Back in the 1970s, before he created his widely syndicated column Free Will Astrology, Rob Brezsny was just another skinny young guy with shoulder-length hair living in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where The Sun is published. (He even wrote for The Sun back then.) But Brezsny had a desire to become more than just “a cross between a village idiot and a marginally entertaining monstrosity,” he says. Inspired by a girlfriend and some graffiti he saw in a Roy Rogers bathroom, he took off for California.
While down and out in Santa Cruz, Brezsny spotted a help-wanted ad for an astrology columnist in the weekly Good Times. A student of astrology, he had always considered newspaper horoscopes “an abomination,” dispensing dull predictions and inane advice. If he was going to write one — for the princely sum of fifteen dollars a week — it would have to be different. His horoscopes would be “poetry in disguise,” love letters to his readers, antennae picking up signals from “the other side of the veil.”
Wanting to dispel the notion that the stars alone determine our fates, Brezsny named his column Free Will Astrology. It is now the most widely syndicated feature in the nation’s free weeklies, read and enjoyed by believers and nonbelievers alike. (Free Will Astrology can be read free of charge at www.freewillastrology.com.)
In 2001 Brezsny founded the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, which he describes as “a think tank of sorts,” to balance what he sees as the unrelenting negativity in the news and entertainment media. The Beauty and Truth Laboratory, which may or may not have offices in Brezsny’s garage, is dedicated to exploring the possibilities of “pronoia.” Coined by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. A “pronoiac” is someone who believes that the world is conspiring to shower him or her with blessings.
Brezsny’s latest book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia (Frog, Ltd.), is a combination of humor, philosophy, self-help, and alternative news, designed to help the reader “surrender to the conspiracy.” It is excerpted here with permission of the author. © 2005 by Rob Brezsny.
— Ed.
GLORY IN THE HIGHEST
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 other process millions of years to perfect. The gift of these vivid hues comes to you courtesy of an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear reactions in order to convert its body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.
On this day, like almost every other, you have awoken inside a temperature-controlled shelter. You have a home! Your bed and pillow are soft, and you’re covered by comfortable blankets. The electricity is turned on, as usual. Somehow, in ways you’re barely aware of, a massive power plant at an unknown distance from your home is transforming fuel into currents of electricity that reach you through mostly hidden conduits in the exact amounts you need, and all you have to do to control the flow is flick small switches with your fingers.
You can walk! Your legs work wonderfully well. Your heart circulates your blood all the way down to replenish the energy of the muscles in your feet and calves and thighs, and when the blood is depleted, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This blessing recurs over and over again without stopping, every minute of your life.
Your home is perhaps not a million-dollar showplace, but it’s sturdy and gigantic compared to the typical domicile in every culture that has preceded you. The floors aren’t crumbling, and the walls and ceilings are holding up well, too. Doors open and close without trouble, and so do the windows. What skillful geniuses built this sanctuary for you? How and where did they learn their craft?
In your bathroom, the toilet is functioning perfectly, as are several other convenient devices. You have at your disposal soaps, creams, razors, clippers, tooth-cleaning accessories — a host of products that enhance your hygiene and appearance. You trust that unidentified scientists somewhere have tested them to be sure they’re safe for you to use.
Amazingly, the water you need so much of comes out of your faucets in an even flow, at the volume you want, and either cold or hot as you desire. It’s pure and clean; you’re confident no parasites are lurking in it. Someone somewhere is making sure these boons will continue to arrive for you without interruption for as long as you require them.
In your closet are many clothes you like to wear. Who gathered the materials to make the fabrics they’re made of? Who imbued them with colors, and how did they do it? Who sewed them for you?
In your kitchen, appetizing food in secure packaging is waiting for you. Many people you’ve never met worked hard to grow it, process it, and get it to the store where you bought it. The bounty of tasty nourishment you have to choose from is unprecedented in the history of the world.
Your many appliances are working flawlessly. Despite the fact that they run on electricity, which could kill you instantly if you touched it directly, you feel no fear. Why? Your faith in the people who invented, designed, and produced these machines is impressive.
It’s as if there were a benevolent conspiracy of unknown people who are tirelessly creating hundreds of useful things you like and need.
There’s more. By some improbable series of coincidences or long-term divine plan, language has come into existence. Millions of people have collaborated for many centuries to cultivate a system for communication that you understand well. Speaking and reading give you great pleasure and a tremendous sense of power.
Do you want to go someplace that’s at a distance? You can choose from a number of ways to get there. Whatever mode of transportation you pick — car, plane, bus, train, subway, ship, helicopter, or bike — you have confidence that it will work efficiently. Multitudes of people who are now dead devoted themselves to perfecting these machines. Multitudes who are still alive devote themselves to ensuring that these benefits keep serving you.
Let’s say it’s now 9:30 A.M. You’ve been awake for two hours, and a hundred things have already gone right for you. If three of those hundred things had not gone right — your toaster was broken, the hot water wasn’t hot enough, there was a stain on the pants you wanted to wear — you might feel that the universe was against you, that your luck was bad, that nothing was going right. And yet the vast majority of things still would be working with breathtaking efficiency and consistency. You would clearly be deluded to imagine that life is primarily an ordeal.
THE EXPERIMENT
DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a means of training your senses and intellect so that you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.
HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright.
PROCEDURE: Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.
DISCLAIMER: This material may be too intense and controversial for some readers. It contains graphic scenes of peace, love, joy, passion, reverence, splendor, and understanding. You should therefore proceed with caution if you are a jaded hipster who is suspicious of feeling healthy and happy. Ask yourself: “Am I ready to stop equating cynicism with insight? Do I dare take the risk that exposing myself to uplifting entertainment might dull my intelligence?” If you doubt your ability to handle relaxing breakthroughs, you should stop reading now.
EVIL IS BORING
When an old tree in the rain forest dies and topples over, it takes a long time to decompose. As it does, it becomes host to new saplings that use the decaying log for nourishment.
Picture yourself sitting in the forest gazing upon this scene. How would you describe it? Would you dwell on the putrefaction of the fallen tree while ignoring the fresh life sprouting out of it? If you did, you’d be imitating the perspective of many modern storytellers, especially the journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas. They devoutly believe that tales of affliction and mayhem and corruption and tragedy are inherently more interesting than tales of triumph and liberation and pleasure and ingenuity. Using the machinery of the media and entertainment industries, they relentlessly propagate this dogma. It’s not sufficiently profound or well-thought-out to be called “nihilism.” “Pop nihilism” is a more accurate term. The mass audience is the victim of this inane ugliness, brainwashed by a multi-billion-dollar propaganda machine that makes the Nazis’ Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda look like a child’s backyard puppet show.
At the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more captivating than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and omnipresent the former have become, they are actually quite dull. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.
How did it come to be that the news is reported solely by journalists? There are so many other kinds of events besides the narrow band favored by that highly specialized brand of storytellers. Indeed, there are many phenomena that literally cannot be perceived by journalists. Their training, their temperament, and their ambitions make vast areas of human experience invisible to them.
“Ninety-six percent of the cosmos puzzles astronomers,” read a headline on CNN’s website: proof that at least some of our culture’s equivalent of high priests — the scientists — are humble enough to acknowledge that the universe is made up mostly of stuff they can’t even detect, let alone study.
If only the journalists were equally modest. Since they’re not, we’ll say it: The majority of everything that happens on this planet escapes their notice.
FEAR OF BEAUTY
The Italian city of Florence harbors the richest trove of art treasures in the world. Its many museums are hot spots for outbreaks of a rare psychological disorder. Foreign tourists sometimes experience breakdowns while standing in the presence of the tremendous beauty, and are rushed to the psychiatric ward of Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital.
“Many visitors panic before a Raphael painting,” reports Reuters. “Others collapse at the feet of Michelangelo’s statue of David.”
Psychiatrists have named this pathology the Stendahl Syndrome, after the French novelist who wrote about his emotional breakdown during a visit to the city’s art collection in 1817.
As you embark on your explorations of pronoia, you should protect yourself against this risk. Proceed cautiously as you expose yourself to the splendor that has been invisible or unavailable to you all these years.
BURN, BABY, BURN
Try this meditation: Imagine that you are both the wood and the fire that consumes the wood. When you focus your awareness on the part of you that is the wood, you hurt; it’s painful to feel your sense of solidity disintegrating. But as you shift your attention to the part of you that is the fire, you exult in the wild joy of liberation and power.
It may be tempting to visualize yourself more as the fire than as the wood. But if you’d like to understand pronoia in its fullness, you’ve got to be both wood and fire simultaneously.
YOUR AWAKENING TREE
Many people alive today think that our civilization is in a dark age and on the verge of collapse. In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard points out that such beliefs have been common throughout history. Around 300 B.C. Hindus were convinced they lived in a “degenerate and unfortunate time” known as the Kali Yuga — the lowest point in the great cosmic cycle. In 426 A.D. the Christian writer Augustine mourned that the world was in its last days. In the early 1800s the renowned Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman grieved for the world’s “widespread atheism and immorality.”
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 on your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree.”
Go sit under that tree. The time for your awakening is at hand.
PRONOIA’S VILLAINS
According to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Judas was actually a bigger hero than Jesus. Judas unselfishly volunteered to perform the all-important villain’s role in the resurrection saga, knowing he’d be reviled forever. It was a dirty job that only a supremely egoless saint could have undertaken. Jesus suffered, true, but he enjoyed glory and adoration as a result. Let’s apply this way of thinking to the seemingly bad people in our lives.
Interesting narratives are an essential part of the universal conspiracy to give us exactly what we need. We all crave drama. We love to be beguiled by twists of fate that cause the stories of our lives to unfold in unpredictable ways. Just as Judas played a key role in advancing the tale of Christ’s quest, villains and con men and clowns may be crucial to the entertainment value of our own personal journeys.
Try this: Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine Wow to elaborate.
There is another reason to love our enemies: They force us to become smarter. The riddles they thrust in front of us sharpen our wits and sculpt our souls.
Try this: Act as if your adversaries are great teachers. Thank them for their crucial contribution to your education.
Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: it needs to reach full term. Just as a child isn’t ready to be born after five months of gestation, the new world we’re creating has to ripen in its own time. The recalcitrant reactionaries who resist the inevitable birth are simply making sure that the far-seeing revolutionaries don’t conjure the future too suddenly. They serve the greater good.
YOU’RE A GOOD KILLER
In order to live, you take plants and animals that were once alive and rip them apart with your teeth, then disintegrate them in your digestive system.
Your body is literally on fire inside, burning up the oxygen you suck into your lungs.
You didn’t actually cut down the trees used to make your house and furniture, but you colluded in their demise.
Then there’s the psychological liquidation you’ve done: killing off old beliefs you’ve outgrown, for instance.
I’m not trying to make you feel guilty — just pointing out that you have a lot of experience with positive expressions of destruction.
Can you think of other forms this magic takes? As an aspiring master of pronoia, it’s one of your specialties — a talent you have a duty to wield with energetic grace.
ART LESSONS
French painter Henri Matisse wanted his art to be “free from unsettling or disturbing subjects . . . soothing, a kind of cerebral sedative, as relaxing in its way as a comfortable armchair.”
Spanish painter Pablo Picasso had a different opinion. Art is offensive, he asserted. “It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous.”
As you practice the art of pronoia, you will probably get the best results if you swing back and forth between Matisse’s and Picasso’s approaches.
Every once in a while, try out Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s idea, too: “Art that doesn’t attempt the impossible is not performing its function.”
SOARING AND SCROUNGING
Our sources from high society say that when you eat caviar, you shouldn’t use a silver spoon: it taints the eggs with a metallic taste. Instead choose flatware made of gold or mother-of-pearl.
Our connections in low society suggest that when you dive into grocery-store dumpsters to forage for food, your best bet is the stuff in dented cans, since it’s uncontaminated by any toxic garbage lying nearby.
These tips should be useful metaphors for you in the coming years, as you’ll have chances to extract bounty not only while visiting soaring peaks but also when scrounging around dismal abysses.
WHAT IF YOUR DESIRES ARE HOLY?
Some religious traditions view attachment to desire as the root of human suffering. The religion of materialism takes the opposite tack, asserting that the meaning of life is to be found in indulging desires; its creed is: feed your cravings like a French foie gras farmer cramming eight pounds of maize down a goose’s gullet every day.
At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we walk a middle path. We believe there are both degrading desires that enslave you and sacred desires that liberate you.
Psychologist Carl Jung believed that all desires have a sacred origin, no matter how odd they may seem. Frustration and ignorance may contort them into caricatures, but it is always possible to locate the divine source from which they arose. Describing one of his addictive patients, Jung says: “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, or, as expressed in medieval language, the union with God.”
Therapist James Hillman echoes the theme: “Psychology regards all symptoms to be expressing the right thing in the wrong way.” A preoccupation with pornography or romance novels, for instance, may come to dominate a passionate person whose quest for love has degenerated into an obsession with images of love. “Follow the lead of your symptoms,” Hillman suggests, “for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.”
In Maldoror and Poems, the French poet Comte de Lautréamont writes about holy yearning disguised as mournful complaint. “Whenever you hear the dogs howling in the fields,” his mother told him as a child, “don’t deride what they do: they thirst insatiably for the infinite, like you, me, and the rest of us humans. I even allow you to stand at the window and gaze upon this exalted spectacle.”
Like all of us, you have desires for things that you don’t really need and aren’t good for you. But you shouldn’t disparage yourself for having these wants, nor should you conclude that every desire is tainted. Rather, think of your misguided longings as the bumbling, amateur expressions of a faculty that will one day be far more expert. They’re how you practice as you work toward becoming a master of desire. It may take a while, but eventually you will want only things that are good for you, and good for everyone else, too.
RADICAL EVERYTHING
“I’ve been practicing radical authenticity lately,” my friend Brandon told me. “I’m revealing the blunt truth about unmentionable subjects to everyone I know. It’s been pretty hellish — no one likes having the social masks stripped away — but it’s ultimately rewarding.”
I told him I admired his boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface, but I was curious as to why he implied that they’re all negative. To practice radical authenticity, I asked, shouldn’t he also express the raw truth about what’s right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn’t he unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?
Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don’t. As a budding pronoiac, you have a mandate to be honest about both kinds of truth.
RECEPTIVITY REMEDIES
I’ve tried a wide variety of meditative practices from many traditions: I’ve calmed myself through rhythmic breathing; watched the nonstop procession of my thoughts; visualized images of deities; cultivated unconditional love; chanted mantras; taken rigorous self-inventories to determine whether my actions live up to my ideals.
But in my years of study, I’ve never heard of a form of meditation that would ask me to take my attention off myself and observe other people with compassionate objectivity. That’s why I was forced to invent it. Hereafter known as “sacred eavesdropping,” this meditation is practiced in public places and builds one’s ability to pray in the manner described by poet W.H. Auden, who defined prayer as “paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.”
HEALTHY SKEPTICISM
On those rare occasions when journalists deign to report a UFO sighting, they dutifully describe eyewitness accounts. But their juices don’t start to flow until they interview skeptics who offer derisive dismissals of the incident: “Astronomy professor X said that even trained pilots can be fooled into thinking the planet Venus is a flying saucer.”
I wish this approach were applied to other kinds of news. Imagine a CNN anchorman regurgitating the words he has heard at a Pentagon news conference, then calling on leftist scholar Noam Chomsky to provide a skeptical perspective. Visualize a journalist for Time magazine interviewing three politicians about their latest views on gay marriage or the Middle East, then asking poet Anne Waldman to critique their gross, ahistorical literalism. This is the approach I’d like to see reporters take to every story.
BLIND SPOTS
Galileo Galilei didn’t invent the telescope, but he created a better version of the first, primitive model. In the early seventeenth century, he used his telescope to make astronomical discoveries that contradicted the Catholic Church’s cosmology. The caretakers of the old guard were furious. “The earth is the center of the universe,” they told him after he announced he had detected moons revolving around Jupiter. “What you say you have seen is impossible.” They refused even to look through Galileo’s new tool.
In later years scientists adopted a similar attitude toward a variety of phenomena, including meteorites and dinosaurs. Until the 1800s, writes Roy Gallant in Sky and Telescope, “the scientific community scoffed at those who believed stones fell from the heavens, though meteorites had been seen to fall and had been collected since ancient times by the Chinese and the Egyptians. As stones continued to rain down from the sky, learned scientists explained them away as condensations of the atmosphere or concretions of volcanic dust.”
Similarly, until the nineteenth century, scientists didn’t believe that large “reptiles” had once walked the earth. Throughout history people had found what we now know are fossils, but the experts decreed that they could not possibly be the remains of an ancient extinct species.
The moral of the story: As smart as we may be, and as much as we might know, there are truths we have become dead set against believing, let alone seeing.
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 human form, 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 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 this slow-motion awakening of humanity. These sanctuaries might take the form of temporary autonomous zones, such as festivals and parties and workshops, where we can ritually explore the evolving mysteries of pronoia. Or they might be more-enduring autonomous zones, such as homes and cafes and businesses, where we can regularly practice freeing ourselves from the slavery of hatred in all its many guises.
What else can we do to help each other? We can conspire 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 with putrefaction. We need each other’s dauntless cunning as we goad and foment the blooming life forces within us.
Here’s a third way we can collaborate: we can inspire one another to perpetrate compassionate tricks and healing mischief.
What do tricks and mischief have to do with our quest? Isn’t America in a permanent state of war? Isn’t this the most militarized empire in the history of the world? Hasn’t government paranoia about terrorism decimated our civil liberties? Isn’t it our duty to grow more serious and weighty than ever before?
On the contrary: I say this is the perfect moment to take everything less seriously, less personally, and less literally.
Permanent war and the loss of civil liberties are immediate dangers. But they are only symptoms of an even larger, long-term threat to the fate of the earth: the genocide of the imagination.
I have identified pop-nihilist storytellers as the vanguard perpetrators of this genocide of the imagination, but there are other culprits as well: the fundamentalists. And I’m not referring just to the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism. Scientists can be fundamentalists, too. So can liberals and capitalists, atheists and hedonists, patriots and anarchists, hippies and goths, you and I. 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 — they, too, are fundamentalists.
Every fundamentalist divides the world into two camps: those who agree with him or her, and those who don’t. There is only one right way to interpret the world, the fundamentalist believes, and a million wrong ways. All fundamentalists take everything way too seriously, and way too personally, and way too literally. For them, the untrammeled imagination is taboo. Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination and enslaving it to his or her belief system.
And here’s the bad news: We all have our own strain of the fundamentalist virus. Ours may not be as virulent and dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalist strain of Islamic terrorists, or right-wing Christian politicians, or CEOs who act as if making a financial profit were 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.
BLAME FEST
Psychotherapists say it’s not only naughty but counterproductive to blame others for your problems. A skilled practitioner urges his or her clients to accept responsibility for the part they’ve played in creating their own predicaments. The reason is as much pragmatic as it is ethical: when you’re obsessed with how people have done you wrong, you have little ambition to change the behavior in yourself that got you into this mess.
Although I endorse this approach, I also know that dogmatic adherence to it can warp your mental health as much as any other form of fanaticism. That’s why I urge you to enjoy once in a while an unapologetic blame fest. Choose a time when you will find fault with everyone except yourself. Howl in protest at the unfair slights people have committed against you. Wallow in self-pity as you visualize the clueless jerks who have done you wrong. For best results, bark your complaints in the direction of no one but God, an inanimate object, or your mirror.
THE 80 PERCENT RULE
Readers of my horoscope column Free Will Astrology are sometimes surprised to hear me say I believe in astrology only about 80 percent.
“But what about the other 20 percent?” they cry. “Are you saying your horoscopes are only partially true?”
I assure them that my doubt of astrology only proves my love for it. By cultivating a tender, cheerful skepticism, I inoculate myself against the virus of fanaticism. This ensures that astrology will be a supple tool in my hands, an adaptable art form, and not a rigid, explain-it-all dogma that literalizes and distorts the mysteries it seeks to illuminate.
During the question-and-answer segment of one of my performances, an audience member complained, “Why do you dis science so much? Science is the source of a lot of pronoia. I would think you’d love it.”
I pointed out that I regularly extol the virtues of the scientific method. “Some of my best friends are scientists,” I teased.
The fact is, I critique science no more than I do any other system of thought I respect and use. I believe in science about 80 percent — the same as I do astrology, psychology, deconstructionism, feminism, cabala, Buddhism, left-wing political philosophy, and twenty-two other belief systems.
I do think science is in greater need of loving skepticism, though. As the dominant ideology of our age, it has a magisterial reputation comparable to the infallibility accorded the medieval Church. Its priestly promoters sell it as the ultimate arbiter of truth, an approach to gathering and evaluating information that trumps all others.
Here’s another problem: Though science is an elegant method of understanding the world, only a minority of its practitioners live up to its high standards. The field is dominated by men and women motivated as much by careerism and egotism as by a rigorous quest for excellence. This is common behavior in all fields, of course, but it’s a special problem in a creed that’s promoted as the premier method for knowing the truth.
There’s a further complication: Scientists are no less likely to harbor irrational biases and emotional fixations than the rest of us. They purport to do just the opposite, of course. But in fact they simply hide their unconscious motivations better, aided by the myth that scientists are in service to purely objective truth. This discrepancy between the myth and the actual state of things is, again, not confined to science. But it’s particularly toxic in a discipline that presents itself as the very embodiment of dispassionate investigation.
There are many scientists who, upon reading these words, might discharge a blast of emotional, nonscientific derision in my direction. Like true believers everywhere, they can’t accept halfhearted converts. If I won’t buy their whole package, then I must be a superstitious, fuzzy-brained, New Age goofball.
To which I’d respond: I love the scientific approach to understanding the world. I aspire to appraise everything I experience with the relaxed yet eager curiosity and the skeptical yet open-minded lucidity characteristic of a true scientist.
HOT-DOG SUTRA (OR ONE WITH EVERYTHING)
“Make me one with everything,” the Buddhist monk said to the hot-dog vendor who was hawking food near the temple.
The vendor made a frank with mustard, ketchup, relish, and onions. The monk took it and handed over a twenty-dollar bill.
The vendor stashed the cash in his apron and turned his attention to the next customer.
“But where’s my change?” the monk inquired.
“Change must come from within, my friend,” said the vendor.
SACRED UPROAR
Pronoia is closer than your breath and older than death. It dreams like a mountain, laughs like a river, prays like the sun, and sings the way the animals think. It’s always as fresh as the beginning of time.
Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy designed to keep us well-supplied with blessings. What kind of blessings? Palatial homes, attractive lovers, lottery winnings, successful careers? Maybe. But just as likely: interesting surprises, unexpected challenges, gifts we hardly know what to do with, conundrums that force us to get smarter.
Novelist William Vollman referred to the latter types of blessings when he said that “the most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s complicated, a tricky problem that you don’t know how to solve.”
Christian writer C.S. Lewis once expressed his thanks that God hadn’t answered all his prayers, because he realized it would have been disastrous to have some of them granted.
Pronoia provides the gifts your soul needs, not necessarily those your ego craves.
Pronoia works because there is a Divine Being who comprises the entire universe. When I say, “Life is a conspiracy to shower us with blessings,” I understand that this Divine Being is the Chief Architect, Builder, and Manager of the conspiracy. She oversees the evolution of 500 billion galaxies and every single thing in them, yet is also available as an intimate companion and daily advisor to each one of us.
Some lovers of pronoia don’t like this part of my rap. They want pronoia to be free of anything that smacks of God. Atheism works better for them. That’s OK with me. No hard feelings.
Other lovers of pronoia don’t appreciate my referring to the Creator as “She.” They either want to stick with the pronoun that has been used for hundreds of years, or else don’t want any gender associations whatsoever. That’s OK with me. No hard feelings.
The Maker of the conspiracy constantly tinkers, always keeping the big picture in mind and moving in the direction of ultimate blessings for all concerned. But the Maker also loves getting help from us. To the degree that we coconspire, the inevitable blessings ripen more lyrically and in greater fullness.
Pronoia asks us to be awake to the shifting conditions of the Wild Divine’s ever-fresh creation. It encourages us to be quite happy about regularly divesting ourselves of the beliefs and theories that guided us yesterday so that we can see clearly what’s right in front of us today.
As much as we might be dismayed at the actions of our political leaders, pronoia says that toppling any particular junta, clique, or elite is irrelevant unless we overthrow the mass hallucination called “reality” — including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves. The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.
Pronoia will change your past if you let it. It’s the language you study at night in your dreams, the open secret of how to live forever, the last judgment transformed into a daily gift.
EVIL FEARS LAUGHTER
Are demons and devils real? In my view, it doesn’t matter whether or not they exist in an objective or literal sense. The point is that we are all plagued by split-off, unintegrated portions of our own and other people’s psyches that behave exactly as if they were diabolical entities: demons, djinn, dybbuks, and devils working at cross-purposes to our desires.
In dealing with their hassling interventions, I endorse the approach described by Paul Foster Case in his book The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. Case suggests that mirth is the best way to beat the devil. “Laughter is prophylactic,” he writes. “It purifies subconsciousness and dissolves mental complexes. In a hymn to the sun god Ra we read, ‘Thy priests go forth at dawn, washing their hearts with laughter.’ This is a prescription we may all follow to advantage.”
My friend and teacher Vimala Nostradamus echoes Case. “The best way to neutralize the devil is to laugh at him,” she says. “Satan’s most effective recruiting technique is to get people to take themselves too seriously.” To exemplify her argument, she once told her daughter about a foolproof way to avoid being hassled if you’re a woman walking by a crew of construction workers: pick your nose.
The novels of Tom Robbins provide spiritual guidance about dealing with diabolical spirits, both those that originate within us and those that come from without. Here’s a sample tip from his Jitterbug Perfume: “Play — more than piety, more than charity or vigilance — is what allows human beings to transcend evil.”
SACRED ADVERTISEMENT
The Beauty and Truth Laboratory researchers’ sunny dispositions are made possible in part by the mantra “I don’t know.” It’s an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject.
It’s fun to say. Try it: “I don’t know.”
Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: “I don’t know.”
Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: “I don’t know.”
Empty your mind and lift your heart: “I don’t know.”
Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: “I don’t know.”
WALKING UPHILL BACKWARD
It was my final day of work on this book. I had to send the manuscript to the printer in a few hours. There was one problem: the last page was still blank.
I decided to take a hike in the hills, hoping I might drum up an oracle on the way. Nothing interesting appeared for an hour. Then, while rambling down a trail from the top of the ridge, I spied the back of a man moving toward me. It took me a while to realize he was walking up the hill backward. As he passed me, I heard him giving himself a pep talk.
When I got home, I told a friend about this scene, seeking her insight about what motivated him to engage in such an odd mode of travel. My friend said she’d done it herself. It’s a psychological trick that helps make a steep ascent easier: you stay focused on how much you’ve already accomplished rather than being overwhelmed by the heights that are ahead of you.
Why not try it yourself?
