(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.
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
Here's what singer-songwriter Jason Mraz has said about me and my book PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA:
"Meet Rob Brezsny. He writes everybody's favorite astrology column, Free Will Astrology. I dig him for his powerful yet playful insights, his poetry and his humor. I recently got turned onto his book, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia. Believing not that the world is out to get you, but rather, the world is there to GIVE you, takes you to a powerful place.
"Rob's website alone can give you a lift just by smelling it. Today I salute him for his dedication to inspiration."
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Go to Youtube to see Mraz talk about the concept of pronoia during one of his live shows.
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Jason Mraz is one of the most famous agents of pronoia. More than any other celebrity I know of, he's out there feeding the conspiracy to shower blessings on all of creation. In his blog, he encourages readers to view the world as a fount of glory; he urges them to be sources of goodness and gratitude.
I'm glad to see that his song "I'm Yours" is officially the longest running hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
What does it mean when an intelligent optimist like Mraz has such mainstream popularity? Here's what I suspect: The media may relentlessly wallow in news about what's wrong and bad and rotting, but many people are resisting that hypnotic hum as they wake up to the glorious other side of the story.
(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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