''Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia:

How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings''
- by Rob Brezsny

To buy his book from which several pieces are excerpted here, go to:
Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Rob's Website: http://www.freewillastrology.com/beauty/

CRITIC'S CORNER
“Rob Brezsny, the renegade wizard behind the syndicated ‘Free Will Astrology’ column, has dedicated himself to putting the ‘pro’ back into ‘protest.’ In his new book, PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA, he presents his own irreverent manifesto, mixing activism and optimism. It reads like the I Ching on Ecstasy and is as insightful and puzzling as a Zen koan.”
- Frances Lefkowitz, Body + Soul magazine

"I have seen the future of American literature and its name is Rob Brezsny." - Tom Robbins, author of Still Life with Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, Another Roadside Attraction, and Skinny Legs and All

Book Description
Human beings are selfish, small-minded, violence-prone savages, civilization is a blight on the earth, and the rising tide of chaos ensures that everything's going to fall apart any day now. Right? Wrong, says Rob Brezsny. In Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia, he declares evil is boring, the universe is friendly, and life is a sublime gift created for our amusement and illumination. This buoyant perspective is not rooted in denial. On the contrary, Brezsny builds a case for a "cagey optimism" that does not require a repression of difficulty, but rather, seeks a vigorous engagement with it. The best way to attract the blessings that the world is conspiring to give us, he insists, is to dive into the most challenging mysteries. This witty, inspiring how-to shows how any reader can become "a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender . . . lustfully compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss."

Read excerpts from PRONOIA ...



Bigger, Better, More Interesting Problems

Is there anything more dangerous than getting up in the morning and having nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up? That state can be a threat to your health, because if untreated it incites an unconscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might rouse some excitement.
*

Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It’s as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself—indeed, you make yourself—through the riddles you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.
Conventional wisdom implies that the best problems are those that place you under duress. There’s supposedly no gain without pain. Stress is allegedly an incomparable spur for calling on resources that have been previously unavailable or dormant. Nietzsche’s aphorism, “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” has achieved the status of an ultimate truth.
We half-agree. But it’s clear that stress also accompanies many mediocre problems that have little power to make us smarter. Pain frequently generates no gain. We’re all prone to become habituated, even addicted, to nagging vexations that go on and on without rousing any of our sleeping genius.
There is, furthermore, another class of difficulty—let’s call it the delightful dilemma—that neither feeds on angst nor generates it. On the contrary, it’s fun and invigorating, and usually blooms when you’re feeling a profound sense of being at home in the world. The problem of writing my book is a good example. I’ve had a good time handling the perplexing challenges with which it has confronted me.
Imagine a life in which at least half of your quandaries match this profile. Act as if you’re most likely to attract useful problems when joy is your predominant state of mind. Consider the possibility that being in unsettling circumstances may shrink your capacity to dream up the riddles you need most; that maybe it’s hard to ask the best questions when you’re preoccupied fighting rearguard battles against boring or demeaning annoyances that have plagued you for many moons.
Prediction: As an aspiring lover of pronoia, you will have a growing knack for gravitating toward wilder, wetter, more interesting problems. More and more, you will be drawn to the kind of gain that doesn’t require pain. You’ll be so alive and awake that you’ll cheerfully push yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your personal frontier well before you’re forced to do so by divine kicks in the ass.
*

The definition of “happiness” in the Beauty and Truth Laboratory’s “Outlaw Dictionary of Pronoiac Memes” is “the state of mind that results from cultivating interesting, useful problems.”
*

"The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem for you that you don’t know how to solve.” —William Vollman
*

When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity. There has been no English equivalent until now.
The Beauty and Truth Laboratory has retooled an English term to convey a similar meaning: “kairos.” Originally borrowed from Greek, “kairos” has traditionally meant “time of destiny, critical turning point, propitious moment for decision or action.” In its most precise usage, it refers to a special season that is charged with significance and is outside of normal time; its opposite is the Greek chronos, which refers to the drone of the daily rhythm.
These meanings provide the root of our new definition of the word. As of now, when used in the context of a discussion of pronoia, “kairos” will have the sense of “a good crisis, rich problem, productive difficulty.”
*

“We should feel excited about the problems we confront and our ability to deal with them,” says Robert Anton Wilson. “Solving problems is one of the highest and most sensual of all our brain functions.”

What is the Beauty & Truth Laboratory?
by Rob Brezsny

The Beauty and Truth Laboratory is an ever-expanding web of think tanks and mystery schools devoted to exploring pronoia. Since I launched the prototype in October 2001, 12 other branches have sprung up in basements, barns, and bedrooms all over the world: eight in North America and others in Amsterdam, London, Florence, Italy, and Sydney, Australia.
All of these, including my own in Marin County, California, are similar in spirit to pirate radio stations. They’re not registered, incorporated, or licensed, and Goddess forbid that they should ever become the canonical hubs of a franchise.
That doesn’t mean I eschew power, authority, and wealth. My own branch of the Beauty and Truth Laboratory is stationed in a garage next to the house I rent on the seedy outskirts of suburbia, but I’d have no problem moving to a more expansive location, like say, a conference center on a 100-acre compound in an idyllic place that the original inhabitants of this continent regarded as a power spot. And I’d love it if this book sold a million copies, or if Beauty and Truth Laboratories were as common as 7-Elevens in 10 years.
On the other hand, I’m happy with whatever blessings life conspires to bring me. If it’s to my and your ultimate benefit that this book reaches no more than 10,000 wise guys and riot grrrls, I will celebrate that outcome. And my garage-based laboratory is fine just the way it is, with its sloping floor and row of tiny windows darkened by the exuberant persimmon tree outside. The modesty of its structure is a constant reminder that the most important aspect of my work is building the Beauty and Truth Laboratory within me. As I prod my imagination to nurture ever-more detailed visions of love, compassion, joy, freedom, beauty, and truth, I’m better able to spot and name all those good things in the world around me. I also become more skilled at creating them.

My humble headquarters brings another advantage. It encourages me to regard everywhere I go as a potential extension of the Beauty and Truth Laboratory. My experiments aren’t confined to the hours I spend in the solitude of my ivory tower, but also spill out into the fertile chaos of daily life.
On one epiphanic occasion, an eight-lane highway at rush hour turned into a temporary Beauty and Truth Laboratory. It was just a few days after my return from the Burning Man festival where the dream of the Laboratory had hatched. I was driving on 101, the artery that bisects Marin County.
As I cruised at 65 mph between Larkspur and Corte Madera, a blonde in a Jaguar convertible with the top down passed me on the right. Perhaps distracted by the chat she was enjoying on her cell phone, she suddenly zipped in front of me. After hitting my brakes to avoid rear-ending her, I honked my horn to express my annoyance. In response, she careened back over to the lane she’d been in before cutting me off, then slowed down and waited for me to catch up. I avoided eye contact at first, but finally looked over. Quaking with agitation, she was flashing me a middle-finger salute and a mad face as fierce as a Tibetan demon. Her car was veering closer to mine. Might she actually crash into me on purpose?
I was quaking with agitation myself. My adrenaline surged, threatening to explode to mushroom cloud-proportions. Curses were rising from my gut to throat. At the same time, I resisted it all. I didn’t want to be possessed by stupid rage because of the carelessness of a bad driver. Such a trivial eruption of my fight-or-flight instinct was against my religion.

Then a miracle happened. As if through divine intervention, without any prompting from my will, fond memories of Burning Man surged into my imagination. I was back there squatting on the ancient lake bed with my stack of baby wipes, intimately conversing with the Goddess of the sun. I could hear the thump of music in the distance and feel the desert breeze on my cheeks.
The stabbing rage that had filled my abdomen dissipated. In its place, a whirlpool of warmth spiraled around my heart. It was a luxurious, sensual feeling, almost erotic. Then came a prick like a needle popping a water balloon, followed by a gush of sweet release. A heart orgasm? I was suffused with a sense of well-being. All was right with the world, and I felt a cheerful affection for everything, even the mad woman in the Jaguar.
As urgent as my wrath had been just a few moments before, so now was my tenderness. I felt triumphant. For the first time in my life, I had conquered an adrenaline rush of anger as it was happening. In comparable situations in the past, I had always needed a cooling-off period before I could soften my heart.
It was as if I had succeeded at a difficult game that required all my macho prowess, only the prowess in this case was demonstrated through love instead of strength and cleverness.

I looked over at the crazed monster in the car that was on the verge of sideswiping mine. She was still glaring at me as if transfixed. Her demeanor had not lost any of its obscene savagery. Had she even glanced at the road in front of her recently?
I rolled down my window and leaned my head out. Less than ten feet now separated our faces. She looked as if she were about to leap out of her seat and pounce on me. Just in time, I smiled and blew her three kisses. Then, summoning my ample powers of vocal projection, I boomed out the words, half-singing, “I love you. I have always loved you. And I will love you until the end of time.” I put my hands together in the gesture of prayer, using my knees to steady the steering wheel, and bowed my head in her direction.
I was utterly sincere. There was not a speck of sarcasm or irony in the mix. At that moment, I was a bodhisattva linked directly to the undulating love of the Goddess. I had no doubt that a radiant beam of divine sweetness was emanating from me, bathing the mad woman in a palpable ray of lusty compassion. She had to be feeling it.

There was one more gift I longed to deliver: the talisman I kept on my dashboard. It was a spectacular piece, meticulously constructed by my friend Calley, who was an adept in a Qabalistic mystery school as well as an expert in origami, the Japanese art of paper-folding. She had taken eight one hundred-dollar bills—real legal tender—and folded them into the shape of an eight-pointed star. Golden threads, small rubies, fragments of a meteorite, and the 400 million-year-old fossilized penis of a daddy longlegs were the other essential elements. Everything was mounted on a circular disk of gold, six inches in diameter.
I treasured the piece. Calley had made it for me at a time in my life when I was purging myself of old, ingrained desires that were no longer in harmony with my evolving ideals. The kind of fame that I had coveted in my early years of being a rock musician, for instance, no longer interested me. Nor did my former fascination with having an endless variety of sexual partners. Calley invoked her sophisticated understanding of Qabalistic and astrological principles to design the talisman so that it would supercharge my ability to change my life in accordance with my will.
This was the gift I wanted to bequeath to my former adversary, Jaguar Woman. Her convertible top was down and our cars were nearly touching, so the risk of missing my target was small. Taking my beloved power object in my right hand, I reached out the window and flung it. She swerved away but not out of range. It fell into the front seat of her car.

I returned my gaze to the road ahead, checking to see if the divine guidance that had been pouring through me had extended to keeping my car on track. It had. A few seconds later, I returned my gaze to Jaguar Woman. She was holding up the talisman as she stared at me. Her face had turned innocent and awed, almost reverent, as if she had seen the Ghost of Christmas Future arm-in-arm with a long-lost loved one. I guessed that her demons had withdrawn.
After that her car slowed, quickly falling behind my pace. In my rearview mirror, I observed her making her way to the far right lane. She drove carefully, using her turn signal. She got off at the next exit.
In the midst of my exuberant oneness with all of creation, a tinge of sadness crept in. I mused on how I’d never know if my victory over the angry devil within me would produce any lasting effect on Jaguar Woman. Would she fully appreciate the love I invoked in response to her attack? If nothing else, surely the gift of the talisman would change her life forever, right?
As I sped toward the Golden Gate Bridge, I remembered a quote I’d once heard attributed to basketball coach John Wooden: “You can’t have a perfect day without doing something for someone who’ll never be able to repay you.” I mused on the fact that while this was a relatively selfless approach to giving gifts, it was still imperfect: Maybe the recipient of your largesse couldn’t literally pay you back, but he or she could think wonderful thoughts about you; your ego would benefit. No, a more ultimate expression of generosity, an improvement on Wooden’s formulation, would be to give anonymously to someone who couldn’t repay you.
Which was what I had just done. Rather than bemoaning the fact that I’d never know whether or how Jaguar Woman would benefit from my gift, I realized I should celebrate.

At this point in my impromptu Beauty and Truth Laboratory experiment, I had settled into full meditation mode. Though I was barreling along a crowded freeway at high velocity, my brain was enjoying an expansive perspective made possible by an abundance of alpha waves. I embodied the definition of meditation offered by the Hindu sage Patanjali: “an unbroken flow of knowledge on a particular object.”
My stream of consciousness flowed on to the next clue, advice I’d once heard articulated by the Dalai Lama. He said you should work as hard as you can to fight for justice and reduce suffering—even as you accept with equanimity that all of your efforts may come to absolutely nothing in the end. My translation: Give your best beauty and live your highest truth without expecting any rewards.
My unbroken flow of knowledge glided on to the next thought, this one planted in me by the author Rachel Pollock. “We cannot predict the results of healing, either our own or the world around us,” she said. “We need to act for the sake of a redemption that will be a mystery until it unfolds before us.”
*

I looked around my car for something to write on. At the end of my drive I’d be meeting a potential investor in San Francisco, and I wanted to record the results of my spontaneous Beauty and Truth Laboratory experiment before having to hand myself over to the business part of my brain.
There was only one surface available to take notes on: a piece of junk mail lying on the floor in the backseat. Poorly designed, it had a lot of empty space on one page. I balanced it on my thigh as I recorded the notes that became the basis for what you’ve just read.
A half hour later I was at 16th Street and Portrero in San Francisco, where I scored a parking space in record time. Before getting out to go to my meeting, I sat in my car and composed the last few paragraphs of this report. They read as follows:
First there was the “Baby Wipe Communiqué,” and now there’s the “Blank Space on a Piece of Junk Mail Communiqué.” I prophesy that the future will bring the “Bar Napkin Communiqué,” the “Grocery Bag Communiqué,” the “Mulberry Leaf Torn Off the Tree Next to the Library While I’m Walking by Communiqué,” and many others.
A new tradition is announcing itself. It reveals I’ve got to be ready to conjure up the Beauty and Truth Laboratory at a moment’s notice, whenever a pressing experiment needs to be done—even if it’s in my car, a sports bar, the check-out line at Safeway, or on a stroll downtown.
This is not to say that some future Beauty and Truth Laboratory breakthroughs won’t also unfold on the beach after midnight on the winter solstice or on my meditation pillow after three days of fasting and praying.
But I vow to be vigilant for the possibility that any place and any time may become the holy ground where I can commit radical acts of pronoia or gather revelations that will change my mind every which way about the mysterious, ever-deepening meanings of pronoia. I promise to seize the pregnant pauses, leap into the empty spots, and squeeze through the cracks in the system.

I HAVE A DREAM
by Rob Brezsny

If you’ve ever been to a poetry slam, you know that sensitive lyrics in praise of love and beauty are rare. Far more common are vehement diatribes that curse injustice and hypocrisy.
I’m not putting that stuff down; I’ve been known to unload some dark rants myself. But at this perfect moment, the Beauty and Truth Laboratory is more interested in pragmatic idealism. We’re thirsty for streams of visionary consciousness, fountains of lustrous truth, and floods of feisty hope.
Therefore, we propose that instead of a poetry slam, you participate in our “I Have a Dream” Slam. To get in the mood, read or listen to the speech that Martin Luther King Jr. made at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The text, as well as an MP3 of King giving the speech, is available on the Web.

Here’s an excerpt:

• I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
• I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
• I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
• I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!
• I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor’s lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!
• I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

Maybe King’s plea will inspire you to create your own personal “I Have a Dream” manifesto.
To be part of the “I Have a Dream” Slam, send your offering to
rebelgrail@yahoo.com
or P.O. Box 150628, San Rafael, CA 94915.

Now here’s my “I Have a Dream” speech.

• I have a dream.
• I have a dream that in the New World, there will be a new Bill of Rights. The first amendment will be, “Your daily wage is directly tied to how much beauty and truth and love you provide.”
• I have a dream that in the New World, childbirth will be broadcast in prime time on a major TV network every night.
• I have a dream that the New World will have rapturists, and they’ll vastly outnumber the terrorists. The rapturists will be performance artists with a conscience ... charismatic improvisers who love to spring fun surprises. They’ll commit unexpected interventions and unscheduled spectacles that delight hordes of strangers.
• I have a dream that in the New World, we will add an eleventh commandment to the standard ten: Thou shalt not bore God.
• I have a dream of a week-long annual holiday called the Bacchanalia. Work and business will be suspended so that all adults can explore their ripe mojo with frothy erotic experiments. Tenderly orgiastic marathons will rage unabated. Reverential ecstasy and grateful generosity will rule.
• I have a dream that when anchormen report tragedies on their nightly TV shows, they’ll break down and cry and let their emotions show. No more poker faces.

*
In the New World, you’ll be a fascinating enigma worthy of a best-selling unauthorized biography and I’ll be an inscrutable genius whose every move is packed with symbolic meaning—and vice versa. That will be the law in the New World—far different from the Old World, where schadenfreude is epidemic and your distinctive flair is supposed to make me feel worshipful or diminished.
*

I have a dream that in the New World, the word “asshole” will be a term of endearment rather than abuse. Plutocracy will be a felony. April Fool’s Day will come once a month. There’ll be scientific horoscopes and mystical logic. Every one of us will have at least one imaginary friend. Compassion will be an aphrodisiac.
In the New World, we’ll launch an affirmative action program that ultimately makes most of us celebrities. Buddhist real estate developers will build a chain of sacred shopping centers in the heartland. The CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies will be required by law to enjoy once-a-week sessions with Jungian psychotherapists. Pioneers in artificial intelligence research will develop computers that can talk to God.
In the New World, same-sex marriages will be fully sanctioned, of course. But why stop there? We’ll also legalize wedding bonds among threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, and large groups of people who are in love with each other. I have a dream that we will expand the meaning of love beyond anything our ancestors imagined.
*

In the New World, our children will study singing and dancing and meditation and dream work with as much diligence as they now devote to math and science. They’ll learn to see with their own eyes and think with their own minds and feel with their own hearts, studying those subjects as intently as they do spelling and grammar and social studies. Beginning in seventh grade, they’ll get lessons in the art of creating successful intimate relationships. And we’ll teach them why it’s only fair that for the next 3,000 years we use “her” for the generic singular pronoun instead of “him.”
*

I have a dream that we will take everything we need and give everything we have. We’ll be both selfish altruists and generous braggarts, Llibertarian socialists and capitalist humanitarians. That’ll be the law in the New World—different from the Old World, where you can blindly serve your own interests or devote yourself to the needs of others, but not both.
*

I have a dream that in the New World, Oprah Winfrey will buy up all the Pizza Huts on the planet and convert them into a global network of menstrual huts, where for a few days each month, every one of us, men and women alike, can resign from the crazy-making 9–5—drop out and slow down, break trance and dive down into eternal time.
We will sleep eight and a half hours every night and practice our lucid dreams ... sing love songs from the future while soaking in long, hot baths ... feast on chocolate as we converse with the little voices in our heads ... research the difference between stupid suffering and wise suffering until we finally get it right . . . wear magic underwear made from eagle feathers, spider webs, and 100-year-old moss . . . and conjure up bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.
*

In the New World, you’ll kick your own ass and I’ll wash my own brain. I’ll be my own parents and you’ll be your own wife. And vice versa. That’ll be normal in the New World—different from the Old World, where everyone except me is to blame for my ignorance and you call on everyone except yourself to give you what you need.
I’ll push my own buttons and right my own wrongs. You’ll wake yourself up and sing your own songs.
*

I’m the president now . . . and so are you. I am the Supreme Commander of the United Snakes of the Blooming HaHa . . . and so are you. And what we proclaim is that in the New World, we will love our neighbors as ourselves, even if our neighbors are jerks. We will never divide the world into us against them. We will search for the divine spark even in the people we most despise, and we will never dehumanize anyone, even those who dehumanize us.
I have a dream that sooner or later every one of us will become a well-rounded, highly skilled, incredibly rich master of rowdy bliss—with lots of leisure time and an orgiastic feminist conscience.

Welcome Home

Let me remind you who you really are: You’re an immortal freedom fighter in service to divine love. You have temporarily taken on the form of a human being, suffering amnesia about your true origins, in order to liberate all sentient creatures from suffering and help them claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright. You will accept nothing less than the miracle of bringing heaven all the way down to earth.
Your task may look impossible. Ignorance and inertia, partially camouflaged as time-honored morality, seem to surround you. Pessimism is enshrined as a hallmark of worldliness. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Stories about treachery and degradation provoke a visceral thrill in millions of people who think of themselves as reasonable and smart. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are readily believed.
To grapple against these odds, you have to be both a wrathful insurrectionary and an exuberant lover of life. You’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as you resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by very self-important people who act as if they know what they’re doing. You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

What can we do to help each other in this work?
First, we can create safe houses to shelter everyone who’s devoted to the slow-motion awakening. These sanctuaries might take the form of temporary autonomous zones like festivals and parties and workshops, where we can ritually potentiate the evolving mysteries of pronoia. Or they might be more enduring autonomous zones like homes and cafes and businesses where we can get regular practice in freeing ourselves from the slavery of hatred in all of its many guises.
What else can we do to help each other? We can conspire together to carry out the agenda that futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard names: to hospice what’s dying and midwife what’s being born. We need the trigger of each other’s rebel glee as we kill off every reflex within us that resonates in harmony with the putrefaction. We need each other’s dauntless cunning as we goad and foment the blooming life forces within us that thrive on the New World’s incandescent questions.
Here’s a third way we can collaborate: We can inspire each other to perpetrate healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom . . . .
What? Huh? What do tricks and mischief and jokes have to do with our quest? Isn’t America in a permanent state of war? Isn’t it the most militarized empire in the history of the world? Hasn’t the government’s paranoia about terrorism decimated our civil liberties? Isn’t it our duty to grow more serious and weighty than ever before?
I say it’s the perfect moment to take everything less seriously and less personally and less literally.

Permanent war and the loss of civil liberties are immediate dangers. But there is an even bigger long-term threat to the fate of the earth, of which the others are but symptoms: the genocide of the imagination.
Earlier I cited pop nihilist storytellers as vanguard perpetrators of the genocide of the imagination. But there are other culprits as well: the fundamentalists. I’m not referring to just the usual suspects—the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism.
Scientists can be fundamentalists. So can liberals and capitalists, atheists and hedonists, patriots and anarchists, hippies and goths, you and me. Those who champion the ideology of materialism can be the most fanatical fundamentalists of all. And the journalists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, poets, and other artists who relentlessly generate rotten visions of the human condition are often pop nihilist fundamentalists.
Every fundamentalist divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and like him and help him, and those who don’t. There is only one right way to interpret the world—according to the ideas the fundamentalist believes to be true—and a million wrong ways.
The fundamental attitude of all fundamentalists is to take everything way too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. The untrammeled imagination is taboo. Correct belief is the only virtue. Every fundamentalist is committed to waging war against the imagination unless the imagination is enslaved to his or her belief system.
And here’s the bad news: Like almost everyone in the world, each of us has our own share of the fundamentalist virus. It may not be as virulent and dangerous to the collective welfare as, say, the fundamentalism of Islamic terrorists or right-wing Christian politicians or CEOs who act as if making a financial profit is the supreme good or scientists who deny the existence of the large part of reality that’s imperceptible to the five senses.
But still: We are infected, you and I, with fundamentalism. What are we going to do about it?
I say we practice taking everything less seriously and less personally and less literally. I suggest we administer plentiful doses of healing mischief, friendly shocks, compassionate tricks, blasphemous reverence, holy pranks, and crazy wisdom.

Evil Is Boring

When an old tree in the rain forest dies and topples over, it takes a long time to decompose. As it does, it becomes host to new saplings that use the decaying log for nourishment.
Picture yourself sitting in the forest gazing upon this scene. How do you describe it? Would you dwell on the putrefaction of the fallen tree while ignoring the fresh life sprouting out of it? If you did, you’d be imitating the perspective of many modern storytellers, especially the journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas.
They devoutly believe that tales of affliction and mayhem and corruption and tragedy are inherently more interesting than tales of triumph and liberation and pleasure and ingenuity. Using the machinery of the media and entertainment industries, they relentlessly propagate this covert dogma. It’s not sufficiently profound or well thought out to be called nihilism. Pop nihilism is a more accurate term. The mass audience is the victim of this inane ugliness, brainwashed by a multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that in comparison makes Himmler’s vaunted soul-stealing apparatus look like a child’s backyard puppet show.
At the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more captivating than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and omnipresent the former have become, they are actually quite dull. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.
Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the rot, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough. We reject this assumption as well. We don’t believe that entropy dominates the human experience. Even factoring in the prevailing misery in the Middle East and Africa, we doubt that the Global Bad Nasty Ratio ever exceeds 50 percent. And here in the West, where most of you reading this live, the proportion is lower.
Still, we’re willing to let the news media fill up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration. We can tolerate a reasonable proportion of movies and novels and TV dramas that revel in pathology. But we also demand EQUAL TIME for stories about integrity and joy and beauty and bliss and renewal and harmony and love. That’s all we ask: a mere 50 percent.

I vividly recall a shock I had in April 2000. While perusing the front page of my local daily newspaper, I found a tiny oasis of redemptive news amidst the usual accounts of reeling turmoil. It reported that inner cities all over America were undergoing a profound renaissance. From Los Angeles to New Orleans to Boston, the poorest sections of town were becoming markedly safer. New businesses were opening, capital was flowing in, neighborhood clean-ups were proliferating, drug sales were decreasing, and people were relaxing on their front porches again.
I was amazed that such an uplifting story had cracked the media’s taboo against good news. And yet its anomalous presence as an exception to the rule proved that the rule is virtually ironclad.
At this late date in the evolution of pop nihilism, the problem is not merely the media’s relentless brainwashing. We of the mass audience have become thoroughly converted to the sadomasochistic vision of the world: so much so that we’ve almost lost the power even to perceive evidence that contradicts that vision. The good news is virtually invisible.
Even those of us whose passion it is to champion the cause of beauty and truth are in the early stages of fighting our blindness. We are retraining our eyes to see the emancipating truth about the nature of reality.
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As we gather the secret stories of the human race’s glories and success, the Beauty and Truth Laboratory doesn’t spend much time on ho-hum data like, “Two thousand planes took off yesterday and all landed safely.” We leave that to others with more patience. Our preferred evidence emphasizes the triumphs that have entertainment value equal to the bad nasty stuff.
We also want our good news to consist of more than reports about hurts being healed and disasters being averted. We celebrate the family of the deceased Israeli girl who gave her heart to be transplanted into a sick Palestinian boy, but we also want a front-page story about physicist Paul Ginsparg, who has revolutionized scientific communication by creating a free service for publishing and reading research reports on the Internet.
We cheer forest protection activist Odigha Odiga’s successful campaign to preserve Nigeria’s last remaining rain forests, but we want to hear more about George Soros, whose philanthropy has provided billions of dollars in support for intellectual freedom and democratic societies in more than 30 countries.
We honor West Virginia’s Julia Bonds, who has made headway in her campaign to halt mountaintop coal mining before it turns more river valleys into waste dumps, but we also want sensational acknowledgment for Ruth Lilly, who donated $100 million of her fortune to Poetry magazine, even though its editors had rejected all the poems she had submitted for possible publication over the years.
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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 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 for 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.
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The cabal of zoom and boom is brought to you in part by Erwin S. Strauss’s book How to Start Your Own Country.


Glory in the Highest
from the book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
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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.
Do you want to go someplace that’s at a distance? You have a number of choices about what machines to use in order to get there. Whatever you decide—car, plane, bus, train, subway, ship, helicopter, or bike—you have confidence that it will work efficiently. Multitudes of people who are now dead devoted themselves to perfecting these modes of travel. Multitudes who are still alive devote themselves to ensuring that these benefits keep serving you.
Maybe you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people in the world who has the extraordinary privilege of owning a car. It’s a brilliant invention made by highly competent workers. Other skilled laborers put in long hours to extract oil from the ground or sea and turn it into fuel so you can use your car conveniently. The roads are drivable. Who paved them for you? The bridges you cross are potent feats of engineering. Do you realize how hard it was to fabricate them from scratch?
You’re aware that in the future shrinking oil reserves and global warming may impose limitations on your ability to use cars and planes and other machines to travel. But you also know that many smart and idealistic people are diligently striving to develop alternative fuels and protect the environment. And compared to how slow societies have been to understand their macrocosmic problems in the past, your culture is moving with unprecedented speed to recognize and respond to the crises spawned by its technologies.
As you travel, you might listen to music. Maybe you’ve got an MP3 player, a fantastic invention that has dramatically enhanced your ability to hear a stunning variety of engaging sounds at a low cost. Or maybe you have a radio. Through a process you can’t fathom, music and voices that originate at a distance from you have been converted into invisible waves that bounce off the ionosphere and down into your little machine, where they are transformed back into music and voices for you to enjoy.
Let’s say it’s 9:30 a.m. You’ve been awake for two hours, and a hundred things have already gone right for you. If three of those hundred things had not gone right—your toaster was broken, the hot water wasn’t hot enough, there was a stain on the pants you wanted to wear—you might feel that today the universe is against you, that your luck is bad, that nothing’s going right. And yet the fact is that the vast majority of everything is working with breathtaking efficiency and consistency. You would clearly be deluded to imagine that life is primarily an ordeal.

A Dangerous Taboo

The Beauty and Truth Lab's ongoing exploration of pronoia is a conversation, not a dictation. It’s an inquiry, not dogma. We’re explorers in search of the ever-evolving truth, not authorities proclaiming doctrine from on high. We refuse to be salespeople intent on getting you to be like us or buy our ideas. In fact, let’s look at the downsides of the perspectives we celebrate.
The first thing you should consider before leaping into a relationship with pronoia is that it is utterly at odds with conventional wisdom. The 19th-century poet John Keats said that if something is not beautiful, it is probably not true. But the vast majority of modern storytellers— journalists, filmmakers, novelists, talk-show hosts, and poets—assert the opposite: If something is not ugly, it is probably not true.
In a world that equates pessimism with acumen and regards stories about things falling apart as having the highest entertainment value, pronoia is deviant. It is a taboo so taboo that it’s not even recognized as a taboo.
The average American child sees 20,000 murders on TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with hundreds of multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. The authors of thousands of books published this year will hope to lure you in through the glamour of murder, addiction, self-hatred, sexual pathology, shame, betrayal, extortion, robbery, cancer, arson, and torture.
But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.
If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia, people you respect may wonder if you have lost your way. You might appear to them as naive, eccentric, unrealistic, misguided, or even stupid. Your reputation could suffer and your social status could decline.
But that may be relatively easy to deal with compared to your struggle to create a new relationship with yourself. For starters, you will have to acknowledge that what you previously considered a strong-willed faculty—the ability to discern the weakness in everything—might actually be a mark of cowardice and laziness. Far from being evidence of your power and uniqueness, your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you’ve been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism.
the onset of pronoia, you may feel fine about the fact that you generate much of your dynamic energy through anger, agitation, discomfort, and judgmental scorn. But once the pronoia kicks in, you’ll naturally want more positive feelings to be your high-octane fuel. That will require extensive retraining. The work could be arduous, delicate, and time-consuming.
Are you truly ready to shed the values and self-images that keep you locked into alignment with the dying civilization? Will you have the stamina and inspiration necessary to dream up bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems? Do you realize how demanding it will be to turn yourself into a wildly disciplined, radically curious, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, ingeniously loving, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss?
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Try saying this aloud: "I die daily." It’s one of our favorite formulas for success. Is it right for you? Say it again, using a different tone of voice this time. "I die daily." Chant it in a fake foreign accent. Sing it to the tune of the nursery rhyme, "Frère Jacques." Play with it in the voice of the cartoon character you loved best as a child. Repeat it 10 times in a row, or try other vocal experiments. Then muse on these questions.
What do you need to kill off in yourself in order to tune in to the beauty that’s hidden from you? What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you? Which of your theories may have been useful and even brilliant in the past but are now keeping you from becoming aware of the ever-fresh creation that unfolds before you?
"I die daily" means that it’s not enough to terminate your stale mental habits just once. The price of admission into pronoia is a commitment to continual dying. You’ll have to ask yourself rude questions and kick your own ass again and again. Today’s versions of beauty, truth, love, goodness, justice, and liberation will pass away. To keep abreast of the latest developments—to cultivate tomorrow’s versions of pronoia—you’ll have to immerse yourself regularly in the waters of chaos. Your relationship with pronoia will have to be a never-ending improvisation.
The dream of a steady-state utopia is anathema to Beauty and Truth Laboratory researchers. We’re allergic to any paradise that resembles a spotless shopping mall within the walls of a gated community in heaven.
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Pronoia is fueled by a drive to cultivate happiness and a determination to practice an aggressive form of gratitude that systematically identifies the things that are working well. But it is not a soothing diversion meant for timid Pollyannas strung out on optimistic delusions. It’s not a feel-good New Age fantasy used to deny the harsh facts about existence. Those of us who perceive the world pronoiacally refuse to be polite shills for sentimental hopefulness.
On the contrary, we build our optimism not through a repression of difficulty, but rather a vigorous engagement with it. We understand that the best way to attract blessings is to grapple with the knottiest enigmas.
Each fresh puzzle is a potential source of future bliss—an exciting teaching that may usher us to our next breakthrough.
Do you want to be a pronoiac player? Blend anarchistic rebelliousness with open-hearted exuberance. Root your insurrectionary fervor in expansive joy instead of withering hatred. Enjoy saying "no!" but don’t make it the wellspring of your vitality. Be fueled by blood-red yeses that rip against the grain of comfortable ugliness.
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A Spell to Commit Pronoia, by psychotherapist Jennifer Welwood:

• Willing to experience aloneness,
  I discover connection everywhere;
  Turning to face my fear,
  I meet the warrior who lives within;
  Opening to my loss,
  I am given unimaginable gifts;
  Surrendering into emptiness,
  I find fullness without end.
  Each condition I flee from pursues me.
  Each condition I welcome transforms me
  And becomes itself transformed
  Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
  I bow to the one who has made it so,
  Who has crafted this Master Game;
  To play it is pure delight,
  To honor it is true devotion.

Unabashed Pronoia Therapy

1. Go to the ugliest or most forlorn place you know—a drugstore parking lot, the front porch of a crack house, a toxic waste dump, or the place that symbolizes your secret shame—and build a shrine devoted to beauty, truth, and love.
Here are some suggestions about what to put in your shrine: a silk scarf; a smooth rock on which you’ve inscribed a haiku or joke with a felt-tip pen; coconut cookies or ginger candy; pumpkin seeds and an origami crane; a green kite shaped like a dragon; a music CD you love; a photo of your hero; a votive candle carved with your word of power; a rubber ducky; a bouquet of fresh beets; a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

2. Late at night when there’s no traffic, stride down the middle of an empty road that by day is crawling with cars. Dance, careen, and sing songs that fill you with pleasurable emotions. Splay your arms triumphantly as you extemporize prayers in which you make extravagant demands and promises. Give pet names to the trees you pass, declare your admiration for the workers who made the road, and celebrate your sovereignty over a territory that usually belongs to heavy machines and their operators.

3. Where exactly does happiness come from? That’s the riddle posed by David Meyers and Ed Diener in their article, "The Science of Happiness," published in The Futurist magazine.
Write your answers to their question. Map out the foundations of your own science of happiness. Get serious about defining what makes you feel good. What specific experiences arouse your deepest gratification? Physical pleasure? Seeking the truth? Being a good person? Contemplating the meaning of life? Enjoying the fruits of your accomplishments? Purging pent-up emotion?

4. Have you ever seen the game called "Playing the Dozens?" Participants compete in the exercise of hurling witty insults at each other. Here are some examples: "You’re so dumb, if you spoke your mind you’d be speechless." "Your mother is so old, she was a waitress at the Last Supper." "You’re so ugly, you couldn’t get laid if you were a brick."
I invite you to rebel against any impulse in you that resonates with the spirit of "Playing the Dozens." Instead, try a new game, "Paying the Tributes." Choose worthy targets and ransack your imagination to come up with smart, true, and amusing praise about them. The best stuff will be specific to the person you’re addressing, not generic, but here are some prototypes: "You’re so far-seeing, you can probably catch a glimpse of the back of your own head." "You’re so ingenious, you could use your nightmares to get rich and famous." "Your mastery of pronoia is so artful, you could convince me to love my worst enemy."

5. Salvador Dali once staged a party in which guests were told to come disguised as characters from their nightmares. Do the reverse. Throw a bash in which everyone is invited to arrive dressed as a character from the best dream they remember.

6. "The messiah will come when we don't need him any more," wrote Franz Kafka. Give your interpretation of his remark.

7. On a big piece of cardboard, make a sign that says, "I love to help; I need to give; please take some money." Then go out and stand on a traffic island while wearing your best clothes, and give away money to passing motorists. Offer a little more to drivers in rusty brown Pinto station wagons and 1976 El Camino Classics than those in a late-model Lexus or Jaguar.

8. In response to our culture’s ever-rising levels of noise and frenzy, rites of purification have become more popular. Many people now recognize the value of taking periodic retreats. Withdrawing from their usual compulsions, they go on fasts, avoid mass media, practice celibacy, or even abstain from speaking. While we applaud cleansing ceremonies like this, we recommend balancing them with periodic outbreaks of an equal and opposite custom: the Bliss Blitz.
During this celebration, you tune out the numbing banality of the daily grind. But instead of shrinking into asceticism, you indulge in uninhibited explorations of joy, release, and expansion. Turning away from the mildly stimulating distractions you seek out when you’re bored or worried, you become inexhaustibly resourceful as you search for unsurpassable sources of cathartic pleasure. Try it for a day or a week: the Bliss Blitz.

9. When many people talk about their childhoods, they emphasize the alienating, traumatic experiences they had. It has become fashionable to avoid reporting memories of the good times in one’s past. This seems dishonest—a testament to the popularity of cynicism rather than a reflection of objective truth.
I don’t mean to downplay the way your early encounters with pain demoralized your spirit. But as you reconnoiter the promise of pronoia, it’s crucial for you to extol the gifts you were given in your early years: all the helpful encounters, kind teachings, and simple acts of grace that helped you bloom.
In Homer’s epic tale, The Odyssey, he described nepenthe, a mythical drug that induced the forgetfulness of pain and trouble. Modern culture has turned the myth into reality: There are now many stimuli serving that purpose.
If Homer were alive today, we wonder if he’d write about a potion that stirs up memories of delight, serenity, and fulfillment? Imagine that you have taken such a tonic. Spend an hour or two remembering the glorious moments from your past.

10. Become a rapturist, which is the opposite of a terrorist: Conspire to unleash blessings on unsuspecting recipients, causing them to feel good.
Before bringing your work as a rapturist to strangers, practice with two close companions. Offer them each a gift that fires up their ambitions. It should not be a practical necessity or consumer fetish, but rather a provocative tool or toy. Give them an imaginative boon they’ve been hesitant to ask for, a beautiful thing that expands their self-image, a surprising intervention that says, "I love the way you move me."

11. "There are two ways for a person to look for adventure," said the Lone Ranger, a TV character. "By tearing everything down, or building everything up." Give an example of each from your own life.

12. To many people, "sacrifice" is a demoralizing word that connotes deprivation. Is that how you feel? Do you make sacrifices because you’re forced to, or maybe because your generosity prompts you to incur a loss in order to further a good cause?
Originally, "sacrifice" had a different meaning: to give up something valuable in order that something even more valuable might be obtained. Carry out an action that embodies this definition. For instance, sacrifice a mediocre pleasure so as to free yourself to pursue a more exalted pleasure.

13. Are other people luckier than you? If so, psychologist Richard Wiseman says you can do something about it. His book The Luck Factor presents research that proves you can learn to be lucky. It’s not a mystical force you’re born with, he says, but a habit you can develop. How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.
Name three specific actions you’d like to try in order to improve your luck.

14. Conjure up an imaginary friend and have an intimate conversation with him and her for at least 10 minutes. Bear in mind that this talk can be a rational creative act, not an excursion into lunacy. Composer Robert Schuman had long dialogues with his imaginary friends, Florestan and Eusebius, who provided valuable ideas for his musical scores. W.S. Merwyn wrote a poem in which he recounted the surprising counsel of his teacher John Berryman: "He suggested I pray to the Muse/ get down on my knees and pray/ right there in the corner and he/ said he meant it literally."

15. Some scholars believe the original Garden of Eden was where Iraq stands today. Though remnants of that ancient paradise survived into modern times, many were obliterated during the American war on Iraq in 2003. A Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher who lives near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers kept us posted on the fate of the most famous remnant: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Until the invasion, it was a gnarled stump near Nasiriyah. But today it’s gone; only a crater remains.
Let this serve as an evocative symbol for you as you demolish your old ideas about paradise, freeing you up to conjure a fresh vision of your ideal realm.

16. 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, shamanic shapeshifting, supernatural powers, or religious knowledge.
But I also believe in a second kind of healing that is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what’s merely sufficient to a sublime state. Using this definition, describe two acts of healing: one you would enjoy performing on yourself and another you’d like to provide for someone you love.

17. Is the world a dangerous, chaotic place with no inherent purpose, running on automatic like a malfunctioning machine and fundamentally inimical to your happiness? Or are you surrounded by helpers in a friendly universe that gives you challenges in order to make you smarter and wilder and kinder? Trick questions! The answers may depend, at least to some degree, on what you believe is true.
Formulate a series of experiments that will allow you to objectively test the hypothesis that the universe is conspiring to help you.

18. Those who explore pronoia often find they have a growing capacity to help people laugh at themselves. While few arbiters of morality recognize this skill as a mark of high character, I put it near the top of my list. In my view, inducing people to take themselves less seriously is a supreme virtue. Do you have any interest in cultivating it? How might you go about it?

19. "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Take which you please; you can never have both." Give an example from your own life that refutes or proves Emerson’s assertion.