George Carlin had a way with words...

Read this...


We are taking it up the ass people.

make a wish

Getting Closer to Waking Up

(Excerpted from the revised and expanded edition ofPronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. To hear a podcast version of this text, go here.)

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.

OBJECTIVE OF PRONOIA: To explore the secrets of becoming a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss.

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 your birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.

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.

GUIDING QUESTION: "The secret of life," said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, "is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do." What is that task for you?

UNDIGNIFIED MEDITATIONS TO KEEP YOU HONEST: Brag about what you can't do and don't have. Confess profound secrets to people who aren't particularly interested. Pray for the success of your enemies while you're making love. Change your name every day for a thousand days.

MYTHIC ROLE MODELS: Prometheus and Pronoia. In Greek mythology, Pronoia was the consort of Prometheus, the divine rebel who pilfered a glowing coal from his fellow gods so that he could slip the gift of fire to humans.

TOP-SECRET ALLIES: Sacred janitors, benevolent pranksters, apathy debunkers, lyrical logicians, ethical outlaws, aspiring masters of curiosity, homeless millionaires, humble megalomaniacs, hedonistic midwives, lunatic saints, sly optimists, mystical scientists, dissident bodhisattvas, macho feminists, and socialist libertarians who possess inside information about the big bang.

DAILY PRACTICE: Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart -- even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections.

POSSIBLE REWARDS: You will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time -- not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather: exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself; crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths; outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with irrepressible empathy; generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you; and a lust for justice that's leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.

USAGE NOTE: We employ the adjectival form "pronoiac" rather than "pronoid." That way, it rhymes with "aphrodisiac" and resonates with "paradisiacal" instead of being conditioned by "paranoid."

DISCLAIMER: Material in this book may be too intense and controversial for some readers. It contains graphic scenes of peace, love, joy, passion, reverence, splendor, and understanding. You will not find any references to harsh, buzzing fluorescent lights in a cheap hotel room where a heroin dealer plots to get revenge against the authorities at his old high school by releasing sarin gas into the teachers' lounge. There are no reports of Nazi skinheads obsessed with re-creating the 14th-century Tartars' war strategy of catapulting plague-ridden corpses into an enemy's citadel.

Completely absent from these pages are any stories about a psychotic CEO of a Fortune 500 company who has intentionally disfigured his face to help him elude the CIA, which wants to arrest him for the treasonous sale of his company's nanotech weapons technology to the Chinese. 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.

Dannyboy's Theory - (Where We Are Going and Why It Smells the Way It Does)

From Jitterbug Perfume
Tom Robbins

To put it simply, humankind is about to enter the floral stage of its evolutionary development. On the mythological level, which is to say, on the psychic/symbolic level (no less real than the physical level), this event is signaled by the death of Pan.

Pan, of course, represents animal consciousness. Pan embodies mammalian consciousness, although there are aspects of reptilian consciousness in his personality, as well. Reptilian consciousness did not disappear when our brains entered their mammalian stage. Mammalian consciousness was simply laid over the top of reptilian consciousness, and in many unenlightened, underevolved, underdeveloped, individuals the mammalian layer was thin and porous, and much reptile energy has continued to seep through.

When our remote ancestors crawled out of the sea, they no doubt had the minds of fish. Smarter, more adventurous and curious than their fellows who remained underwater, but fish-minded, nonetheless. On the long swampy road to a primate configuration, however, we developed a reptile mind. After all, in those tens of millions of years, reptile energy dominated the planet. It culminated in the dinosaurs.

As Marcel LeFever suggested in his address to the perfumers' convention, reptile consciousness is cold, aggressive, selfpreserving, angry, greedy, and paranoid.
Paul McLean was the first neurophysicist to point out that we still carry a reptilian brain, functional and intact, around in our skulls today. The reptile brain is not an abstract concept, it is anatomically real. It has been carpeted over by the cerebrum, but it is there, deep within the forebrain, and consists of the limbic lobe, the hypothalamus, and, perhaps, other organs of the diencephalon. When we are in a colt sweat, a blind rage, or simply feeling smugly dispassionate, we may be sure that, for the moment, our reptile brain is in control of our consciousness.

As the Age of Reptiles was drawing to a close, the first flowers and mammals appeared. Marcel LeFever believes that the flowers actually eliminated the great reptiles. Mammals also may have contributed to their egress (not "exit") because for many early mammals there was nothing quite like a couple of dinosaur eggs for breakfast.

At any rate, our ancestors had by then evolved brains that were both mammalian and floral in their formation. For reasons of its own, evolution allowed mammalian energy to hold sway, and the recently developed human midbrain or mesencephalon, which had folded over the old diencephalon, could be accurately labelled a mammal brain.

Characteristics of mammal consciousness are warmth, generosity, loyalty, love (romantic, platonic, and familial), joy, grief, humor, pride, competition, intellectual curiosity, and appreciation of art and music.

In late mammalian times, we evolved a third brain. This was the telencephalon, whose principal part was the neocortex, a dense rind of nerve fibers about an eighth of an inch thick that was simply molded over top of the existing mammal brain. Brain researchers are puzzled by the neocortex. What: is its function? Why did it develop in the first place?

LeFever has postulated that the neocortex is an expanded memory bank, and it certainly possesses that capability. Robert Bly thinks that it is connected somehow to light. If the reptile brain equates with cold and the mammal brain with warmth, then the neocortex equates with light. BIy's hunch makes a lot of sense because the third brain is a floral brain and flowers extract energy from light.

Even prior to the mysterious appearance of the neocortex, our brains had strong floral characterisffcs. The whole brain is described in science as a bulb. The neurons of which it -is composed have dendrites: roots and branches. The cerebellum consists of a large mass of closely packed folia, which are bundles of nerve cells described in the literature as leaflike. Not only do the individual neurons closely resemble plants or flowers, the brain itself looks like a botanical specimen. It has a stem, and a crown that unfolds, in embryonic growth, much in the manner of a petaled rose.

In the telencephalon, the new brain, the floral similarity increases. Its nerve fibers divide indefinitely, like the branches of a tree. This process is called, appropriately, arborization. In the proliferation of those twiggy fibers, tiny deposits of neuromelanin are cast off like seeds. The neuromelanin seeds apparently are the major organizing molecules in the brain. They link up with glial cells to regulate the firing of nerve cells. When we think, when we originate creative ideas, a literal blossoming is taking place. A brain entertaining insights is physically similar, say, to a jasmine bush blooming. It's smaller, and faster, that's all.

Moreover, neuromelanin absorbs light and has the capacity to convert light into other forms of energy. So Bly was correct. The neocortex is light-sensitive and can, itself, be lit up by higher forms of mental activity, such as meditation or chanting. The ancients were not being metaphoric when they referred to "illumination."

With the emergence of the neocortex, the floral properties of the brain, which had, for millions of years, been biding their time, waiting their turn, began to make their move, the gradual move toward a dominant floral consciousness.

When life was a constant struggle between predators, a minute-by-minute battle for survival, reptile consciousness was necessary. When there were seas to be sailed, wild continents to be explored, harsh territory to be settled, agriculture to be mastered, mine shafts to be sunk, civilization to be founded, mammal consciousness was necessary. In its social and familial aspects, it is still necessary, but no longer must it dominate.

The physical frontiers have been conquered. The Industrial Revolution has shot its steely wad. In our age of high technology, the rough and tough manifestations of mammalian sensibility are no longer a help but a hindrance. (And the vestiges of reptilian sensibility, with its emphasis on territory and defense, are dangerous to an insane degree.) We require a less physically aggressive, less rugged human being now. We need a more relaxed, contemplative, gentle, flexible kind of person, for only he or she can survive (and expedite) this very new system that is upon us. Only he or she can participate in the next evolutionary phase. It has definite spiritual overtones, this floral phase of consciousness.

The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the timeless time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

In a hundred different ways, we have mastered the art of space. We know a great deal about space. Yet we know pitifully little about time. It seems that only in the mystic state do we master it. The "smell brain", the memory area of the brain activated by the olfactory nerve, and the "light brain, "the neocortex," are the keys to the mystic state. With immediacy and intensity, smell activates memory, allowing our minds to travel freely in time. The most profound mystical states are ones in which normal mental activity seems suspended in light. In mystic illumination, as at the speed of light, time ceases to exist.

Flowers do not see, hear, taste, or touch, but they react to light in a crucial manner, and they direct their lives and their environment through an orchestration of aroma.

With an increased floral consciousness, humans will begin to make full use of their "light brain" and to make more refined and sophisticated use of their "smell brain." The two are portentously linked. In fact, they overlap to such an extent that they may be considered inseparable.

We live now in an information technology. Flowers have always lived in an information technology. Flowers gather information all day. At night, they process it. This is called photosynthesis.

As our neocortex comes into full use, we, too, will practice a kind of photosynthesis. As a matter of fact, we already do, but compared to the flowers, our kind is primitive and limited.

For one thing, information gathered from daily newspapers, soap operas, sales conferences, and coffee klatches is inferior to information gathered from sunlight. (Since all matter is condensed light, light is the source, the cause of life. Therefore, light is divine. The flowers have a direct line to God that an evangelist would kill for.)

Either because our data is insufficient or because our processing equipment is not fully on line, our own nocturnal processing is part-time work. The information our conscious minds receive during waking hours is processed by our unconscious during so-called "deep sleep." We are in deep sleep only two or three hours a night. For the rest of our sleeping session, the unconscious mind is off duty. It gets bored. It craves recreation. So it plays with the material at hand. In a sense, it plays with itself. It scrambles memories, juggles images, rearranges data, invents scary or titillating stories. This is what we call "dreaming." Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy. In the future, when we become more efficient at gathering quality information and when floral consciousness becomes dominant, we will probably sleep longer hours and dream hardly at all.

Pan, traditionally, presides over dreams, especially the erotic dream and the nightmare. A decline in dreaming will be further evidence of Pan's demise.

Returning to information efficiency, science has learned recently that trees communicate with each other. A tree attacked by insects, for example, will transmit that news to another tree a hundred yards away so that the second tree can commence manufacturing a chemical that will repel that particular variety of bug. Reports from the infested tree allow other trees to protect themselves. The information likely is broadcast in the form of aroma. This would mean that plants collect odors as well as emit them. The rose may be in an olfactory relationship with the lilac. Another possibility is that between the trees a kind of telepathy is involved. There is also the possibility that all of what we call mental telepathy is olfactory. We don't read another's thoughts, we smell them.

We know that schizophrenics can smell antagonism, distrust desire, etc., on the part of their doctors, visitors, or fellow patients, no matter how well it might be visually or vocally concealed. The human olfactory nerve may be small compared to a rabbit's, but it's our largest cranial receptor, nevertheless. Who can guess what "invisible" odors it might detect?

As floral consciousness matures, telepathy will no doubt become a common medium of communication.

With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation.

With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate.

With floral consciousness, well have empathetic telepathy.

A floral consciousness and a data-based, soft technology are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and pacifist internationalism are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and an easy, colorful sensuality are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers are more openly sexual than animals. The Tantric concept of converting sensual energy to spiritual energy is a floral ploy.) A floral consciousnes and an extraterrestrial exploration program are ideally suited for one another. (Earthlings are blown aloft in silver pods to seed distant planets.) A floral consciousness and an immortal society are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers have superior powers of renewal, and the longevity of trees is celebrated. The floral brain is the organ of eternity.)

Lest we fancy that we shall endlessly and effortlessly be a the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, let us bear in mind that reptilian and mammalian energies are still verbal much with us. Externally and internally.

Obviously, there are powerful reptilian forces in the Pentagon and the Kremlin; and in the pulpits of churches, mosques and synagogues, where deathist dogmas of judgment, punishment, self-denial, martyrdom, and afterlife supremacy are preached. But there are also reptilian forces within each individual.

Myth is neither fiction nor history. Myths are acted out in our own psyches, and they are repetitive and ongoing.

Beowulf, Siegfried, and the other dragon slayers are aspects of our own unconscious minds. The significance of their heroics should be apparent. We dispatched them with their symbolic swords and lances to slay reptile consciousness. The reptile brain is the dragon within us.

When, in evolutionary process, it became time to subdue mammalian consciousness, a less violent tactic was called for. Instead of Beowulf with his sword and bow, we manifested Jesus Christ with his message and example. Jesus Christ, whose commandment "Love thy enemy" has proven to be too strong a floral medicine for reptilian types to swallow. Jesus Christ, who continues to point out to job-obsessed mammalians that the lilies of the field have never punched time clocks.)

At the birth of Christ, the cry resounded through the ancient world, "Great Pan is dead." The animal mind was about to be subdued. Christ's mission was to prepare the way for floral consciousness.

In the East, Buddha performs an identical function.

It should be emphasized that neither Christ nor Buddha harbored the slightest antipathy toward Pan. They were merely fulfilling their mytho-evolutionary roles.

Christ and Buddha came into our psyches not to deliver us from evil but to deliver us from mammal consciousness. The good versus evil plot has always been bogus. The drama unfolding in the universe in our psyches is not good against evil but new against old, or, more precisely, destined against obsolete.

Just as the grand old dragon of our reptilian past had to be pierced by the hero's sword to make way for Pan and his randy minions, so Pan himself has had to be rendered weak and ineffectual has had to be shoved into the background of our ongoing psychic progression.

Because Pan is closer to our hearts and our genitals, we shall miss him more than we shall miss the dragon. We shall miss his pipes that drew us, trembling, into the dance of lust and confusion. We shall miss his pranksterish overturning of decorum; the way he caused the blood to heat, the cows to bawl, and the wine to flow. Most of all, perhaps, we shall miss the way he mocked us, with his leer and laughter, when we took our blaze of mammal intellect too seriously. But the old playfellow has to go. We've known for two thousand years that Pan must go. There is little place for Pan's great stink amidst the perfumed illumination of the flowers.

Just recently, a chap turned up in New Orleans who may have been the prototype of the floral man. A Jamaican, they say, named Bingo Pajama, he sang songs, dealt in bouquets, laughed a lot, defied convention, and contributed to the production of a wonderful new scent. In some ways, he resembled Pan. Yet, Bingo Pajama smelled good. He smelled sweet. His floral brain was so active that it produced a sort of neocortical honey. It actually attracted bees.

When Western artists wished to demonstrate that a person was holy, they painted a ring of light around the divine one's head. Eastern artists painted a more diffused aura. The message was the same. The aura or the halo signified that the light was on in the subject's brain. The neocortex was fully operative. There is, however, a second interpretation of the halo. It can be read as a symbolized, highly stylized swarm of bees.

Crestview IGA

Love Bomb

(excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)

I feel closer to you when I imagine that all of us are collaborating to fight monumental dangers. The telepathic links among us heat up when our emotions register the possibility that a global cataclysm could wipe us out.

That's why I think of the nuclear bomb as a gift. It's a terrible and sacred taboo that mobilizes our love for each other better than any other symbol.

It's the superhuman profanity on which all life depends and against which all values must be tested. Shadowing every one of our personal actions, the bomb is the fascinating blasphemy that won't stop ranting unless we're all very, very good.

In the quiet abyss of our imaginations, we unconsciously worship it, believing in its extravagant potency as if it were a god. It is the most spiritual, most supernatural material object in the world, a fetish that has the power to literally change all life on earth instantly and forever. We agree to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its apparition above all other apparitions. No other spectacle inspires more perverse attraction.

And yet it's secret. How few of us have ever stood next to the magic body of a hydrogen bomb in a missile silo or laboratory -- breathed in its smell, touched it, communed with its actual life. Its presence among us is rumor and mystery, like flying saucers and the afterlife. We hear stories.

At night our dreams turn the bomb into the philosopher's stone, the pearl of great price, the doppelganger of the messiah, the violent ecstasy of religious conversion. Our blood is alive to its alchemy, alert to its offer of the blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We recognize the bomb as our impossible teacher because it harbors a dangerous light that seems to mimic the sun.

It's ours. We made it. We imagined it into existence so we could remember that we are all one body. When I fantasize the bomb vaporizing me into its pure primeval heat and radiation, I remember that you and I are made of the same stuff. The bomb frees us to imagine that we all live and die together, that we are all born out of Adam, the indivisible hermaphrodite god of our species. And we can return now because we never left.

We need the bomb. We need the bomb because only the tease of the biggest, most original sin can heal us. The bomb is a blind, a fake, a trick memory we're sending ourselves from the future that shocks us better than all the abstract devils.

Let's call the bomb a love that's too big for us to understand yet. Let's say it's the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that wants to cure us so it doesn't have to kill us. Let's say it's the last judgment that promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means.

We have genetic potentials and divine powers so undreamed of that they will feel like magic when they finally bloom. But they may remain partially dormant in us until we're terrified not just of our individual deaths but also of the extinction of the human archetype.

+

Bless the fear. Praise the danger. O God of Good and Evil Light, let the ugly power fascinate us all now. Let it fix our dread so precisely that we become one ferocious, potently concentrated magician, a single guerrilla mediator casting a spell to bind the great Satan bomb. There will be no nuclear war.

Grace Emerges in the Ebb and Flow, Not Just the Flow

Pronoia doesn't promise uninterrupted progress forever. It's not a slick commercial for a perfect summer day that never ends.

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow.

The waning reveals a different kind of blessing than the waxing.

But whether it's our time to ferment in the valley of shadows or rise up singing in the sun-splashed meadow, fresh power to transform ourselves is always on the way.

Our suffering won't last, nor will our triumph.

Without fail, life will deliver the creative energy we need to change into the new thing we must become.

(excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of 
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)

The Seeker

A poem by Rilke in his Book of Hours (translated by Robert Bly):

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.

Rob's permutation:

I am circling around love, around the throbbing hum,

and I have been circling for thousands of days,

and I still don't know if I am a wounded saint,

or a rainy dawn, or a creation story.

One Vision

Day and night, no difference.

The sun is the moon: an amalgam.

Their gold and silver melt together.

This is the season when

the dead branch and the green branch

are the same branch.

Nightmares fill with light like a holiday.

Humans and angels speak one language.

The elusive ones finally meet.

Good and evil, dead and alive,

everything blooms

from one natural stem.

You know this already, I'll stop.

Any direction you turn

it's one vision.

-Rumi

as translated and rendered by Coleman Barks and David Ulansey

Pronoia's Villains

According to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Judas was actually a more exalted hero than Jesus. He 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 done. Jesus suffered, true, but enjoyed glory and adoration as a result.

Let's apply this way of thinking to the task of understanding the role that seemingly bad people play in pronoia.

Interesting narratives play an essential role in the universal conspiracy to give us exactly what we need. All of us crave drama. We love to be beguiled by twists of fate that unfold the stories of our lives 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 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 how crucial they've been in 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 its full term. Just as a child isn't ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth 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.

Smith Family Crest

Toute en bon heure

The Invitation is an Honor

Rob Brezsny's Thinking...

Hypotheses: 1. If everything seems to be under control, you're probably not moving fast enough. 2. If you're not pretty much always half-confused, most likely you're not thinking deeply enough. 3. If you're not feeling forever amazed, maybe you're not seeing wildly enough. 4. The truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and outrageously abundant.

Tom Robbins

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much, 
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, 
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends,
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, 
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; 
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  ~This is to have succeeded!"

Gazing Into the Abyss of Happiness

excerpted from PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia


More and more creative people find they do their best work when they're feeling healthy and secure. We know writers who no longer need to be drunk or in agony in order to shed the numbness of their daily routine and tap into the full powers of their imagination. We have filmmaker friends whose best work flows not from the depths of alienated self-doubt but rather from the heights of well-earned bliss. Singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey is the patron saint of this new breed. "When I'm contented, I'm more open to receiving a lot of inspiration," she has testified. "I'm most creative when I feel safe and happy."



At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we've retired the archetype of the tormented genius. We have zero attraction to books and movies and songs by depressed jerks whose work is celebrated but whose lives are a mess. Stories about supposedly interesting creeps don't rouse our perverse fascination because we've broken our addiction to perverse fascination. When hearing about illustrious creators who brag that they feel most stimulated when they're angry or miserable, we unleash the Official Beauty and Truth Lab Histrionic Yawn.



Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don't view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it's a rare commodity attainable only through dumb luck. "One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness," said novelist Willa Cather. "One only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere."



There is another obstacle to overthrowing the status quo. Oppressively nice, indiscriminately optimistic, sentimental comfort-hoarders give happiness a bad name. They seem to justify Flaubert's mean-spirited observation that "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."



Here's a third blotch on the reputation of happiness: that it's mostly an absence of pain. In  The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche frames the issue well: "Would you prefer the happiness of scratching a mosquito bite over the happiness of not having a mosquito bite in the first place?"



It's possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that does not paralyze the will or sap ambition. For the first clue about how to proceed, we turn to Buddhist researchers Rick Foster and Greg Hicks.



In their book  How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People, they reveal that the number one trait of happy people is a serious determination to be happy. Bliss is a habit you can cultivate, in other words, not an accident that you stumble upon by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere.



For another clue about how to conjure up a kind of happiness that does not anesthetize the soul, we call on Kenneth Koch. Here's what he wrote about Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse: "So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss. But Perse had the courage to look into happiness."

Daily Inspirations from don Miguel Ruiz

Ok, so it's a few days worth, but there are good things to consider here...who couldn't use a little inspiration?

You are an angel, and your life is your message. You can be a messenger of lies, fear, and destruction; or a messenger of truth, love, and creation. But you cannot deliver lies and truth at the same time.

The best moments of your life are when you are being your authentic self. When you are in your creation and doing what you love to do, you become what you really are again. You are not thinking in that moment; you are expressing. Your emotions are coming out, and you feel great.

Transform your life with self-love. From now on, let every action, every reaction, every thought, and every emotion be based on love. Increase your self-love until the entire dream of your life is transformed from fear and drama to love and joy.

Love and accept yourself just the way you are. You are what you are; you don't need to pretend to be something else. When you pretend to be what you are not, you are always going to fail.

The word is pure magic. The power of our word comes directly from God, and faith is the force that directs this power. Everything in our virtual reality is created with the word. We use the word for the creation of our story, to make sense out of everything we experience.

Love others without conditions. When you love without conditions, you the human, and you the God, align with the Spirit of Life moving through you. Your life becomes the expression of the beauty of the expression of the beauty of the Spirit, and your dream becomes a masterpiece of art.

You are only responsible for your half of a relationship. There are two halves in every relationship, but you are only responsible for your half of the relationship; it is not up to you to control the other half. Respect the other half and there is always going to be peace in that relationship.

To master love, you have to practice love. The art of relationship is a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice. To master a relationship is, therefore, about action; it is not about attaining knowledge.

Respect each others dream. In a relationship, there are two dreamers with two different dreams. You need to accept the differences that exist between two dreamers; you need to respect each other's dream.

Cultivate wisdom. You don't need to accumulate knowledge to become wise; anyone can become wise. When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, and you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head.

Create the perfect relationship between you and your body. Treat your body with all your love, honor, gratitude, and respect. When you make it your goal to adore your own body and accept yourself completely, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone else you are with.

Love is the medicine that accelerates healing. Love yourself, love your neighbor, love your enemies, but begin with self-love. You cannot love others until you love yourself. You cannot share what you do not have. If you do not love yourself, you cannot love anyone else either.

You are an artist of the spirit. Find yourself and express yourself in your own particular way. Express your love openly. Life is nothing but a dream, and if you create your life with love, your dream becomes a masterpiece of art.

Accept your own divinity. Everything is a manifestation of God. When you know that the power that is Life is inside you, you accept your own divinity, and yet you are humble because you see the same divinity in everyone else.

Love is unconditional. In love, there are no conditions; you love for no reason, with no justification. You are free to be what you are, and you allow others to be what they are.

Love is kind and just. When you are in love, a smile is always on your face. You feel good about yourself and because you are happy, you are kind. Love is also just; when you make a mistake, you pay only once for that mistake.

Love is compassionate and respectful. Love is compassionate and respectful, but doesn't feel sorry for anyone. If someone falls, compassion helps you to say, "Stand up. You can do it." Compassion comes from respect, and is the result of knowing that others are strong enough and intelligent enough to make their own choices.

Perceive with the eyes of love. If you have the eyes of love, you see wherever you go. The trees are made with love. The animals are made with love. Everything is made with love. When you perceive with the eyes of love, you see God everywhere.

Love is all around you. You search for love outside yourself when love is all around you. Love is everywhere, but you need to have the eyes to see.

Listen to the silent voice of your integrity. When the voice of knowledge becomes the voice of integrity, your emotional body becomes the way it was when you were a child. You return to the truth, to your own common sense. You return to love, and you live in happiness again.

We are born with silent knowledge. When we are born, our body knows what it is, and it knows what to do. We can feel silent knowledge every time we breathe.

I enjoy the presence of myself. I find myself smiling and having fun, even when I am just by myself. The more I enjoy myself, the more I enjoy my life, and the more I enjoy the presence of everyone around me.

Epilogue ~ Tree of Dreams

There is magic in this world if you want the world to be magical.  If you want life to be special, it will be.  No one wants to be bored or consumed by ordinary drudgery.  But what happens, all too often, is that when magic is presented to us, we don't believe it because we don't trust ourselves.  We don't realize what can really be accomplished.  We don't realize that if we wish to, we can take other forms.  We can sit in the presence of the great masters, angles, or ancient seers of wisdom and find peace and wisdom, but it takes many small deaths, the giving away of old limitations, to get there.

I want you to know that there is much, much more to your life than what you think is there.  It doesn't matter what you believe in, which God, which Life, which Creator, which Messiah.  It doesn't matter.  What matters is your ability to love.  What matters is your dialogue with the divine and how you manifest that in life for the simple joy of it, for the healing of it, and for the inspiration of beauty that it provides for all those around you.

Getting Closer to Waking Up

(Excerpted from the revised and expanded edition ofPronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. To hear a podcast version of this text, go here.)

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.

OBJECTIVE OF PRONOIA: To explore the secrets of becoming a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss.

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 your birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.

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.

GUIDING QUESTION: "The secret of life," said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, "is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do." What is that task for you?

UNDIGNIFIED MEDITATIONS TO KEEP YOU HONEST: Brag about what you can't do and don't have. Confess profound secrets to people who aren't particularly interested. Pray for the success of your enemies while you're making love. Change your name every day for a thousand days.

MYTHIC ROLE MODELS: Prometheus and Pronoia. In Greek mythology, Pronoia was the consort of Prometheus, the divine rebel who pilfered a glowing coal from his fellow gods so that he could slip the gift of fire to humans.

TOP-SECRET ALLIES: Sacred janitors, benevolent pranksters, apathy debunkers, lyrical logicians, ethical outlaws, aspiring masters of curiosity, homeless millionaires, humble megalomaniacs, hedonistic midwives, lunatic saints, sly optimists, mystical scientists, dissident bodhisattvas, macho feminists, and socialist libertarians who possess inside information about the big bang.

DAILY PRACTICE: Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart -- even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections.

POSSIBLE REWARDS: You will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time -- not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather: exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself; crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths; outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with irrepressible empathy; generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you; and a lust for justice that's leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.

USAGE NOTE: We employ the adjectival form "pronoiac" rather than "pronoid." That way, it rhymes with "aphrodisiac" and resonates with "paradisiacal" instead of being conditioned by "paranoid."

DISCLAIMER: Material in this book may be too intense and controversial for some readers. It contains graphic scenes of peace, love, joy, passion, reverence, splendor, and understanding. You will not find any references to harsh, buzzing fluorescent lights in a cheap hotel room where a heroin dealer plots to get revenge against the authorities at his old high school by releasing sarin gas into the teachers' lounge. There are no reports of Nazi skinheads obsessed with re-creating the 14th-century Tartars' war strategy of catapulting plague-ridden corpses into an enemy's citadel.

Completely absent from these pages are any stories about a psychotic CEO of a Fortune 500 company who has intentionally disfigured his face to help him elude the CIA, which wants to arrest him for the treasonous sale of his company's nanotech weapons technology to the Chinese. 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.