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Prayer for You
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Pronoia Taboo
"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends." --Robert Anton Wilson THE PRONOIA TABOO by Rob Brezsny The primary meaning of the word healing is "to cure what's diseased or broken." Medical practitioners focus on sick people. Psychotherapists wrestle with their clients' traumas and neuroses. Philanthropists donate their money, and social workers contribute their time to helping the underprivileged. I am in awe of them all. The level of one's spiritual enlightenment, I believe, is more accurately measured by helping people in need than by meditation skills or mastery of religious doctrine. But I also believe in a second kind of healing which is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what's merely sufficient to a state of sublime blessing. I'm driven with ambition to promote this work, even as I aspire to do my share of fixing what's hurt. What would the world look like if there were doctors who specialized in fostering robust health in their patients? What if the textbooks that psychotherapists used to evaluate their clients were crammed not just with descriptions of pathological states, but also with a catalogue of every variety of bliss, integrity, magnanimity, eros, and wisdom? Imagine how odd and wonderful it would be if universities began turning out professionals in a brand new field, the science of happiness. I must confess that early in my career, I was proud of my well-crafted cynicism. Like most novelists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, and critics, I subscribed to the dogma that evil is interesting and good is boring. You can imagine my dismay, then, when my muses began to nudge me in the direction of sly optimism. "It will ruin my image!" I complained to them from the depth of my worried meditations. "I refuse to write shiny happy propaganda! I will not turn into a dopey Pollyanna bereft of all critical thinking skills!" But the muses were immune to my protests. Slowly and inexorably, they reconfigured my coyote angel rebel clown persona to serve a new master: PRONOIA. The opposite of paranoia, pronoia is defined as the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. (Terence McKenna had a slightly different angle on it: "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.") To their credit, my muses managed to pull off this alchemical abracadabra without annihilating my native skepticism. If anything, it has become more robust, anchored as it is now in the thrilling quest for good news. But the transformation was neither rapid nor smooth. So strenuously did I resist and so deep were my imprints that it has taken me until recently to begin creating the ultimate self-help program on pronoiac living. It's titled, "EXTREME PRONOIA THERAPY: 888 Steps to Becoming an Aggressively Sensitive, Wildly Disciplined, Lyrically Logical, Ironically Sincere, Insanely Poised, Lustfully Compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss." I will be offering EXTREME PRONOIA THERAPY at the Burning Man event in the Nevada desert between Monday, August 27 and Saturday, September 2. But wait a minute. I don't want to put pressure on you to develop a passionately committed relationship with pronoia. It's wise to go slowly. Merely flirting with pronoia is a good first step. Becoming a full-fledged, feel-it-in-your-bones practitioner of pronoia is risky, after all. What could be more wildly at odds with prevailing cultural norms? The nineteenth-century poet John Keats said that if something is not beautiful, it is probably not true. But the vast majority of modern storytellers -- journalists, film-makers, novelists, talk-show hosts -- assert the opposite: If something is not ugly, it is probably not true. In a world that regards cynicism as a supreme sign of intelligence and treats evil as if it were the most supremely entertaining subject of all, pronoia might even be called a perversion. It is a taboo so taboo that it's not even recognized as a taboo. You have easy access to a multi-million-dollar film in which an elegant, intellectual cannibal fries up and eats human brains. You can contemplate the artistic wonders of a crucifix in a vat of urine or view the autopsy photos of dead race-car driver Dale Earnhardt. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few obscure novels, songs, films, photos, or news stories that dare to depict life as a gorgeous mystery designed to liberate the human soul. Pronoia is the biggest and most secret taboo of all. And so you must approach it with full awareness of the consequences that may ensue if you embrace it. You've got to be aware of the responsibilities it entails. As you carry out your share of the conspiracy to commit beauty and truth and love and goodness, you'll have to summon a whole hell of a lot of nerve. Pronoia may require you to commit bigger, better, more original sins. Pronoia may inspire you to conjure up wilder, wetter more interesting problems. Pronoia may ask you to commit crimes that don't break any laws -- primal crimes against the most ridiculous dogmas and unnecessary taboos, laughing crimes against the consensual hallucination called "reality." True pronoiacs are not nice, polite, orderly, and accepting. They're sorcerers. They exert tremendous effort to go against the grain of comfortable ugliness, to rise up and claim their own breakthrough perceptions rather than allowing the media's filters to take root in their brain and distort their perceptions. Beauty and truth and goodness and love are not sentimental ideas in which pronoiacs seek sanctuary from the world's stupidity and nastiness. Beauty and truth and goodness and love are hard-earned, almost impossible to conjure, and require great ingenuity and tricky strategy to create. Pronoiacs fight for them inexhaustibly. Pronoiacs rejoice in regular dips into chaos because that's where they find the ever-fresh pronoiac future. They are not interested in creating a steady-state utopia, some sweet, bland heaven resembling a spotless shopping mall. Pronoia is a messy, ever-shifting thing. Today's mode of beauty, truth, goodness, and love will pass away sooner or later, so pronoiacs are ever alert for how to perpetrate the next version with consciousness and intention. They don't wait around for the change to be dictated by random entropy. The word abracadabra itself is a word of pronoiac power. Down through the ages, it has been uttered ritualistically by wizards to help them conjure the magical transformation they seek. Of course in the modern world most people don't believe in real magic, only in stage magic. To most people, therefore, abracadabra is a sham word used by entertainers who pull rabbits out of hats and do card tricks. But just between you and me, beauty and truth fans, abracadabra is an actual, time-honored, sorcerer's word of power. Its literal meaning is "I create as I speak." It suggests that the words that form in our mind and come out of our mouths have a great impact on the life we create for ourselves. With the help of abracdabra, we aid and abet transformations that for all intents and purposes are real magic. ABRACADABRA: We create as we speak. ABRACADABRA: We declare that pronoia is true and real and alive in the world. ABRACADABRA: We are now creating not just any old goodness and love and truth and beauty. We are creating wild goodness and ingenious love and ever-fresh truth and beauty that incites and provokes. ABRACADABRA: We are centers of expression for the primal will to good, which eternally creates and sustains the universe. |
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© 1995-2008 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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