falling in
love? Not just with a person but with life itself? And can that be scary?
Is it possible that you might feel a chord of gorgeous terror resound in
your gut when you entertain the thought that every person and even
every animal and plant and rock in the world is ganging up to make your
life interesting -- almost more brilliantly interesting than you can bear?
Does pronoia threaten to cause all perceptions, all sensations, all
interactions to verge on being orgasmic?
I've been heading in this direction lately and it's freaking me out. Can
extreme happiness be dangerous to my well-being? —Butchtastic
Dear Butchtastic: First thing we'll say is that while pronoia inevitably feeds
the soul, it doesn't necessarily further the agendas of the ego. The
anxiety that's welling up may be the result of your old self-image clinging
to the shrunken expectations it had gotten used to thinking of as
essential to its identity.
The second thing is that when people invite pronoia to take over their
perceptual filters, they often feel as if they're falling in love with a Scary
Yet Friendly Vastness that kicks their butts until they wake up to the
secret beauty they've been ignoring.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I was lying in my bed basking in a sunbeam
this morning, too comfortable to get up and take my Prozac, when I
thought, Hey, what if I'm not, you know, emotionally challenged? What if
I'm just lazy? Maybe if I worked harder at cultivating happiness, I'd just
sort of outgrow my depression -- you know, render it irrelevant. Do you
have an opinion about this theory? —Slothful Slack Seeker
Dear Slothful: We'd have to know more about your personal history to
evaluate whether laziness is the cause of your depression.
We do know this, though: Many people are extremely lax about their
pursuit of happiness.
Here's our question to you: What tricks would you have to play on
yourself in order to get more aggressive about mastering the art of
feeling really good?
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I've wrestled all my life with fear. But lately
it's been even worse than usual. My personal demons seem to be winning,
or at least getting the better of the fight. I think it's related to the fact
that when I caught wind of the idea of pronoia, I started working hard to
lose all my illusions. Now I'm thinking maybe that was a mistake. Perhaps I
needed my illusions to keep the demons at bay? —Crybaby
Dear Crybaby: Hang on. This is the toughest part of your struggle. It may
seem that the illusions you dissolved were the main barriers safeguarding
you from your demons. But what's more likely is that those illusions were
food for your demons. Very soon now the demons will have devoured the
last of their fuel and will start to starve. If they don't die off, they will at
least fly away in search of other nourishment.
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Dear Flow-Meisters: If you were, like me, setting out on a 10-year project
to become a beautiful truth-teller, having the simple goal of actually
expressing the things that Everyone Ought to Say But Doesn't, what
would you do? Other than to bother your favorite truth-tellers for advice,
of course! —Aspiring Fount of Truth
Dear Aspiring Fount: One of the best ways to increase your mastery is to
regularly tell yourself the truth about yourself with kick-ass kindness.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: You must be kidding with your Pollyanna crap.
Either that or you're lying to get gullible people to love you and give you
money.
The truth is, life is not in the least bit kind. It's a brutal struggle for
survival -- at best. We are, sadly, animals who are stuck being conscious
of our own mortality, forever stalked by death, and trying to avoid both
that knowledge and the inevitable appearance of the grim reaper. Wake
up and see the sickness and misery that life on this planet really is. —
Your Good Cheer Makes Me Puke
Dear Puker: It's true that the Beauty and Truth Lab errs on the side of
optimism, but only because so many so-called experts and leaders err on
the side of cynicism. Our calling is to overcompensate for the relentless
propaganda that creates the false impression that ugliness rules the
world.
By the way, when we urge people to more fully appreciate the multitude
of blessings they take for granted, it's not the same as advising them to
pretend there's no suffering in the world.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: My mom calls me fat but feeds me pork rinds.
My strongest supporter is a person I want to wrap up like a mummy,
shove into a canoe, and push into the middle of the lake.
My exuberant imagination has taken me hostage, violating its own
principles. I'm so ambivalent and indecisive about everything that even
my addictive nature can't figure out what to be addicted to.
I'd embrace my contradictions if I could, but they've got me surrounded
like a pink-haired, cross-dressing SWAT team frothed up on multiple
espressos. Can you point me in the direction of the pronoiac exit from
this circus-like hell? —Crazy Crank
Dear Crazy: We detect a lot of wit and style in your meditations. Maybe
that's the purpose of the limbo you're in: It's an opportunity to build your
skill at being lively and feisty and smart no matter what your outer
circumstances are.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: The chemo treatments burned out all the
math skills in my brain, which were already pretty meager. On the other
hand, they awakened my ability to feel perfectly at ease while in the midst
of paradoxical situations that everyone else finds maddening and
uncomfortable.
The chemo also made me ridiculously tolerant of people's contradictions,
sometimes even their hypocrisies, and freed me to enjoy life as an
entertaining movie with lots of interesting plot twists rather than as a
pitched battle between everything I like and everything I don't like. I
guess I could say that my cancer helped turn me into a pronoiac! —The
Chaos Artist Formerly Known as Risa Kline
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I'm sorry to report that your bright and
cheery outlook for the future did not come true. The gods have laid the
cosmic smackdown upon me. My metaphorical buttocks are still smarting.
I don't blame you, mind you. It is entirely my fault. My wishes were
different from what the gods wished for me; I was utterly out of sync
with the Grand Scheme of Things. My question now is: Being that I am in
the habit of desiring pleasures that are good for my ego but bad for my
soul, how do I break the habit? —Contrite Karma Chameleon
Dear Contrite: Not blaming others, but rather taking responsibility for
your actions, is the best way. And you've just done that.
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I used to give fear a free rein to crawl around
my mind. But your philosophy has inspired me to fight back against that
bad habit. I made a pronoiac shield for myself, and I sleep with it every
night.
It's a hubcap on which I've glued protective symbols, like the fragment of
a mirror I stole from the hospital where I was born, the toothbrush of an
ex-lover I'm still good friends with, 20 Tylenol pills arranged in the shape
of a peace sign, a notebook page on which I wrote my best dream ever (in
which my mom and dad were Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama), a library
card from Princeton University with both my name and Einstein's on it, a
painting of a mutant butterfly dive-bombing a rainbow that's on fire, a
bumper sticker that reads "Adrenaline is my drug of choice," and a million
dollars in money I made out of cut-up photocopies of all the people I love.
— Laughing at My Anxieties
Dear Laughing: If we ever market a line of pronoiac products, we hope
you'll contribute a whole batch of your shields.
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Dear Compassion Police: Can you tell me why my trivial prayers are often
answered (please don't let the light turn red, please let there be enough
milk for one cup of coffee, etc.), but never my big life-changing prayers
(please send me a soul mate, please help me make money at what I love
to do)? Are God's priorities screwed up, or is it me? —Dumb Luck
Collector
Dear DLC: There's an old fairy tale in which two old folks are given three
wishes by a magic dwarf, but impulsively waste them on the first silly
whims that pop into their heads. I'll tell you what I would have told them:
Proceed on the assumption that only a few of your fervent prayers will be
granted. Don't use them up on pleas for convenience when you're tired,
cranky, or desperate. A Tibetan proverb says, "The person who gets
stuck on petty happiness will not attain great happiness."
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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I'm a very analytical person, with a doctorate
in nuclear physics and a high-tech job. All my training and business savvy
tell me that Rob Brezsny's astrology column is superstitious mumbo
jumbo, yet every time I've faced a crisis in the last 10 years, his
horoscopes have provided accurate wisdom and counsel when things
seemed darkest.
The same is true about the book Pronoia. The scientist in me knows that
you Beauty and Truth Lab people are utopian nutcases. It's absolutely
demented to regard the universe as friendly and to fantasize that there's
some vast, invisible conspiracy of blessing-bestowers. And yet I have to
confess that whenever I try the pronoiac strategies you describe, my life
veers in the direction of synchronicity and delight.
On the one hand, none of this makes any sense. On the other hand, I
don't care that it doesn't make any sense. Somehow I'm able to draw
sustenance from something whose power I don't understand or even
believe in. In any case, thank you! —Humble Genius
Dear Genius: You've described a quality that we aspire to in our efforts to
cultivate pronoia: the ability to be helped by powers that are beyond our
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The preceding blips are excerpts from my book
*PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA*
It's available at Amazon: http://bit.ly/Pronoia
or Powells: http://bit.ly/PronoiaPowells
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MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:
The World Is a Miraculous Mess, and It's Going to Be All Right. In her latest
book, author adrienne maree brown envisions a world of abundant justice,
abundant attention, and abundant liberation.
https://tinyurl.com/ybtj7taq
The Disruption of White Supremacy. The white male-centric colonial
system is incapable of the leadership we need, and Indigenous knowledge
is essential for the innovation that will follow this disruption.
https://tinyurl.com/y8zqnu5l
Bye, Spotify: Musicians Take Back Ownership With This Cooperative. There
is a streaming service that can benefit both artists and listeners.
https://tinyurl.com/y9dwep6x
(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They aren't advertisements,
and I get no kickbacks.)
Please tell me your own nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES:
Truthrooster@gmail.com.
Read old but still useful archives of Pronoia Resources:
https://pronoiaresources.com
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning May 24
Copyright 2018 by Rob Brezsny
http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/
Grammar key: Asterisks equal *italics*
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Now is a favorable time to worship at the
shrine of your own intuition. It's a ripe moment to boost your faith in your
intuition's wild and holy powers. To an extraordinary degree, you can
harness this alternate mode of intelligence to gather insights that are
beyond the power of your rational mind to access by itself. So be bold
about calling on your gut wisdom, Gemini. Use it to track down the tricky,
elusive truths that have previously been unavailable to you.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): "A poem is never finished; it is only
abandoned," wrote poet W. H. Auden, paraphrasing poet Paul Valéry. I
think the same can be said about many other kinds of work. We may wish
we could continue tinkering and refining forever so as to bring a beloved
project to a state of absolute perfection. But what's more likely is that it
will always fall at least a bit short of that ideal. It will never be totally
polished and complete to our satisfaction. And we've got to accept that. I
suggest you meditate on these ideas in the coming weeks, Cancerian.
Paradoxically, they may help you be content with how you finish up the
current phase of your beloved project.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I highly recommend that you spend the next three
weeks hanging out on a beach every day, dividing your time between
playing games with friends, sipping cool drinks, reading books you've
always wanted to read, and floating dreamily in warm water. To indulge in
this relaxing extravaganza would be in maximum alignment with the
current cosmic rhythms. If you can't manage such a luxurious break from
routine, please at least give yourself the gift of some other form of
recreation that will renew and refresh you all the way down to the core of
your destiny.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Contemporaries of the ancient Greek
philosopher Pythagoras told colorful stories about the man. Some
believed he was the son of a god and that one of his thighs was made of
gold. When he crossed the Casas River, numerous witnesses testified that
the river called out his name and welcomed him. Once a snake bit him, but
he suffered no injury, and killed the snake by biting it in return. On
another occasion, Pythagoras supposedly coaxed a dangerous bear to
stop committing violent acts. These are the kinds of legends I expect you
to spread about yourself in the coming days, Virgo. It's time to boost
your reputation to a higher level.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): My counsel may seem extreme, but I really
think you should avoid mildness and meekness and modesty. For the
immediate future, you have a mandate to roar and cavort and exult. It's
your sacred duty to be daring and experimental and exploratory. The
cosmos and I want to enjoy the show as you act like you have the right to
express your soul's code with brazen confidence and unabashed freedom.
The cosmos and I want to squeal with joy as you reveal raw truths in the
most emotionally intelligent ways possible.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): French novelist Honoré Balzac periodically
endured intense outbreaks of creativity. "Sometimes it seems that my
brain is on fire," he testified after a 26-day spell when he never left his
writing room. I'm not predicting anything quite as manic as that for you,
Scorpio. But I do suspect you will soon be blessed (and maybe a tiny bit
cursed) by a prolonged bout of fervent inspiration. To ensure that you
make the best use of this challenging gift, get clear about how you want
it to work for you. Don't let it boss you. Be its boss.
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WHY IS IT CALLED "FREE WILL" ASTROLOGY?
It's called Free Will Astrology because my goal is to create horoscopes
that nurture your free will!
Contrary to what some horoscope fans believe, there's no such thing as
predestination. Fate is a tricky, wiggly sucker that keeps changing its
mind about where it wants to go. The stars may impel, as the astrological
saying goes, but they don't compel.
That's why I've never considered myself a fortuneteller. I prefer to think
that my greatest service is as a psychic intelligence agent, helping you
expose the hidden patterns and unconscious forces that may be affecting
your life without your knowledge.
If I "predict" anything, it's not so much the future as the unknown part of
the present.
And if you ever want more than the 'scopes you're reading here, keep in
mind that I also create 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. They tend to bring out more of the patient counselor in
me, and have a bit less of the poet.
To buy and listen to your Expanded Audio Horoscope online, go to
http://RealAstrology.com.
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"I always feel like I know myself better after listening to your audio
'scopes."
-June R., Austin, TX
"Your audio horoscopes calm me down when I'm too manic and pep me up
when I'm down."
-Arthur T., Cleveland, OH
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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Ancient civilizations waged war
constantly. From Mesopotamia to China to Africa, groups of people rarely
went very long without fighting other groups of people. There was one
exception: the Harappan culture that thrived for about 2,000 years in the
Indus River Valley, which in the present day stretches through
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Archaeologists have found little evidence
of warfare there. Signs of mass destruction and heavy armaments are
non-existent. Art from that era and area does not depict military conflict.
One conclusion we might be tempted to draw from this data is that
human beings are *not* inherently combative and violent. In any case, I
want to use the Harappan civilization's extended time of peace as a
metaphor for your life in the next eight weeks. I believe (and hope!)
you're entering into a phase of very low conflict.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Every human being I've ever known, me
included, has to wage a continuous struggle between these pairs of
opposites: 1. bad habits that waste their vitality and good habits that
harness their vitality; 2. demoralizing addictions that keep them enslaved
to the past and invigorating addictions that inspire them to create their
best possible future. How's your own struggle going? I suspect you're in
the midst of a turning point. Here's a tip that could prove useful: Feeding
the good habits and invigorating addictions may cause the bad habits and
demoralizing addictions to lose some of their power over you.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): "Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar
rooms in one's own castle," said author Franz Kafka. I suspect this idea
will be especially relevant to you in the coming weeks, Aquarius. And
more than that: In addition to books, other influences may also serve as
keys to unfamiliar rooms in your inner castle. Certain people, for instance,
may do and say things that give you access to secrets you've been
keeping from yourself. A new song or natural wonderland may open doors
to understandings that will transform your relationship with yourself. To
prep you for these epiphanies, I'll ask you to imagine having a dream at
night in which you're wandering through a house you know very well. But
this time, you discover there's a whole new wing of the place that you
never knew existed.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Just for now, let's say it's fine to fuel
yourself with comfort food and sweet diversions. Let's proceed on the
hypothesis that the guardians of your future want you to treat yourself
like a beloved animal who needs extra love and attention. So go right
ahead and spend a whole day (or two) in bed reading and ruminating and
listening to soul-beguiling music. Take a tour through your favorite
memories. Move extra slowly. Do whatever makes you feel most stable
and secure. Imagine you're like a battery in the process of getting
recharged.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Aries poet Anna Kamie_ska described the
process of writing as akin to "the backbreaking work of hacking a
footpath, as in a coal mine; in total darkness, beneath the earth."
Whether or not you're a writer, I'm guessing that your life might have felt
like that recently. Your progress has been slow and the mood has been
dense and the light has been dim. That's the tough news. The good news
is that I suspect you will soon be blessed with flashes of illumination and a
semi-divine intervention or two. After that, your work will proceed with
more ease. The mood will be softer and brighter.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Do you know what you are worth? Have you
compiled a realistic assessment of your talents, powers, and capacities?
Not what your friends and enemies think you're worth, nor the authority
figures you deal with, nor the bad listeners who act like they've figured
out the game of life. When I ask you if you have an objective
understanding of your real value, Taurus, I'm not referring to what your
illusions or fears or wishes might tell you. I'm talking about an honest,
accurate appraisal of the gifts you have to offer the world. If you do
indeed possess this insight, hallelujah and congratulations! If you don't,
the coming weeks will be an excellent time to work on getting it.
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Homework: Send news of your favorite mystery -- an enigma that is both
maddening and delightful -- to 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.
Requests for anonymity will be honored. We are not responsible for
unsolicited submission of any creative material.
Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright
2018 Rob Brezsny
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