Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia | The Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

Evil is boring. Cynicism is stupid. Despair is lazy. The truth is that the universe is inherently friendly. Life is a sublime game created for our amusement and illumination, and it always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

I've been reading Pronoia for a few days now because I'm going to meet author and astrologer Rob Brezsny this Sunday to begin promoting his reworked and expanded edition of the book. He is going to start paying me to do this, so I figured I owed it to the man to read the thing first. This is an honest endorsement. I am not getting paid yet.

This is a book for dreamers, schemers, dancers, and revelers of all kind. Bookworms who can not contain your excitement, here is someone who gets you. You will find Primordial Gossip, Dionysian Manifestos, Guerilla Oracles, Secrets, Sacred Advertisements, calls to arms, and exercises, including: Meditate naked under a waterfall | Relive the last day of your childhood | Sip the tears of someone you love | Rebel against your horoscope | Create a luxurious orphanage in Romania | Pick blackberries in the rain | Feel sorry for a devious lawyer | See how far you can spit a mouthfull of beer | Give yourself another chance | Dream of stealing the peaches of immortality from a dragon guarding PlatoPlato's cave | Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse | Sing the first song you ever heard.

SAMPLE EXERCISE: Burn, Baby, Burn

Try this meditation: Imagine that you are both the wood and the fire that consumes the wood. When you focus your awareness on the part of you that is the wood, you hurt; it's painful to feel your sense of solidity disintegrating. But as you shift your attention to the part of you that is fire, you exult in the wild joy of liberation and power. | It may be tempting to visualize yourself more as the fire than the wood. But if you'd like to understand pronoia in its fullness, you've got to be both wood and fire simultaneously.

Brezsny's buoyant perspective is not rooted in denial. He builds a case for a cagey optimism that does not require a repression of difficulty but rather seeks a vigorous engagement with it.

He reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's spirit in Gay Science. Pronoia could be read as an explanation to those who do not understand Nietzsche when he asks them to stand on their heads, who want to know more when he says "Every day without dancing is a day wasted." I agree with this whole-heartedly. But it's hard to dance every day. It's hard to do anything every day, whether that's blogging or going to class or work or even doing your favorite drug, if you like drugs, or sleeping with the same person or sleeping at the same time, et cetera into infinity. But this book has almost as many pages as there are days in the year, and most of them have a wealth of lines that I know would benefit me to meditate on for far longer than a mere day.

He also reminds me of Hakim Bey, who urges us to "Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence."

I TOOK THAT QUOTATION DIRECTLY FROM HIS WEBSITE BECAUSE HE ENCOURAGES ME TO. All of his works can be found here.

SCENARIO: YOU HAVE AN ABUNDANCE OF LIFE. WHAT DO YOU DO?

Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.

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.

DAILY PRACTICE

Push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to 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.

THINK ABOUT THIS

What would it be like to fight tenderly for beauty and truth and love without despising those who spread ugliness and lies and division?

Everything I've quoted has been from the first 30 pages of a 300 page text. I am intimidated by the vast amount of wisdom Brezsny has managed to make fun, interactive, addictive. This is the type of text i want in classrooms. Pronoia is the answer to our small-minded, violence-prone selves for which we so quietly and desperately and secretly wish, and it should be required reading for every citizen of the postmodern barbarism we could leave behind us if we just learned to think differently.

I'd like to remark that Allvoices and the emergence of widespread citizen journalism is an amazing opportunity for the well-being of humans everywhere. From Pronoia:

I invite you to share with us the interesting good news you come across in your travels. Not sentimental tales of generic hope; not "Chicken Soup for the Soul;" not life imitating the faux Hollywood art of contrived happy endings; but rather crafty, enigmatic, lyrical eruptions of the sublime; unpredictable outbreaks of soul that pass Emily DickinsonEmily Dickinson's test for poetry: She said she always knew when she was reading the real thing because it made her feel like the top of her head was about to come off.

Feel free, too, to take up the cause of zoom and boom as you resist the practitioners of doom and gloom in your own sphere. Demand equal time for news about integrity and joy and beauty and pleasure and renewal and harmony and love. In your personal life, be alert to stories that tend to provide evidence for the fact that all of creation is conspiring to give us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

P.S. Part of our task is to hunt down and identify the interesting good news that's going on now. But we've also been charged with the job of creating the good news that's coming.

I am thrilled to have found this book and even more excited that I get to meet Rob and thank him in person for his positive energy and passion 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.

PRAISE

"I have seen the future of American literature and its name is Rob Brezsny."
—Tom Robbins, author of Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, and many more

""This wild, wise, and subversive book is a must read for those who want to live a more imaginative and free life . . . Rob Brezsny is a Culture Hero."
—Utne Reader

"I dig Rob Brezsny for his powerful yet playful insights, his poetry, and his humor . . . I salute him for his dedication to inspiration."
—Jason Mraz, singer-songwriter

"Brezsny holds his own place next to other cultural shamans such as Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Reverend Ivan Stang, William S. Burroughs, and Ken KeseyKen Kesey."
—PopMatters

"The verbally acrobatic, mystically literate Brezsny lets fly a thousand zingers, each with the feel of having been carved with poetic effort to express a hard reality instead of a platitude."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Brilliant! Absorbing! Wildly useful! Rob Brezsny gets my nomination for best prophet in a starring role. He’s a script doctor for the soul."
—Marisa TomeiMarisa Tomei, actress

"With Pronoia, renegade wizard Rob Brezsny presents an irreverent manifesto, mixing activism and optimism. It reads like the I Ching on Ecstasy and is as insightful and puzzling as a Zen koan."
—Body + Soul