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PRONOIA Invites Surrender to the Unfathomable
by Rick DelVecchio Rob Brezsny says the apocalypse is now, so let's dance. "We are in fact living through the apocalypse," the astrology columnist-author-musician declares in his radically optimistic self-help bible, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings, a surprise top-1,000 seller on Amazon.com. The biblical idea of apocalypse is the terrifying end of things, followed by judgment. Brezsny's version takes away the fear and the finality and redefines apocalypse as a slow, subtle, revolving process of death and rebirth in which we're all invited to take part. In the end, according to him, we can't lose. But -- and this is the trick -- first we have to be willing to play the game. Brezsny argues that the game is stacked in favor not so much of steady happiness as happy accidents -- iridescent streams of fruitful, fulfilling or inspiring moments in the mundane. He wrote the book in order to provide evidence, tips and inspiration for people who sense that theory is right but who find that media and education provide little in the way of guidance. "We're not looking for starry-eyed optimism and repressed boosterism," Brezsny said. "Pronoia is not boosterism for empty-brained people. I think the media tend to emphasize that part of human experience that doesn't work. There are a lot of people who don't identify that as their primary state of existence." READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ PRAYER OF GRATITUDE TO THE TRICKY GODDESS OF BENEVOLENT MISCHIEF All hail the Tricky Goddess of Benevolent Mischief, also known as the Cosmic Instigator of Healing Trouble. Let us praise and ratify her ingenious plan to turn the status quo upside-down. The vivid exposure of greed, corruption, and delusion among the top echelons of the American political and financial hierarchy is a blessing on all of humanity. The eruption of fertile chaos is making it difficult to carry on with business as usual, and we could not have received a more energizing gift. A prayer: Oh Wise Trickster Goddess, You Compassionate Conjurer of Relentless Change, You Righteous Rascal in Charge of Keeping a Steady Flow of Sacred Uproar Pouring into Our Lives: Please continue to influence the masters of plutocracy and war and their media minions to be ever-more obvious as they spin out their perversions of your glorious creation, so that more and more of our sleeping tribe will wake up to the Open Secret. Inspire the enforcers of mass hallucination to display their hypocrisy in an ever-escalating melodrama of spittle flecks and sour faces, as in a slapstick morality play from the Middle Ages, so that we, their captive audience, may convulse with purgative guffaws that shatter the mass hallucination. And if you don't mind, Sweet Divine Rebel Goddess, please allow us to nurture a spark of hope that the breakdown in the Way Things Have Always Been Done will lead to fresh, hot, tidal-wave breakthroughs of beauty, truth, justice, equality and love everywhere we turn. And now, in my capacity as Sacred Janitor of the Invisible Government of Sweaty Meditation, I hereby declare the entire United States of America a Temporary Autonomous Zone. As formulated by writer Hakim Bey, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is any festive event that liberates the imaginations of everyone present, thereby making it possible for life to be penetrated by the Marvelous. Authority and dignity and routine have no place at a TAZ; an uninhibited quest for rabble-rousing conviviality must be the only guideline. (See Bey's website.) Here are a few suggestions, mostly from Bey, to get you started in creating your own local celebration of TAZ. Feel free to dream up your own, and make sure to tell me about them. (Send your emails to uaregod@comcast.net.) Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence and spiritual beauty. Burglarize houses, but instead of stealing, leave behind beautiful and confusing gifts. Spread gossip about the unsung genius of people who don't get nearly enough credit for their good work. Take a few friends and a boom box to an all-night grocery store and engage in ecstatic, whirling dervish-style dancing in the aisles until you're thrown out. Scrawl the following graffiti in courthouse lavatories and on playground walls: "I dare you to scare yourself with how beautiful you are." Pick people at random, says Bey, and convince them they're the heirs to an enormous, useless, and amazing fortune—say, 5,000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or a leper colony in India, or a collection of alchemical manuscripts. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, and will perhaps be driven to cultivate a more intense quest for exhilarating adventures. Scrawl the following poem by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) in courthouse lavatories, on playground walls, and through e-mail lists: AT THIS PARTY I don't want to be the only one here Telling all the secrets -- Filling up all the bowls at this party, Taking all the laughs. I would like you To start putting things on the table That can also feed the soul The way I do. That way We can invite A hell of a lot more Friends. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The following piece is adapted from my book PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings LIBERATE YOUR IMAGINATION Let me remind you who you really are: You are one of the chosen ones. You're a luminous being. A primordial miracle. A resplendent avatar. You are a deity in disguise--not a Buddha or a Christ, but of the same lineage and made from the same mojo. I want to be sure you get what I'm saying. You're an immortal messiah. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you're getting better at playing the mysterious master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed. Let me put it another way. You're a rebel creator longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. You are a dissident bodhisattva joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment. It's time to remember. You are a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs that has temporarily taken on the form of a human being, agreeing to endure amnesia about your true origins. And why did you do that? Because it was the best way to forge the exquisitely unique and robust identity that would make you such an elemental force in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth. You and I are freedom fighters scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve all of our fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with more blessings than they know what to do with. * Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of our brothers and sisters believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Is war really peace? Is slavery really freedom? Is ignorance strength? How did it all get so insane? Even many of the smartest among us seem to have lost their vision. Cynicism has become a supreme sign of intelligence. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are popular. At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain't easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We've got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers. We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality. Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy. That's especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame. I know you know what I mean. Aren't you psychically assaulted by dangerous images every day? Don't the media relentlessly blast you with their trendy doom and gloom fixation, barraging you with messages about how bad life is? Doesn't the entertainment industry force-feed you insipidly paranoid scenarios in the same way a French foie gras farmer crams eight pounds of corn down the gullet of his prize goose every day? Aren't your eyes and ears constantly scalded by blistering harangues to buy stuff you don't really need? Isn't the sacred temple of your imagination pounded ruthlessly by smart bombs whipped up by evil advertising geniuses in their Madison Avenue laboratories? Hasn't your ability to envision the astounding intricacy and richness of the web of life gotten hijacked and hooked on decadent fantasies about new possessions that would allegedly make you happier? Your imagination is supposed to be the engine of your destiny. It is the wizard's wand you can use to design your future. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Every human creation on this earth has begun as a vision in someone's imagination. Your imagination is also your very own all-purpose joy stick, your snakeskin bag of magic tricks. It's your remote-control channel-changer, and the only reliable rearranger of anything anywhere anytime. It's your X-Factor, your wild card, your wicked funny instigator, your Goddess-sanctioned trouble-maker -- your swarming, terraforming, always-morning brainstormer. Love desperately needs your imagination. As psychologist James Hillman says, "For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining." Your imagination is the single most important tool you have in your daily fight to be free. It is the source of every act of liberation you will ever need to pull off. But how can your imagination flourish--how can it dream up scenarios that energize you to create your own version of heaven on earth--if you are forever deluged by dazzling psychic toxins that sting and sap and wound your lust for life? Too many of our brothers and sisters have fallen victim. Their swarming terraforming always-morning brainstormers have been cruelly fooled into acting as if their deepest desires are impossible lies. As a result they live incoherent lives corroded by chronic anxiety. I for one am no longer willing to tolerate the epidemic obsession with big bad nasty things and flashy trite empty-hearted things. I say it's time for us to re-consecrate and regenerate and lubricate and liberate and take back our imaginations. Here are my demands. DEMAND #1: I demand that Amnesty International launch a crusade against a form of terrorism I call the genocide of the imagination. DEMAND #2: I demand that you periodically go on a media fast. For a week at a time, once a season, avoid all TV, movies, novels, yalk shows, newspapers, magazines, and Internet. DEMAND #3: I demand that you learn to tell the difference between your own thoughts and those of the celebrities who have demonically possessed you. DEMAND #4: I demand that People magazine do a feature story on "The World's Fifty Sexiest Perpetrators of Beauty, Truth, and Rowdy Bliss." DEMAND #5: I demand that you wear underpants on your head and dance naked in slow motion whenever you watch movies on TV about tormented geniuses who create great art but treat everyone in their lives like crap. DEMAND #6: I demand that you refuse to be entertained and entranced by bad news--by stories whose plots are driven by violence, abuse, terrorism, bigotry, lawsuits, greed, crashes, alcoholism, disease, and torture. DEMAND #7: I demand that you seek out and create stories that make you feel that the universe is friendly and life is on your side. You could hunt down stories about how, for example, rising rates of intermarriage are helping to dissipate ethnic and religious strife worldwide; how the violent crime rate in America has been steadily declining for 30 years; how death rates from cancer are shrinking; the birth rate among teenage mothers is the lowest it's been in six decades; acreage devoted to organic farming is increasing rapidly; the number of refugees and weapons sales all over the world are way down from the level they were 15 years ago, and how the actual bare naked truth is that levels of literacy and education and political freedom and peace and wealth are steadily growing all over the world. DEMAND #8: When you're too well-entertained to move, screaming is good exercise. Which is why I demand that you scream now and then whenever you're soaking up slick crap generated by the imaginations of people who are devoted to money, power, and ego instead of love, reverence, and play. * There is another force that fuels the war against the imagination--and that's fundamentalism. The fundamentalist takes everything way too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. He divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and those who don't. There is only one right way to interpret the world, and a million wrong ways. The fundamentalist not only enslaves his own imagination to his belief system, he wants to enslave our imaginations too. The liberated imagination, God forbid, is taboo. In one of her poems, Diane DiPrima declares that a war against the imagination is raging worldwide. "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination," she says. "All other wars are subsumed in it." If she's right, then the war against terrorism is a symptom of the war against the imagination. The war against our civil liberties is a symptom of the war against the imagination. The war against the environment, the war against the poor, the war against some drugs--all symptoms. It's the fundamentalists who want this war. They fight it and force everybody else to fight, too. And who are the fundamentalists? It's not just the usual suspects; it's not just the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism. There are many other kinds of fundamentalists, and some of them have gotten away with practicing their fundamentalism in a stealth mode. Among the most successful are those who believe in what Robert Anton Wilson calls fundamentalist materialism. That's the faith-based dogma that swears physical matter is the only reality and that nothing exists unless it can be detected by our five senses or by technologies that humans have made. There is no inherent meaning or purpose to the universe, the fundamentalist materialists proclaim. There is no divine intelligence. The universe is a dumb accidental machine that grinds on endlessly out of blind necessity. I see spread out before me in every direction a staggeringly sublime miracle lovingly crafted by a supernal consciousness that oversees the evolution of 500 billion galaxies, yet is also available as an intimate companion and daily advisor to every one of us. But to the fundamentalist materialists, my perceptions are dead wrong and utterly idiotic. There are many other varieties of fundamentalism. Every ideology, even the ones I like, has its share of true believers, fanatics who judge all other ideologies as inferior, flawed, and foolish. I know astrologers who insist there's only one way to do astrology right. I know Buddhists who adamantly decree that the inherent nature of life on earth is suffering. I know progressive activists who sincerely believe that every single Republican is either stupid or evil or both. I know college administrators who would excommunicate any psychology professor who dared to discuss the teachings of Carl Jung, who was in my opinion one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. I know pagans who refuse to consider any other version of Jesus Christ beyond the sick parody the Christian right has fabricated. There are true believers everywhere. And they don't like to hear that there are at least three sides to every story. They don't like to hear that everyone has a piece of the truth. And here's the really bad news: Many of us here, including me, are infected with the fundamentalist virus. Each of us is fanatical, rigid, and intolerant about products of the imagination that we don't like. We wish that certain people would not imagine the things they do, and we allow ourselves to beam hateful, war-like thoughts in their direction. We even wage war against our own imaginations, commanding ourselves, sometimes half-consciously, to ignore possibilities that don't fit into our neatly constructed theories. Each of us sets aside certain precious beliefs and symbols that we give ourselves permission to take very seriously and personally and literally. Our fundamentalism, yours and mine, may not be as dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists and right-wing Christian politicians. It may not be as destructive as the CEOs who worship financial profit as the supreme measure of value and the scientists who ignore and deny every mystery that can't be measured. But still: We are all infected, you and I. We are fueling the war against the imagination. (What's your version of the virus?) This has got to stop. We are primordial miracles. Resplendent avatars. Deities in disguise. Rebel creators. We are wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life dedicated to navigating our way through this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game. It is our sacred duty to keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free, and to make sure that all of our fellow messiahs, even those who volunteered to play the roles of ignorant deceivers, have the chance to keep their imaginations wild and hungry and free. How might we start curing ourselves of the virus and move in the direction of becoming more festive, relentless champions of the liberated imagination? For starters, we can take everything less seriously and less personally and less literally. We can laugh at ourselves at least as much as we laugh at other people. We can blaspheme our own gods and burn our own flags and mock our own hypocrisy and satirize our own fads and fixations. We can enjoy the pleasures of healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, irreverent devotion, holy pranks, playful experiments, and crazy wisdom. We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom. We can be humble enough to understand that it's a crime against life to act like a know-it-all who has everything all figured out. + Changing the Way We Change Dear Readers, I love our relationship. You feel like my extended family. And if you know the importance that family often holds for people born under the sign of Cancer, like me, you're aware of how evocative it is for me to make a statement like that. A substantial minority of you aren't Americans, and so have had only a marginal interest in the electoral spectacle that we Americans were enthralled by for so long. I hope that my writing about the Obama-versus-McCain showdown (and its parallel theme, the Uranus-versus-Saturn showdown) has yielded some useful fodder for your personal evolution, even if you haven't been riveted by the specific details of the unfolding drama. Among the American part of my readership, there have been a few outcries and uproars about my involvement with the political process. Those of you who are McCain supporters or Nader devotees haven't been happy with my tilt toward Obama. Other readers don't think I should sully myself with any kind of political meditations, but should remain above it all. One of the most interesting emails I got about this issue is here. I've welcomed your dissidence and complaints, as I do any time my writing piques your desire to speak out. One of my favorite tasks is to inspire you to liberate your imagination. To do that well, you have to be eternally primed to question the ideas and motivations of any so-called authority, expert, leader, or teacher -- including me. And besides that, I love the fact that my extended family is a diverse group of wildly different characters. I certainly don't want to hang around exclusively with people who are like me. + With all that as a preface, I'll go ahead and express my joy in Obama's ascendancy: BRAVO! VIVA! HALLELUJAH! EUREKA! ABRACADABRA! More than a vindication of a particular ideology or political agenda, his selection by a majority of American voters (ratified by an even vaster majority of the world's citizens) is a triumph of emotional intelligence, integrity, reasonableness, compassion, and the higher powers of human consciousness. It is a profound sign that Americans are growing up. Obama invites us to be motivated not by fear and hatred but by the "better angels of our nature," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase. What's especially thrilling to me is that Obama's spirituality is the soulful, thoughtful kind. His humble, rational relationship with the divine mysteries suggests that fundamentalists, whether they're the religious right or the new atheists, will no longer be able to frame the mainstream debate about spiritual matters. Here is a good essay about the issue. I think the rise of Obama also vividly demonstrates an important point about pronoia. Many of us have been convinced that we've been living through the New Dark Ages; we've been entranced by the belief that the world is in terrible trouble and we're all on the brink of disaster. Even those of us who don't swallow that cynical meme have had to acknowledge that some crazy bad stuff has been happening. But the way I see it, the election of a smart, spiritual black man who is a good listener with a flexible mind is not some impossible miracle, not some inexplicable escape from certain doom. The truth is that many of us have been preparing the way for this outbreak of pronoia for years. Obama's emergence as a prime leader is a natural evolution of the work we've all been doing behind the scenes and outside of the media's spotlight -- both on ourselves and on our local institutions. As Sam Smith has written: "Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its beneficiary." + Here are two essays that capture some of the essence of other important themes in Obama's victory: "Obama is the first postmodern president" "Very smart people are thinking and talking in serious conversations from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded," Now I want to mention two big caveats about this monumental shift in the collective destiny of America. First, Obama and his team have a lot of work to do. That's why I endorse many of the points listed on these two websites: The first 100 days: What Obama can do to address the cratering economy, broken healthcare system, two wars, poverty and inequality, and the stained US reputation in the world. and here: Fix This, Barack Second we Americans have a lot of work to do. The resuscitation of our country will have to be accomplished primarily by we-the-people, and as much on the local level as in the federal realm. This won't just be a matter of political organization. It will also require us to be continually at work on ourselves, purging the parts of us that resonate in harmony with the dying world and feeding the parts of ourselves that are capable of creating a paradise-on-earth. Here's a quote from my book: 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 sour, crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality" -- including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves. We can't change the world unless we change 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. Here's a quote from Carl Jung: "The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others." Finally, a quote from Tom Robbins: "Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ PRAYER OF GRATITUDE TO THE TRICKY GODDESS OF BENEVOLENT MISCHIEF All hail the Tricky Goddess of Benevolent Mischief, also known as the Cosmic Instigator of Healing Trouble. Let us praise and ratify her ingenious plan to turn the status quo upside-down. The vivid exposure of greed, corruption, and delusion among the top echelons of the American political and financial hierarchy is a blessing on all of humanity. The eruption of fertile chaos is making it difficult to carry on with business as usual, and we could not have received a more energizing gift. A prayer: Oh Wise Trickster Goddess, You Compassionate Conjurer of Relentless Change, You Righteous Rascal in Charge of Keeping a Steady Flow of Sacred Uproar Pouring into Our Lives: Please continue to influence the masters of plutocracy and war and their media minions to be ever-more obvious as they spin out their perversions of your glorious creation, so that more and more of our sleeping tribe will wake up to the Open Secret. Inspire the enforcers of mass hallucination to display their hypocrisy in an ever-escalating melodrama of spittle flecks and sour faces, as in a slapstick morality play from the Middle Ages, so that we, their captive audience, may convulse with purgative guffaws that shatter the mass hallucination. And if you don't mind, Sweet Divine Rebel Goddess, please allow us to nurture a spark of hope that the breakdown in the Way Things Have Always Been Done will lead to fresh, hot, tidal-wave breakthroughs of beauty, truth, justice, equality and love everywhere we turn. And now, in my capacity as Sacred Janitor of the Invisible Government of Sweaty Meditation, I hereby declare the entire United States of America a Temporary Autonomous Zone. As formulated by writer Hakim Bey, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is any festive event that liberates the imaginations of everyone present, thereby making it possible for life to be penetrated by the Marvelous. Authority and dignity and routine have no place at a TAZ; an uninhibited quest for rabble-rousing conviviality must be the only guideline. (See Bey's website.) Here are a few suggestions, mostly from Bey, to get you started in creating your own local celebration of TAZ. Feel free to dream up your own, and make sure to tell me about them. (Send your emails to uaregod@comcast.net.) Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence and spiritual beauty. Burglarize houses, but instead of stealing, leave behind beautiful and confusing gifts. Spread gossip about the unsung genius of people who don't get nearly enough credit for their good work. Take a few friends and a boom box to an all-night grocery store and engage in ecstatic, whirling dervish-style dancing in the aisles until you're thrown out. Scrawl the following graffiti in courthouse lavatories and on playground walls: "I dare you to scare yourself with how beautiful you are." Pick people at random, says Bey, and convince them they're the heirs to an enormous, useless, and amazing fortune—say, 5,000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or a leper colony in India, or a collection of alchemical manuscripts. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, and will perhaps be driven to cultivate a more intense quest for exhilarating adventures. Scrawl the following poem by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) in courthouse lavatories, on playground walls, and through e-mail lists: AT THIS PARTY I don't want to be the only one here Telling all the secrets -- Filling up all the bowls at this party, Taking all the laughs. I would like you To start putting things on the table That can also feed the soul The way I do. That way We can invite A hell of a lot more Friends. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The following piece is adapted from my book PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings LIBERATE YOUR IMAGINATION Let me remind you who you really are: You are one of the chosen ones. You're a luminous being. A primordial miracle. A resplendent avatar. You are a deity in disguise--not a Buddha or a Christ, but of the same lineage and made from the same mojo. I want to be sure you get what I'm saying. You're an immortal messiah. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you're getting better at playing the mysterious master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed. Let me put it another way. You're a rebel creator longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. You are a dissident bodhisattva joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment. It's time to remember. You are a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs that has temporarily taken on the form of a human being, agreeing to endure amnesia about your true origins. And why did you do that? Because it was the best way to forge the exquisitely unique and robust identity that would make you such an elemental force in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth. You and I are freedom fighters scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve all of our fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with more blessings than they know what to do with. * Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of our brothers and sisters believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Is war really peace? Is slavery really freedom? Is ignorance strength? How did it all get so insane? Even many of the smartest among us seem to have lost their vision. Cynicism has become a supreme sign of intelligence. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are popular. At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain't easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We've got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers. We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality. Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy. That's especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame. I know you know what I mean. Aren't you psychically assaulted by dangerous images every day? Don't the media relentlessly blast you with their trendy doom and gloom fixation, barraging you with messages about how bad life is? Doesn't the entertainment industry force-feed you insipidly paranoid scenarios in the same way a French foie gras farmer crams eight pounds of corn down the gullet of his prize goose every day? Aren't your eyes and ears constantly scalded by blistering harangues to buy stuff you don't really need? Isn't the sacred temple of your imagination pounded ruthlessly by smart bombs whipped up by evil advertising geniuses in their Madison Avenue laboratories? Hasn't your ability to envision the astounding intricacy and richness of the web of life gotten hijacked and hooked on decadent fantasies about new possessions that would allegedly make you happier? Your imagination is supposed to be the engine of your destiny. It is the wizard's wand you can use to design your future. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Every human creation on this earth has begun as a vision in someone's imagination. Your imagination is also your very own all-purpose joy stick, your snakeskin bag of magic tricks. It's your remote-control channel-changer, and the only reliable rearranger of anything anywhere anytime. It's your X-Factor, your wild card, your wicked funny instigator, your Goddess-sanctioned trouble-maker -- your swarming, terraforming, always-morning brainstormer. Love desperately needs your imagination. As psychologist James Hillman says, "For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining." Your imagination is the single most important tool you have in your daily fight to be free. It is the source of every act of liberation you will ever need to pull off. But how can your imagination flourish--how can it dream up scenarios that energize you to create your own version of heaven on earth--if you are forever deluged by dazzling psychic toxins that sting and sap and wound your lust for life? Too many of our brothers and sisters have fallen victim. Their swarming terraforming always-morning brainstormers have been cruelly fooled into acting as if their deepest desires are impossible lies. As a result they live incoherent lives corroded by chronic anxiety. I for one am no longer willing to tolerate the epidemic obsession with big bad nasty things and flashy trite empty-hearted things. I say it's time for us to re-consecrate and regenerate and lubricate and liberate and take back our imaginations. Here are my demands. DEMAND #1: I demand that Amnesty International launch a crusade against a form of terrorism I call the genocide of the imagination. DEMAND #2: I demand that you periodically go on a media fast. For a week at a time, once a season, avoid all TV, movies, novels, yalk shows, newspapers, magazines, and Internet. DEMAND #3: I demand that you learn to tell the difference between your own thoughts and those of the celebrities who have demonically possessed you. DEMAND #4: I demand that People magazine do a feature story on "The World's Fifty Sexiest Perpetrators of Beauty, Truth, and Rowdy Bliss." DEMAND #5: I demand that you wear underpants on your head and dance naked in slow motion whenever you watch movies on TV about tormented geniuses who create great art but treat everyone in their lives like crap. DEMAND #6: I demand that you refuse to be entertained and entranced by bad news--by stories whose plots are driven by violence, abuse, terrorism, bigotry, lawsuits, greed, crashes, alcoholism, disease, and torture. DEMAND #7: I demand that you seek out and create stories that make you feel that the universe is friendly and life is on your side. You could hunt down stories about how, for example, rising rates of intermarriage are helping to dissipate ethnic and religious strife worldwide; how the violent crime rate in America has been steadily declining for 30 years; how death rates from cancer are shrinking; the birth rate among teenage mothers is the lowest it's been in six decades; acreage devoted to organic farming is increasing rapidly; the number of refugees and weapons sales all over the world are way down from the level they were 15 years ago, and how the actual bare naked truth is that levels of literacy and education and political freedom and peace and wealth are steadily growing all over the world. DEMAND #8: When you're too well-entertained to move, screaming is good exercise. Which is why I demand that you scream now and then whenever you're soaking up slick crap generated by the imaginations of people who are devoted to money, power, and ego instead of love, reverence, and play. * There is another force that fuels the war against the imagination--and that's fundamentalism. The fundamentalist takes everything way too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. He divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and those who don't. There is only one right way to interpret the world, and a million wrong ways. The fundamentalist not only enslaves his own imagination to his belief system, he wants to enslave our imaginations too. The liberated imagination, God forbid, is taboo. In one of her poems, Diane DiPrima declares that a war against the imagination is raging worldwide. "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination," she says. "All other wars are subsumed in it." If she's right, then the war against terrorism is a symptom of the war against the imagination. The war against our civil liberties is a symptom of the war against the imagination. The war against the environment, the war against the poor, the war against some drugs--all symptoms. It's the fundamentalists who want this war. They fight it and force everybody else to fight, too. And who are the fundamentalists? It's not just the usual suspects; it's not just the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism. There are many other kinds of fundamentalists, and some of them have gotten away with practicing their fundamentalism in a stealth mode. Among the most successful are those who believe in what Robert Anton Wilson calls fundamentalist materialism. That's the faith-based dogma that swears physical matter is the only reality and that nothing exists unless it can be detected by our five senses or by technologies that humans have made. There is no inherent meaning or purpose to the universe, the fundamentalist materialists proclaim. There is no divine intelligence. The universe is a dumb accidental machine that grinds on endlessly out of blind necessity. I see spread out before me in every direction a staggeringly sublime miracle lovingly crafted by a supernal consciousness that oversees the evolution of 500 billion galaxies, yet is also available as an intimate companion and daily advisor to every one of us. But to the fundamentalist materialists, my perceptions are dead wrong and utterly idiotic. There are many other varieties of fundamentalism. Every ideology, even the ones I like, has its share of true believers, fanatics who judge all other ideologies as inferior, flawed, and foolish. I know astrologers who insist there's only one way to do astrology right. I know Buddhists who adamantly decree that the inherent nature of life on earth is suffering. I know progressive activists who sincerely believe that every single Republican is either stupid or evil or both. I know college administrators who would excommunicate any psychology professor who dared to discuss the teachings of Carl Jung, who was in my opinion one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. I know pagans who refuse to consider any other version of Jesus Christ beyond the sick parody the Christian right has fabricated. There are true believers everywhere. And they don't like to hear that there are at least three sides to every story. They don't like to hear that everyone has a piece of the truth. And here's the really bad news: Many of us here, including me, are infected with the fundamentalist virus. Each of us is fanatical, rigid, and intolerant about products of the imagination that we don't like. We wish that certain people would not imagine the things they do, and we allow ourselves to beam hateful, war-like thoughts in their direction. We even wage war against our own imaginations, commanding ourselves, sometimes half-consciously, to ignore possibilities that don't fit into our neatly constructed theories. Each of us sets aside certain precious beliefs and symbols that we give ourselves permission to take very seriously and personally and literally. Our fundamentalism, yours and mine, may not be as dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists and right-wing Christian politicians. It may not be as destructive as the CEOs who worship financial profit as the supreme measure of value and the scientists who ignore and deny every mystery that can't be measured. But still: We are all infected, you and I. We are fueling the war against the imagination. (What's your version of the virus?) This has got to stop. We are primordial miracles. Resplendent avatars. Deities in disguise. Rebel creators. We are wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life dedicated to navigating our way through this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game. It is our sacred duty to keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free, and to make sure that all of our fellow messiahs, even those who volunteered to play the roles of ignorant deceivers, have the chance to keep their imaginations wild and hungry and free. How might we start curing ourselves of the virus and move in the direction of becoming more festive, relentless champions of the liberated imagination? For starters, we can take everything less seriously and less personally and less literally. We can laugh at ourselves at least as much as we laugh at other people. We can blaspheme our own gods and burn our own flags and mock our own hypocrisy and satirize our own fads and fixations. We can enjoy the pleasures of healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, irreverent devotion, holy pranks, playful experiments, and crazy wisdom. We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom. We can be humble enough to understand that it's a crime against life to act like a know-it-all who has everything all figured out.
Read Excerpts
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 process millions of years to perfect. The interesting 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. Did you know that the sun is located at the precise distance from you to be of perfect service? If it were any closer, you'd fry, and if it were any further away, you'd freeze. Here's another one of the sun's benedictions: It appears to rise over the eastern horizon right on schedule every day, as it has since long before you were born. Do you remember when you were born, by the way? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked hard on your behalf. No less miraculous is the fact that you have continued to grow since then, with millions of new cells being born inside you to replace the old ones that die. All of this happens whether or not you ever think about it. 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 hour of your life. Your home is perhaps not a million-dollar palace, 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 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, with 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. There is someone somewhere making sure these boons will continue to arrive for you without interruption for as long as you require them. Look at your hands. They're astounding creations that allow you to carry out hundreds of tasks with great force and intricate grace. They relish the pleasure and privilege of touching thousands of different textures, and they're beautiful. 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 get to choose from is unprecedented in the history of the world. Your many appliances are working flawlessly. Despite the fact that they feed on electricity, which could kill you instantly if you touched it directly, you feel no fear that you're in danger. Why? Your faith in the people who invented, designed, and produced these machines is impressive. It's as if there's a benevolent conspiracy of unknown people that is tirelessly creating hundreds of useful things you like and need. There's more. Gravity is working exactly the way it always has, neither pulling on you with too much or too little force. How did that marvel ever come to be? By some prodigious, long-running accident? It doesn't really matter, since it will continue to function with astounding efficiency whether or not you understand it. Meanwhile, a trillion other elements of nature's miraculous design are expressing themselves perfectly. Plants are growing, rivers are flowing, clouds are drifting, winds are blowing, animals are reproducing. The weather is an interesting blend of elements you've never before experienced in quite this combination. Though you may take it for granted, you relish the ever-shifting sensations of light and temperature as they interact with your body. There's more. You can smell odors and hear sounds and taste tastes, many of which are quite pleasing. You can think! You're in possession of the extraordinary gift of self-awareness. You can feel feelings! Do you realize how improbably stupendous it is for you to have been blessed with that mysterious capacity? And get this: You can visualize an inexhaustible array of images, some of which represent things that don't actually exist. How did you acquire this magical talent? 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. . . . READ THE REST HERE *
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week of Monday,
June 29, 2009
The Divine Wow Is Here Now
There's a new interview with me available online. It covers a lot of ground, including my thoughts about the nature of prophecy and the national outlook for 2009. It's HERE. + The Honey and Vinegar Tasters My long-time mentor and friend Richard Grossinger has just published what I consider to be the best book of the year: The Bardo of Waking Life Everyone has a piece of the truth and no one has more than a piece of the truth. But Grossinger's masterwork is the biggest chunk of truth I've read in years. I love it so much, I wrote the foreword for the book. It's called "The Honey and Vinegar Tasters." You can read my foreword here. + Free Will Astrology Is Now Available Via RSS Click here:  + An article in the Santa Cruz publication Good Times includes a summary of my beliefs about the nature of astrology. Check it out. + We're Getting Nicer Every Day "Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century . . . We are now living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth . . . The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world." + Revolution in Human Evolution "Over the past 300 years, and particularly during the 20th century, human biology has changed. People in the industrialized world are taller, heavier, stronger. They're more resistant to disease and more likely to overcome it when they do get sick. They live longer, their lives less fraught with chronic ailments. We're just not falling apart like we used to. Even our internal organs are stronger and better formed." + Buddha in Glory Center of all centers, core of cores, almond, that closes tightly in and sweetens,-- this entire world out to all the stars is your fruit-flesh: we greet you. Look, you feel how nothing any longer clings to you; your husk is in infinity, and there the strong juice stands and crowds. And from outside a radiance assists it, for high above, your suns in full splendor have wheeled blazingly around. Yet already there's begun inside you what lasts beyond the suns. --Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow from New Poems + FUTURE SEX Beyond Porn: Make Sex Funny with Comic Sutra Laughing Sexercises + "On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 means 'not at all satisfied with my life' and 7 means 'completely satisfied,' the people on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans average 5.8--the same as the Inuit people in Greenland and the cattle-herding Masai of Kenya, who live in dung huts with no electricity or running water. Calcutta's slum dwellers score only a little lower, at 4.6." More here. + "Ultimately what we're touching is the invisible, all-pervasive Intelligence that surrounds us and penetrates us. It is grooming us to be able to tolerate its splendor. It can't just reveal itself openly because we would be forfeited; we'd never know what hit us." -Terence McKenna + MP3s of all 22 tracks of my band's most recent CD are now available free. * NEW! Go here for an FAQ about this website and astrology in general. * If you have encountered examples of the following evidence, tell us about it. Send your testimony to the Beauty and Truth Laboratory at rebelgrail@yahoo.com or P.O. Box 150628, San Rafael, CA 94915: 1. bliss that flows toward you because you've made a habit of expecting it and cultivating it; 2. good news that's really interesting; fascinating stories that provide an antidote to the media's obsession with hardship, anguish, deterioration, and death; 3. states of emotional wealth and psychological health: the missing half of the story; 4. mirabilia: mysterious revelations, rejuvenating prodigies, ineffable breakthroughs, beguiling ephemera, sudden deliverance from boring evils; 5. plain old everyday miracles; 6. the good news you've gone out and created. * PRONOIAC RESOURCES DREAMWORK Jonathan Zap CD Spiritual Madness by Caroline Myss FESTIVALS Burning Man Oregon Country Fair MAGAZINES Utne Reader Lilipoh Ode Yes BOOKS Spiritual Madness by Caroline Myss How to Know Higher Worlds: The Classic Guide to the Spiritual Journey by Rudolf Steiner Love and the World : A Guide to Conscious Soul Practice by Robert Sardello A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life: Self Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither by Nina Wise Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People by Rick Foster and Greg Hicks Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie The Gift by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch T.A.Z.: Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers The Essential Crazy Wisdom by Wes Scoop Nisker False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear by Marc Siegel The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld by Patrick Harpur The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right by Rabbi Michael Lerner Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles by Bruce Lipton Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men by Michael Meade The Once and Future Goddess: A Sweeping Visual Chronicle of the Sacred Female and Her Reemergence in the Cultural Mythology of Our Time by Elinor Gadon Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life by Thomas Moore Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey by Alex Grey Radical Dreaming: Use Your Dreams to Change Your Life by John D. Goldhammer The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery FILMS Me and You and and Everyone We Know Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders Disney's Fantasia To Be and to Have (Etre et Avoir in the original French), directed by Nicolas Philibert The New Heroes Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain ASTROLOGER Ro Loughran DVDs The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme Worldspirit by Alex Grey and Kenji Williams Goddess Juice WEBSITES New Dimensions World Broadcasting Network Abraham-Hicks Mosaic Integral Naked: Video Classes with Provocative Thinkers The Onion GreenBlue Bioneers Heroic Stories Swami Beyondananda Happy News Good News Network Good News Blog Ethical Traveler Caroline Casey's Visionary Activism Institute for Play The Daily Grail Seed Savers Seacology The Lucidity Institute: center for lucid dream research The Evolver Project Reality Carnival The World Question Center Internet Audio Archive "How Change Works" "Time Management for Anarchists" Extropy Institute: Transhumanism Transhumanism Institute of Noetic Sciences Omega Institute Ray Kurzweil: "Levels of intelligence far greater than our own are going to evolve within this century. We will ultimately saturate all of the matter and energy in our area of the universe with our intelligence." POETRY "Ode to Gaiety" by James Brougton: Daniel Ladinsky MUSIC Illinois by Sufjan Stevens There Will Be a Light by Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama When I Was a Boy by Jane Siberry Copper Wimmin Shri Durga by DJ Cheb I Sabbah Floetic by Floetry "Soul Meets Body" from Plans by Death Cab for Cutie "Ode to Joy" from Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven Call of the Valley by Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, Hari Prasad Chaurasia Som'ma La Maison de Mon Reve by CocoRosie The Essence by Deva Premal "King without a Crown" from Youth by Matisyahu Room Noises by Eisley Medulla by Bjork "How Can I Keep from Singing?" -Shaker hymn ARTICLES "We Are the Web" by Kevin Kelly "So What Do You Have to Do to Find Happiness" "Are Progressives the New Traditionalists?" by Scott McKeown "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory" "A Heretic for Our Times" by Jay Walljasper "Awakening pinch from a mysterious new crustacean" by Mark Morford "State of Emergency: A Paratheatre Manifesto" by Antero Alli "Before the Fall: Evidence of a Golden Age" Conversations between Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber "13 things that do not make sense" "The Trouble with Positive News" "A List Of 10 Media-Fed Myths" Top 10 Science breakthroughs of the year PLACE Chapel of Sacred Mirrors The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York City Archipelago of Los Roques, Venezuela Getty Museum, Los Angeles VISUAL ART Manholes of Japan Ashes and Snow Astronomy Picture of the Day FOOD Cafe Gratitude PROTECTION FROM PARANOIA Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: Practical Mind Control Protection for Paranoids VISIONARY AUTHOR Daniel Pinchbeck, author of *Breaking Open the Head*: Erik Davis, author of *Techgnosis*: Terence McKenna Martin Prechtel PAINTING The Village and I by Marc Chagall Four Panels for Edwin R. Campbell by Wassily Kandinsky * WHAT IS PRONOIA DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It's the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It's a mode of training your senses and intellect so 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: The material in PRONOIA 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. + THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY The syndicated radio show TO THE BEST OF OUR KNOWLEDGE has done a piece that includes a segment with Rob talking about PRONOIA. Access it here. * Read Mark Morford's piece on the book. * Read Boulder Weekly's story preceding Rob's appearance in Boulder. * Read the story in the Fort Collins Weekly. * Read one writer's account of her meeting with Rob at the Oregon Country Fair on July 8, as well as her review of Pronoia. * Read a story about Rob from the Indy Week. * Excerpts from Rob's book appear in an issue of The Sun, a fine pronoiac magazine. To read a selection of some of the pieces that appeared, go here and click on "Secrets of Pronoia." * From the Good Times * From the Santa Fe Reporter * Listen to a recent radio interview with Rob. * Read a story about Rob published in Metro Santa Cruz * Read an interview with Rob originally published in the Ventura County Reporter * Check out the podcast interview that R.U. Sirius did with Rob. Scroll down the page to "The R.U, Sirius Show #11." [Caution: contains liberated language.] * MIRABILIA REPORT (Mirabilia n. events that inspire wonder, marvelous phenomena, small miracles, beguiling ephemera, inexplicable joys, changes that inspire quiet awe, eccentric enchantments, unplanned jubilations, sudden deliverance from boring evils; from the Latin mirabilia, "marvels.") * The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants. * The seeds of some trees are so tightly compacted within their protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free them, allowing them to sprout. * Thirty-eight percent of North America is wilderness. * Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek. * With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun. * A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing. * As it thrusts itself into our Milky Way Galaxy, the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius is unraveling, releasing a thick stream of dark matter that is flowing right through the Earth. * A chemist in Australia finally succeeded in mixing oil and water. * Except among birds and land mammals, the females of most species are bigger than the males. * The South African version of TV's Sesame Street has an AIDS-positive Muppet named Kami. * The sky not only isn't falling--it's rising. The top of the troposphere, the atmosphere's lowest layer, is slowly ascending. * To make a pound of honey, bees have to gather nectar from about two million flowers. To produce a single pound of the spice saffron, humans have to handpick and process 80,000 flowers. In delivering the single survivor necessary to fertilize an ovum, a man releases 500 million sperm. * Some Christians really do love their enemies, as Jesus recommended. * Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does. * There are always so many fragments of spider legs floating in the air that you are constantly inhaling them wherever you go. * "The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles," says science writer James Trefil. * Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the whole island smells like vanilla ice cream. * Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it, and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up. * In his book *The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead,* physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead at the end of time. * In the Ukraine you can buy Fat in Chocolate, a food with a layer of dark chocolate covering a chunk of pork fat. * Robust singing skill is correlated with a strong immune system in songbirds. Male birds with the most extensive repertoire of tunes also have the largest spleens, a key measure of immune system health. * Bali has 80,000 temples. * Romanian physicists created gaseous globes of plasma that grew, reproduced, and communicated with each other, thereby fulfilling the definition for life. * In an apparent attempt to raise their volume above the prevailing human din, some nightingales in big cities have learned to unleash 95-decibel songs, matching the loudness of a chainsaw. * There is a statistically significant probability of world-class athletes and military leaders being born when Mars is rising in the sky. * Some piranhas are vegetarians. * In the pueblos of New Mexico, bricks still measure 33 by 15 by 10 centimeters, proportions that almost exactly match those of the bricks used to build Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut 3,500 years ago. * Childbirth is often joyful even though it's painful. * In hopes of calming flustered lawbreakers, Japanese cops have substituted the sound of church bells for sirens on police cars. * Scientists believe they'll be able to figure out why cancer cells are virtually immortal, and then apply the secret to keeping normal cells alive much longer, thereby dramatically expanding the human life span. * Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises. * When she is born, a baby girl has all the ova she will ever have. * Bluebirds cannot see the color blue. * Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia. * Bob Hope donated half a million jokes to the Library of Congress. * Bees perform a valuable service for the flowers from which they steal. * "Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship," wrote Adam Gopnik in *The New Yorker.* * Revlon makes 177 different shades of lipstick. * Your tongue is the strongest muscle in your body. * The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible. |
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What We're Reading
Words to live by:
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What We're Listening To
Music that's rocking our world:
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© 1995-2009 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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